we've been discussing antlers and nature inspired trends for some time now.. so the trend is been catching up big time hence the NYTimes article repoosted here
enjoy
By ERIC WILSON
Published: April 26, 2007
NATURE is so in.
Scoff, if you must, as you flip through the May issue of Vogue, which extols the eco-friendly attributes of Cheap Monday jeans. (The label, that two-inch bit of posterior branding, is made from recycled paper.) Roll your eyes at the Sundance Channel’s environmental living series, which includes an episode heralding the green movement in fashion with commentary from Carson Kressley, late of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Snicker as your friends toss out their elasticized cotton briefs for ones made of bamboo or bean sprouts, practically biodegrading before your very eyes. You, skeptical shopper, have missed the point.
Nature — or the appearance of embracing nature — is chic these days. Judging by the direction of fashion and home décor and of-the-moment restaurants and shops, you might mistake Manhattan for Montana. The raw concrete floors and white walls of 1990s minimalism have been swept away. In their place, new boutiques and cafes in the city’s glossier neighborhoods resemble overdesigned hunting lodges — dark and moody, with uneven floorboards to trip over and, almost inevitably, a set of antlers hanging from the rafters.
“This is the return to nature in design,” said Jeff Madalena, an owner of clothing shops in Williamsburg and Park Slope with the woodsy sounding name Oak. Mr. Madalena, who sells antler-shaped pendants from Alex & Chloe, said that design enthusiasts crave spaces and shapes that suggest a lived-in authenticity, as opposed to the stark coolness of modern design.
“People have a nostalgia for this authentic grandmother’s basement kind of space, like every bar in the city now looks like Welcome to the Johnsons,” he said, referring to a wood-paneled bar on Rivington Street in Manhattan. “Most of the people we deal with are pretty young and not originally from New York, so there is an element involved of remembering their childhoods.”
Chandeliers made of interlocking antlers light the men’s store Odin on Lafayette Street in SoHo. A similar lighting fixture was imported from the Pacific Northwest for the Chip & Pepper denim and T-shirt store on Mulberry Street. TG-170 on Ludlow Street has one too, and the shopping bags there are printed with a variety of stags, rams and elk. And then there is Freemans Sporting Club, the fashion offshoot of the Rivington Street restaurant, which rivals the American Museum of Natural History in its collection of antlered taxidermy.
This makes for a suspicious amount of wilderness nostalgia, given the unlikelihood that a broad swath of the New York City population grew up in the Elmer Fudd lifestyle.
“It’s an iconic indication of some sort of rural lifestyle, I guess,” said the designer Rogan Gregory, who briefly displayed antlers in his store on Franklin Street. “It’s like, if a store has antlers on the walls, that somehow makes them legitimate.”
As metaphor for a bucolic ideal, antlers are fine. But their proliferation in fashion (in jewelry and graphics on T-shirts and hoodies) and home design (as candlestick holders and chandeliers) suggests a deeper societal meaning. To be sure, in various cultures, antlers symbolize masculine aggression, regeneration, sacrifice, financial stability and, in some cases, Satanism (see Joan Fontaine in “The Witches”). In popular culture, they are likely to mean something else entirely, but what?
Raz Keren, a men’s wear designer who uses a stag’s skull as a logo, gave it a stab. Mr. Keren sees the antler’s appearance in fashion as a reaction to current political events.
“People are tired of dealing with war and death,” he said. “This is their protest.”
Mind you, it is a protest that is aesthetically pleasing to designers and graphic artists, though the sheer profusion of antlers would seem more probable in Appalachia than in the greater metropolitan area. But here they are.
There are antler-trimmed restaurants, as in the rustic realism of Cafe Cluny in the West Village, the contrived ski-lodge theme of Aspen in Chelsea and the wall of antlers in the Lobby Bar of the new Bowery Hotel. Baked, a bakery in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, uses antlers as its logo design. Seven Grand, a new whiskey bar in downtown Los Angeles, has a neon stag’s head marquee and antlers on just about every surface inside. “Antlers have a kind of maximalism that satisfies our urge for things to be overdesigned,” said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion and retail trends. “And because they are natural, we don’t have to take the blame for their being overdesigned. They are busy, convoluted objects, but they are natural.” Contrarily, a mounted buck also recalls a decorative decadence more appropriate to 19th-century French literature or, in some people’s minds, a movement that is against nature. Those deer aren’t hanging about in a petting zoo.
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Mr. Gregory likened the antler motif to the great skull-and-crossbones trend of last year, in which an anti-establishment symbol became so ubiquitous as to lose all of its visual potency. And this raises an intriguing point: the exclusiveness of chic, edgy design has been greatly diminished by its acceptance in mass retailing and the quick dissemination of new ideas.
Antlers could then be read as the design world’s reassertion of its manhood by celebrating an object that is not classically, or universally, appealing (and one that is typically attached to the male species of the animal kingdom). Antlers are a butch gesture, a symbol of potency, the trophy of hunters. They can not be found at Target
Oops, it turns out they can. Target sells a “simulated antler table lamp.”
In his fall men’s wear collection, John Galliano included aggressive, tribal-looking headgear made of a cornucopia of phallic references, horns and samurai swords among them. He seemed to be marking his territory as if to dare some lesser designer to take him on.
It is notable as well that many of the shops that are rife with antlers are targeting a new breed of male consumer who is dabbling in a stereotypically feminine embrace of fashion. At Hollander & Lexer, a new men’s store on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn with the feel of shopping in a slightly demented explorer’s club, a mounted African kudu head watches over Rogues Gallery T-shirts and Paul Smith jeans, as if to remind shoppers that fussing over their wardrobes need not be an effete pursuit.
The stag as an archetypal symbol was not lost on Lisa Kinoshita, who designs a jewelry collection called Mineral in Tacoma, Wash., which includes a sterling silver antler pendant. But she doubts that the current popularity is based on more than aesthetics.
“Where once the stag was a symbol of religious regeneration,” she said, “it could be said that today it appeals to those who worship modern design.”
Or it could just be a personal childhood memory fraught with psychological metaphor. Chip and Pepper Foster, the twin brothers who founded Chip & Pepper, use antlers in their store and their designs because the word “antler” is twin code language. They say “antler” to refer to a situation in which they face down a challenge. When they were 8, the brothers encountered a deer on a trail with a big rack. According to Chip Foster, he unleashed a primal scream, which frightened the animal.
“Man, we were so little it looked like an elephant,” he said. “We were scared to death.”
Helen Mirren, as Elizabeth, had one of those moments in “The Queen,” when her encounter with a stag became symbolic of her reign and her reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Somehow the majesty wears off when antlers are rendered as the pattern of a hoodie.
from nytimes.com
Riiiight... that's stretching it a little far!
