#and we can't even own fucking furniture that we've owned for like 15 years

[sherlock-is-ace]

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[ghostonly]

Has anyone else noticed how the fucked up economy has affected interior design trends? Or is it just me?

Like, maybe I'm not looking in the right places and I'm just missing new trends because I don't read magazines, but it seems like the economy basically breaking has left interior design at a standstill.

We've been doing contemporary interior design for about 20 years now and I don't see any obvious signs of it going away any time soon. All of the new interior design trends are just new things that fit into contemporary convention. We move from this white stone to that white stone. We switch from white rugs to black rugs. We keep using glass but this time it's round. We change the focus color from red to blue. Like, there may be some changes in trends, but they're all just different branches of the same thing. And I can't help but feel like this is obviously caused by economical fuckery.

In the past, interior design trends have changed dramatically from decade to decade. Even the longer lasting ones didn't stay mainstream for more than 15 years or so (at least from what I know of more recent centuries), because every 10-15 years a new generation of people move out of their parents' home and get their own place.

You know... until now.

Our economy is so fucked up that for the first time in a long time, people are literally incapable of independent living. Millennials who have moved out of their parents' homes moved directly into the arms of the housing crisis in 08. They got a small apartment. They furnished it with hand-me-downs and thrifted furniture that their personal sense of style had absolutely no bearing on. And since then, millennials have been continually doing this song and dance of replacing their broken furniture with the cheapest thing they could find at Walmart (pseudo contemporary, black or white, build-it-yourself flatpacks) or whatever thing from the 70s they could find at Goodwill.

My sibling is a great example of this. They're 35 with 2 kids and a spouse and had never had a new piece of furniture in the entire time they'd lived independently until I bought them a flatpack dresser from Walmart for Christmas, because they didn't have a dresser at all.

The younger millenials in their mid-late 20s and the older gen z either stayed with their parents or went from a college dorm to an apartment crammed with roommates who all brought their handed-down furniture with them.

None of us have the money to actually impact interior style trends. We may have interior design ideas in our heads, but that's where they stay, because we can't pay to make them a reality.

So, only the people with money are able to impact style trends, and who has money? People who are 40+ and have had the same stable job for over a decade. The same people who started the contemporary design trend in the early 2000s. Rich people who are also around that age. Older rich people who are hiring interior designers and architects who are 40-50, in the prime of their (non manual labor) working years, and who love contemporary interior design. They moved out and made a statement and no one has had the money to challenge that design statement since then.

So, instead, we all continue to buy cheap knockoff contemporary furniture, or furniture that's so old and outdated, our grandparents would think it's tacky (That's why they donated it)

And it just makes me so mad.

What beautiful interior design trends would we be coming up with if we all had the money, not only for housing, but for new furnishings and decor for said housing?

I know there are young people with that capability, but not enough of them to make a real wave in the interior design world.

Our interior design legacy is DIY and putting cheap paint on a cabinet from the 70s. Our interior design legacy is eclectic misery. And I'm sad about it.