neverending nineties BONUS: who sees, who crafts?
aestheticism and the study of aesthetics, particularly aesthetics used in a commercial or corporate setting, especially home decor, is not neutral. the question of whose eyes the advertiser or the artist is trying to draw, of which professionals get to sit in positions of power and declare 'this is our target demographic' - it's always loaded and weighty.
I'm a Native woman with white family members, and it was to whiteness that my family on both sides assimilated in many ways while still maintaining some cultural ties. The aesthetics I have nostalgia for - Victorian and Renaissance revival, Global Village Coffeehouse, Whimsigothic - are fundamentally centered around white sensibilities and white perspectives, because they were conceived by white people for white people. Global Village (GVC) in particular has a troubling relationship with the question of cultural appropriation vs appreciation, depending on who drew a corporate mural or designed a dining space's decorations. Many of their 'tribal' or 'world' motifs are imitations of authentic designs with no attribution or credit given. Victorian revival draws on the aesthetics of a brutally imperialist empire that conquered territory all across the world and destabilized regions for decades if not centuries after. I own an antique lamp in that style, inherited from my Native grandmother who saw hyperfeminine Victoriana as a status symbol and an aspirational aesthetic, that is literally called a Gone with the Wind lamp. Decoplex, which hasn't come up yet but will, lionizes and romanticizes the aesthetics of Art Deco and the later 1930s; the United States was segregated at that time and the Hollywood studio system it draws on for inspiration was infamously awful to Black performers and artists. Frasurbane relies on a particular kind of affluent whiteness for its primary inspiration and target demographic. Gothic fashion, especially fashion photography, has had a massive problem with racism for longer than I've been alive.
I don't think anyone who likes or wishes to emulate these aesthetics is racist or problematic solely because they like pretty things. I like them; I'd be awfully hypocritical if I said everybody except me was evil, and I'd be self-hating if I said everybody including me was evil but kept on liking well-constructed photographs from before the advent of generative AI. But it's irresponsible, especially as a Native woman, to act as if everything is completely neutral and the very things I have nostalgia for aren't themselves telling on how my family tried to assimilate into whiteness for the sake of security and social/financial advancement.
My solutions to this are twofold.
First, obviously, is to try and find examples of vintage architecture and fashion and photography and art by and featuring nonwhite people in addition to the overwhelming whiteness of things like Victoria magazine. I've already posted a project by Javier Senosiain, a Mexican architect responsible for the growth of Mexican organic architecture as a style, and I go out of my way to find fashion photography featuring nonwhite people both behind and before the camera. The 1990s, particularly in English, particularly for the aesthetics I'm fondest of, have a whiteness problem, but letting that go by unchallenged contributes to that same problem. I also avoid vintage sources like Southern Living, because I think that glamorizing and romanticizing all-white Southern living is actively participating in Confederate apologia, and I don't fuck with that shit.
Second, when I'm not sourcing exclusively vintage images, I do go out of my way to fill my dash and my Pinterest and other sources of creative inspiration with people of color, more explicitly nonwhite aesthetics, and to celebrate things like Enchanted Living magazine going out of its way to recreate classic 19th century Pre-Raphaelite paintings with Black models or spotlighting Black artists who make fantasy art and Black models and costumers who like the same kinds of fantastical aesthetics that make up the publication's bread and butter. It's really, really easy to follow nonwhite historical costumers and visual artists and photographers and learn about nonwhite models and fashion designers and musicians. If you're someone who's noticing how beige everything is around you, you can and should take action to change that.
I don't think that I'm doing anything wrong by having fondness for these styles. I can't help that my family, particularly my mother's family and maternal grandmother, really aspired to be the kind of people who lived Like That (white-passing/white-assimilated, financially stable, capable of creating homes that were beautiful by white standards). I can't help living as a colonized person and being moved by the culture that swallowed mine whole. But I don't want anyone who's following me and going "ooh pretty pictures!" to lose sight of the fact that nothing here is foreordained to be pleasurable or interesting. We like what we like for institutional and structural reasons. What we do with those likes is up to us.