Let ME introduce you to the least-great name for a suburb at any time: Pleasantview. That is in which I grew up, in 1970s Canada, in a split-stage with an uncool fake hearth in which my mothers and fathers proudly displayed a guide identified as “Gnomes.” The only, only interesting issue we owned—sorry, “Gnomes”—was a white, plastic mushroom lamp, the slimmest of connections to foreign principles like grooviness, Studio 54 and Cher. But even its stubby glamour was compromised: It sat on the Tv, pressured to coexist with “The Waltons,” surrounded by kitschy figurines: a china shepherdess, a prayerful baby, a buffalo, none of which experienced at any time snorted cocaine with Halston. Continue to, as a kid aspiring to aesthetic sophistication, I disproportionately pinned my hopes on that white, glowing lump of plastic we probably bought at Sears.
I hadn’t considered about it in a long time. But on a new, soggy April working day in New York Town, exactly where I now are living, I ducked into the MoMA Style and design Store to escape the rain and could not overlook the several, several mushroom lamps with their distinct semispherical shades that, priced from $30 to $1,430, experienced sprouted in nearly each corner. And so started a quest to find out how the sole ray of chicness in my oppressively pleasant childhood has resurfaced as a décor (and social-media) darling in 2022.