Standards. What has happened to standards?
The governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, and his family, are living in a triple-wide while renovations on the Governor’s Mansion are being made. The 2,131-square-foot, $110,000 manufactured house, which was trucked to the site in three parts, is located in the mansion’s back yard. This should be an early warning sign–a Republican governor thinks manufactured housing is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a mansion. Even though it is Arkansas, where, according to the 1990 census, 12 percent of the population live in mobile homes, this is only one of the indicators that kitsch is not what is used to be.
Elevating manufactured housing to mansion status is just one of the dramatic changes in the hierarchy of the style pantheon. Things that used to be considered less than cool, garden gnomes for instance, are becoming quelle swell.
The Wall Street Journal reports that sales of the kitschy yard-art creatures are up 75 percent over the past two years. Other staunch examples of Americana are buttressing the economic good times.
Cool Whip and Velveeta are propping up Kraft. Well, maybe not solely, but the giant parent company, Kraft Foods, is posting record growth, up 8.1 percent since 1997. Although individual products are not credited, processed foods are a large portion of the Kraft family.
Pickup trucks, the unglamorous workhorses of the automotive industry, are the sustaining life force in American vehicle sales. Those close to the balance sheets say that GM’s profitability in 1999, $5.6 billion, came from sales of its new pickup trucks.
This uptick has induced a frenzy of bigger-better-more. Both Ford and General Motors are unleashing “luxury” pickup trucks in 2001. Look for the deluxoid Cadillac Escalade SUT (sport utility truck), and Lincoln’s Blackwood pickup truck.
Conveyances, foodstuffs and housing are not the only items in a taste turnaround. Pamela Anderson Lee has become one of America’s most guilty pleasures and recognized exports. Fashion always strikes the first blow. Is it any wonder, then, that the latest state of denim is dirty? Calvin Klein jeans ads are using models literally rolling around the ground in what looks like dirty denim.
Bleached, stone-washed, baggy-to-the-point-of-public-exposure or tight-enough-to-cause-oxygen-deprivation, jeans have run the gamut of shape and finish. The latest retail come-on: crud-encrusted.
Toward the mean
There is no significant mark on the style timeline to indicate when the poles began to reverse, but right now we are witnessing a confluence of common items from mid-America flowing upstream, acquiring status at every whirlpool, with the formerly fashionable sliding downhill toward decrepitude.
The collision course in the middle ground will render both average. Nothing will be left at either end of the scale. Everything will hover in the middle. Median has become the land of lost cachet.
When there are no extremes, there is no scale. We are left with a plinth on which to build a new world order of style succession. Or, we can strike a new course of equality where a garden gnome is equal to a Michael Graves teapot. A place where first families can live in trailers or mansions.
There may be liberation when we’re not ruled by the flow chart of what’s hot and what is merely tepid.
