Some of My Latest Home Décor
But first, some thoughts about material culture.
I’ve recently acquired four really wonderful vintage items that I want to share with you folks. But first I want to talk about some stuff that’s been on my mind.
I have a complicated relationship with material culture. On the one hand, I don’t care even a little bit about having a fancy car, a big mansion, a ginormous TV, the latest electronic gadgets, or the other conventional trappings of materiality. I never shop at big box stores or malls, almost all of my clothing is bought second-hand, a fair amount of my furniture is from yard sales or my local Buy Nothing group, and I’m completely uninterested in high-end luxury brands. In short, I’m not attracted to the conventional strain of material culture, or what’s often called conspicuous consumption (the term that, in 1993, led me to come up with the concept that now serves as the name of this website).
On the other hand, however, I’m very attracted to stuff, and I have a lot of it. People often tell me that my apartment “looks like a museum,” because it’s filled with vintage advertising displays, industrial doodads, oddball collections, wall charts, and so on (and that’s just the stuff that’s out in the open — I also have lots of vintage ephemera filed away on shelves and in drawers). A lot of these items are arguably pretty frivolous, or even very frivolous. And although I already have plenty of them, I’m always on the lookout for more, because I remain fascinated by vintage items and the stories they have to tell. All of which means I engage a lot with material culture, just not with the usual materials.
And here’s the thing: Whether you’re shopping at the mall or at the flea market, conspicuously or inconspicuously, capitalism is always trying to seduce us with the fantasy — the fallacy — that happiness is just one more material purchase away. Of course, some purchases really do enhance one’s life, but retail therapy is generally a sucker’s game. I think about that a lot, especially when I’m considering buying something I want but don’t really need. It’s part of why I decided not to buy that “missing” Pyrex bowl that I recently wrote about.
But despite pondering these issues quite a bit, I’m still susceptible to them. Lately, for example, I’ve noticed that life feels a bit more empty, a tad less exciting, if I don’t have any items saved in my eBay watchlist (i.e., the items I’m keeping an eye on). It doesn’t even matter if I actually plan to purchase or bid on any of the watchlist items — it’s more about the sense of possibility, the lure of the fantasy. I’d be the first to admit that there’s something pretty fucked up about that.
All of this is particularly interesting given that the President of the United States and his Treasury Secretary have both been inveighing recently against material excess. I don’t think either of them really means it (both of them are fabulously wealthy, at least one of them is practically synonymous with conspicuous consumption, and their comments mainly seem like a convenient attempt to rationalize the administration’s tariff policy), but I do think there’s some truth to their implicit critiques of material culture, even if they’re insincere.
I mention all of this because, as I said at the beginning of this article, I’ve recently acquired some excellent vintage items. I’m excited to tell you about them, but a little part of me has some misgivings about buttressing the retail therapy fallacy. Much like the situation with the missing red Pyrex bowl, I didn’t need any of these items I’m about to show you; on some level, they’re more like toys, and I already have plenty of toys.
That said, however, these toys are really fun, they weren’t expensive, and I thought long and hard before pulling the trigger on any of them. They’re not among the items I’d rush to save if my home caught on fire, but they make that home more enjoyable, more interesting. Every time I see one of them, I smile. That’s a version of materialism I’m happy to represent.
After that lengthy preamble, here are the four vintage items I want to show you:
1950s Apple Crate Label
I’ve long been fascinated by the world of old fruit crate labels. It’s one of those product categories that could have had fairly straightforward, generic design values but instead had absolutely spectacular aesthetics. I’ve always resisted the urge to collect them, because I’d probably get carried away and end up with hundreds of them. But as a daily apple eater, I couldn’t resist this endearingly bizarre example, which probably ranks among history’s most wholesome portrayals of child labor. The slingshot in the back pocket is a particularly nice touch.
I try to display things in the appropriate room, so of course this mini-masterpiece is now in my kitchen:
And how much did this item set me back? A mere six bucks. Huzzah!
1960s Hernia Brace Store Display
