Officially, the trend would be towards recovery and recycling: today, we make new out of old. And yet, many of them, conversely, make old with new. Acquired by LVMH, the Buly house (“founded in 1803”, according to the legend of the brand, but really created in 2014) is called “dispensary” and sells fake old-fashioned creams, old-fashioned ointments, and brow combs, from the misidentified era of combing brows. Nostalgia has grown and invented roots are part of the business of all kinds of brands, like Moleskine whose notebooks (created in 1997) claim to be those, legendary, of Ernest Hemingway (died in 1961) on the pretext that the writer was describing a notebook in the book Paris is a party.
While we talk about adapting to a new era and climatic challenges, brands are recreating decorations of old woodwork and silver teapots to sell bowls, brushes or jams that are overpriced but marketed in values of yesteryear. . As if family photos of the “glorious thirty” had the same nostalgic power for everyone, the 53 Feuillette bakeries and sandwich shops are decorated with the same digitized reproductions of black and white family photos of the parents of the brand’s founder.
“If you don’t put family photos, you feel at the hotel”, decodes Jean-François Feuillette, whose shops are also equipped with real-fake fireplaces. New breweries seek to look weathered upon opening. “Our elders to us are Mamie Bellanger and Papi Dubillot”indicates on its website the Nouvelle Garde group whose three breweries Dubillot, Boulanger and Martin – “Enjoyable stops in a Paris of the past” – opened in a period Paris… post-2019. It seems that this is called “authentoc”.
How do we recognize them?
They use the words “workshops”, “house” Or “factory” to talk about their business set up three years ago without a workshop, house or factory. They found a grocer’s great-grandfather or a restaurant ancestor, from whom they say they were inspired. They don’t create fake old, they “bring life back”. They have a branch in Perche and another in New York. On their website, there is always a “history” part. They are delighted to have a French name: with the word “house” in front, it can give the impression of having been “founded” three generations ago. They are going to play sports at the L’Usine room, but have never worked in the factory.
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