Monday, March 8

Unhappy Hipsters

As the people (person?) behind the website Unhappy Hipsters knows, sometimes having too much taste is as bad as having none at all. A simple idea: add silly captions to pretentious, underbuilt, overdesigned interiors and exteriors ripped from the headlines of modish living magazines. The result is darkly funny social sature, or perhaps like reading a biography of Le Corbusier written by Edward Gorey:
"He deeply resented her insistence that their wardrobes coordinate."

"Babe, look! It says here that some people live in trailers, intentionally, without a hint of irony."

"Nutmeg sat stoically atop the cushions. Yet her internal dialogue was a cacophony of discordant thoughts, mostly centered on the absurdity of the double Nelson clocks."

"Unable to complete another painting, he surrendered to the realization that he was truly…madly…deeply in love—with plywood."
(More here).

While we're on the subject, why not have a look round Bad British Architecture?
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5 comments:

  1. Jam11:04 PM, March 09, 2010

    Mahvelous. I especially like the ones with kids in them -- not another Bauhaus documentary!

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  2. Thomas V9:11 PM, March 10, 2010

    Somehow I managed to acquire a free subscription to Dwell... which I at first thought was totally useless, and then realized it was actually serving the useful purpose of completely cataloging every bad and expensive interior design idea as a warning to future generations.

    It's actually very hard to take it seriously - I almost wonder if the editor secretly realizes it's terrible and is putting on the earnest talk.

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  3. Thomas V9:28 PM, March 10, 2010

    Also thinking that those people are not really Hipsters. They are too clean and unselfconsciously rich.

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  4. Matthew10:24 PM, March 10, 2010

    Maybe they're really, really neatnik bobos or really, really postmodern yuppies?

    Ah, Dwell...I do wonder how the interior designers who come up with this stuff live with themselves. I'm reminded about the story which claims Mies van der Rohe lived in a colonial-style house...though actually I find Mies preferable to this overpriced melange of plywood and glass...

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  5. Anonymous2:53 PM, March 11, 2010

    Ya, totally not hipsters otherwise there would be fridges full of PBR in every corner...

    I am actually a fan of minimalist design, especially after living in a 100+ year old five bedroom colonial for 25 years. I couldn't stand the claustrophobic fussiness anymore.

    We graduated our last kiddie from college, moved back into the city into a gorgeous modern apartment, refurnished it in a pretty minimalist style, and I finally feel like I can breathe. No more garish florals, annoying decorative cushions and itchy, knit throws and just too much "stuff" everywhere.

    People can take any design style too far -- whether it' the modern, minimalist look or the stuffy, pretentious we-live-in-flyover-land-but-we'd-like-you-to-think-we're-English-aristocracy look.

    I'll err on the side of clean lines and minimal clutter than on the tickity-tackity tschotskes-everywhere HSN design sensibility, thank you very much.

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