Book Review: Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic

Title: Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic

Author: Rachel Ashwell

Date: 1998

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-039208-8

Length: 210 pages

Illustrations: color photos and line drawings

Quote: “I learned to appreciate vintage and history...I honed an ability to know what to restore and, more important, what to leave alone.”

Rachel Ashwell financed her move from Britain to Southern California by decorating other people’s houses, not with whatever some department store was trying to sell (as an older generation of home decorators did), but with her own flea-market finds.

This daring move calls for criticism on social-political-economic grounds. That Ashwell did it was laudable. Whether the rest of us should try to copy it is debatable, and calls for mindfulness. Making something fashionable can be an easy way to destroy what made it valuable. Flea markets are, primarily, FUN. They’re also a way for small businesses to start without going into debt, and a way for the recently unemployed or disabled or bereaved to meet a few of the sudden expenses life has dumped upon them. This gives them a valuable place in society that depends on their being kept accessible, cheap, and, well, fun. The idea of “an upscale flea market” is not obviously or intentionally contrary to the idea of a good flea market—but in effect it is. Raise the booth fees, edge out the cheap junk that might appeal to jammy-fingered kids rather than the selfconsciously trendy and arty crowd, and you’ve replaced a good flea market with a horrid, pretentious source of overpriced...well...cheap junk. Because real gold will be real gold no matter how much brass and plastic surround it, but when people who don’t have real gold start charging the same prices for brass and plastic that they would for gold, then people who recognize real gold have a reason to sneer at the pretentious flea market.

There’s also a tendency for slick types to finance “really interesting” flea market businesses with illegitimate operations...one way to recognize this happening is when the genuinely casual vendors or the resolutely wholesome and small ones start feeling dissed or patronized. Women tend to enter flea markets, either casually or amateurishly, to sell off things that no longer need space in our homes: baby supplies after menopause, things a departed friend or relative won’t be using again, things that cost more than we ought to have spent on them in the first place and might have enough resale value to allow us to keep the house. When we are new both to an individual market and to flea-marketing, it’s easy and natural to assume that a guy who’s obviously buying and selling the more coveted items, for profit, might overtly fail to listen to us, address us as “Baby” or “Grandma” or some similar bogus endearment as a show of lack of respect, even try to discourage us or push us to go home before he does, because he is a sexist jerk. Guys who act that way are, of course, sexist jerks but if we pay attention we find that that’s not the full extent of what’s wrong with their operations. It’s always worthwhile to find out what kind of illegitimate business they’re up to—drugs, illegal gambling, stolen goods, etc.

Even a wholesome, low-budget market tempts vendors (they’re numerous these days) who are in fact old, ill, and in pain, whether they look it or not, and do in fact receive prescriptions and discounts for medications they find it possible not only to get by without, but to resell at a profit. They may be enabling the self-destruction of idiots who aren’t likely to be missed, but by keeping themselves active  they are replacing those idiots with smarter, more experienced, active citizens.

Any movement toward oh-not-just-raising-prices-for-profit-but-making-the-market-more-“upscale”-and-“professional”, which market managers will try if they think some vendors and customers will tolerate it, creates the financial pressure that makes pill resellers start buying as well as selling, handling more and “harder” drugs than their own surplus. That’s when they start trying to clear the “sweetie pie” vendors out of the way so “the big boys” can “do business,” and when their business needs to be shut down by the police. As these markets lose the respect of people looking for fabulous deals on “shabby chic” china dishes, they also attract vice and crime.

Toward the end of Shabby Chic Ashwell lists her favorite (big, pricey) markets, sources of the faded colors and antique styles that fitted into her decorating look (which, for those who don’t recognize it, might remind them of Laura Ashley). That’s the part of the book that could most usefully have been left out. If those were good, legitimate markets in 1998, chances are that they’d been ruined by 1999. Ashwell really should not have given the kiss of death to those markets. Fortunately they weren’t even in the same States where I’ve either shopped or sold. The focus is of course on California.

That’s a short appendix, squeezed in at the back of the book between a discussion of cleaning and refinishing techniques and an early-twentieth-century style “inspirational poem” at “The End.” The main 200 pages of this book are all about decorative looks. What Ashwell had to tell people probably can be communicated better through photos than through words; certainly her book consists more of photos than of words. We see lots of furniture, dishes in china cupboards, books on shelves, plus some clothes modelled by young women and children.

And, of course, colors...

I think the essential challenge for anyone writing about colors, designing (anything) with colors, mixing colors, shopping for colors, etc., is to acknowledge that, while you might like a particular “palette” of colors better than others, not everyone else needs to share your taste.

Women tend to sound judgmental about colors when we lack training in working with different styles and palettes.

I think Carole Jackson’s biggest contribution to the world was that her “Color Me Beautiful” system required everyone to learn to see four general categories of colors (with or without advanced practice in identifying “palettes” that blur the edges between two of the big four categories). Human faces usually fit into one category more than the others, although some people are hard to classify. In theory all colorists would agree that a face fits into one color category. In practice some people really do look good in colors from two or even three categories, and trained colorists can disagree on whether to count an individual as Spring or Autumn.

Printed color photographs can complicate matters by nudging color tones closer together than they might have been in real life, but it looks on the front cover as if Rachel Ashwell is one of those people. “Her” color palette appears to be a compromise for her face. She looks like a natural Autumn, or maybe even Spring, who likes colors that are in the Summer palette and has built her whole look, at least when these pictures were taken, around mixing colors that blur on the edges between the Summer, Spring, and Autumn categories. Things are off-white, or they are pastel-colored. Most of the pastel colors are very pale pastels. They’re pink and mauve, but very pale shades of pink and mauve, with brown rather than blue undertones. Or they’re yellow, but very soft shades of yellow that blur toward cream, ivory, and pine wood rather than lemon or orange. Or they’re green—pale greens with visible blue overtones and quite strong yellow undertones. Occasionally they’re true blue, but faded...like indigo-dyed denim, which is bright blue when new but always shows its white warp threads even before the blue starts fading, or like blue-on-white china, where some parts retain a bright true blue color but the white always predominates.

Enough people like this cross-“seasons” group of colors, at least in decor, that there’s an alternative school of colorists that regard it as a primary color group in its own right. In the 1980s Leatrice Eiseman worked with a color classification system of cool-toned “Sunrise,” warm-toned “Sunset,” and this mix of pale colors with cream and ivory as “Sunlight.” The “Sunlight” palette definitely lends itself to secondhand furniture, which is often faded. It’s probably a compromise palette for almost anybody to wear. Sunbleached furniture material is often good for several more years of service; genuinely sunbleached clothing may not be.

Shabby Chic is a visual guide to using Sunlight colors. They make soft, pretty combinations. They clash with the Winter colors the majority of people wear well.  Since the effect of mixing Winter colors with softer, more “natural” (non-aniline-dyed) colors tends to be making the other colors look faded...

Women can sound downright bigoted about the colors that aren’t their own (or, in some cases, their mothers’, or those of some other fashion mentor). In the past, when everybody did not have equal access to every color that caught their eye, various cultures evolved judgmental ways to describe colors. The intense Winter and Spring colors were dissed as “garish” or “childish”; soft Summer colors were “faded” or “washed-out,” and warm Autumn browns were “pre-soiled” or “dirt-colored” to those they didn’t suit. 

Since my hand-knitting brand is “clothing, not ‘fashions’,” I’ve not retreated back, as most retailers of mass-produced garments have, to the bad old Waste Age custom of marketing “this season’s colors” and purging colors that may be what someone wants from my display. Sometimes someone twits me about this: “Don’t you have some more contemporary colors than all those 1980s [they mean Winter] colors?” I do, but since the person has used a hostile rather than professional tone I’m apt to hit back, “Y’mean that pre-soiled, urban grunge look?” Actually it’s only on Winters that browns and brownish grays look “dirt-colored.” On Autumns, of which the speaker is probably one, brown is a vibrant color that brings out the person’s unusual good looks.

Colors speak directly to the emotional, even reptilian, layers of our brains but it’s worth the effort of learning to see colors with a detached professional eye. You are, for example, more likely to get the designs of your dreams from artisans or decorators to whom you describe your colors without making harsh judgments on theirs. Better yet, as Ashwell fortunately does in this book, show pictures. If someone has a clear, true picture of the couch and the rug and the picture on the wall and says "I want a blanket to put on this couch," we are communicating.

Ashwell betrays a habit of thinking of books on shelves as décor items, to be judged by their covers, rather than words to be judged by their meaning. She knows someone who finds the freshly printed colors on book jackets too bright, so she loses the jackets and displays the beautifully fading colors of older books’ hard covers. Isn’t that special! Ick! Actually, it depends on the community. I both buy and sell secondhand books without paper jackets, but some booksellers say they can’t sell them.

If a person wanted to display books as décor items, it’s not hard to do. In fact it could be fun to do as a family project with children. You can’t have too many book covers and it’s so easy to cut paper to wrap around a book. You could color-code book covers to make it easier to see which shelf a book belongs on. You could decorate them with scenes from the book. You could play with visual effects on your computer, printing off book jackets with colors, shading effects, or decorative fonts. But the backs of books on a shelf are such small areas of color that books can’t really be said to affect the color balance in a room, unless you put a lot of color-matched covers side by side. 

Actually, since most houses benefit from having light-colored interiors that maximize the efficiency of lighting, Ashwell’s pale color palette could inspire tweaks in any direction. Ashwell suggests re-dyeing yellowed white fabric to a “flattering sepia.” Spoken like an Autumn...to the majority of humankind, who are Winters, there is no such thing as a flattering sepia. If yellowed white fabric doesn’t bleach back to white, most of us would dye it a bright color, or maybe black. If you take design or decorating seriously, you do this kind of “translation” automatically, and you can use and enjoy Shabby Chic. If not, you probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.

So, in summary: If you are the kind of person who can get the most use out of Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic, you probably don’t need it, but you’ll probably enjoy it. I don’t think it’s an ideal first book for someone who’s new to The Applied Visual Arts, unless that person happens to be in Ashwell’s peculiar color niche, as described above. It is, in any case, a gorgeous book. It’s the sort of book I like having on a display just to show that, bristling and value judgments aside, I do understand how those minority-appeal color palettes work...and actually I enjoy using them, now and then, on commissions from people who look different from me. You might like it for that purpose too, or you might like it as a guide to putting together your home and/or wardrobe.