Millennial Home Decor Via Chyna Reynolds on Pinterest
Millennials, the generation responsible for this trend, were clearly desperate for a minimalistic environment. Almost certainly because they grew up surrounded by quite the opposite in their homes: warm colors, dark-brown wooden furniture, and a whole heaping load of clutter. They, quite simply, needed to escape that environment and differentiate their own lives from their parents’ as soon as they were able, shaping their own spaces into something new, simplistic, and peaceful. Beyond their childhood homes, the reality of young adults was so chaotic that their need for simplicity likely solidified even further. Who’s to say, but maybe they simply liked the way it looked, and all this surmising means naught. Either way, the ‘Millennial Beige’ aesthetic was the holy grail to every young household, and it was here to stay.
Or so we thought.
Every fashion has its highs and lows, and every fashion trend has the moment it gains the title ‘old’. And the millennial beige was no different. Somewhere around the beginning of the 2020s, a big shift in home decor fashion has happened, unlike anything before. It wasn’t just that the ‘clean aesthetic’ was no longer considered fashionable, but it was suddenly being mocked and ridiculed. By whom, you ask? By Gen Zs, who suddenly decided that no color in a home was considered ‘sad’.
Before we knew it, the ‘Sad Millennial Beige’ term rose to fame alongside Gen Z’s colorful home aesthetic. Many a Gen-Z TikTokker condemned the aesthetic of the “sad beige” Millennial “Momfluencers” who seemingly have a contempt for anything with a bright or variance of color. Tearing their hair out and falling to the floor every time a Millennial house flipper tore up a colorful character home and painted everything a dull grey.
Just like with any other aspect of life, Gen Z cannot stand being similar to any generation that came before them, and exemplifies this in the way they choose to decorate their homes. The calm and clear aesthetic of a ‘beige’ home did not sit well with this younger generation, and they over-compensated by filling their personal spaces with every color and pattern known to man, claiming it intensified happiness by being surrounded by chaos.
Gen Z Decor Via Nel Floral On Pinterest
While there is nothing wrong with wanting your house to have color in it, it is another thing to shame those who feel differently, and this is exactly what happened with ‘Sad Millennial Beige’. And, for which, we have social media to blame. For years, millennials have let Gen Zs push them around and affect their life choices, in fear of being perceived as old or irrelevant. That fear has seeped into their homes as well, and as soon as it became clear that the white aesthetic was no longer considered fashionable to the younger generation, the trend of adding colors to previously colorless houses reached the doorsteps of the easily influenced millennials.
However, even as millennials tried to accommodate these new fashions, most still failed. Many people online were taking pride in changing their ‘sad’ aesthetic by adding color to their homes, only to be mocked for adding the ‘wrong’ color. Take, for example, the color “sage green”, which many millennials used to add more ‘life’ to their houses, overcompensating for the lack of color in their homes by splashing it everywhere. This overuse led to it being considered “not colorful” or “not good enough” in the eyes of the younger generations—lumping it straight back in with the “Sad Beige” and the trend it was intended to depart from. It seemed as if no matter what millennials tried to do to please Gen Z, the trend-setters, they always drew the short end of the stick.
Would this have happened if it weren’t for these two generations’ obsession with social media? Older generations, like baby boomers, never felt shamed into changing their home decor, like millennials do now. But they don’t spend hours on TikTok, feeling scared that they are soon becoming out of touch with fleeting trends and fashions; they just live their lives however they want (well, at least in that regard). Could that happen for millennials, too, if they set themselves free from their ‘For You’ pages and the strong opinions of those younger than them?
It’s not ‘sad’ to have a house decorated with beige colors, it’s ‘sad’ that we allow others to tell us what we should or should not do in the comfort of our own home. What is wrong with not wanting your house to look like a unicorn vomited on the walls? Who says you have to own pink furniture to be considered a happy person? No one should feel pressured to add or remove anything to or from their homes if they do not wish to, and it’s unfortunate that millennials yet again allow Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha, to dictate or push them around in that matter.
Fashionable or not, if you wish your house to be colorless or colorful, only one needs to have an input on that matter: You. No one should change themselves for the sake of others, so maybe lay off the Pinterest inspiration boards and just decorate your home how you want it to look. After all, the only one living there is you, even if Gen Zs on social media sometimes make you feel otherwise.