…Guy comes home after working late into the night and pours himself a stiff one. He means to take it upstairs to bed with him, but first he gets a look at his haggard face in the mirror over the bar. He is dead white. In fact, he is dead white from head to toe. The thing is that his wife, walking in her sleep, has slapped him with swatches of white paint, and in his semi coma, due to over work and long hours, the paint dripping down his front had felt merely refreshing.
And so begins the male backlash against “shabby chic”—a house fashion dictum some irregulars refer to as “shitty chic”—as they make their way through the mounds of fringed cushions from thrift stores, and chairs that won’t buckle beneath them, toward a sofa with a soft sprung underbelly that touches the floor and all of it illuminated by lamps with shades where tears are turned away from the room, and which an embracing cracked shepherd and shepherdess hold aloft. Everything in the room in the softly lit room is white. Even the Persian cat that wanders in to nestle in a white basket.
The male backlash comes under the heading of “the Tuscany look.” A look once confined to his den or study—known by the household as “the cave--where it is never night or day has spread throughout the house. Straight back chairs covered in polished dark leather held by huge brass upholstery tacks, Lounge chairs designed for a wooly mammoth. Gothic breakfronts that hold huge tankards from Germany and Russia, art that features women in fetching velvet gowns trailing in the dust and, weeping at the feet of men, primitive religious icons hammered together by gnomes in a forest, thick velvet curtains that are never drawn open, great dining tables that groan with heavy hammered silver candlelabra, and an occasional faux mastiff resting on the floor next to the chair where the master sits. Everything white is brown again, every shade of brown. Men love big, brown things and every woman knows it. All the place needs is a moat.
The men are back, ladies. Hold onto your doilies.
10:09:00 AM 
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