i've been to about a million antique shops in the past two days.
it's very sad to think about how decorative and lasting things used to be compared to how they are now. "back in the day" even potato sacks looked nice, with little illustrations and stenciled letters on burlap.... now potatoes come in plastic bags that end up in landfills.
nothing is made to last anymore; the tragedy of this is that so many things grow more beautiful with age.
i bought some fantastic old photographs at one of the shops:
i love the quaintness of the family, and how absolutely absolutely grumpy the little boy by the tree is. also his boots :] unfortunately i have no information about the identities of any of the people, or even the locations or years. if anyone can guess from the clothing, i'd love to know!
this made me remember that i actually scanned a few of my own family's very old photographs a couple months back. here they are:
i really wish that it was socially acceptable to wear fancy old clothes. i mean, there's steampunk and goth and things like that, but they're sort of lame. i really wish i had lived in the 1950s/60s in london... apparently at that time there was a subculture known as "teddy boys" (and "teddy girls"). they were somewhat associated with gangs and whatnot, but their fashion was fantastic. they wore jackets and waistcoats and trousers, all of which needed to be custom made and were paid for in installments. not such a fan of the hair styles... but i guess you can't have it all.
(replace the quiffs with powdered wigs, my other true love, and then you've got something.)
they're all delightfully androgynous. :]
for more teddy boys info, go to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_boy
(it's enormously hard to find any information about them for some reason.)
(as for powdered wigs....
...amadeus is a fabulous movie, clearly.)
back to my point about old things being superior.
even more recent lovely things are disappearing.
polaroid film, for example, is no longer being made. which is awful, as they're a perfect example of the beauty in imperfection. this is a photo i just adore, of my house that my mom took in 1994:
in contrast, a white-balanced, perfectly in-focus digital photograph is artless to me... and will never become more beautiful with age while stored on a computer (unless you save it as something lossy like a jpeg i guess, but i don't think that's really the same).
what do you think? are you drawn to antiques and things that are falling apart with history, like i am? why or why not?
