Fiesta Farms Video Shoot #2: Meeting Mafalda and Clara

Today, I had the plea­sure of meet­ing Clara and Mafalda; an Ital­ian Toronto mother and daugh­ter who allowed us to video them mak­ing stuffed arti­chokes for the Fiesta Farms web­site. They were warm, and lovely, and had an amaz­ing rap­port that had us all in stitches. Again, we were served an amaz­ing lunch and even a glass of white wine. What a life I’m living.

For the sec­ond time in two days of shoot­ing, I was sur­prised to walk into the home of a sup­posed “granny” to dis­cover that her home was more styl­ish than my own. When I think of a “granny”, I think of my own grand­mother whose house over­flowed with chachkas, pho­tographs and old fash­ioned, wood trimmed fur­ni­ture. Clara’s home did not stink of moth balls. In fact, she had all the lat­est mod­ern stain­less steel appli­ances and a tele­vi­sion set big­ger than I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know why I’m sur­prised. My 60 and 70-something par­ents are pretty hip and live in a swanky condo. It seems granny chic is only the rage for us 40 some­things who only have faint mem­o­ries of plas­tic cov­ered fur­ni­ture and giant coloured glass ash­trays from our own grand­par­ents. Here’s some evi­dence of the fact that granny chic is a real, and grow­ing trend:

• Flickr’s granny chic page has over 1,500 photos
• Etsy, the three year old online craft store sold $27 mil­lion in goods last year
• Pop­u­lar blogs like decor8 are bring­ing granny chic to a whole new level

What to make of our long­ing for our grandmother’s aes­thetic? If 60 is the new 40, then 40-somethings are miss­ing the ol’ fash­ioned com­fort of their granny’s house. All those Lululemon-ed grannys are mak­ing us nos­tal­gic for the feel of fur coats and a Chanel Num­ber 5. If I were a psy­chol­o­gist, I’d say we’re fil­ing that void by dec­o­rat­ing our homes with nos­tal­gic reminders of time gone by. Oh Granny, where art thou?