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Donald Trump, White Trash Icon<\/p>\n
One of the most remarkable things about the Old Days is that there were Americans with taste. Today, Americans appreciate bad taste, or America wouldn\u2019t look the way America does. Enough has already been said about Trump and his shitty taste, his awful manners his gross appearance, the garbage of his personality, and what we surmise are his astronomical outstanding credit card balances — because you know how New Money always has to parade itself around in front of you like a dumb peacock. But there is more to say.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s bad taste is typical of a large swath of Americans. Not like he necessarily dresses the way most Americans do, in gigantic suits with a cut and a sheen of a drunk Bombay tailor and inexplicably long, shiny neckties in Bus and Tunnel colors the have to be held down with tape (it is hard to believe that this vulgar hair-weave troglodyte made his home in NYC,<\/em> though).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are no ways in which Americans will not go sartorially awry. Ill-fitting T-shirts that showcase somewhere they’ve been or a feat accompli, like ‘NYC Marathon’ or ‘Columbus Zoo’, or “2008 World Champions”. Khakis with puffy pleats, shorts past the ankles, which makes them, well, pants. On-air sport’s broadcasters dress up like comic book super villains. College football team logos slammed on jumbo-sized shirts and sweatshirts, socks, hats and jackets. The old and the new mixing freely; confusedly, and unencumbered by the rigid aesthetic diktats of village life. The result is an embarrassment of bewildering sartorial neologisms, only to be found in America. Several decades of economic ruin and sports frustration can make anyone loathe to change out of sweatpants, but must we be turned into a Crimson Tide penal colony?<\/p>\n Every successful brand needs an aesthetic, <\/span>and Donald Trump has spent decades cultivating his, a theme of “conspicuous consumption”*. <\/strong>Trump’s best-known asset is Trump Tower, a brassy-d\u00e9class\u00e9 58-story skyscraper with a horrible huge pleated fa\u00e7ade threatening 5th Avenue in Manhattan valued at $371 million. The top three floors are his personal Penthouse, the theme of which is Success! <\/em>Just in case you weren’t sure about Donald Trump’s Success!<\/em>, he’s planted two ridiculously giant doors encrusted in both gold and diamonds, beyond where a blaze of vulgarity awaits. It looks less suited to native new Yorker, and more to a Saudi prince. Or a Russian oligarch.<\/p>\n NYC is a gallery of famous displays of wealth by robber barons and social climbers of the late 19th include the the railroad tycoon Vanderbilt’s r “Petit chateau” on Fifth Avenue, and the mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In the older days, the uber rich surrounded themselves with the very best furniture, porcelain and art created for the nobles of the French Court in the 17th and 18th century in the pursuit of social acceptance from high society. Trump has no such ambitions. His sensationally hideous trappings show he is not of the “old order”. This adds to his appeal for those who feel forgotten by the established elite. Trump wants the aesthetic of flamboyant patrons of the gilded age, but unlike the European-style salons designed for the new money of the late-19th and early-20th centuries filled with genuine treasures, nothing in Trump’s interiors are real. He owns all phonies.<\/p>\n Mr Trump conflates \u201cover the top\u201d with \u201cluxury\u201d and \u201cexpensive\u201d with \u201cquality\u201d. Everything is \u201crepro.\u201d Repro gilded French furniture, New, shiny marble, of course, not the worn, “used”old stuff. But where wealthy industrialists and bankers of yore sought to attain social prestige by association with authentic objects that belonged to a lost world of ancien-r\u00e8gime France, Trump’s interiors mimic the only the most superficial aspects of French Court art. His penthouse boasts humongous canopy beds, fresco-style ceilings and colossal chandeliers, a bronze statue of Eros and Psyche. ** Louis XIV-inspired furniture, wrongly proportioned, over-scaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking “historical” detailing. Shiny surfaces, ginormous gold and glass chandeliers and giant golden mirrors. marble coats walls and floors and tabletops, every square inch of the bathrooms. Uncomfortable looking furniture, spaces far apart. the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche. It’s little surprise that the substantive current design was done by Henry Conversano<\/a>, a casino designer.<\/p>\n America is a design illiterate country, identity-lacking building that dominates much of the American landscape hence our architecture is one of banal oppression. Architects turned their backs on suburbia long ago, and suburbia responded by designing for itself. We wantonly tear down actual older homes and rebuilt tomes that are “inspired” by French chateaus, Spanish villas or, alarmingly, early American plantations. What says \u201csuccessful American\u201d better than an ersatz Monticello? Modern homes are often a mash-up of disparate architectural styles with little regard for geography or history. As opposed to the symmetry of, say, a classic Colonial-style house \u2014 with the front door in the middle and windows placed evenly on either side \u2014 new American homes have irregular features that confuse the eye. Garages that dwarf the house. Bombastic entrances, with stretched columns or oversize pediments (or both). Key design features that aren\u2019t even amenable to human comfort. The uncozy \u201cgreat room\u201d with insanely high ceilings, stress including non-rectangular rooms. It’s like a bricolage of elements chosen to impress non-existent guests. Chandeliers, columns and de facto lobbies, that are drawn on the architecture of banks.<\/p>\n There is simply no quality control for architecture in an age of building boom similar to that of the post-depression 1930s. It is an architecture identified by the profit that can be made from it rather than the community it can build or ideology it can inspire. In a country where the haute couture of housing is a couple of Texas rubes jumbling bewilderingly trendy faux farmhouse touches like distressed wood with subway tiles and more clocks than a 19th-century train station architect, we are setting a very low barre.<\/p>\n Donald trump owns little to no “art” (He has often bragged about his “original Renoir,”<\/a> which and a reproduction of Renoir’s “La Loge” painting used to “hang’ in one of his jets and now keeps in Trump Tower. Despite all the times he’s been told that it is copy, and that the original hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, he insists it’s real (“just look at the signature, tells people). FACT: Painter Thomas Kinkade’<\/a>s nauseating fantasies are said to hang in one out of every 20 homes in America.<\/p>\n Donald Trump’s lavish Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago,<\/em> was built in 1927<\/a> by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post for $7 million. Marion Sims Wyeth, noted for designing many of Florida\u2019s signature Gilded Age mansions, oversaw the project. But Post’s insistence on the late-stage participation of Joseph Urban, a scenic designer for the Ziegfield Follies is what turned a masterpiece into a monstrosity in the eyes of many architectural critics. She shared her private realm during wartime as a hospital, foreshadowing what she expected might be one of her lasting legacies: Her dream of having Mar-a-Lago repurposed for a greater good, as a presidential retreat and sanctuary for visiting heads of state. The government did not want to maintain the property and returned it to the Post estate who sold it to Donald Trump in 1985 for a mere $5 million, who then immediately ruined it. Mar-a-Lago<\/em> the private club, includes a “Louis XIV-style” ballroom containing $7 million in gold leaves and countless different gold-plated sinks and shitters. There is a “library”, filled with rare first-edition books that no one in the family ever read.<\/p>\n Dictators might work in the grand styles<\/em> of earlier centuries -Italian Renaissance, Napoleonic, or French baroque – but they never use anything actually old -materials and furniture. Old is dirty and shabby! Old isn’t fancy! Everything is brand spanking new. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump\u2019s look, comes from the author of book called Dictator Style <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n