Opinion: The era when it was popular entertainment for hypnotists to make hapless victims squawk like chickens and put lampshades on their heads is blessedly over – yet TikTok and Instagram make people cheerfully do ever more humiliating things and tell the world about it.
Lately, they’ve gulled people into putting ceramic hedgehogs and plastic cactuses in the butter conditioner, hanging mermaid ornaments off the milk carton and découpaging their Wattie’s sauce bottles with tasteful nudes.
This is called fridgescaping. It’s the latest annexation of daily living by the décor-obsessed, who started with tablescaping and benchscaping and seemingly won’t stop until we’re resurfacing our toilet bowls with anaglypta. For anyone still admirably ignorant about all this, it means treating a utilitarian space like a theatrical set. If the coffee table isn’t an elaborate tableau or the kitchen countertop an exhaustively curated expression of one’s personality, this shows a serious lack of commitment.
Euphoric online influencers say now is the time to make the inside of the fridge into a diorama. Anyone feeling a bit superior for having one of those pricey lazy Susan “space optimisers” is simply not trying hard enough. The fridge must strobe a theme, a mood, a statement.
Most famously there are Bridgerton fridgescapes prinking out the egg storer and the vege drawer with Regency frou-frou. Vases of herbs and wild flowers punctuate the pickles, lace and velvet festoon the bacon packets and covered leftovers, and it’s verging on derelict if something that can possibly fit into a beribboned basket is not put in one immediately.
This may be preferable to many people’s freestyle approach to fridgescaping, though arguably, reserving the nether regions as a purgatorial staging post before the compost heap or insinkerator is a pithy comment on food waste. And it’s hard to say what’s more over the top – fridgescaping or recent warnings from the UK’s Food Standards Agency that storing food with frilly things could breed harmful bacteria. It can certainly be nauseating.
What’s next? Surely we can improve upon nodding dogs and fluffy dice in our dashboard-scaping? Why would one not take the time to recreate Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding on the toilet cistern?
A kindly take on all this is that it’s an extreme form of nesting. Generation Rent may be driven to micro-embellish their environment because a home and garden of their own are unobtainable. Tattoos and piercings – there’s even mouthscaping – may be further symptoms.
It could simply be more online showing off. Look at me, aren’t I quirky (in exactly the same way as hundreds of thousands of others)?
But it’s inarguable that TikTok, Instagram and the like constitute the most widespread human psychological experiment ever conducted.Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 became classics, it was envisaged, to proof modern society against mind control. Those authors could not have conceived of the non-coercive influencing power of social media. People die as a result of doing utterly stupid things they see others doing online.
On the positive side, in the fashion industry, social media democracy is beginning to overtrump the traditional stranglehold of a few multinationals. Prime example: the billowy midi dresses declared “cancelled” last year are still flourishing because that’s so often what people are still posting themselves wearing.
Experts legitimately worry about the incursion of Chinese surveillance technology into Western economies via Chinese appliances and vehicles. Perhaps the soft power of TikTok, with its appearance of grassroots exuberance and ability as a motivator rather than just a reporter, is a more effective spy tool.
Meanwhile, a fuzzy bunny on the meat shelf is surely a proportionate riposte to all those years of neo-brutal chrome, black, white and greige décor.
