That ’70s Sofa
I don’t know who watched “That ’70s Show.” I never did, not even once. I may have glanced at the characters while pressing the remote to change the channel. I’m not saying I didn’t like the show. I think it may have a cult following. I just never took the time to watch it, perhaps because when it was on — in the early aughts — I wasn’t deeply pining for the decade, nor was I ready to find humor in it.
It is ironic then that when it comes to things vintage I now have moved from the ’60s, the decade of my birth, to the ‘70s and even the ’80s. Although I have mostly stopped wearing vintage clothing, once a passion, I toy with the idea of wearing ’80s “Dallas” style clothing, and I am drawn at last to ’70s design in general.
I definitely know my way around the decade of my elementary and middle school years, and when I find a piece of furniture from the era I am strongly drawn to it. How can I not be when it is the furnishing of my youth and of my family’s aspirations? In the living room of our home in Detroit was, from around 1974 till I left home in 1983, a gold damask couch covered in plastic, two lime green crushed velvet chairs whose legs and arms were made of “walnut” wood with a speckled black finish. The chairs sat on opposite sides of our front window, equaling in stature the white damask curtains my mother made of her own imagination and will. In the ten or more years that the chairs were the pride of our living room, feigning our family’s financial stability, we wore the velvet thin. The plastic that was to keep the golden couch new grew hard within a year, cracking along its seams until, having come apart almost entirely, the irreparable couch cover was a worse embarrassment than a soiled couch would have been.
Our somewhat traditional furniture made that owned by my Aunt Inez — fifteen years my mother’s junior — emit an aura of the modern and hip. I remember just when she purchased the loveseat that would be the only two-person accommodation in her living room. I remember the piece because, before she bought it, I hadn’t known that there was such a thing as a loveseat. It was a concept that quickly affected me, my associating it, maybe for life, with romantic love. Shortly after Aunt Inez bought the loveseat, she reunited with Uncle Vernon, whose return to the Chrysler assembly line after a layoff, may have played a role in the fabric of their own family life.
One day, not long ago, I found at Goodwill, not a loveseat like my aunt’s, but a short, chubby, chair in a fabric that reminded me of it. Besides being drawn to the aura of that ‘70s chair, I had a rationale for making the purchase. Who couldn’t see that the chair was of timeless design, with its simple lines and over-stuffed comfort? Though I had done no research, the chair seemed akin to Memphis design.
Even the brown-and-tan plaid fabric wasn’t a turnoff. The chair wasn’t filthy exactly, well, the arms where someone had comfortably watched television for fifty years were rather greyed, but the seat cushion wasn’t so bad and the pillow was almost clean. The plaid to me is Proust’s grandmother’s painted teacups. The design immediately brings to the surface for me so many memories. The combination of earthiness and modern invention in the '70s chair transport me back to my adolescent years, ones that forestalled, thank goodness, a premature falling of darkness that Baldwin wrote of in “Sonny’s Blues.” I want to believe even now that a new sofa can, contrary to an imminent blues accompanying adulthood, perk up one’s present. A piece that conjures personal history brings up both joy and sorrow.
As charming as the chair is in its own way, I plan to recover it hopefully with a $6 dollar a yard bolt I’ve spotted at a fabric store in my neighborhood. I once paid an eighty-three year old nice Southern lady eight hundred dollars to make a slipcover for my own damask sofa, white and camelback. Having honed a few sewing skills of my own, I will try my hand at reupholstering the chair.
One of two sofas now in my living room— once sold by the upscale L.S. Ayres Department Store— goes very well with the plump ’70s chair. The sleek sofa I purchased a few months later than the chair. My local Restore has at any given time at least fifteen old couches in stock, and the cost of having one goes lower and lower as customers view them as though they were aged dogs in a pound. People have their reasons, their dispositions, and pre-dispositions. In my son’s words, “I like what I like.” I translate that as, “After years of having to live in a house full of old stuff, I want new stuff.” How universal is that preference? Still, I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to sit on other people’s body dirt however much we all do so in other places — airports, restaurants, hospital waiting rooms. I suppose bringing other people’s detritus home is a different story, but I choose not to see it as all that different.
There’s a vlogger, Bernadette Banner, whom I like to watch, who has a good take on what it means to buy used. If you too watch Bernadette as she shops for fabrics and notions for her period clothing, you know that she is living her tiempo guisto. I admire her both for discovering her “perfect time” and for making a living by doing so. Her philosophy —
“Every thing, every item, every thing just has an energy to it, has a life almost, and therefore I like to treat the things that I have, that I possess, that I purchase and that I come to own with a sort of respect. I like them to have a purpose, I like them to have a place, I like them to have a use.”
Like Marie Kondo, clutter for Bernadette is things inhabiting one’s home without having use or sparking joy or appreciation. Saddened by the scale of manufacturing in a consumer society, Bernandette, much like myself, sees herself as a caretaker of previously used items rather than, primarily, as a consumer. As odd as it sounds, old items are for me gifts that keep on giving, and the best thing that antiques bestow is a sense of the past, of both dormant and active energies. Who cannot feel the soul of an old house, an old car, or an old pair of leather shoes?
Old sofas have been the site of how many family gatherings? Weekend movies nights? Repasses and dinner parties? Baby and bridal showers?
My Restore sofa, white, soft, and ample is a wonderful backdrop for a collection of pillows, handcrafted cushions displaying skills of piecing and quilting. I have an assemblage of such pillows, and they remind me, not of Aunt Inez but of my Grandmother Daisy, who sat on her own, ’50s, sofa, always with a basket of fabric squares at her side. A third thrift store in town sells the pillows for $1 each, their current value to most Americans I suppose. But I see them anew, grandmillennial, yes, but also as retaining traces of the creative energy that brought them into existence. On my white sofa, I have two pillows displaying two white cats posing with their tails curled around them. What does it take for one to see such items in a new light? How does one come to appreciate kitsch?
My husband and I are empty nesters, and our children come home but once a year. Our living room is no longer host to gangs of teenagers who tramp through on their way to the kitchen. The room is for us now, and my husband has made the comfy chair his spot for movie watching. I put my feet up on “my” sofa, a couple cushions supporting my back. I grab one of the cat pillows, squeeze it, and marvel, wondering about the person who made it. The cushion is so soft, and it is clean because I have washed it. I envelop myself in their fluff. I am luxuriating, excusing myself for a bit of materialism because it is balanced by deep appreciation of human residue.
My husband hasn’t always been a believer in my scavenging ways. But the other day he paid me what I consider a compliment. He said simply, “we aren’t taught to shop [your] way.” I nodded and smiled. I suppose it can be considered bourgeois to eschew what designer Terence Conran referred to as a “stick-on lifestyle.” But I haven’t chosen to furnish my family’s life with old things because I think myself too good for plastic, compressed wood, or fake gold but, rather, because I love the life stories old things have buried within them, and I realize that, those histories, are very much connected to me.
