Illustration: Guardian Design View image in fullscreen Illustration: Guardian Design Life and style The rise and fall of mid-century modern: how millennials fell out of love with their favourite look Once coveted for its clean lines and timeless design, the functional furniture is no longer seen as cool. Anyone for cottagecore and chrome?
Sarah Phillips Thu 29 Oct 2026 06.00 CET Share Prefer the Guardian on Google “I definitely don’t think it is cringe,” says Laura Budds, a vintage furniture dealer based in Norfolk. “But I do think we have reached the peak, and we’re on the descent.” Budds is talking about mid-century modern furniture, which has recently come under fire from younger generations for being – like so many things, including trainer socks and high-waisted jeans – a deeply millennial aesthetic. As the Wall Street Journal declared : “Midcentury modern design has met the fate of pumpkin spice lattes, cocktails in mason jars, no-show socks, leggings and other aspects of millennial culture: it has become cringey.”
Budds, 44, is resigned to the fact that she is a “mid-century millennial”. She’s even made a career out of it: she sells furniture and vintage clothes at Williams & Parfitt , a modern antiques centre in Wymondham, Norfolk. But she says she has had to diversify in recent years to cater to changing tastes among younger customers, who are moving away from the “wall-to-wall mid-century” look beloved by the generation above them. She says of gen Z: “I don’t think they are so bound by the eras or designers – they just buy what they like. They aren’t afraid of older antiques and will have a bit of whimsy or taxidermy.”
The term “mid-century modern” was originally coined to refer to architecture and design that became popular from the 1940s to the 1970s, largely in the US, Brazil and Europe. Famed for its clean lines and simplicity, the style had visual forebears in the Bauhaus movement and classic Scandinavian design, along with the philosophy of beautiful yet functional furniture for the masses that spread to the US, UK and beyond in the postwar era. British-made items include Ercol and Robin Day chairs and G Plan teak sideboards, all of which are still coveted. (Anglepoise’s timeless industrial lighting, too, was associated with the aesthetic.)
View image in fullscreen Laura Budds, in a Wassily armchair by Marcel Breuer, for Knoll. Photograph: Supplied image The book Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s, written by Cara Greenberg and published in 1984, is often seen as being responsible for popularising the phrase. Today, she says, the term has “become meaningless, applied to everything from museum-quality material to made-in-China repros on eBay”.
Greenberg lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first mid-century purchase was an Eames plywood lounge chair bought at a street market in NYC in the 1970s, which she still owns. These days, she is more interested in a comfy sofa: “not a mid-century modern speciality”, she says, given the aesthetic’s tendency for furniture to be fairly upright and firm, often designed with polite conversation in mind rather than slouching and scrolling.
But, Greenberg says, she will still defend the best of it “as the most innovative and stylish furniture America ever came up with”: Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife duo who revolutionised design with multipurpose chairs; George Nelson’s industrial looks for the furniture company Herman Miller; Eero Saarinen’s Tulip chair for Knoll.…