LA Home Furnishings Trend: 'Dumpster Diva Deluxe'

As a sophisticated, consuming woman who promotes polo on Governor’s Island, my brow is still furrowed (sans Botox) over this home design article in the LA Times: The rich welcome the humble-looking abode.

Correctly calling the “burlap is the new velvet’ trend an ‘arony alert’, writer David Keeps reminds us the looking poor doesn’t come cheap.

The look is based on key Cultural Creative principles, referenced by Jonathan Adler: an organic, modern direction evidenced in tree-stump end tables and other designs that recall the back-to-nature hippie era; the urban loft aesthetic, which embraces castoff industrial furnishings and found objects; and a growing green consciousness, with an emphasis on recycled materials.

I support and totally understand the desire to dial down conspicuous consumption.

Some examples of “dumpster diva deluxe” make sense. “I’ve seen high-end chairs stripped of gilt to the natural wood and upholstered in very plain canvas,” said Brooke Hodge, former curator of architecture and design at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and coiner of the term. “That’s a more refined, less trendy way to show restraint.”

Reading this article, I stress that this is the Modern way of dealing with today’s trend towards inconspicuous consumption. A Cultural Creative is looking for the authentic nature of the investment — is it really green, or does the item just look natural.

Most Cultural Creatives and definitely the Smart Sensuality woman — who may be an ex-Modern — wants to make the investment in an authentic product but also at a more sensible price, leaving her the money to send a kid to camp or buy AIDS drugs in Africa, perhaps travel to an eco lodge. 

In the state of our current economy, unless the woman has buckets of money — and even then it’s not likely — the Smart Sensuality and Cultural Creative mindset is to invest in others, while investing in ourselves.

Paying top dollar to look poor doesn’t resonate, the way it might have in the past. This trend is a distinctly Modern mindset.