Let ME introduce you to the minimum-amazing identify for a suburb at any time: Pleasantview. That is exactly where I grew up, in 1970s Canada, in a break up-degree with an uncool phony fireplace in which my moms and dads proudly shown a ebook termed “Gnomes.” The only, only cool detail we owned—sorry, “Gnomes”—was a white, plastic mushroom lamp, the slimmest of connections to foreign concepts like grooviness, Studio 54 and Cher. But even its stubby glamour was compromised: It sat on the Tv set, compelled to coexist with “The Waltons,” surrounded by kitschy collectible figurines: a china shepherdess, a prayerful baby, a buffalo, none of which had at any time snorted cocaine with Halston. However, as a kid aspiring to aesthetic sophistication, I disproportionately pinned my hopes on that white, glowing lump of plastic we most likely acquired at Sears.
I hadn’t considered about it in several years. But on a latest, soggy April working day in New York Metropolis, where by I now are living, I ducked into the MoMA Design and style Retail store to escape the rain and could not ignore the several, numerous mushroom lamps with their distinct semispherical shades that, priced from $30 to $1,430, experienced sprouted in approximately every corner. And so commenced a quest to find out how the sole ray of chicness in my oppressively enjoyable childhood has resurfaced as a décor (and social-media) darling in 2022.