Trendspotting: Chandeliers Are Shit

Here's a draft of a piece I've just done for this Liverpool job.

Hey there all you tastemakers – check out the megasexy-superfunk style craze that’s taking the city by storm. Oooh, it’s simply to die for my darlings. (No, literally, I mean it – you simply have to die).

Yep, in every bar, in every shop, in every nook and cranny of Liverpool-cool there’s a calling-card of chic that is (again, quite literally) priceless…

…You mean you haven’t seen them? You haven’t spotted all those multi-coloured plastic chandeliers everywhere!? Jeez man, and I thought you were cool… Sigh. But take a look around you – they’re all over the place, from the Phil to the docks. Like a hydra, you ignore one and ten more spring into view. Black ones, pink ones, giant ones, dwarf ones – there’re chandeliers everywhere. Everywhere! It feels more like a regime than a trend… albeit a nice regime based on fun and quirkiness. ‘Cos that’s what plastic chandeliers are, aren’t they? -they’re fun and quirky… like garden gnomes.

See, when you mention design, you automatically think of the greats: Philippe Starck, Terence Conran, erm… Linda Barker. And great design is great because of its timelessness. Great design lasts. Like a DFS sofa, or a Burberry check baseball cap. And the coloured plastic chandelier is no different. A chandelier evokes scenes of decadence and grandeur – the execution of Louis XVI perhaps, or Nazis banqueting at the Berghof. The coloured plastic chandelier is pure unadulterated class, man.

You think they’re naff? Tasteless? Tacky!? No, no, no you philistine pig. They’re not a beguiling urban folk-art phenomenon, at all. We’re the Capital of Culture –duh! You don’t get any more cultured and refined than chandeliers, mate. That bar you’re in now, yeah, with a black plastic chandelier over head? It might look and feel like a particularly shit Christmas in limbo, but that’s bleeding-edge, 21st century, no-expense-spared über-chic. That is S.T.Y.L.E, man. And if you’ve got a coloured plastic chandelier, you’re a paladin of taste. (Although most of you plebs won’t even know what a paladin is).

The Otherwise Excellent Taste of Liverpool exhibition is on across the city as we speak. Admission is free.