Nostalgia business has a high-tech future
Play
VVG Something, a 42-square-metre bookstore in Taipei's east district, was picked recently as one of the world's 20 most beautiful bookshops by an entertainment website.
The Taipei shop is described by Flavorwire.com as “almost utilitarian but filled with simple old-world grace” that resembles “what we might imagine our ideal ship’s main cabin to look like”. In addition to a small collection of mainly architecture and design books curated by the owner, the petit shop also sells unlikely articles of nostalgia such as handmade iron nails, vintage metal locks, old typewriters and oil-paper envelopes.
The shopkeeper at VVG (short for Very Very Good) Something says that since the local media reported on the website’s accolade, she has seen a significant increase in visitors to the place, which began as a hobby of the restaurant-running owner.
People have been drawn to nostalgia throughout history. What people are seeking now, however, is the revival of a sensual world rapidly disappearing beneath cutting-edge technologies.
What “old-world grace” shops are mainly offering are not the items of the past (who would need a handmade metal nail, after all?) but more importantly the sounds, smells and textures of bygone ages. In an era of unscratchable touch screens and sleek, perpetually Internet-connected devices that seem to smoothen all the edges of the world, people suddenly find themselves yearning for the reassuring roughness of the imperfect.
While digital cameras have replaced analogue models, and are themselves being replaced by smart phones, currently many of the popular camera apps allow users to create “vintage photos” – slightly out of focus, or colour saturated. In an age of computer-generated action blockbusters and 3D thrillers, the most-talked-about picture in Hollywood this year is a black-and-white silent film called “The Artist”.
The story is the same in Asia: the movie that got most people talking in the Chinese-speaking world recently is the 1990s period romance “You Are the Apple of My Eye”, whose mandarin-Chinese title means “the girls we chased together back in those years”. The Taiwanese movie is often referred to locally and in Hong Kong, where it became the top-grossing Chinese-language film in history, simply as “Those Years”. It is the nostalgia that sells, not the love story.
It might sound paradoxical, but the “nostalgia industry” is the latest spin-off of the high-tech industry. As the increasing availability of smart devices and Internet connections start to make the sleek and magical world long-imagined by sci-fi writers a reality, the reassurance and the illustrative simplicity offered by the analogue, the unconnected, the mechanical and the rough is growing in value.
The nostalgia industry, however, is not merely a used-goods business. The common feature between VVG Something, “The Artist” and vintage photography apps is that they are all carefully designed modern projects aiming to “create” a sense of an older time. The bookshop might look old in pictures, but it is well-curated to fit the taste of modern readers and has none of the mouldy smells of an old shop. The apps, needless to say, run on smart devices and can send photos wirelessly.
For the time being, local nostalgia business is mainly headed by nimble entrepreneurs, from boutique shop owners to vendors at “cultural bazaars” mushrooming in the “chic areas” across Taiwan. The government, however, should consider targeting it as a mainstay of the cultural industry. For starters, it can renovate historical sites and storied tourist attractions with the appeal of nostalgia in mind.
