^{Last year, for about a good three months, I compulsively watched Homeworthy videos on YouTube…three, four, five videos a day. This was in addition to other channels like it.}

^{I was obsessed with getting my apartment to look like the interiors I’d seen in the videos.}

^{At the time, I was renting a white box apartment. You know the kind. Looks like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. I couldn’t stand it.}

^{But I didn’t want to decorate it in a way I’d later regret either…nothing too crazy…nothing too wild. Nothing too colorful, right? Baby steps.}

^{I noticed, however, that the interiors I gravitated toward were “wild” in their own special ways. They very obviously bore the very unique aesthetic tastes of their owners. They were room portraits of the people who lived in those spaces.}

^{They weren’t the homes of professional interior decorators. No. I found them too clinically curated, everything too perfect and in the right place with all the right matching colors of furniture and decor. And even when rooms looked more eclectic, they always felt as if they’d been decorated in a self-conscious way with prints and patterns picked out in anticipation of outside viewers’ opinions. (I could be wrong, of course.)}

^{My favorite homes belonged to—surprise, surprise—visual artists and writers, as well as architects, fashion designers, art and antique collectors.}

^{One home was lambasted by viewers in the comments section for being too “messy” or not camera-ready. What happened was that we got a shot of the owner’s slightly disorganized closet, but isn’t this the way we really live? Things get messy. Stains form on floors and carpets. Stuff accumulates. Dishes don’t get done sometimes.}

^{I liked the tours featuring homes that actually felt lived in and personally decorated with loved objects that the owners could go on and on about, not like a showroom at Restoration Hardware.}

^{I sighed whenever I came across another all-beige or all-white apartment on Homeworthy. One of the worst offenders—to me—was a couple living in Boston. Oh, the shame…}

^{Almost everything in their apartment was white. White walls, white bathroom, white furniture, with only some color coming in the form of a few paintings. I reeled back in terror. One room seemed to have original red brick walls before they were so callously painted white.}

^Aaaaaaah.

^{But really, this is just my preference. If you love all-white decor, go nuts.}

^{Still, the tides of home interiors (and fashion, too) appear to be changing.}

^{A book I recently read, Fashion & Interiors: A Gendered Affair, helped me to better understand the relationship between trends in fashion and the ones in home interiors.}

^{(These two applied art forms are also feminized, but we’ll ignore the gendered aspect for now.)}

^{It often seems like maximalist fashion people who wear lots of color, patterns, and interesting shapes have houses and apartments that match this style.}

^{It works in reverse, too.}

^{Remember when quiet luxury was all the rage?}

^{Spurred on by TV shows like Succession, fashion YouTubers and TikTokers took to telling everyone where to shop or what to buy, to make it look as if your great-great-grandfather was a railroad monopolist who left you a fat lump in a trust fund.}

^{It featured muted colors like beige, black and white; clothes with basic shapes and clean lines. It almost reminds me of—oh, yeah—Western home interiors that have been popular for at least this past decade.}

^{A trend that started a few years back and is beginning to take more of a hold is this move toward a sentimental, more personal style (leaning toward maximalism), rather than cultivating a minimalist, perfectly polished look, both for fashion and interiors.}

^{At the beginning of the year, House Beautiful’s Erica Finamore and interior designer Sarah Stacey noted that antique (or at least antique-looking) wall tapestries are trending right now because: “That slightly imperfect quality is exactly why tapestries feel timely. As interiors move away from overly sleek minimalism, handmade details and visible age are having a moment. Stacey points to a broader cultural shift, noting that with AI everywhere, people are craving artisanal, handmade things…”}

^{A tech-heavy world may indeed be behind this trend toward authenticity and imperfection, one that turns away from robotic perfection. And perhaps we’re sick of everything being mediated through a screen, too—like this very post :).}

^{Perhaps we crave the personal touch and beauty that’s dictated by us and not by algorithms—something more human.}

^{But I think the cause of this rising trend is a bit more classic: When the pendulum swings one way, it’s only a matter of time before it swings the other way.}

^{Once, we happily rocked skinny jeans like no tomorrow until suddenly, it became uncool. Then it was hello baggy wide legs. A desire to express personal style (and not dress like the human version of a bowl of oatmeal or follow every microtrend) is also trending (as a value, I guess), according to sources like Fashion Times.}

^{It’s the old pendulum swing.}

^{Right now I feel quite averse to bland interiors and their muted tones, but who knows? It could be that one day I get sick of this stuff in my house, all this abundance of color and patterns and “curated” style.}

^{Maybe I’ll start dressing like a fan of The Row, move into a white box apartment…and not bother decorating.}