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.
for reminding us what a cool children's book this one was!)
