The hard part about living a vintage lifestyle is that you never quite know who’s in it for the #aesthetic and who’s in it for the #maga.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all into the superficial charm of gloves and hats and tea time, but I’m also a modern person with modern sensibilities. I support Black Lives Matter, BIPOC, intersectional feminism, LGBTQIA rights, labor rights, and eating the rich, among other such noble and righteous causes.
Which brings me to lamps. I want some vintage lamps for our apartment. (Aside from the haunted lamp I already bought.) I’ve been scouring eBay, Etsy, and local virtual marketplaces for parlor lamps, and I’ve noticed something a bit… strange. A great many of these painted globes are marketed as “gone with the wind southern heritage confederacy” lamps. In the tradition of shoving as many words as possible into a listing description in order to generate views, it makes perfect sense. But I’m just trying to buy a lamp, you guys, not stand up to the war of northern aggression. It’s a lamp. Why does it have to be a racist lamp? Why do eBay sellers have to tag a fucking hand-painted lamp with an ideology? None of them are even converted, eletrified oil lamps dating to the antebellum or Civil War era. Most of them are from the early 1900s, and even more were manufactured in New Jersey or New York.
The vintage movement is growing, and I’m seeing a lot of “vintage looks, not vintage values” statements from folks, which is encouraging. I’ve spent a long time in this complicated love affair with old things, trying to figure out the ethics of possibly giving my money to people who might turn around and pay their Klan dues with it. I’ve made choices not to buy certain items from certain people when I couldn’t figure out what, exactly, they were up to in this world that often glorifies and romanticizes old things. Many people are now trying to determine the values of brands and businesses as the BLM movement engages in sustained protests against police violence, but I’m an old hat at this consumer dance.
Which brings me to a tea set. My husband has been getting more on board with the vintage life, embracing the the balance I attempt to strike between beauty and utility. He’s enjoyed high tea with me at an art deco hotel and has decided that he’d enjoy having a lovely tea set of our own. So, of course, I began hunting for the perfect find.
There’s an entire racist, colonial history of tea and tea sets, and I’ve come across certain pieces which explicitly celebrate English, Dutch, Belgian, or French colonial power. It’s jarring to recognize Black slaves painted onto a delicate, pastoral toile pattern, and yet I’ve been so jarred. I even once found a KKK tea cup, produced, I believe, to commemorate the release of Birth of a Nation.
I will eventually find the perfect set. It will probably be flowery and ridiculous, and I will love it and cherish it until the day I die, probably because I did the most basic vintage white bitch thing and bought a terrifying old murder house because it had “good bones” and then wound pushed down the basement steps by a poltergeist. I just hope that when the estate agent lists it on whatever the contemporary equivalent of eBay is, they don’t call it a “antique colonial white supremacy maga godly women stay home tea set” or some shit.
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