Welcome to Chaos Glamour, the death of Rich Mum, and the joyful orgy of colour, pattern, and personality that is taking her place. Let’s talk about beige. For the last five years, we have all been swimming in it.
Cream sofas so white they look like they’ve never been sat on by children or adults. Effortless linen closets full of neutral jumpers that don’t crease ( HOW?? ). Kitchens so white and sparse they actually look sterile and a place where maybe one loaf of homemade sourdough bread is baked per annum.
Instagram. Pinterest.
Blogs.
Target’s designer line.
EveryWHERE has been shouting at us for years that if we just fill our homes with greige cashmere and $40 bottles of liquid soap we too can look like we spend our summers on Nantucket and name our offspring after prep schools. I am here to tell you that it.
Is. Over. Dead.
Finished. BURYING THIS VIBE Okay please don’t bury me there literally took me an hour to choose an appropriate GIF. Anyway.
LAST autumn I noticed something at a dinner party. I opened the front door ready for the typical Brooklyn dining soiree; chill beige paint on the walls, distressed wooden table set with quirky vintage vessels filled with single stems of sad recycled paper wrapped flowers. Three women seated around the table, all rocking non-descript oatmeal cashmere jumpers because god forbid one of us shows some fashion sense by actually trying to look nice.
What I walked into was… traffic stopping. The hostess, Eliza (who for legal reasons we’ll just refer to as Eliza from now on, not because there’s any doubt about her actual name but because googling “Emily Grey rich mum death” isn’t going to turn up the search results I’d like), stopped styling Instagram worthy homes full of Rich Neutrals about six months ago and replaced all of it with colour. And I mean ALL THE COLOUR.
She had painted her living room a shimmery peacock blue, reupholstered her couch in a kitschy botanical print and covered her dining table in an outrageously busy vintage suzani in I don’t know… fifteen shades of tropical paradise? It was set with vintage china in whatever funky patterns she could find, mismatched vintage goblets in jewel tones… it was glorious. And I might have cried a little bit. “What the hell happened to this place?” I asked her excitedly, as she poured me a cocktail into what I can only describe as a liquified radioactive pumpkin that must have been hand blown in the 1970s. “Did you break up with your boyfriend?
Did you lose your job? Are you okay???? ?” “No! I had breakfast with my sister and her daughter who is SIX and she was like ‘Isn’t this couch stupid boring?’ And I realised I couldn’t look at another beige pillowcase without clawing my own eyes out.
Life is too short to live in a beige spaceship.” Girl, I get it. The influx of maximalism hitting the home world has caught my eye too. First the streets of Brooklyn, now my own damn living room.
Truthfully, Eliza wasn’t the only style icon expelling beige grenades from her designer closet over the last year. Bloggers and instagrammers I’ve watched preach the church of capsule wardrobe wardrobes full of expensive-but-not-tooooo-expensive everything in eight shades of oatmeal suddenly started… dressing. Like.
People. Electric blue suit? Cheque.
Hot pink platforms? Why the hell not? It wasn’t just fashion either; the perfectly curated clean neutral aesthetic of every influencer “girl boss” with more white kitchen cabinets than Actual Cabinets used to own was slowly being infiltrated by jewel tones,Pattern Mixing (gasp! ), and ancient pottery that actually looks old.
Like FILLED WITH THE HAPPINESS OF YEARS OF FUN TIMES old. It’s what I’m calling Chaos Glamour. It’s maximalism and mood dripping through every pore of your damn foundation topped with kohl-rimmed madness.
Basically, it’s the aesthetic equivalent of ripping off your black turtleneck and letting your wild, messy hair hang out after decades of tightly pulled up banquets and tasteful clothing choices. To clarify: by Rich Mum we mean the colorless bland woman you waited behind in Trader Joe’s while she lugged her Out AND Backward toddler in a Snugli while you surreptitiously peeked into her groceries to find NOTHING BUT WHITE FOOD. The woman with the squeaky clean marbled foyer who smiles so tightly her face hurts and who dresses in $400 designer versions of exactly the kind of oatmeal jumper we all own but would never dare pair with pink trousers because that’s SIMPLY NOT WHO SHE IS.
Nothing about the Rich Mum aesthetic was rich. It was curated, refined, sterile… and expensive as hell to maintain. She had the Range Rover and the Holiday Home in VT but her actual existence screamed “LOOK HOW MUCH MONEY I MAKE I CAN BUY EVERYTHING WHITE BUT STILL YOU NEVER SEE STAINS ON ME” Does anyone else feel like that says something problematic about cleanliness??
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Like, I know Rich Mums want us to believe we’re talking literal marble countertops and silver plated cookware here but there are some deep fried socio-econo-whatevers stained into that aesthetic. TL;DR: Rich Mums were mean. Chaos Glamour is ready to PARTY.
Photo by Jesada fotos on Unsplash I reached out to Leila Rodriguez, interior designer responsible for some of my favourite ingrams of happily lived-in residences to chew her brain about all things post-Beige. “The fact is, people are TIRED of living in pristine spaces where they can’t actually LIVE without Fear Of Ruining Everything,” Leila told me over coffee at her studio, which was painted FREAKING EMERALD GREEN and filled with vintage ceramic hippos. “There was such judgment around that Pinterest perfect minimalist vibe. Like you weren’t trusted with colour or patterns because you might ‘do it wrong’.” The Final Straw COVID. Wait, hold up, stick with me on this. “What really set people off,” Leila continued, “was that during COVID they spent LIKE TWO YEARS in these homes that looked amazing on Instagram but didn’t actually work for how they needed to LIVE.
And now add to that a global financial uncertainty like no other we’ve faced in decades and telling your customers they need to burn it all down and start over in Chartreuse is just…….bad business?” Fearless advice from the professionals. And while chaos glamour has been simmering in the design world for awhile (shoutout all my diy goblin friends who have been doing it right for YEARS) Leila and I agreed that 2022 was the year maximalism finally hit womenswear as well. “There has been this SUCH RELEASE now that we can wear REAL clothes again and entertain without fear of needing to vacuum before guests arrive IDK it feels very victory lap to me?” said fashion editor Stephanie John when I asked her when she noticed the shift. She went on a rapid-fire textual rant about pattern mixing like it was going out of style (lol am I right??) but leaned most heavily on this point; WE DONT CARE IF YOU DO IT WRONG Pattern mixing was basically punishable by death in the rich mum fan club.
Buy a trace of chartreuse peeked through and you were banished forever, crying in the awayfoots trying to return your baby registry gifts and pretend like you never wanted that perfectly monochromatic kitchenette to begin with. Designer after designer, in equal parts luxury and accessible market caps, are realising they CAN charge thousands of dollars for a patchwork coat because PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT IT. What was once a Design Code Red (messy shirt hanging over the back of a perfectly plumped down sofa?!?) is now front and centre on every street style sheet.
Pattern Mixing has finally stopped being the “nahhh yeah you could never” of fashion and turned into the “oh hell yeah I am doing this and every silly cute thing that matches” Why Now? ? Sure, we could sit here and philosophize about maximalism being the tasteful antithesis to five years of worldwide shitstorm but ladies and gentlemen I give you the numbers; Colourful clothing sales are UP 43% from this time last year while searches for “maximalist fashion” and “ dopamine dressing ” have increased by 134% and we are not slowing down. PINCH ME What is Chaos Glamour, you ask?
Glad you asked! Here are my official(ally unofficial) guidelines for making sure your home and wardrobe are staying true to the Art Gods of Chaos Glamour. 1) COLOUR: think about painting an entire room a bold colour, or pair multiple bold colours together in your wardrobe instead of wearing just one as a “pop”!
That shade of dusty lilac you’ve been “saving for the perfect piece”? Perfect. 2) MISMATCH: Rich Mum would NEVER be caught dead serving drinks in anything other than an identically monogrammed set of Riedel stemware.
Chaos Glamour embraced the wonky vintage tea set for dinner parties and looks remarkably good in them too. 3) ACTUALLY OLD THINGS ARE GREAT: Rich mum jeans are ripped on purpose. Chaos Glamour jeans are ripped from years of sliding down pool slides.
One is expensive to upkeep, the other actually holds memories. You can tell which one I prefer. 4) IMPERFECTIONS ARE ALLOWED: Sure that plate is chipped and it’s driving Mrs.
SM over in the corner crazy but it’s also the plate you got on your honeymoon in Jamaica and hasn’t left your kitchen since so DEAL WITH IT, BITCH. 5) PERSONALITY PLEASE: Bonus points if the plates match your vintage clothing inspired wallpaper that you got at a flea market in Asheville. Extra bonus points if you once stayed at that VERY BED & BREAKFAST and those plates are from your pantry.
SELF-DECLARATION OF CHAOS GLAMOUR INSANITY: I am currently giving birth to this monstrosity of a dining room wall: Photo by user Rach on Flickr Colorblocked walls? Cheque. Vintage dining chairs I REFUSE to switch back to matchy-matchy boring ones that came with the house?
Double cheque. Funky ceramics because, why the hell not? Um… quadruple cheque?
SO HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT ALL THIS COLOUR? ? I recently attended a dinner party in the newly redesigned flat of longtime minimalist Emily Liu. Gone were the sterile whites and moodier-than-thou navy’s of yesteryear, replaced with cobalt walls, teal couches, lime yellow rugs, and glass display cabinets full of… stuff.
Just a TON of weird stuff. Vintage cameras, old perfume bottles, vintage lotion bottles, you name it.
Like someone spilled every favourite thing from every room in her house onto the floor and said “figure it out.” I caught up with Emily at the party, expertly balancing a giant martini in two fingers while filling her reclaimed industrial pipeplate glasses with purple vodka from what I can only describe as a hollowed out kidney. “I was just so bored of living in a theme park version of my home,” she laughed. “I wanted walls I loved walking into, sofas I wanted to curl up on with my dogs… Life is short, why live in a joyless box?” She took a healthy gulp of her drink. “Plus the dogs shed SO MUCH on that rug.
Like… who cares?? ?” As she spoke, I watched guests arrive and realised something; no two people had dressed alike.
Some brave souls wore colour head to toe, others experimented with pairing prints they learned NEVER to mix in Mrs. SM’s perfectly curated closet.
Everyone from PUNK ROCK GRANNIES in Hawaiian shirts and leather jackets to snooty art directors wearing full on vintage Chanel. The variety, the joy, the damn personality was palpable. I looked around the room at the colour blocked walls and decor I knew Emily spent months curating to create a home that felt like… well, home.
And do you know what I didn’t see? White pillows. Credits// All screenshots via Emily Grey & Co.
Instagram. Photos provided by Jess Tran, courtesy of the Emily Grey Archive. Top (header) Photo by Linda Rodriguez on Unsplash
