7 ms·

The Death of Flair

71 points by samclemens 10y ago

Animats 10y ago
Summary: Chain restaurants drop the cluttered old junk look. Fear in the collectables market as the chains sell off all that junk.
- apendleton 10y ago
  That's a good summary of the entirety of the headline (subtitle included), but honestly not a very good summary of the article. Not much is dedicated to the "what happens to the industry" question, and it's mostly devoted to how the current/fading aesthetic cluttered came to be. As someone who was not alive during the '70s when a lot of these places started, and never witnessed the very different function they then served (countercultural, sex-focused, etc.), I found all of that totally fascinating.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I honestly had no idea that the "antiques" at those restaurants were actually real. I had assumed it was all reproductions made specifically for that interior decor.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    Me too, I thought it was all shipped out from some warehouse in, like, Missouri whenever they opened a new one.
    - Animats 10y ago
      Hollister, the poser surfer brand, tried that. At one time every store had a fake copy of a surfboard made by a famous board maker. He sued. He won.
agentgt 10y ago
It reminds of of Seinfeld: PETERMAN: Morty. My stories are what sell these clothes. MORTY: Cheap fabric, and dim lighting. That's how you move merchandise. Now the problem is TGIF will no longer have dim lighting (because apparently modern is bright lighting). What a shame.
- sizzzzlerz 10y ago
  or the episode in The Simpsons where Moe turns his bar into Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag with "a whole bunch of crazy crap on the walls".
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Which is referenced and embedded in the article!
    - sizzzzlerz 10y ago
      oops! missed that. nevermind.
- drawkbox 10y ago
  Not only that they were dark and you could get lost in them. They had booths and private walls where you couldn't just walk in the front door and see everyone like an open office under one giant spotlight. I dig the new modern warehouse style like Chipotle's but everything is too open with little personality. Restaurants used to be like a labyrinth in some restaurants, all dark and adventurous where noise didn't carry, now it is a GAP/Apple Store in the mall. Back in the day with arcades and flair, I guess I miss it. Everything looks the same. One day Ronald McDonald, dark booth labyrinths and flair will return. Famous Dave's BBQ has some of this like Fridays/Cracker Barrel and I like it, fun to look around and you can't see everyone either.
- mindslight 10y ago
  AFAICT, "modern" lighting uses spotty directional lights which only seem bright if you look right at them. Their actual subject illumination is quite poor, especially with the contrast.
rdtsc 10y ago
Establishments want to project an image of class. It used to be class was associated with flair. The more intricate and multi-colored flower patterns you had, the more wealthy you were. The more gold foil and ornate columns the better. Then at some point tables have flipped (furniture pun intended) and mid-century modern, minimalist design became a sign of wealth. Which, funny enough had started with "let's make things functional and simple", stuff regular folk can use. So it got inverted a bit, the poor people like kitsch and flair, but the rich to differentiate themselves, end up with blank white walls and dining room furniture made from unfinished birch. This in part accounts for why IKEA is so popular today. Now everyone can look like they live in Palm Springs, CA, but it is also cheap. > The biggest trend right now is industrial design, which creates the feeling of being in a warehouse or unfinished building—and that requires hunting down turn-of-the-century factory At some point someone decided that unfinished walls, exposed wiring and air conditioning pipes in the ceiling means "youthful" and "cool". Probably because those warehouse-like places in abandoned industrial parts of town were places artists would congregate, sometimes to have shows or performances. Wonder if people will get tired of that eventually, and it will become the epitome of what office open spaces are with associated implications: hard to focus, noisy, ugly decor, loud. At some point we made fun of cubicles, and now we'll make fun of industrial-looking open spaces.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >At some point we made fun of cubicles, and now we'll make fun of industrial-looking open spaces. Yep, I remember making fun of cubicles, and pining for a walled office when I had one. Now, I pine for the days when I had a cubicle. It wasn't great, but it was a whole lot better than this open-plan crap. I guess it's a lot like a prisoner stuck in "the pit" or similar inhumane cage pining for going back to living with the general inmate population where he had to worry about getting shanked.
- ashark 10y ago
  > Establishments want to project an image of class. It used to be class was associated with flair. The more intricate and multi-colored flower patterns you had, the more wealthy you were. The more gold foil and ornate columns the better. In the specific case of chain restaurants, I thought flair was an attempt to replicate the cluttered-junk aesthetic that certain local joints acquired organically over time, not to signal wealth.
mc32 10y ago
Both pictures look good but present a different atmosphere. I think the main issue with restaurant décor is that they allow the furniture etc to become apparently old and creaky. It becomes obvious someone is skimping on maintenance. So, give that Corpus Christi location ten years without proper maintenance and it too will look like a has been location.
jccalhoun 10y ago
Whoever wrote that headline should be ashamed. The article is basically really a history of TGIFridays and what happens to the antiques is basically only a paragraph or two. If you want that, fine. I was there to find out what happened to the antiques and they don't even give a specific answer: As old Friday’s closed or remodeled, what happened to all the unwanted antiques? "The woman who was in charge of purchasing had to figure out what to do with everything"
coredog64 10y ago
I work with a restaurant franchisee, and if you ever want to generate a long and creative stream of expletives, ask him about corporate mandates to remodel. I expect this type of remodelling will be the end of a bunch of marginally profitable TGIF locations.
- douche 10y ago
  Makes perfect sense, especially if they have a clientele that has gotten used to things the way they are. People, on aggregate, tend to be kind of resistant to change, and are creatures of habit. You go in and frig with the decor or the menu, and people that have been going there as a regular thing for years will get irritated and try other places.
sizzzzlerz 10y ago
Office Space came out in 1999. Fridays started removing the junk from their walls in 2005 followed by Ruby Tuesday in 2007 because they were supposedly embarrassed with the depiction of restaurants like theirs in a 6- or 8-year old movie? Not a real strong temporal correlation there.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  Yeah and 'flair' in the movie was something the staff wore, you know buttons and zany accessories. I never thought it referred to the stuff on the walls.
  - jonnathanson 10y ago
    I think a lot of people have conflated those two things over the years.
- DanBC 10y ago
  Office Space is often cited as a slow burn sleeper movie, not so popular when it was released, picking up fans over the years.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    A lot of Mike Judge's work is like this.
- rhizome 10y ago
  The article covers this.
- sverige 10y ago
  And really, by the same reasoning, Fight Club should have killed off Ikea before it ever got big here. Yet every time I turn around, it seems there's a new Ikea going up.
- mindslight 10y ago
  That's the speed at which fashion changes. If trends spread instantly, the system might actually converge.
GuiA 10y ago
The old style is kitschy, but at least it's coherent. The picture showing off the prototype location is just terrrible though - it succeeds in mimicking the modern minimalistic aesthetic, but the result falls completely flat. Weird colors, mismatched chairs and tables, it's just a clutter of furniture... ugh. The booths, propped up menus, and haphazardly placed pillars are all out of place here. Some European McDonald's look better than that. I wonder how much they paid for this concept, because a group of interior design senior students could do better in a month.
- danielvf 10y ago
  It looks exactly like the bland, mid range hotel dining rooms of thr 1990's. In fact, I had to check the caption carefully to mske sure that was actually the new design.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bigtunacan 10y ago
Now Friday's looks just like the inside of a Perkins or IHOP... I don't see how this is more appealing to millennials.
simulate 10y ago
During the 2008 financial crisis, I got a great deal on some lovely and interesting commercial rental space for my 20 person software and consulting company in the financial district of San Francisco. It was an old bank building with lots of marble in the entrance and a nice view of the Transamerica building. The developers we hired from outside of San Francisco did not like the space because a commercial bank building did not match their expectations of what a Bay Area tech company should look like. After our lease was up, I let the developers decide what space we would move to. We ended up in a minimalist SOMA warehouse with unfinished walls and ceiling and sealed concrete floors.
- douche 10y ago
  This is why we can't have nice things...
- mathattack 10y ago
  I've been at two companies which tore up the floors and ceilings to get the unfinished look. It reminded me of friends in school who spent hours working on making their hair look sufficiently unmanaged.
  - theoh 10y ago
    It isn't worrying so much as substantive of a totally image-driven lifestyle. William Morris, for example, wasn't exactly a model of democratic equality but he had an image of authenticity in mind which was achievable without extreme/real contrivances. The problem now is that the neo-yuppie lifestyle requires completely ersatz constructions: walls that look bricky, an urban "buzz" when everyone is boring and elite... etc.
- greggman 10y ago
  This is true of pretty much every tribe/culture. You want to be a hippie and stick it to the man. You must have dirty hair or dreads, wear sandals, have those baggy light pants (no idea what they are called). South Park made fun of this years ago with their depiction of goths but it's true for pretty much all groups. My brother in law (I love him, just taking short cuts to explain) is monster truck loving heavy metal loving hick stereo type. He hates suits and dressing up but at the same time he has his outfit (jean shorts and a t-shirt with a print on it) and it fits with his tribe of friends and it's just as much of a conscious fashion statement. An attempt to fit in by dressing like your peers. I'm just as guilty. I can't really imaging having a video game company in the offices of E-Corp.
RichardCA 10y ago
Thanks, I can't tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to read such a well-written long-form article, free from pop-ups, requests to sign up with my email address for updates, or getting scolded for using Adblock. This made my day.
- benbreen 10y ago
  Collector's Weekly puts out surprisingly good long form writing. I first came across them because they wrote an article about my home town [1] and keep coming back because it's very hard to predict what topics they'll cover. It's basically a history magazine in disguise as a website about collectibles. [1] http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevils-who-were-just-crazy-enough-to-invent-mountain-biking/ http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevi...
draw_down 10y ago
The caption for the top picture mentions "Tiffany-style lamps". So, Friday's moved from aping the tastes of rich people of bygone eras to aping the tastes of contemporary rich people. In other words, the story is that over decades, rich people's tastes in decor changed. Ho hum.

71 points by samclemens 10y ago

Summary: Chain restaurants drop the cluttered old junk look. Fear in the collectables market as the chains sell off all that junk.

apendleton 10y ago
That's a good summary of the entirety of the headline (subtitle included), but honestly not a very good summary of the article. Not much is dedicated to the "what happens to the industry" question, and it's mostly devoted to how the current/fading aesthetic cluttered came to be. As someone who was not alive during the '70s when a lot of these places started, and never witnessed the very different function they then served (countercultural, sex-focused, etc.), I found all of that totally fascinating.
ams6110 10y ago
I honestly had no idea that the "antiques" at those restaurants were actually real. I had assumed it was all reproductions made specifically for that interior decor.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Me too, I thought it was all shipped out from some warehouse in, like, Missouri whenever they opened a new one.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Hollister, the poser surfer brand, tried that. At one time every store had a fake copy of a surfboard made by a famous board maker. He sued. He won.

agentgt 10y ago

It reminds of of Seinfeld: PETERMAN: Morty. My stories are what sell these clothes. MORTY: Cheap fabric, and dim lighting. That's how you move merchandise. Now the problem is TGIF will no longer have dim lighting (because apparently modern is bright lighting). What a shame.

sizzzzlerz 10y ago
or the episode in The Simpsons where Moe turns his bar into Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag with "a whole bunch of crazy crap on the walls".
- rhizome 10y ago
  Which is referenced and embedded in the article!
  - sizzzzlerz 10y ago
    oops! missed that. nevermind.
drawkbox 10y ago
Not only that they were dark and you could get lost in them. They had booths and private walls where you couldn't just walk in the front door and see everyone like an open office under one giant spotlight. I dig the new modern warehouse style like Chipotle's but everything is too open with little personality. Restaurants used to be like a labyrinth in some restaurants, all dark and adventurous where noise didn't carry, now it is a GAP/Apple Store in the mall. Back in the day with arcades and flair, I guess I miss it. Everything looks the same. One day Ronald McDonald, dark booth labyrinths and flair will return. Famous Dave's BBQ has some of this like Fridays/Cracker Barrel and I like it, fun to look around and you can't see everyone either.
mindslight 10y ago
AFAICT, "modern" lighting uses spotty directional lights which only seem bright if you look right at them. Their actual subject illumination is quite poor, especially with the contrast.

rdtsc 10y ago

Establishments want to project an image of class. It used to be class was associated with flair. The more intricate and multi-colored flower patterns you had, the more wealthy you were. The more gold foil and ornate columns the better. Then at some point tables have flipped (furniture pun intended) and mid-century modern, minimalist design became a sign of wealth. Which, funny enough had started with "let's make things functional and simple", stuff regular folk can use. So it got inverted a bit, the poor people like kitsch and flair, but the rich to differentiate themselves, end up with blank white walls and dining room furniture made from unfinished birch. This in part accounts for why IKEA is so popular today. Now everyone can look like they live in Palm Springs, CA, but it is also cheap. > The biggest trend right now is industrial design, which creates the feeling of being in a warehouse or unfinished building—and that requires hunting down turn-of-the-century factory At some point someone decided that unfinished walls, exposed wiring and air conditioning pipes in the ceiling means "youthful" and "cool". Probably because those warehouse-like places in abandoned industrial parts of town were places artists would congregate, sometimes to have shows or performances. Wonder if people will get tired of that eventually, and it will become the epitome of what office open spaces are with associated implications: hard to focus, noisy, ugly decor, loud. At some point we made fun of cubicles, and now we'll make fun of industrial-looking open spaces.

Grishnakh 10y ago
>At some point we made fun of cubicles, and now we'll make fun of industrial-looking open spaces. Yep, I remember making fun of cubicles, and pining for a walled office when I had one. Now, I pine for the days when I had a cubicle. It wasn't great, but it was a whole lot better than this open-plan crap. I guess it's a lot like a prisoner stuck in "the pit" or similar inhumane cage pining for going back to living with the general inmate population where he had to worry about getting shanked.
ashark 10y ago
> Establishments want to project an image of class. It used to be class was associated with flair. The more intricate and multi-colored flower patterns you had, the more wealthy you were. The more gold foil and ornate columns the better. In the specific case of chain restaurants, I thought flair was an attempt to replicate the cluttered-junk aesthetic that certain local joints acquired organically over time, not to signal wealth.

mc32 10y ago

Both pictures look good but present a different atmosphere. I think the main issue with restaurant décor is that they allow the furniture etc to become apparently old and creaky. It becomes obvious someone is skimping on maintenance. So, give that Corpus Christi location ten years without proper maintenance and it too will look like a has been location.

jccalhoun 10y ago

Whoever wrote that headline should be ashamed. The article is basically really a history of TGIFridays and what happens to the antiques is basically only a paragraph or two. If you want that, fine. I was there to find out what happened to the antiques and they don't even give a specific answer: As old Friday’s closed or remodeled, what happened to all the unwanted antiques? "The woman who was in charge of purchasing had to figure out what to do with everything"

coredog64 10y ago

I work with a restaurant franchisee, and if you ever want to generate a long and creative stream of expletives, ask him about corporate mandates to remodel. I expect this type of remodelling will be the end of a bunch of marginally profitable TGIF locations.

douche 10y ago
Makes perfect sense, especially if they have a clientele that has gotten used to things the way they are. People, on aggregate, tend to be kind of resistant to change, and are creatures of habit. You go in and frig with the decor or the menu, and people that have been going there as a regular thing for years will get irritated and try other places.

sizzzzlerz 10y ago

Office Space came out in 1999. Fridays started removing the junk from their walls in 2005 followed by Ruby Tuesday in 2007 because they were supposedly embarrassed with the depiction of restaurants like theirs in a 6- or 8-year old movie? Not a real strong temporal correlation there.

gerbilly 10y ago
Yeah and 'flair' in the movie was something the staff wore, you know buttons and zany accessories. I never thought it referred to the stuff on the walls.
- jonnathanson 10y ago
  I think a lot of people have conflated those two things over the years.
DanBC 10y ago
Office Space is often cited as a slow burn sleeper movie, not so popular when it was released, picking up fans over the years.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  A lot of Mike Judge's work is like this.
rhizome 10y ago
The article covers this.
sverige 10y ago
And really, by the same reasoning, Fight Club should have killed off Ikea before it ever got big here. Yet every time I turn around, it seems there's a new Ikea going up.
mindslight 10y ago
That's the speed at which fashion changes. If trends spread instantly, the system might actually converge.

GuiA 10y ago

The old style is kitschy, but at least it's coherent. The picture showing off the prototype location is just terrrible though - it succeeds in mimicking the modern minimalistic aesthetic, but the result falls completely flat. Weird colors, mismatched chairs and tables, it's just a clutter of furniture... ugh. The booths, propped up menus, and haphazardly placed pillars are all out of place here. Some European McDonald's look better than that. I wonder how much they paid for this concept, because a group of interior design senior students could do better in a month.

danielvf 10y ago
It looks exactly like the bland, mid range hotel dining rooms of thr 1990's. In fact, I had to check the caption carefully to mske sure that was actually the new design.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

bigtunacan 10y ago

Now Friday's looks just like the inside of a Perkins or IHOP... I don't see how this is more appealing to millennials.

simulate 10y ago

During the 2008 financial crisis, I got a great deal on some lovely and interesting commercial rental space for my 20 person software and consulting company in the financial district of San Francisco. It was an old bank building with lots of marble in the entrance and a nice view of the Transamerica building. The developers we hired from outside of San Francisco did not like the space because a commercial bank building did not match their expectations of what a Bay Area tech company should look like. After our lease was up, I let the developers decide what space we would move to. We ended up in a minimalist SOMA warehouse with unfinished walls and ceiling and sealed concrete floors.

douche 10y ago
This is why we can't have nice things...
mathattack 10y ago
I've been at two companies which tore up the floors and ceilings to get the unfinished look. It reminded me of friends in school who spent hours working on making their hair look sufficiently unmanaged.
- theoh 10y ago
  It isn't worrying so much as substantive of a totally image-driven lifestyle. William Morris, for example, wasn't exactly a model of democratic equality but he had an image of authenticity in mind which was achievable without extreme/real contrivances. The problem now is that the neo-yuppie lifestyle requires completely ersatz constructions: walls that look bricky, an urban "buzz" when everyone is boring and elite... etc.
greggman 10y ago
This is true of pretty much every tribe/culture. You want to be a hippie and stick it to the man. You must have dirty hair or dreads, wear sandals, have those baggy light pants (no idea what they are called). South Park made fun of this years ago with their depiction of goths but it's true for pretty much all groups. My brother in law (I love him, just taking short cuts to explain) is monster truck loving heavy metal loving hick stereo type. He hates suits and dressing up but at the same time he has his outfit (jean shorts and a t-shirt with a print on it) and it fits with his tribe of friends and it's just as much of a conscious fashion statement. An attempt to fit in by dressing like your peers. I'm just as guilty. I can't really imaging having a video game company in the offices of E-Corp.

RichardCA 10y ago

Thanks, I can't tell you what a breath of fresh air it is to read such a well-written long-form article, free from pop-ups, requests to sign up with my email address for updates, or getting scolded for using Adblock. This made my day.

benbreen 10y ago
Collector's Weekly puts out surprisingly good long form writing. I first came across them because they wrote an article about my home town [1] and keep coming back because it's very hard to predict what topics they'll cover. It's basically a history magazine in disguise as a website about collectibles. [1] http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevils-who-were-just-crazy-enough-to-invent-mountain-biking/ http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-hippie-daredevi...

draw_down 10y ago

The caption for the top picture mentions "Tiffany-style lamps". So, Friday's moved from aping the tastes of rich people of bygone eras to aping the tastes of contemporary rich people. In other words, the story is that over decades, rich people's tastes in decor changed. Ho hum.