Celestial Seasonings : Right now, we want the moon and the stars to accessorize our homes. But what’s on the horizon?
About the time a home furnishings trend shows up on a bathmat, it’s washed up.
So it is with heavenly objects. Not that you’d know it by scanning the stores and catalogues: Suns, moons and stars still fill the shelves and cover multiple pages. But such is the nature of these trends--just when they’re everywhere, they’re goners.
“It is post-peak,” pronounces Raymond Berger, vice president of Plummer-McCutcheon, which gave two entire pages to the celestial theme in its most recent catalogue.
During the decorating-down years (on average, people replace furniture only 1 1/2 times during their lifetimes, designer Vladimir Kagan says), we freshen our nests with small decorative items. They are to furniture what accessories are to fashion--affordably priced additions that stretch the life span of the major, expensive pieces. And they’re the fuel that fires yard sales of the future.
Where a furniture style can take five to 10 years to max out, a decorating theme might come and go in a matter of months. With two years on the scene, celestial items have had a long run.
There is no consensus on its exact flash point, but early signs of the celestial look include a snow globe at a German gift fair, a cotton throw at a New York gift show and needlepoint pillows at a New York craft fair. Within a few months of those isolated sightings in 1992, the sun, moon and stars motif began appearing on everything from clocks, dishes, candles, linens, napkin rings and watering cans to shower curtains. As prices go, the merchandise leans toward the low end.
If the celestial theme came out of the blue, the reasons for its popularity are equally obscure. The brilliant yellow and orange graphics on a dark blue background hardly enhance the favored furniture styles of the day, such as Mission, nor do they complement the reigning palette of faded colors.
“Perhaps it has a sense of mysticism, or escape,” Berger suggests. “When it was at its peak, we were in a recession.”
Mystical iconography had another brief fling last winter when angels sprouted wings and took off, seemingly overnight. They rated a Time magazine cover before degenerating into swap-meet fodder. Now, though, angels appear to be getting a second life. Moons, stars and suns in pastels are being mixed with angels for some fairly rococo combos. American country is moving toward fussy Victorian style, and cherubs and moons fit right in with the lacy furbelows.
Design trends have traditionally trickled down from such high-end sources as a furniture style, a designer’s line or even a museum show, but these days they often start, as the celestial theme did, at the mass-market level.
“The middle level is where all the action is,” says color consultant Leatrice Eiseman of the Eiseman Center in Seattle. “We have a three-tier system of price levels. There is the high end, or designer realm, the middle ground and then the low end, discount-price level. Now that it is trendy and permissible to talk about saving money and shopping at Price Club and Target, there is a lot more attention being paid to the middle level. The mass market is getting more attention, and new things are being introduced at this level.”
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Sunflowers were another graphic phenomenon that bloomed midfield, as part of the American country look of several years ago. Cows and gingham also figured into the farm scene, but sunflowers ultimately struck out on their own to bedeck rugs, teapots, vases, linens, coffee mugs and candlesticks. Some are designed to look like folk art, others are done in dark, muted colors to complement Mission-style furniture, and still others are as garishly bright and sickeningly sweet as daisies and happy faces--two overused devices from decades past. The sunflowers are also starting to fade.
Chili peppers, ivy and fruit have also been popular in the middle-price range but will probably have disappeared by this time next year.
On an ascent are African-inspired items. Such fabrics as kente cloth have caught on in the textile and fashion markets and fueled a growing selection of African-like prints on linens and dinnerware.
“I think African-themed items will be a fairly important classification,” says Mary Morris, vice president of Ross-Simons, publishers of the home-wares catalogue Anticipations. Society seems to moving toward a greater appreciation of ethnic influences, she says.
Robinsons-May stores are already stocking dishes and table linens modeled on African mud-cloth designs.
Also on the rise is a home-wares trend influenced by a furniture style referred to variously as Bloomsbury chic, palace trash, neo-ancestral and shabby chic. About two years ago, the severely trendy began collecting old chairs with moth-eaten, worn, velvet upholstery and displaying them just like that--decrepitly shabby. The idea was to have furniture look as if it had been in the family for generations--as in old family, old money.
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The decorative bits accompanying this theme are intentionally mismatched, worn and patched. The plates are different from the soup bowls, the mirrors need re-silvering, and the sofa cushions are upholstered in one fabric, the back and arms in another.
Now, furniture manufacturers are reproducing the look. “It’s in the $1,000-sofa range now,” Berger says. “I’ve seen slipcovers with incredibly creative mixes of fabrics. One piece of upholstery may have six fabrics on it.”
The shelves of American Rag Maison et Cafe on South La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles are stocked with like-minded items. “We are going for a mixture of things, rather than one look. Stripes and patterns on pillows. We mix two different types of plates--things from cafes and things from flea markets,” owner Margot Werts says.
At stores with more moderately priced merchandise, wine glasses with mismatched stems come as a set and pillows have a mix of patterns. The Pottery Barn, for one, offers a sofa upholstered in ticking stripes combined with faded cabbage roses.