Collector Chats With Peter S. Seibert

This Week: Are We Really Becoming The Jetsons?

By Peter Seibert

Do you remember the Jetsons, whose super modern world was seen in the 1960s and 1970s as the harbinger of what we would be like in the

2020s? No books, but everyone reads from a computer screen. No old things, just modern furnishings that were built into your house. Robots were there to accomplish all the domestic tasks. It was a utopian world where, in theory, one was free for the nobler pursuits because life’s chores were taken care of. Except, of course, that this would not have been very good television. The Jetsons were the postmodern version of America and a response to both the Flintstones in their prehistoric world and the Honeymooners.

The sense over the last decade has been that antiques are anathema to the modern world and in particular to Gen Z and Millennials. Experiences are held highly over material things as to where you spend your money. These new generations were predicted to be the death of collecting. And yet, I don’t believe it. As much as paid pundits have pontificated about how grandmother’s china needs to be thrown out as valueless and lacking interest, I would argue that the opposite is true.

This past Sunday my eldest daughter wanted to go over to South Street in Philadelphia to do some shopping. I tagged along as the bearer of the overused credit card. The stores that she and hundreds of others her age were going into specialized in vintage fashions from the 1950s onward. And from those vintage fashion stores, we walked to others that sold vinyl records. And from those record shops, we went next to nostalgia shops selling everything from lava lamps to Mexican pottery.

Now for the collectors of Chippendale and Old Paris, I hear you. This is not collecting early antiques, but, it is still about collecting. It is the pursuit of a hidden treasure, to find a unique item that you can share with others, or maybe even to purchase an item that has a low carbon footprint (since it is now 100 years old). The death of collecting for 20- to 30-year-olds was not apparent on South

Street. It was alive and well and fitted out in balloon pants, Roy Orbison records and waterfall dressers.

So I am being a wee bit melodramatic with this column, but I do think it’s important that we separate out reality from hyperbole. The other week I was in a group shop in Lambertville, N.J., and heard a dealer loudly proclaiming that all young people hate antiques and that they would not know quality if they saw it. They only wanted IKEA and things they could put in a backpack. Not hardly is what I would say to that. They know what they like and can afford, and perhaps that is not what

Continued on page 9