Enable 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 break up-amount with an uncool pretend fireplace in which my mothers and fathers proudly displayed a book called “Gnomes.” The only, only neat thing we owned—sorry, “Gnomes”—was a white, plastic mushroom lamp, the slimmest of connections to overseas 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 little one, a buffalo, none of which had at any time snorted cocaine with Halston. Nevertheless, as a kid aspiring to aesthetic sophistication, I disproportionately pinned my hopes on that white, glowing lump of plastic we likely bought at Sears.
I hadn’t thought about it in years. But on a the latest, soggy April day in New York Metropolis, where I now live, I ducked into the MoMA Layout Retail outlet to escape the rain and could not overlook the lots of, quite a few mushroom lamps with their unique semispherical shades that, priced from $30 to $1,430, experienced sprouted in virtually each individual corner. And so began a quest to discover out how the sole ray of chicness in my oppressively pleasurable childhood has resurfaced as a décor (and social-media) darling in 2022.