Twee-dle-Dumb: Wes Anderson’s Bar Luce
If you weren’t already familiar with the word twee — “affectedly dainty or quaint” is the first definition at Dictionary.com — then you probably learned it while reading about filmmaker Wes Anderson.
This past week Anderson debuted Bar Luce, a cafe he designed in Milan. It’s about as masculine an interior you would expect from a man perpetually referred to as twee.
Vogue (which has a slideshow of the place) dubbed it pretty much perfect, but GQ, in a post today written by a woman, was far more scathing:
The café is a hideous Formica disaster. Located in the Fondazione Prada art complex, Bar Luce harkens to the 1950s and 60s and also a regurgitated pastel heap of furnishings. The floor looks as if it has a rash, with a thick helping of calamine lotion on it. The walls featured a particularly ill-suited trio of schemes: Blue Formica! A shock of wood paneling! Kitschy wallpaper! This wallpaper, by the by, is an illusory trompe l’oeil balcony from which your eyes would maybe like to leap, if they could save themselves.
I’m sure at some point we’ll visit the decor of Anderson’s films.
If anyone else had done this we would be calling it “Midcentury Modern” but since it was done by someone far more successful than any of us, it is twee. There is nothing more twee than a misguided, jealous wannabe critic.
In my neighborhood, twee phobia is overcome with motorcycles and guns to compensate for self – perceived masculine inadequacy.
Everyone has their own definition of a masculine interior. This doesn’t fit mine, but if others find pleasure in it, so be it.
RKM, thought text was clear this was more a post on a failed masculine interior. But one with pinball machines.
Forget its masculinity, if anyone else had done this we wouldn’t be talking about it at all because it’s ugly, uninspired, corporate, and lazily put together. I enjoy Wes Anderson’s films, but if indeed this is his and not a rubber-stamped committee’s handiwork, he phoned it in.
Christian, the text is indeed clear, and I simply desired to voice my agreement…it isn’t a masculine interior , as I would define the same.
And DCG…couldn’t agree more…ugly, uninspired, corporate and lazy.
Now, Christian, your post on boat houses…that’s a different matter entirely!