The death of ‘shabby chic’

After more than 200 years, a uniquely British taste is on the way out. Shabby chic has been vacuumed, whitewashed and dry-cleaned out of existence. Frayed shirt collars, egg yolk on the tie, soup stain on the crotch, roses rambling out of control over the crumbling terrace flagstones, walls cluttered with pictures, tables covered with teetering piles of books. The quintessentially British air of decayed gentility has been destroyed by a combination of minimalism, modernism and nihilism. For the first time in history we live in a civilisation where, the richer you are, the fewer things you have, and the newer, cleaner and more stripped-down those things must be.

Shabby chic meant the opposite. The idea was that the richer you were, not only did you have more things, but also the things were older and more run-down. ‘I’ve got so much stuff, and it’s so old that of course it’s going to get dusty and battered,’ went the mantra, ‘but it’s so stylish that it’ll never go out of fashion.’