Hardcor Decor: the Instagram archive of vintage furniture

Is there anyone who really cares about the sets and furnishing of porno movies? The answer is yes: @hardcor_decor (not to confuse it with @decorhardcore, the iconic inspiration account that takes care of interior design for all kitsch lovers).

The account of James Bellesini is an archive, about 770 posts, of details, tapestries, shag carpets, and screenshots of plateau shoes mixed with fragments of 70s softcore vintage porn.

"The genesis of Hardcor Decor came about close to 2 years ago when I was living in New York and beginning a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend in Sydney. Everything was born thanks to a long distance relationship, we are both retro-obsessives, and would scour Tumblr retroporn for our mutual amusement and augmented sexting! The more ‘60s and ‘70s images I found, the more I was captivated by the amazing backgrounds" explained Bellesini

As Another magazine pointed out, the idea turned out to be a very interesting project, both for the quality of the selected images and for its ability to restore the original aesthetic standards of the past, from make-up to feminine lingerie.

Looking at the selected posts, it emerges how the seventies aesthetics has recently infected an important fashion sector, recalled by Petra Collins's photographs of Alessandro Michele's Gucci. The success of @hardcor_decor, but also of the artists just mentioned, is a certain prouderie d'antan, aesthetics increasingly attracted by a certain pseudo bourgeois vision of the ugly, a nostalgia of disharmony (better if of Soviet origin) that, reworked from contemporaneity it becomes synonymous with uniqueness.

This aesthetic of ugliness is certainly not new. The first to coin the term is the German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz in 1853.

In the early years of the century, the Viennese expressionists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Gustav questioned the axiom for which beauty is the ultimate goal of art, just as Miuccia Prada did in the 90s for fashion ... a red thread which remains tense until today, up to Demna Gvasalia and colleagues.

If beauty is acceptance, normality, conformity, everything that is disturbing, wrong or distonic is special, palatable, even marketable.

In short, good and bad exchange meaning to the point of canceling each other. So hurray for the floral wallpaper and porn actors for revealing nothing attractive.

Two fun facts: among the followers of the profile there is also the stylist of Vetements and Balenciaga, Lotta Volkova. The founder of @hardcor_decor also runs a Tumblr account called "Booze & Broads", a space that, thanks to fewer site censorship restrictions, contains a more in-depth and explicit research on vintage eroticism.