Every Saturday evening, a suburban street in Greater Manchester bears witness to a peculiar sight: at the first-floor bay window of a 1930s semi, top-hatted heads bow over a platter of Victoria sponge slices, silhouetted against the sepia light of a gasoline lamp. Eavesdroppers might even catch the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan issuing from an 1890s gramophone as Michael Koropisz, a 24-year-old portrait artist who goes about his daily life as if he’s a well-to-do Briton of the 1890s, stages a tea party for fellow Victorian enthusiasts.
“We do get children pointing and laughing, and passersby taking selfies in front of us,” says Koropisz, who wears a top hat and 120-year-old frock coat, and adheres to a “pious” code of conduct.
Koropisz, who also eschews television and any “music that post-dates 1900,” hosts these Saturday-night tea parties in his bedroom at his parents’ house, which is fitted out with replica cornicing and ceiling roses, a grandfather clock, an upright ebony piano and a bureau for the ink stand and quill that replaced his laptop when his historical enthusiasm became a lifestyle in 2017.
Photo: AFP
His dad Bob, a plasterer, helped with the wood-panelling and classical dentils, with the refit costing ￡8,000 (US$10,100).
“My parents are Ukrainian and a bit bemused by my choices, but they’re very supportive,” explains Koropisz.
“I just think that when all the cornicing and arches and aesthetic stuff went away the best of society went with it,” he says, adding that he takes his behavioral lead from Victorian etiquette books.
Photo: AFP
Koropisz is one of a growing number of Britons seeking to embrace a lifestyle based on a past era — nostalgia enthusiasts who see more value in the past than the present and choose to dress, eat and behave to suit.
NOSTALGIA
In her work on cultural nostalgia, US academic Barbara Stern differentiates between two brands of nostalgia: “historical nostalgia,” which expresses a desire to retreat from contemporary life into a distant past viewed as superior to the present; and “personal nostalgia,” which recollects a (largely fictionalized) home of one’s childhood as a font of warmth, security and love.
Photo: AFP
“Nostalgia has a number of psychological functions,” explains Tim Wildschut, a professor of psychology at the University of Southampton who studies personal nostalgia. “It gives meaning and connectedness, and makes sense of our own identity through time as well as offering us escape from the troubles of the present.” Nostalgia, he says, is exerting a particularly powerful pull now, in a moment of national crisis that calls to mind the Second World War years, which are popularly presented as the embodiment of gumption and community spirit.
“Our research shows that loneliness and social isolation trigger nostalgia. Nostalgia, in turn, increases perceived social connectedness and support. Viewed in this way, nostalgia offsets the negative effects of loneliness.”
Living history offers a dual pay-off, forming our self-hood as it swaddles us in the psychological comfort blanket of an imagined past. Britons have long enjoyed vintage dress-up: 50s teddy boys based their style on Edwardian street gangs; men born long after D-Day still gather to reenact the battles of both world wars. What’s new are people who, like Koropisz, commit to living their lives as if the intervening 40, 50 or 130 years never happened — as well as the communities that have grown around vintage lifestyles. The latter include online interest groups, such as the #tradwife movement; weekends themed for everything from 50s dancing to the lifestyle of the world wars and subsequent years (the War and Peace Revival attracted 50,000 attendees for its fourth outing in 2019); and the grand Victorian balls that are the highlight of Koropisz’s year.
While the scene has been emergent since the turn of the millennium, the 2012 Diamond Jubilee supercharged British nostalgia for the 1950s, says Stella Sims, who wrote her cultural studies doctorate on this wave of “retromania.”
“In the early 2010s you got this surge of interest in 1950s fashion and pastimes, from knitting to partner-dancing, cupcake baking and the WI,” she says. “Then the World War One centennial, from 2014-2018, also fed into this.”
For University of Sussex historian Claire Langhamer, the nostalgia for 20th century lifestyles, in particular, can be put down to a cultural appetite for escapism.
“With everything that’s going on at the moment, from the climate to Brexit and now Covid-19, it’s no wonder there’s this urge to retreat to an era when the future seemed to be about progress and optimism, rather than environmental and political collapse,” she says, adding that living historians’ fetishistic focus on domestic arrangements is telling. “When you have no hope of affording your own home it’s seductive, isn’t it, to hark back to eras when home ownership was an ordinary expectation?”
TRADITIONAL AESTHETICS
The domestic retreat demanded by the coronavirus lockdown, she adds, has served to heighten people’s focus on domestic aesthetics and routines.
The living history scene has its celebrities: period tailor Zack Pinsent ( @pinsent_tailoring ) commands 355,000 followers on Instagram, Georgian enthusiast Kitty Pridden ( @18thCent_Kitty ) feeds 6,000 Twitter followers close-ups of powdered wigs and court dress; and Dean Turner
and Linda Easton have achieved social media fame with their 1940s aesthetic, house and garden.
“It’s the community that I like,” says Estelle Bilson, 41, a technical designer who shares her love of 1970s living with Stephen De Sarasola and their son, and bases her style on a Good Life -era Penelope Keith.
“A woman in the States recently sent me a frosted Christmas bauble because she knows it’s the era I’m into, but we’ve never met,” Keith says.
The family enjoy Angel Delight and “hilariously phallic” Fanny Craddock banana candles in their “pretty orangey” dining room, surrounded by teak G-Plan furniture, wicker hanging baskets, JH Lynch portraits and a sunburst rug. When Bilson recently bagged a 70s bathroom suite for ￡9.99 on eBay, De Sarasola, a sound engineer, demurred: “I told her straight out: it’s shit-brown.”
De Sarasola also takes exception to the peacock TV light and tiger’s head planters which sit, grimacing, in the dining room. “I prefer a 70s look that’s a bit more Sly and the Family Stone and less — I don’t know — Elvis,” he explains.
Bilson takes pleasure in the fact that the family’s lifestyle is eco by default.
“There’s nothing bought new in the house, apart from mattresses, so we have a naturally low carbon footprint,” she says, adding that, for many living historians, sustainability is part of the attraction. “Analogue technology is also much easier to fix,” she says.
When asked about the motivations that led to her retro immersion, Bilson’s answer is straight out of Wildschut’s personal nostalgia playbook.
“My earliest memory is from 1980, when my family was flooded out of our bungalow and re-homed in a council house without our Bauhaus long chair and lovely cabinets,” she explains. “It was pretty traumatic. I think I’m just trying to recreate that lost home.”
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