Shabby chic a pretend poor style that is very fashionable

Shabby chic a pretend poor style that is very fashionable

History, character and trends of the shabby chic style including some advice for shopping and fro a wedding banquet

 

Its guru is the interior designer from the US Rachel Ashwell who has made elegant scruffiness a philosophy of life. The beginning of it all has strong ethic values; recycling, renovating, accepting the film left on things that have been lived as an element able to reveal the soul of things, because the use of objects entraps humanity into them and the story of those who have used them. New objects do not have these stories. So here was born the passion for vintage, market stalls and the new cloche style and most of all furnishings based on hap hazard combinations of thing that are elegant but different. So here come unpaired chairs around a table, where the table setting is made with period porcelains and silver cutlery, unpaired, and playing in a creative way with the contrasts.

So now we have stripped woods that initially were old furniture partially painted

that then became new furniture that want to seem old. In fact the original intent to respect the soul of used things, giving them a new youth, then transformed into a game and a fashion. False poor of course!

Now we have dishes with an irregular profile as if they were printed wrong, knifes with handles that are wrong but they are made by the best knife makers, the tablecloth made on the loom with all different coloured napkins ….

Designer objects, coming from artisan laboratories which seem poor objects but they are not (from Toscana Lovers in Siena).
The shabby chic arrives also on the banquet table at a wedding, for the flowers for example. This is what Maria Grazia Scalzi has prepared at Fattoria del Colle for a Norwegian couple who wanted on the tables can of all shapes with flowers (apparently) wild and many candles.

Seen for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini