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Highlands Today

It's A Brownout!

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 20, 2008

Have you shopped for furniture lately?

Welcome to a world where virtually everything is brown, or some shade of brown. The stores try to fool us by calling the shade chocolate, or taffy, or cappuccino (as if it were food, not furniture), but no one is fooled. It's brown, and brown, and more brown.

It doesn't matter if it's an overstuffed sofa, a recliner chair, or an area rug - it's brown, or beige, or something in between. You might find green, but it will be a brownish green or a brown pattern with a little green in it.

Often, the little bit of color mixed in will be something we used to think didn't even go with brown, like aqua or fuchsia. But, strangely enough, they look good together, or rather, they would if the designers hadn't become so fixated on that particular combination that you literally can't find anything else in the whole store, nor the next store, nor the next ...

You get the picture. And if you do much furniture shopping you'll not only get the picture, you'll get downright sick of it. I've only done a little furniture shopping lately and I'm already beginning to dream in brown and aqua - it's that pervasive.

If you're like me, you prefer gemstone colors - ruby red, sapphire blue, emerald green - and you're out of luck. You might as well go into hibernation, because you're not going to see those colors for several years. The designers have decreed that you don't want them.

It's the same with clothes. Everything is some shade of brown, or aqua mixed with brown. If you don't look good in brown - too bad. Your choices are to wear it anyway, or refuse to buy anything new for the next decade, which is how long it will be before the designers decide that brown is gauche, and we should all be wearing chartreuse, or gray or...whatever.

The designers have not only decided everything should be brown, but also that it should be 1950s style. Click-clack sofas, sunburst clocks, and armless chairs are all the rage. Audrey Hepburn clothes are in. Things no one would have been caught dead in a year ago-popover jackets, full-skirted dresses, and polka dots-are now the fashion rage. The only 1950s "must-have" that has not come back is hats-the only 1950s fad I actually liked.

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I think I should be able to decorate my home in what I like, not what Cindy Crawford likes.

I think I should be able to wear styles and colors that look good on me-with my dark hair, my not-so-perfect figure, my Florida lifestyle-not what looks good on some blond toothpick in Paris.

People come in all different shapes and colors. And our tastes in clothes, furniture, even food, are as different as ... brown and aqua! God created us that way. Diversity is in.

So why must designers try to make us all look alike and live in look-alike homes?

I've decided it's because, unlike what they want us to think, they have no imagination. They are so governed by what others are doing that they've totally lost the ability to think for themselves.

In an age when freedom, individuality, and self-expression are so valued, why is it that the world of design, which should be the epicenter of creativity, is, instead, the very embodiment of mindless herd instinct.

Walking in a store used to be exciting; these days it makes me want to yawn. Hibernation is looking better all the time.

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