mood board: Shabby Chic
Alexia Rossetti Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 9:00AM 
Like a grand dame in her waning years, a shabby chic home reflects faded beauty and elegance but with blurry features. Despite this decay, Shabby Chic became a very popular style that gathered steam in the 1980s and continues to be a fashionable choice till today. In our continuing series on mood boards, we’ll delve into the elements of a shabby chic interior.
Despite its emergence as a somewhat contemporary style, shabby chic has actually been around for a long time – the style really derives from the faded elegance of old British country manors. The British upper class commissioned furniture makers to create long-lasting quality furniture and basically handed it down to their heirs. Sometimes their descendents replaced the furniture with newer styles but as fortunes waned, some kept the more popular pieces – the Georgian and neoclassical styles – until it broke down. What started as mere frugality eventually became a style statement in the 1980s.