These Y2K Pottery Barn Plates On eBay Are Both Awful And Amazing
The time: It's the dawn of a new century. People are partying like it's 1999. Robbie Williams is still a thing. At midnight, all the computers might stop working. At the same time, the future is upon us, and the Sony Aibo is threatening to replace all actual real dogs. It is COMPLETE CHAOS.
Except, of course, for Pottery Barn. Its store is a vanilla-scented refuge of furniture modeled after Geppetto's workshop. And in this bridge to the year 2000, Pottery Barn has taken a more lighthearted approach to welcome the millennium with a dish set, each plate illustrating a different decade of the 20th century, ending with a cryptic vision of "The Future."
So, what were PB's most pressing thoughts of the year 2000?
- Living Large
- Grrl
- Hip Hop (confirmation that these plates were designed by white people)
- Wired
- Underwired
- "E-Mail Me"
- Y2K
- Smoke Free
Let's now take a step back and see how Pottery Barn was viewing the '90s:
- Career Woman (sad that this was novel)
- Daddy Track (??????)
- Hard Body
- Lounge
- Cell Phone
- Casual Friday
- Martinis (this and the previous two clearly catering to yuppies)
- Slacker (nod to the Gen Xers who became yuppies)
- "Cool" (BAHAHAHA)
- Surf the Net
- Tattoos
Let us now peek into "The Future" (according to Pottery Barn):
- Air-Conditioned Pants (surprisingly, an actual, albeit truly ugly, reality)
- Tantric Irony (tantric sex god Sting still unsure of what this means)
- Kevlar Jodhpurs
- Cruelty-Free Mohair
- Tattooed Sportswear
- Programmable Curves
- Implantable e-mail (Elon Musk prob still working on this one)
Official plea to Pottery Barn to either a). reproduce these or b). issue new ones for the 2020s. Some ideas: TikTok, Coastal Grandma, QAnon, Omicron, Streaming Services, Nepo Baby, Swifties, Cheugy, and NyQuil Chicken.
If you love these plates as much as we do, now's your chance to make "The Future" your very own. Shop it below.
