Prune: High frame rate

Rachel Davies on personalized frames, offset mats and the post-“Avant basic” interior.

In the past couple of years, the tone of interiors that dominate my social media feeds has shifted. Take, for an instance, the apartment of @berg_ilicious. I can’t seem to avoid this apartment: over the course of months it’s popped up on my Instagram feed several times, been shared onto the Stories of people I follow, and sent directly to me. Like many of the apartments I see circulating most on the internet today, this unit is not short on wood accents and autumn tones. It’s embodied and halfway to earthy, though more in a ‘70s Sears catalog way than properly bohemian. There are candles flickering moodily, a paper pendant lamp, and a wood wall-mounted magazine holder. There’s also a large frame with a red mat layered with photo booth strips and other printed ephemera, like the pages of a junk journal ripped out and showcased for every visitor to see.

It’s far different from what internet-beloved spaces looked like, say, five years ago. At the time, after a year of spiked screen time reports and increased time indoors, the look of the overly online interiors enthusiast had solidified and been given a name. “Avant basic” was blobs and bursts of color, the Ultrafragola mirror dupe—or its DIY equivalent, the spray-foam encased mirror—the squiggly wave motif, the hooked rug. All of it was in pinks, peaches, or other pastel hues. Artwork in these spaces looked airdropped in, Matisse- or Memphis-inspired shapes framed simply. As our relationship with screentime has changed in the intervening years—this is the year of analog, as the LA Times and several other publications will tell you—the look of the idealized online interiors enthusiast’s apartment has changed too. That analog resurgence reflects people prizing what life was like pre-internet, and this is showing up in the aforementioned frame job seen in @berg_ilicious’s home.

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