The tendency for debt-riddled, future lacking millennials to have homes full of easy to care for plants is just a second time as farce revival of the Edwardian trend if ferns and palms as cheap decor

Material conditions are going to materially condition.

There was also a. Late Victorian succulents craze due to a fad (in England) for novels west in the American west snd mexico

The late Victorian was the first art movement with mass production behind it, which created the idea of the thrift store retro revival with bohemians and urban gays picking up cheap yellow 90s stuff in the mid-century

Which is why if you watch 50s and 60s stuff and someone is suddenly very ornamental and flocked wallpaper and Victorian, it’d basically code for queer. Like watch Beck Book And Candle. When it finally passed into mainstream hippiedom it was the Fern Bar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_bar 

stuff from the 40s tended to use stuff from the 20s as queer coding , Auntie Mame did this, the person who doesn’t know the country has lurched rightward, and may be the origin of “friend of dorothy” for Parker not Garland, since her writing was something of a gay shibboleth

Much like how prohibition and WW2 created the gay bar, straights got the singles bar by mining old gay retro trends https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-t-g-i-fridays-helped-invent-the-singles-bar

Side note, Art Deco got totally discredited in the mid century cause it got quickly shifted into cheap products, it went from upper class expressions of fine craftsmanship to “what the maid liked” in like a decade, the 80s revival of it was weird enough to be it’d own thing

one reason why the biggest Tiffany lamp collection was created by a married couple just doing thrift store searches is that by the 30s it was considered so out of fate, do unspeakably old world and grandmotherly that they go them for almost nothing.

That won’t occur again.

Subcultures aren’t allowed to develop anymore, their aren’t as huge upsets in material and design science, manufacturing quality has plummeted and the division between styles and modernity has vanished.

Plus, the thrift stores have been devoured by Etsy and the like

A good eye for construction and shopping secondhand used to be a survival strategy of the working class and poor and now it’s just what everyone does cause a lot more people are being proletarizaned and trying to put a fun face on it, it’s not a trailer, it’s a tiny home etc

Anyway come back later for why the visual shorthand for “modern” from the mid 1880s onward is a result of them Hygiene movement, a poor understanding of germ theory, and some weird attempts at feminism vis food science