Have any of my 20 or so devoted readers looked at the episodes of this Sundance Channel miniseries? A sort of fly on the wall view of the buying efforts of a gentleman who kits out the interiors of a smallish chain of lifestyle boutiques with ‘found’ items, all of which are then marked up for resale.
An ostensible sort of green endeavor, reusing old items, and laudable, as far as in keeping with what we aim to promote, that antiques are the original green product. But what I found disturbing to the point of nearly rising from the sofa were the forays into the Paris flea market. Certainly given how difficult it is to sell good quality period material, that anyone in their right mind would buy junk, albeit artfully arranged junk, from Parisian, or London, or Roman, market traders astonishes me.
Yet it happens countless times every day. We had lunch not so very long ago with a very nice local person whose major effort over the past year has been the redesign of her home. Someone certainly friendly to Chappell & McCullar, she nevertheless has not traded with us much. She did, though, delight in telling Keith what a wonderful pair of mirrors she had bought from a Paris flea market dealer. We had the opportunity to see these, and, no surprise, they turned out to be something of comparatively recent vintage that had been tarted up for sale. What she paid to have them shipped cost many times what they could, should she so desire, be sold for- and that doesn’t begin to consider what the trader gouged out of her. Well, I suppose everyone needs to possess something that will make a good addition to a garage sale that will, probably sooner rather than later, constitute someone else’s flea market ‘find.’ Who knows? They may eventually, passed from hand to hand, even become antiques.
Some of you may know that our London base is hardly a stone’s throw from the bottom end of the Portobello Road market. What you might not know is we haven’t been through the Saturday antiques market for years. It might be because there are very few antiques actually there, despite the huge number of market stalls. The last item I even remember picking up was a Georgian style silver salt, missing its glass liner. At best a £5 item, the trader was asking £30. Perhaps I looked as though I could, or would, pay £30. He was wrong.
My point is, well patronized flea and street markets have long since ceased to be worthwhile venues, unless you like to be jostled by crowds, have money gouged out of you, risk having your pocketbook stolen, or are bound and determined to be able to tell your friends of your astonishing foreign purchase.
The latter is, I would speculate, what drives much, if not all, flea market purchases by foreigners, the ability to make a story out of it and also to seem, by association, a knowing citizen of the world. What was formerly the delight of the fashionable, ‘antiquing’ (a word I find as excruciating in the hearing as fingernails on a chalkboard) in the Cotswolds, has now become- what’s the term for purchasing cack in the Paris flea market?