Indie Sleaze Is Coming for Interior Design
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Style frontruns interior design. At Funzi’s, a new pizza place on St. Marks, serial restaurateur Kevin Cox is pulling the latest fashions seen on the sidewalk into his design plan. Dickies pants paired with Raf Simons bracelets, cargo pants that taper to Gucci slides, and Tom Ford sunglasses glinting from the pockets of Carhartt jackets have been rendered into wood paneling, checkered tables, and a Tiffany lamp.
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Indie sleaze came for the ‘fits. Now it’s coming for the furniture.
It’s a hard style to pin down, but, in essence, indie sleaze is the pairing of classic basics — some of them working-class signifiers — with hyper-trendy, high-end accessories. The juxtaposition creates an intentional, punky aesthetic tension. Now, people are developing analogues for indie sleaze style staples within interior design. For every pair of Chuck Taylors with a Cartier watch, there’s a La-Z-Boy recliner set against grasscloth walls. If the former works together in fashion, the latter seems to work together in design.
If the trendy and aspirationally trendy bars and restaurants of New York City are any indicator, the hottest club in town is…your grandma’s basement — a relic of the 1970s, albeit with expensive flourishes. Time in quarantine accustomed us to being at home, and on the other side of it, proprietors of eateries and watering holes are thinking about how they can cater to a clientele that’s grown comfortable in their familiar spaces.
Funzi’s is an homage to a family’s porch in rural Massachusetts. “We wanted to marry New York’s favorite comfort food with a comfortable environment,” Cox says. “The place I’m most comfortable in is my grandma’s.” But it’s constructed with extraordinary intention. Cox curated pieces to set the scene in the restaurant’s outside seating space: a credenza leaning against the wall displays a 1960s “Do Not Disturb” sign from a hotel, as well as a faded “No Smoking” sign. A rusty, decorative bowl tries hard to present as lived-in, housing a few No. 2 Pencils, a polaroid, two pairs of safety scissors, and the prerequisite disco ball hood ornament.
On their own, these features make Funzi’s a diorama of a sort of middle-class comfort rapidly lumbering toward extinction. But other details suggest that Funzi’s has got indie sleaze in its crust.
One is the Tiffany lamp hanging from the porch ceiling; another is an oil painting of a woman behind a curtain leaning in the corner. The large sign on the wall displaying the menu in retro fonts is less obvious, but Cox says it’s hand-painted by a local artisan. And then there’s the food, which is not the plain white tee of pizza. Cox plucked Chef James Jaworski from L’Industrie in Williamsburg, one of the most popular spots in the city.
As Dolly Parton once quipped: “It costs me a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Cox is good at what he does, but he has inspirations. He is, for instance, a fan of Ray’s, a trendy Lower East Side bar that looks divey, but also accessorizes with highbrow touches — exactly what you’d expect from a place co-funded by actors Nicholas Braun and Justin Theroux.
There’s the wood paneling, checkered linoleum tiles, a pool table, and vinyl barstools. Downstairs, people party in what looks like the basement from That 70s Show, with leather sofas, a beaded curtain, and flannel chairs, Preston Aamodt, a bartender at Ray’s, tells SPY.
“It’s a dive bar for people who are Soho House members,” added Matt Komorowski, the co-owner of boutique footwear shop J. Fitzpatrick and a Ray’s regular. “It’s like the kids who are getting tats all at once; it looks cool but makes you wonder if there’s anything real under there.”
He adds that the resurgence of indie sleaze seems to have “happened overnight.”
“The Nascar jackets, the low-slung jeans — I do question the longevity of all these looks based on fake-vintage posters, but everyone’s having fun with it, so I say let it ride,” he says.
(As a Ray’s regular, he pulls up to the bar wearing pieces like his Tom Ford leather jacket trimmed with leopard-print pony hair, a vintage Playboy tee, aviator sunglasses, and a Western-style belt.)
Before Ray’s took over, its building used to house Le Turtle, an upscale New American restaurant that had a funky Italian modernist aesthetic. Its ghost still lingers — in the bathroom, Ray’s kept Le Turtle’s flawless marble sink, but it’s now covered in graffiti. It’s a high-low balance that echoes outfits on the other side of the door; the marble sink is the Moschino jacket, the graffiti is its accompanying Guess jeans.
Aamodt describes Ray’s crowd as made up of mostly 20-somethings, sporting casual articles of clothing juxtaposed with eye-catchingly expensive pieces.
“The other day, someone came in wearing a navy blue jumpsuit and a gold necklace,” he says. It’s the type of place where a baseball fan might show up wearing a Yankees cap, but also where an actual Yankee might arrive wearing Bode.
And Ray’s isn’t alone, even within a mile radius; The Flower Shop, for instance, a restaurant and bar in Chinatown, also boasts a ‘70s look. Its own wood paneling. Yellow vinyl booths. Stray, framed drawings – a ship, a bride – and vintage posters look like they could come from your mother’s attic. And like Ray’s, it’s hard to miss the pool table, stationed on a beat-up area rug.
When applied to the privacy of living rooms, however, indie sleaze’s impact has been a little more subtle. West Elm is selling its own line of wood veneer furniture, for instance, but nothing currently boasts the aged, saturated look of the paneling at Ray’s. Takes on indoor folding chairs have crept into stock at Anthropologie. The same goes for mesh chairs at Blu Dot. Burke Decor and Burrow are making modernist pieces from Plywood. Supreme even made an inflatable chair.
Komorowski says that the resurgence of indie sleaze on the sidewalk and in the growing number of anti-establishment establishments is just the latest iteration of the bohemian and dandy convergence.
As for its applications in interior design, Komorowski says that he’s “anti-curation.” His own home is mayhem, eclectic, he says — the vintage, clean look and its pricey accents aren’t for him. “When I buy something, I think of it as one extra piece of the puzzle,” he says. “You don’t just buy a whole new puzzle and put it together at once.”
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