#did they see one excerpt of an edwardian decorator talking about the virtues of simplicity and not realize | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sayitwithsarcophilus · 1 year ago

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The thing about making generalizations about the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of people who lived 100-150 years ago is that people of the post-Industrial Revolution, pre-digital age left behind a crapton of written ephemera, so it's not hard to find primary sources even if you don't have the full resources of an academic historian.

If I want to know what kinds of housewares middle-class Edwardian Americans were buying and how fancy they got, I can consult my reprinted 1906 Sears catalog, and armed with the magic of primary sources I can safely say that minimalism was not the dominant American middle-class aesthetic in the early 1900s.

#how the heck did that person come to this conclusion anyway?#did they assume the model T looked like that for aesthetic reasons #and not to facilitate mass production?#did they see one excerpt of an edwardian decorator talking about the virtues of simplicity and not realize #that they meant “simple compared to the late Victorians?”#was their only exposure to pre-boomer material culture #wwii utility furniture?

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