Nostalgia is Transforming our Home Decor
/Remember when the fastest form of communication was a highly engineered folded up note passed to your bestie in middle school? Or when the only thing you had to take care of was your Tomagotchi and that creepy furby? How about when the only aches and pains you had were in your thumbs from too much Mario Kart. And the toughest decision was the movie you were going to rent at Blockbuster on a Friday night? Those were the days!
If you were born sometime between 1981-1996 then you are considered a ‘millennial’. On Sunday night, after watching Dr. Dre, Snoop, Mary J Blige, 50 Cent, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar perform at the Super Bowl, we all realized we might not actually be the young ones anymore. We are now old enough to get the nostalgic super bowl performance catered to us. Yeah, that’s right, Eminem was rapping about mom’s spaghetti exactly 20 years ago…in 2002!
I could go on and on about nostalgia! Why? Because it makes us feel good! But how? Nostalgia helps strengthen a person’s identity, their sense of self. It is an emotional experience that unifies. Indulging in nostalgic thinking can help reduce the negative psychological impacts of loneliness. Let’s face it, the past 2 years have been as lonely as ever. Our world as we know it has completely changed and there doesn’t seem to be much indication at this point that it will ever go back to the way it was before.
So what do we do about it? We try to find things that make us feel good again. With everyone spending so much time in their homes, a big part of that is changing your living space. Nostalgia comes into play in the decor we surround ourselves with. The millennial things like mid-century modern everything, minimalism, neutral palettes, farmhouse decor and generic direct-to consumer decor are on the way out. Replacing those things are warm and cozy spaces, bright colors and patterns, maximalism, unique thrifty finds and grandma’s furniture inheritance.
A recent trend to capture this style is called “grandmillennial” its a modern take on nostalgic traditional style. Think chinoiserie, wood furniture, wallpaper, bright colors, beautiful layered spaces, warm mix of colors, patterns and textures. It invokes an nostalgic feeling from the 90s that we all need right now. Something familiar and cozy that rebels against the online zoom world we have been living in. So cheers to nostalgia!
