Author: Michael Chappell

Our own ‘Contemporary Classics’ proudly made in the US

It is so much of what we’ve heard over the last couple of years, that manufacturing jobs long lost to the Far East would return to this country. I don’t think flipping burgers at McDonald’s down the road from me is what would be counted as a manufacturing job. It would be interesting, within the nearby McDonald’s, to see what of their interior fittings, even their kitchen equipment, is manufactured in the US.  Not much if anything, I’d wager. Where from and the why? You already know, gentle reader- overwhelmingly, the where from is China, and the why is an acquisition cost fractionally what it is to buy from a US manufacturer. For myself, I would happily pay more for a burger made not just with domestic ingredients, but also prepared using domestically made cookers and afterward to sit on domestically manufactured stools and lean on domestically made counters.  In this, I suspect, I am in the distinct minority.

I mention this by way of introducing something closer to what it is we do, selling period material, and how much has been made over the last couple of years about how changing tastes have been detrimental to the trade. I saw an ad this morning on TV for the company Home Goods, which along with a number of other retailers sells job lot and end of season decorating material for home use- throw cushions, bath towels, decorative flower pots and mirrors- you know it, and you name it, they’ve got it. What you would have trouble naming, though, are the items in stock that are made in the US. Overwhelmingly, the items on offer at any of these retailers were made in low wage countries. Now mind you, nothing is very expensive, but everything is, as an old colleague of mine in the trade used to say when trying to avoid using an opprobrious term to describe third rate material, cheap and cheerful.

Not expensive, and cheap enough to be thrown away, but not very good quality, either. Hopefully biodegradable, too, as so much of it is destined in the not too distant future for the landfill. That sounds sour, and I apologize to my gentle readers, but I ask you- can you say it isn’t so? And while pundits decry the change in taste that seems to now grace the pages of the shelter publications, the internet and HGTV, bear in mind that we’ve a huge number of Chinese manufacturers that are laughing all the way to the bank. The cheap schlock that younger buyers seem so eager to acquire is likewise extremely cheap for low wage countries to produce.

Are you looking for quality and durability? Well, you won’t find it. A few months ago, we sought to replace some Fieldcrest toweling, worn out after some thirty years of use. We were able to find a local outlet that sells Fieldcrest bath linens, but although 100% cotton was clearly of an inferior manufacture. While the towels we were replacing were produced with domestic cotton and spun in a mill in North Carolina, the same brand toweling available now was made in India. A year on, and it’s worn out. Let me see- we got thirty years worth of wear out of the first set of towels that were domestically made and a year’s worth of wear out of the towels made in India. Were the domestically made towels thirty times more expensive than those made in India? Not hardly. Cheaper to acquire, yes- cheaper to own? Not hardly.

Can China, can India produce goods that are of excellent and enduring quality? Of course they can, and have a tradition of doing so that stretches back millennia. Will they do so? And that begs the question- why should they, when we want to price shop and buy looks-like- but- isn’t. For me, of course, when I see what’s on offer at Home Goods, or what graces the pages of most shelters and is broadcast on very many HGTV programs, I know that the typical viewer has never had to replace 30 year old Fieldcrest towels. In more direct terms, our own buyers these days are not only price driven, but don’t actually know domestic quality, because they’ve never seen it.

Fendi, Bond Street- Mallett displaced

So goes the headline in a recent issue of the Antiques Trade Gazette, touting an upcoming trade conference in London featuring, so the article goes, experts on the marketing of luxury goods from whom, presumably, the ailing antiques trade might take a lesson.

Frankly, I don’t know that the trade, composed entirely of smallish, independent businesses have much to learn from what is now the international trade in luxury goods, overarched by LVMH, the behemoth whose marques include Chanel, Fendi, and innumerable others besides the Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennesy brands from which initials the company derives its name. How on earth the trade can compete in promotion with the capital brought to bear by a company such as this, I do not know. Witness my earlier blog posts, Bond Street has become a thoroughfare almost entirely devoted to the retail outlets for the various LMVH brands, with the venerable storefront occupied for so many decades by Mallett for some years now taken over by Fendi.

Moreover, I would question the underlying premise, that the trade might wish to ape luxury goods marketing as this assumes competition for the money spent on what it is the trade has to offer comes entirely from the same pool of buyers. I have for a long time considered that my competition comes from all online retailers who sell furniture and decorative objects, whether period or not. The so-called big box stores and online platforms selling looks-like- but-isn’t non-period and vintage items siphon very much of what formerly went to dealers. The accredited trade also has had much of its business spirited away by the auction houses who now see themselves very much as retail vendors in the business of antiques and fine art. The major houses, in particular, are keenly aware of the benefit of online trading, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s offering commission free buying in their online auctions.

So what to do? It might be thought that dealer organizations might band their members together for purposes of cooperatively promoting the trade. Good luck in doing that- cumulatively, I doubt that every member of the accredited trade could even with the most generous whip around accumulate an annual budget for promotion that would match what Chanel spends in a week. And promotion in what manner and to what effect? Print media? Media ads are hugely cheaper than they were a few years ago, but one needs only to see that very many of the connoiseurial and shelter publications in which ads might be placed have a size of book that is now hugely less, reflecting an ever-growing disinterest in print.

No answers or suggestions in this post, I’m afraid to say, with Chappell & McCullar not a stranger amongst the dealers casting about trying to stay in front of new and prospective clients. While certainly time tested methods can hardly be relied upon to be effective, the imitation of other luxury goods merchants offers no real way forward either. Sadly, the trade in art and antiques counts these days as an ornamental small fish under threat from much bigger fish in a large, international retail pond.

If the book of life is composed of memories, mine must have a burgeoning chapter on The Daily Planet. It was a central feature of what Keith McCullar and I would both consider our salad days, spent living in the Tower District from 1981 to 1989. Mind you, though we moved out of the neighborhood and then eventually away from Fresno, the memories remain vivid, and we’re both of us replete with stories. Just at the moment, every one of these comes flooding back, now we’ve heard the melancholy news of the death of the Planet’s owner, the redoubtable Hannah Benson.

I rarely use the term ‘hangout’ but have no other to describe how we felt about the Planet. For us, an evening out was not complete unless it involved a stop, either for a meal or, more likely, a smart drink or six. Campari and soda in the summer, manhattans the rest of the year- with a cherry and on the rocks (ugh!) for Keith, and classically straight up with a twist for me. A sidebar- you can see that the way we take our drinks is emblematic of our relationship, and it takes a page from Ginger and Fred’s book- I give Keith class, and he gives me sex, although, between ourselves, not as much as he used to.

The tone may be louche, but frankly, that was in no small part the appeal of the Planet, and in this, despite our occasional shall we say bad behavior, we were never, ever chided by Hannah, and not that she turned a blind eye. Once a number of years ago, we were dining with a gay, but very closeted friend of ours- someone, by the way, known to most of my gentle readers, but he’s dead now and decided to the very end to keep his gayness to himself and a very few others so I’ll not betray him. As it happened, we were the three of us planning a trip to London the next week, and, in a wave of horniness enhanced by alcohol, our good friend invited our comely and very, very gay waiter to come along as his guest. Although initially taken aback, our friend’s repeated blandishments turned the head of our young waiter sufficiently that he sought out Hannah and asked her advice. She told him, in our hearing, that he’d be a fool if he didn’t go with us.

The waiter didn’t take Hannah’s advice. Incidentally, it was a wonderful trip and on our return, we made haste to give Hannah an update. The waiter was no longer there, and we never saw him again, with Hannah reporting on the night, with the slightest bit of disdain, he’d found love and didn’t want to work nights.

But Hannah did want to work nights and was loyal to her customers- yes, the food was good and the drinks refreshing, but what Hannah’s hospitality always wrought was fun. We never, ever went to The Daily Planet when we didn’t have fun- and nothing for a guaranteed good time has since taken its place.

Now we’ve returned, when we can, Keith and I attend the Sunday afternoon Fresno Philharmonic concerts, but despite enjoying the performance leaving the concert venue always brings with it more than a bit of wistfulness. In years gone by, post concert almost invariably included a stop at The Daily Planet and our trek home up Van Ness Avenue is yet slightly bittersweet as we pass through the Tower District. Oh, well- blessed memories of Hannah and the Planet and Keith and I will always be thankful for them.

The sad single bottle

In this era of regifting, the single bottle of wine has replaced fruitcake as the preferred recycled gift. This time of year, when I clear my clothes closet and various and sundry other cubbies of things unworn, unused, and generally unwanted- mostly with the purchase tags still attached- I have yet to figure out how to extend that annual clear out to include the wine cabinet. It is replete with single bottles, nearly all of them gifts from people otherwise well-meaning but who felt obliged in some way to give us a gift, but didn’t want to do much more than hand off something without the mental contortion of giving the matter too much thought. Sounds churlish perhaps, but think about it- what good is a single bottle of wine? It is too little for a dinner for four, and, for Keith and me alone, we’ve only a handful of times in our relationship ever had either a cocktail or glass of wine the two of us on our own together. And, if a bottle needs opening to give out a glass to an afterhours visitor, I am wont to open something about which I know nothing. The bottle’s contents may be okay, but then again, it might not be, and I never want to risk offering hospitality that if left to their own devices, a visitor might prefer to spit into the kitchen sink.

So what to do, what to do? Too many people ask this same question and consider it solved by passing the unwanted bottle on to someone else. The next time you receive a single bottle, gentle reader, you may wish to examine the label for telltale signs of fraying, but look charitably if you can on the giver and remember what mental anguish they experienced in deciding to give this single bottle to you. Or, depending how frayed the wine label, you might then determine yourself relieved of giving them a reciprocal gift.

Frankly, we’ve solved our gift giving dilemma years ago, when things were their darkest during the great recession, by making a gift to assist those who most needed help, and I would encourage all of you gentle readers to do the same, to Poverello House, helping the hungry and the homeless.

Let’s all of us turn a regifting dilemma into a glorious season of giving by providing something thoughtfully tangible and eminently useful.

A sidebar- I actually like fruitcake, and although I am not soliciting gifts, for those of you who received this original butt of regifting jokes, a couple of suggestions. Trying slicing and toasting fruitcake, and serving it warm with butter along with breakfast coffee. Or for those of you a bit more ambitious, try substituting a portion of fruitcake along with the other ingredients when making bread pudding. Both of these, trust me, delicious and fruitcake jokes will become a thing of the past.

Yet another Fendi, Bond Street this time

With all the hoopla associated with the sale of the grotesque and shall we say authentically arguable Salvador Mundi, one would assume the major auction houses are a beehive of activity. All I can say is, you couldn’t prove it by me.

But then, virtual activity is very much harder to gauge. We attended a sale at Sotheby’s Bond Street a couple of weeks ago, and the sale room complement consisted of an auctioneer on the podium, and half a dozen associates fielding a bank of phones, and, wait for it, four people- including myself- bidding in the room. Mind you, there were an unknown number of bidders signed on to participate virtually, which must have done the trick overall, as the lots in the sale were pretty generally taken up.

For myself, nothing substitutes for bidding in the room. One can achieve a sense of interest in the material offered, and as a prospective buyer, one can also gauge the competition and if it might be intense, one can then back away, and not risk becoming infected with auction fever.

Or so it was. Now of course, with no one in the room, and all the activity virtual, what was to my mind an exciting activity has now become something very sterile. As indeed, all of Bond Street has become. Gone are very nearly all the independent merchants, and even Sotheby’s has sublet a significant portion of its leasehold to others, witness the presence of a pair of leasing agents while we were there, discussing space availability with a couple of prospective tenants.

Fendi in EUR

I can’t help but put forth a photo showing Fendi, opposite Sotheby’s, now occupying Mallett’s old space, and one has to wonder how many Fendi outlets are actually required, in London or anywhere else. But then, international luxury branding has and continues to roll forward inexorably, continuing to displace what had made London’s Bond Street one of the pillars of the international art market. As I think about it, luxury mass market giant LVMH has very nearly taken over Bond Street, with profound prominence throughout the West End and nearby Knightsbridge, with other Fendi outlets, as well as Chanel, Givenchy, and Louis Vuitton.

The concentration of an enormous amount of capital in corporate hands has materially changed Bond Street, as it has so many other commercial venues internationally, in a nearly fascistic control of even luxury consumerism. It seems appropriate, therefore, that Fendi should have its headquarters in the Mussolini commissioned Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, placed prominently in the dictator’s master planned EUR, outside central Rome.