Beyond The Bird On It: 'Twee Is About Shopping'
By
NPR Staff |
NPR
Monday, December 22, 2014
Update RequiredTo play audio, update browser or
Flash plugin.
Don't be mistaken: There's a powerful economic force behind the proliferation of cutesy, homespun goods that combine an old-fashioned and highly modern aesthetic.
Twee's hallmarks are handcrafted, anachronistic or vintage items — like albums on vinyl, sweaters from the thrift store and, as distilled in a sketch on the show Portlandia, pretty much anything with a bird on it. It's as much an aesthetic as it is a lifestyle, like punk or hip-hop.
"Twee is an almost paradoxical combination of the hypermaterialistic and artisanal and crafted. You literally go into the woods and forage for granola and then you sell it for $13 a pound," says Marc Spitz, author of Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film.
Spitz says the point of twee handicrafts is that somebody else made them. And that can make twee pretty expensive — custom cross-stitched designs sold on the handmade-crafts website Etsy start around $50. Reproduction midcentury furniture, box sets and reissues of classic albums — it's all going to cost you.
"This isn't about gluing macaroni to a piece of colored cardboard. Twee is about shopping," Spitz says. "It fires those chemical synapses in your brain."
Now this might sound cynical — buying your way into a lifestyle and a look. But Spitz says there's also something universal about being twee: Everyone is looking for something bigger than himself to buy into — and to believe in.
" 'Purity,' I guess, is the answer in a word — and true belief is pure. You know, what's more pure than a newborn kitten? What's more pure than something that you whittled? What's more pure than like a muffin you baked with like ingredients that you gathered?"
Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
View this story on npr.org
Follow us for more stories like this
CapRadio provides a trusted source of news because of you. As a nonprofit organization, donations from people like you sustain the journalism that allows us to discover stories that are important to our audience. If you believe in what we do and support our mission, please donate today.
Donate Today