'90s Interior Design Was Hideous – So Why Am I So Jealous Of It?

BBC's Signs Of The Times“I remember very clearly when this carpet was laid,” a Scottish homeowner (who, along with her husband, despised her own house’s decoration) said on the BBC’s 1992 gem Signs Of The Times. It was put down decades prior – the day, she points out, JFK died. “When we installed the carpet, we realised it wasn’t quite right,” her husband commiserated. Perplexingly, he added there was “nothing we can do about that” – they “had to” design their home around the offending flooring, he mourned.He has found a solution, however. “This house would make you want to go out,” he muttered, stiff-jawed. “We just go out [for] walks at night, because it’s not nice to sit in here for any length of time.” The show, co-created with photographer Martin Parr, aimed to “examine perceptions of good and bad taste in the British home.” I’ve loved it for years, but now Gen Z and Millennials have another questionable ’90s decor obsession. HGTV’s 90s show Decorating Cents, which sees host Joan Steffend make over people’s homes by, for instance, placing bruised lemons in the base of vases that hold most of a tree, has gone mega-viral.Some call the decor style “criminal”; millennials stress that this was the furnace in which their notorious love for dull “millennial grey” was forged. The term “90s decorating ladies” has millions of posts on TikTok.But why the obsession, and why now?@artedguru#duet with @ksg9370 why does 90s budget decor look so bad? #Art#Decor#Design#Bad#Ugly 90s. ♬ original sound - ArtEdGuruIt’s partly just funny – but I can’t help but feel pangs of envy and nostalgia, tooLet’s start with the obvious: the content is just funny. It is hilarious to watch a woman earnestly dress citrus fruits in wilting moss and call it a display. A couple discussing their own dodgy carpet pick as though it were an act of God is also, well, gas.But I remember feeling something a little deeper when I first watched Signs Of The Times, which I feel now about Decorating Cents – and I think I’m not alone. There’s something that feels so irretrievable about the anxieties, tortured choices, and outright bad taste in both shows. I wonder if it speaks to the couple-of-decades-long window in which home ownership was, primarily, the domain of ordinary people seeking somewhere to live; taste being dictated neither solely by resale value, nor rental regulations, nor the dictatorial preferences of a homeowning class. In Signs Of The Times, my favourite Scottish couple were, in some ways, facing a predicament no other generation had.They, like my family, lived in a stuccoed two-storey that might have been council property pre-right to buy. A generation before that, my descendants might have had their decor dictated by the needs of a farm, or the quarters of a Big House (for the first half of the 20th century, domestic service “employed the largest numbers of women of any labour market sector in Britain”).What a working-to-middle-class homeowning “aesthetic” looked like, when our decor choices had been so heavily influenced by our work or our boss or our financial standing, might have been so vexatious a question that it led to The Lemon Event.I can’t help but wish bad decor was more viable nowNow that more Gen Z people rent than own, with 42% of Millennials in the same boat – a sizeable chunk of whom are never likely to become homeowners – our decor decisions are once more dictated by Landlord Specials and Developer Grey.42% of us have given up on the hopes of ever buying a home. 25% have moved more than ten times since leaving their family home (I moved out in my teens and have had dozens of addresses since).That’s left our decorating decisions limited to peel-off, non-invasive, deposit-friendly choices, which, though producing some dubious styles, preclude truly, house-ruiningly tasteless choices. They cannot cost too much. They cannot take up too much space. They must never be permanent.Those who have been able to afford to buy are often agonisingly aware of their luck. The question of “good taste” becomes a way to maintain the value of what most know is the biggest asset they (and, likely, their parents) will ever buy.Even the most expressive homeowner, I reckon, will have thoughts of resale value in the back of their minds when decking out their bathroom – thoughts someone whose gaff cost them far less, proportionally, might not have.Perhaps that’s why I feel twinges of jealousy, nostalgia, and even envy when I see a lurid shag bathroom rug or objectively ugly wall paint.That slight window of bad taste feels gone forever. Unless renting becomes much more merciful and permissive or homeownership gets significantly more likely, the question of how best to style your home will never be so fully in young people’s hands that we risk truly, deranged-ly messing them up. Until those unlikely eventualities happen, I sit, I watch the tacky ’90s interiors, and I sigh (despite it all) with envy.Related...All Hail The ‘Fridge Cigarette’'Money Destroys Taste': Jeff Bezos And Lauren Sánchez' Wedding Invite Savaged OnlineHere's Why Boomers Keep Using Ellipses In Text (And Why It Makes You Panic)

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