Today is a day of vindication for every older woman in your life who adorned her windows with lace net curtains and jazzed up her sofas with tapestry cushions and crochet flower blankets.
All of the things that we thought were the home design equivalent of the ugly-Christmas jumper are unironically chic. And a 20-something-year-old influencer is going to talk about how they conjured up the design by contemplating “authenticity” and “lived-in aesthetics” but we have to thank the older generations for what we now call “grandma chic.”
Get In Loser, We’re Going Crocheting
There’s a reason that everybody asked for crochet needles this Christmas. An anti-consumerism and digital minimalism movement has captured this generation. The post-Covid crowd has endured years of declining quality in products and the threat of AI to worsen both products and job scarcity.
Because if we’re all going to lose our jobs as the modern prophets foretell, maybe it’s worth learning a skill that you enjoy? Grandma chic is the push towards a time where we neither craft for profit or for love but for survival. Yanis Varoufakis’ book Technofeudalism explains the death of capitalism and how we now live in a time where we own nothing, but big tech companies are able to rent it to us.
So why has it led us to lace curtains and crochet flowers? Of course, these can be produced en-masse but there’s an individuality that’s missing in that. I can get a knitted blanket from Amazon but so have 20,000 others—so can 20,000 more.
Without sentimentality, we lose the lived-in aesthetic that the 20-somethings of the internet are yearning for. Nobody will ever make a blanket like the one your grandma made for you when you were born.
grandma chic AS An Indicator Of A Wider Problem
Not to position myself as a therapist, but this trend suggests there’s something we need to work on in our relationships with others. Sentimentality comes from relationships. If you don’t have a community or even one person you feel you can connect with beyond the surface, every product will have no story—a product without a story has the same emotional weight as a knitted blanket from Amazon that 20,000 people have. Get it now?
Lockdown didn’t just make us more prone to convenient decorating and shopping. It made us reclusive and unable to connect in the same way. Although you might have great banter with your courier, he’s the middle man in this exchange between you and a faceless entity.
You can’t fix an issue of this magnitude overnight. However, you can go to your local crafts shop and buy some supplies and tools. You can give same-day delivery apps a rest. And most importantly, you can give your granny a call. She might scold you for leaving it too long but it will always be worth it.
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