Uptown Treasures

Some friends of ours who live in uptown Manhattan have just taken delivery of a new sofa, armchair and ottoman. Caroline, who is English, is thrilled. “The fabric is all faded and badly-fitting. It looks as if it has been in the family for 100 years,” she says. “The chair is so huge it can fit two people. Once you have got on, it is hard to get off. But Mum is going to take one look and say, `You paid for that?”’

Caroline’s acquisitions are from Shabby Chic, a California company that makes the ultimate furniture for these anxious times vast, soft pieces that sit you on their laps, cuddle you in their enveloping arms and soothe away horrid 1992. No matter that the whole thing might seem a touch anomalous in a modern flat half-way up a skyscraper: New Yorkers must take their comfort as they can.

I think we had better watch out for shabby chic, because it is getting everywhere and it is ours. After all, nobody in the Western world is shabbier than the British. If only we knew how to market it, our talent for shabbiness could be a huge national export. Shabby Chic, the Californian store, is the perfect example, as it turns out to be the brainchild of a British designer, Rachel Ashwell.

Shabby chic is taking hold in fashion, as well, and the British are acknowledged as the best at it. Witness the careers of the fashion editors Lucinda Chambers and Debbi Mason, who were founding members of British Elle ten years ago. Both became fabulous within their own circles for sitting in the front row of fashion shows wearing second-hand clothes.

During the late 1980s, with sharp-as-a-knife modern tailoring on the runways, it would be fair to say their respective stars were not in the ascendant. They bided their time, had babies and went freelance. But in the past couple of months Ms Chambers has been promoted to the fashion director of British Vogue, and Ms Mason has been called to New York, where she is about to take up the fashion directorship of Mademoiselle magazine.

Fashion designers are on to the growing lure of the old and the shabby, too. Ralph Lauren’s show in New York last month was easily one of the most wearable and appealing collections of the season but the elements, 1930s dresses, ruffle-fronted blouses and silky print scarves, looked as if they had been culled from antique stores. Since it is well known in the trade that Mr Lauren routinely trawls the United Kingdom for beautiful old clothes to adapt for his collections, I became inspired by the conviction that I could do it myself.

So, last week, I went in search of shabby chic the lifestyle. I trailed round London and back to my roots in Bath, a city that was shabby in the 1970s, became smart in the 1980s and is reverting to shabby type in the 1990s, much like me. In London, I discovered a shop on New King’s Road actually called Shabby Chic. No relation to the US version, it uses ecologically sustainable woods and recycled fabrics but it was not shabby enough by a long chalk. I wanted worn, I wanted faded, I wanted beaten up, or so I thought.

In Bath, I had to face facts. To be shabby chic properly, you need skills and resources I do not possess. You need unlimited time to tramp around. Then, you must be clever with your hands to turn this old frock, which is the wrong shape and the wrong length but in a lovely fabric, or that old, chipped, three-legged cupboard into things over which your friends will narrow their eyes and hiss with envy. Thirdly, you must have it in you to haggle Pounds 12.50 down to Pounds 12. I do not.

Next season, I have to admit, I will be one of those fools who will be out buying pre-selected, carefully redesigned old/ethnic shabby chic in expensive stores. My comfort is that I am sure that I will be doing it in the company of many others who share the 1990s taste for shabby values grafted on to an unreconstructed 1980s lust for instant shopping gratification.

Much as I regret it, I have neither the stomach nor the nose for doing it the other way. Definitely not the nose, anyway. After my weekend among piles of old fabric in Bath, I have not stopped sneezing yet.

The man who sells newspapers on 23rd Street was putting the best face on it: “Looks like that Leger didn’t sell too bad and the Van Gogh wasn’t so lousy.”Uptown at Christie’s and Sotheby’s Manhattan salerooms, they put it more elegantly, but the stoic message was the same. The worst fears of dealers and owners failed to materialise in two eagerly awaited sales of Impressionist and modern works. There was no new crash like that of last spring, but still shaky prices and lack of interest have quashed hopes that after 18 months of falling, the art market has turned around.

Leger’s post-Cubist Petit Dejeuner fetched $7.7 million at Christie’s, a healthy enough figure, though belowthe modest estimate of $8 million, and Van Gogh’s drawing, Garden with Weeping Tree sold for $1.32 million at Sotheby’s, below its $1.75 million low estimate and still in the abyss compared with the $6 million a similar work earned before the bubble burst. Giorgio de Chirico’s Delights of the Poet also showed there was some glimmer of faith in the market, coming in just under its low estimate at $2.42 million at Sotheby’s. In the most cheering sale of a generally gloomy

week, Robert Delaunay’s Premier Disque, an icon of modern art, sold at Christie’s for a surprising $5.17 million, well above the high estimate of $3 million.

Nevertheless, both houses finished up with vaults full of unsold works, including a Miro and a batch of secondary Renoirs which languished without the Japanese buyers on whom they could have counted in the 1980s. “Folks are breathing easier this morning,” said Milton Esterow, the publisher of ArtNews magazine, yesterday. “A lot of sophisticated people were scared with all this gloom and doom, and now they have at least got an indicator, though it’s hard to figure out exactly what.”

This news might not cause loss of sleep in Kansas or Cornwall but in New York it counts, even for people who would never dream of spending their money on a painting. For the roaring art market of the late Eighties helped to fuel the bonanza that became a bonfire, burning tens of thousands of the middle classes.

Other parts of the country, like New England, may be more depressed, but as the financial, cultural and communications capital, New York is all psychology. Apart from the financial houses of Wall Street, the biggest victim of the crash in confidence is the housing market. Manhattanites talk of little else these days. As owners of condominiums and co-operative apartments who bought in the late 1980s, they pray someone will make them an offer as big as their mortgages. In the most startling illustration of the gloom, a frustrated property firm last week staged a one-day sale of 141 expensive Manhattan flats, all marked down by a half. It found buyers for only 50 of them.

For the local chattering classes, anything can serve as a barometer. Donald Trump goes shopping at K-Mart, a discount chain, and the news hits the front pages. Someone mentions that The New York Times is advertising itself as essential reading for the unemployed and a pall falls on the dinner table.

After a year in which the dominant fashion has been the baggy drab or recession chic, this week’s spring shows have been watched closely for signs of uplift. Like the art market, the omens are mixed. There are both the high hems that signal recession, and the low hems that denote confidence, as well as signs of desperation, such as Oscar de la Renta’s attempt to brighten the mood by perching beaded parrots on the shoulders of his jackets.

Most of the art buyers this week were Europeans, which suggests the same psychology may be inhibiting the locals when it comes to housing and art. In the 1980s, part of the fun was flaunting the price of new real estate or paintings. Now, like Mr Trump, one has to boast about a sense of value for money. This means no more million-dollar apartments with barely room for a double bed and wardrobe. On the art side, there may be clear value in a big name such as Picasso, but no one wants to be the mug who forked out millions in public for small objects of questionable worth.

Private sales may be the answer. But after the drubbing that the less-informed collectors took the last time round, it seems unlikely that even when the market recovers, they will revert to the practice of flaunting the price tag.