Avery Trufelman was recently the guest on Throwing Fits. In case you don’t know, Avery does the very excellent Article of Interest podcast that countless people I haven’t talked to in years have reached out to tell me they heard me on. Throwing Fits, of course, is “The only podcast that matters,” and I won’t argue with that. It’s exactly my sweet spot: men’s style and 1990s NYC radio jock. The hosts are hilarious, but they also have a really interesting way of getting their guests to say stuff that I find myself thinking about after I’ve listened. Their interview style is…unique. And it keeps the people they’re talking to on their toes and gets pretty good stuff from them. Not in a gotcha sense, but more that the answers feel less practiced or rehashed. The part this time around that really stuck out was when James Harris and Lawrence Schlossman pressed Avery—who dedicated the latest season of her show to prep and the fact that it always seems to be making a comeback—to talk about what she thinks is the next big thing. Her reply: “chintzy shit.”
Avery mentions going through her grandmother’s house on Long Island and looking at the things in her house like chandeliers and “gold-plated stuff” and noticing that’s the sort of thing people are getting into. She mentions “gilt things” or anything Louis XIV-style serves as a way to “get away from that millennial aesthetic” that has been, frankly, awful. Interestingly, Avery says she thinks the infatuation with a sort of gaudy, maximalist design sensibility has something to do with Donald Trump’s presidency, and something she refers to as “Pitkin Avenue Renaissance.” I’d never heard the term, but I love it and how she says it originates from the street in Queens near where Trump grew up and many Russian immigrant furniture dealers sell things like “Tzarist Faberge eggs,” and other things that she says “represents this interesting sort of blurring of class distinctions, where that’s what poor people thought rich people did, and then rich people grew up and did the thing that poor people thought rich people did.”
I thought about that part as I browsed through the Abell estate sale offering things from the personal collection of Larry Flynt. Flynt, as you probably know, grew up poor in Kentucky, then got really rich in the 1970s as a porn king with his Hustler empire. I don’t have to give you the rest of his story, you can just watch The People vs. Larry Flynt if you don’t know it by now. But I will say that because I find smut kings fascinating, I immediately clicked on the link to the auction and half-expected to see items fit for a 1977 swingers club and not what I actually found.
Flynt, or whoever designed his home, was very into what I would assume falls under Avery’s classification of Pitkin Avenue Renaissance. A lot of gold, Tiffany-style lamps, items named after French kings, things made of marble or brass, all part of a bounty of things that look expensive and old, but it’s hard to tell if they’re actually either.
I’m a fan of gaudy, to an extent. I try to be respectful of other people and their tastes, but looking at the Flynt auction, I couldn’t stop thinking about how, bundled together either on my computer screen or in an actual home, most of this stuff looks awful to me. The only thing the items tell you about the taste of the former owner is that they didn’t have much. Maybe not shocking since Flynt’s whole thing was selling bad taste, but he still purchased things that signaled he had money. I assume, to him and others, that is like buying a ticket into the good taste club without having to really care about much beyond the facade. But the thing is that the good taste club itself is only a facade. There’s nothing behind the door.
I’m not trying to pick on Flynt here. I don’t really have any opinions on the guy one way or another. I’m just really interested in this idea of chintzy making a comeback. I suppose everything comes back around. I always liked Memphis Group style, for instance. Likely because it was a thing when I was a kid and it was big and colorful and fun. But even as an adult, seeing it rise in prominence and looking at the work in some of the world’s most famous museums, Memphis-style still brings me joy. I like it, but I’m also aware that a lot of people hated it when it made its debut in 1981 at Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile furniture fair.
This is all arbitrary, but the way design has felt the opposite of individual over the last decade or so feels anything but. Yet while looking at Flynt’s old furniture that aims for grand but comes off as gaudy, I kept thinking about Avery talking about Pitkin Avenue Renaissance coming back around. I’ve seen it myself and I’m starting to think it’s a rebellion against this sort of boring, cookie-cutter, wacky candle, adulting, millennial pink, signs with big words sort of aesthetic that has been too popular since Urban Outfitters/IKEA/Target probably started paying big money to people over 50 to “Get us the millennial shoppers!”
Maybe we need to cleanse ourselves in tacky, weird and fun for a bit to make something new and interesting. I think a big reason Rax King’s book of essays, Tacky: Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer has been such a hit with readers is because it’s an enjoyable read, but King also hits on something that I haven’t seen enough critics or writers grasp, and that is we’ve really blurred the lines between what was once “high,” “middlebrow” and “low” culture. That’s a good thing on the one hand since these ideas are inherently classist. But on the other, being able to simply bask in the fun of lowbrow, tacky, chintzy, ugly, or just plain so-bad-it’s-good or seeing something incredibly gaudy in the Larry Flynt auction and thinking “You know what? I like that and I want it in my living room and I don’t care what anybody says” needs to make a comeback. Digging through the old and unloved, the ugly and underappreciated is how the best new stuff is often formed. Picking through the belongings of a dead rich guy today might be tomorrow’s inspiration for something new, weird and wonderful.