Friday, December 24, 2010
White lights vs. colored lights: The debate never ends
Fun article. … The piece nails the divide without quite saying so: It’s suburbs vs. working-class towns – or at least it used to be that way. As a youth, I remember driving from the white-lights burbs into colored-lights Somerville to visit my grandparents. In addition to colored lights and plastic Santa and Reindeer statues, the All-American City was also known for its orange electric-candle lights in windows. … But the white-vs.-colored-lights battle lines are shifting, helped by what appears to be cutesy irony:
Fun article. … The piece nails the divide without quite saying so: It’s suburbs vs. working-class towns – or at least it used to be that way. As a youth, I remember driving from the white-lights burbs into colored-lights Somerville to visit my grandparents. In addition to colored lights and plastic Santa and Reindeer statues, the All-American City was also known for its orange electric-candle lights in windows. … But the white-vs.-colored-lights battle lines are shifting, helped by what appears to be cutesy irony:
Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York — a place that would seem to suggest sophistication — said the notion that white lights implied good taste was “about a quarter-century out of date.”
“It’s very ’80s ‘Dynasty,’ ” Mr. Doonan wrote in an e-mail, referring to the evening soap opera. “People who are pathological about white lights are usually the same people who stuff their TV into an armoire and try to pretend they don’t have one.” Colored lights, by contrast, Mr. Doonan said, are “beautiful and magical” and carnival-like.
“When I pass a suburban house festooned with twinkly colored fairy lights,” Mr. Doonan wrote, “I always scream ‘Bravo’ out of the window of my car.”
