Kitsch style is a combination of incongruous. This is a style that denies all previous achievements and calls into question the future. It is born out of excessive wealth or satiety, outrageous love or, conversely, out of flagrant, challenging poverty. Kitsch goes its own way, which will never cross with other directions in the art of interior design. Kitsch seems to cross out all the styles that have ever been before him.
Kitsch is a boundless stretch of imagination, depending only on a character and temperament of an owner of an apartment, on their taste and a basic sense of proportion. There are absolutely no canons here. Kitsch does not recognize the rules set by the past.
The very phenomenon of “kitsch-interior” arose quite recently - in the second half of the XX century. The main idea of kitsch is a mockery of traditional history and artistic tastes and styles established over time. We can say that this is a kind of manifestation of nihilism in architecture, complete nihilism, that denies all previous achievements. At the same time, bold bad taste is used as a principle for selecting things in an interior, and the complete inconsistency of colors and interior items becomes main distinguishing feature of kitsch.
Kitsch interiors usually become fashionable when old patterns of good taste start getting boring and boring, while a new aesthetic is still in a process of being formed. Historically, this time coincides with some kind of crisis: social, military or economic, when the life of an ordinary man in the street loses its stability, and society expects changes. And that is why the fashion for kitsch is rather short-lived.
This style is for people whose character is “corrupted” by nihilism from birth. They love to put others in bewilderment, subverting established authorities. These people always dress in a unique way and furnish the place where they live with no less of uniqueness.
Kitsch is usually born between of two extremes: either excessive wealth and satiety, or, conversely, blatant, challenging poverty. But no matter how kitsch is generated, in each case, kitsch is always a manifestation of something shocking and special.
“Wealth kitsch” can also arise as a reaction by interior designers and architects to the need to indulge the tastes, more precisely, or to the fact that some clients don’t have taste at all. A client, who, to put it mildly, has a “special idea” of beauty and style, but at the same time has great financial opportunities and influence in society, often forces professionals to create kitsch “masterpieces”, and all attempts by the designer to convince them of the risks of implementing their wishes break on the stronghold of the client's confidence in their rightness and their own original and "exceptional" taste.
In architecture, usually a favorite theme of kitsch style are the pointed towers and turrets of country cottages, narrow Gothic windows combined with modern blinds and roller shutters, and the corresponding interior decoration: a huge “knightly” living room can be decorated with an ultra-modern electric fireplace ...
The aforementioned “poverty kitsch” has a slightly different look than the wealth- kitsch just described. “Poverty kitsch” has a lot in common with street graffiti. In such kitsch interiors, the main finishing materials are plastic curtains, makeshift partitions, spray-can wall paintings with bright acid paints, and furniture found in a landfill. An interior of this type is not as imitative as its rich relative, and the irony in it is completely replaced by aggression. In such interior you can find anything - car numbers on the walls, stolen road signs, telephone booths and even traffic lights.
In the West, where refined and stylish interiors are no longer a surprise, at one time interior design magazines gave recommendations on how to decorate your home yourself, turning it into a work of kitsch art. This “folk design” aesthetic is based on the fact that each person has some creativity and an original sense of beauty.
In those recommendations, for example, one could find an advice to peel off the wallpaper from part of a wall, and then paint over the resulting holes using a stencil. At the same time, stencils were recommended to be changed frequently for greater artistic expression: from stripes and circles to silhouettes of animals and birds. You can do the same with boring furniture. It is only necessary to tear off the varnish from it in some area and then apply gold paint to these places.
If you are ready to renovate an apartment in this style, you have a great opportunity to show your imagination. But for a house to be truly amazing, you must always see the line between absurdity and beauty.
