I love a good trend. I like going places in my yoga pants and tennies. I love skinny jeans. Ditto leopard prints, polka dots and Mary Janes. I’m glad that brown has been declared the new black.
I don’t fall for every new trend, mind you. To me, for example, subway tile looks like — subway tile.
Alas, those glossy white rectangles everybody’s cementing to their kitchen and bathroom walls remind me of the subways of my New York City days, when subway stations were lit with grim florescent light bulbs, the walls were covered with greasy white — subway — tiles, and the underground air was acrid with the residue of wheels braking and grinding against steel rails.
Not a look and feel I wanted for my new bathroom.
Trends Are Trendy
My personal pique with subway tiles aside, keeping up with the trends can be risky: trends are trendy. They come and go. This year’s hot item could be next year’s pathetic.
Which is why, for my new bathroom, I avoided all the newest tiles on offer around the Bay Area — the subway tiles, but also the quartz, the ceramic, the marble.
Trading in a pair of shoes or skinny jeans every few years will not break the budget. But trading in a bathroom that’s up to date in 2025 and out of date by 2035 can cost you.
Where to Throw a Throw Pillow? On the Bedroom Floor, of Course
Which brings me to my bed pillows. Not the ones I sleep with — the ones that style the bedrooms of my house.
Yes. I fell for that poofy, pillowy, boudoir look.
I bought the duvets. I bought the shams. I bought the decorator pillows.
I bought seventeen of those danged non-pillow pillows. Every bedroom in the house has a herd of them.
And what if someone wants to go to bed at my house? What happens to my fancy-dan throw pillows?
They get thrown, of course.
On the floor.
And on the floor they stay.
For days.
Until somebody comes around to vacuum the floor and throws them back on the bed.
Thoughts on trends at “Those Wild and Wooly Pandemic Hairstyles.” And, “For China’s Young Fashionistas, the Cultural Revolution Is Oh, So Over.”
Your mom once told me she hated throw pillows being all over the place. I’m with you on the subway tiles. Also, the all white kitchens that will eventually show yellow.
Wow! My mother hated throw pillows? I forgot that. Maybe that’s where my pillow pique comes from. My daughter feels the same way about pillows. I wonder how many generations it goes back.