trendey

..this vibrant home with a personal mix of 50’s, vintage, comics, fantasy, toys, 16th century details, wayward puppets, glamorous movie stars, bright colours, beautiful dresses, fairy tale creatures (etc.!) is inhabited by a young illustrator, artist and student. |pics: Frida Ekman, SvD.se|

As you probably already know, no one is drinking coffee in mugs anymore. It’s all about petite and beautiful vintage coffee cups. This phenomena goes along with the 1950’s/60´s housewife trend. For today, a non-negligible amount of young urban people has brought sweet new life to chores and duties our parents thought were overdue. The trend is aimed at the American housewives from the 50s. A bit harsh, a bit glamourous, but mostly back-to-the-bone. The new born interest in home-made soup and bread, 7 kinds of cookies, spectacular cupcakes and in exchangig tips on how best to manage antler salt has not necessarily anything to to with a backlash; i.e. a desire to never work and just wear a floury apron and be devoted to housework. Inside of the trend there’s indeed an element of admiration of each other’s vintage china and puffy vintage skirts, but there’s also a high awareness and a play with stereotypes. It’s way aside from the heroine chic fashion, quite the opposite: with the hair come wavy on rollers and with the tilting pleated skirt, you can eat as much frosting as you wish. It is permissive, and that’s probably one key as to why the trend is so easily absorbed today. The appealing part of the housewife in modern times seems altogether to go back to the genuine: to make real food, cooked from scratch. To practice the tricks and that grandma taught us. To stand firmly on our roots when the wind wines. As long as you know how to grow and harvest potatoes you’ll survive difficult times.

So, even though not all of us will be making 7 sweet pastries for the coffee rope on Sunday, we cant’t escape reality. For this, we need flowered tablecloths and china from the first half of the 1900s. Here’s a lovely vintage coffee cup example:

This weekend the Formex Fair and Exhibition is taking place in Stockholm. It is the largest trade fair for Nordic interior design with around 24,000 national and international professional visitors.

This autumn’s trend theme, Vintage Travel, is presented as a fashionable journey back to yesteryear. It wants to take visitors back to a more glamorous Europe, more specifically by means of a respectably-furnished train carriage with plush-covered seats, an elegant lamp in the window, own compartment and a glorious, old-fashioned restaurant car with white linens and waiters. A lot like taking the train in an old Hitchcock movie, they say (!).

Anyway, the train has a destination and or at least some kind of a route. Quite a few directions are given: It will go back to places comme il faut in the 1940s and 50s: like Venice, Rimini, the French Riviera, or ski resorts such as Wengen and St. Moritz and we will escape into literature appropriate to the era. Maps and globes are essentials.  The colour scale is green (olive green tones) with orange, tomato red and rust as contrasts along with a muted yellow. Those coulours go well with the former mentioned Pantone AW2009 palette, don’t they?

On the fashion side, they want us to picture the fashions of the 1940s and 50s with hats, gloves, boas and fur collars and inspiration is derived from remakes of classics such as “Brideshead Revisited” and “Changeling“. Uniforms, not only military, but also those of the chauffeur, station master, and coach driver provide inspiration. The style is dressed and strict and medals, sashes, emblems and embroidery are important.

In interior decorating, surroundings are cosy, with upholstered furniture, rugs and lots of textiles. A great deal of intricate detail can be found, as well as a mixture of vintage and contemporary. People read books, according to the Formex autumn trend theme! We jot notes in elegant notebooks and on small correspondence cards, and from time to time we may even write a letter by hand.

To close the report, Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins in Changeling, and Matthew Goode as Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revistited. Photos from imdb.com. Now who doesn’t want to jump on this good-old fashion train?