The Lure of Faux Authenticity

I’ve been wait­ing a long time to find an arti­cle that helps me under­stand why Restora­tion Hard­ware car­ries items such as its Wine Bar­rel Chan­de­lier described as “Hand­crafted from French Oak Wine Bar­rel Staves and Hoops” in its mail order catalogue.

How many old French wine bar­rels can there be lying around? Who wants to buy this kind of item through the mail?

I finally found the quin­tes­sen­tial arti­cle on Salon​.com today called Over­priced Antiques for Anx­ious Yup­pies. I found it by googling the words “Reclaimed wood restora­tion hard­ware bull­shit.” Gotta love it when Google works so well. The arti­cle does a bril­liant job of describ­ing our long­ing for objects that:

Trum­pet their own authen­tic­ity and hint at a con­nec­tion to the earth and an appre­ci­a­tion for crafts­man­ship and artistry and the untold charms of the world’s for­eign peoples

But of course, the real­ity is these items are not authen­tic at all. They are just

Our new way of sooth­ing our­selves over our lives of idle acquisition…We pre­tend to appre­ci­ate the strong hands that fash­ioned this hand-woven wool rug or built that delight­ful floor lamp. In this age of ephemeral dig­i­tal con­nec­tions and vaporous 24-hour media feeds when most of us spend our days squint­ing at com­puter screens, it makes sense that we would be infat­u­ated by the notion of real labor, that we would cling to the con­crete­ness of old stuff that looks like it has a long and sto­ried history.

And now there’s a show that allows us to blow-up our fetish for the faux authen­tic. It’s called Man Shops Globe which fol­lows Keith John­son, the lucky fel­low who is head buyer for Urban Out­fit­ters (which owns Anthro­polo­gie) and trav­els the world in search of authen­tic objects to knock-off for our shop­ping pleasure.

It seems we are at the peak post­mod­ernism where the search for ‘authen­tic­ity’ is utterly futile. Those exotic night mar­kets in Thai­land are ways for us to fetishize our idea of exoti­cism. And now, we don’t even need to sup­port their “hand­i­crafts” to dec­o­rate our homes like we’ve trav­eled the world.

Call it arm­chair exoti­cism. Call it faux authen­tic­ity. Bot­tom line is, it’s just more of the same con­spic­u­ous consumption.

Related posts:

1. When Not to use a Turkey Baster
2. Irish Authen­tic­ity at The Ceili Cottage
3. Authen­tic­ity in Social Media: Scalable Intimacy
4. Wine Fla­vor Visu­al­iza­tion. What your mouth sees. Sort of.
5. One of a Kind: The Franchise