A clever piece on the latest in Depression fashion:

(I have no idea why this link went to an article on Michael Jackson’s death. I just spotted it and changed it back – June, 2o14.)

“Falcinelli describes the sensibility currently in vogue—and certainly on display in his restaurants—as a throwback to pre-industrial times, when regular folks actually knew how to make things with their hands. “People are always like, ‘What’s the dope shit right now?'” he says. “Well, the dope shit now is 120 years ago.” So cure your own boar prosciutto. Grow a beard. Go back to the land behind your remodeled seven-figure townhouse.

The retro aesthetic carries over to hooch, which would seem as recessionproof as any consumable. Good-bye, $300 worth of bottle-service vodka in the back corner of a velvet-rope warehouse; hello, $300 worth of single-malt-and-Chartreuse Depression-era cocktails mixed by a mustachioed dude wearing an arm garter. “Sure, there can be a certain level of snobbery,” says Alex Day, who has opened a string of thriving high-end speakeasylike lounges around the country, including Death & Co. in New York. “The bankers who come here never identify themselves as bankers—they don’t like to talk about it.”

So take heed, deposed hedgies aching to splurge with what’s left of your severances: Let that layoff beard get as tangled and bushy as you want—Jenulence makes a nifty hazelnut-and-cedarwood-infused conditioner for a mere $28—then spend away. It’s okay: You’re part of the poorgeoisie—no one will say a word…”