Candy-colored, collapsible plastic crates are taking over trendy Instagram homes, paired with the 80s furniture revival and the surge in squiggly, blobby decor. But when I recently tweeted pictures of the crates, people across the food world quickly commented with familiarity. “Usually when I see these they’re black and filled with heirloom tomatoes or seedlings!” replied Philadelphia-based food writer Alexandra Jones; Eric Rivera, chef-owner of Seattle’s Addo, joked that the crates in which he receives produce are boring by comparison—perhaps in the future he could have his deliveries shipped in containers that are orange or fuchsia (a color that seller Aykasa officially calls “Bodacious”).
I asked chef, writer, and former farmer Abra Berens if the crates looked familiar given her experience, to which she said, yes, crates like those are used at most farms; typically ordered at large farm suppliers, they’re useful because they’re durable, foldable, and nestable. Indeed, search “vegetable crates” or “harvest crates” and you’ll find a selection of sizes in bold, primary colors from large-scale suppliers. They’re utilitarian, like the containers from which you’d point and pick the best tomato at the farmers market or in which a distributor might heft a case of soda bottles for a grocery store.
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On Instagram, the crates, though similar in design, are babyish pastels or jewel-toned. They’re filled with squiggle-shaped candlesticks or Goop-approved sticks of incense. In “orchid,” “banana,” and “baby blue” shades, they’re in the background of photos for a brand that sells “contemporary lifestyle goods for the discerning modern pet owner.” In red, the crate displays the Christmas hamper of wine, salami, and Comté from the London restaurant Top Cuvée. Though the design site Hunker called them a trend last year, they’ve gotten so popular recently that I saw a comment this week that said, “I need to know why everyone is obsessed with those plastic crates. Is it irony?” How exactly did plastic vegetable crates go from farmers market staples to of-the-moment pieces of decor, sold for around $30 each at stores like Urban Outfitters and even the MoMA Design Store?
Most people attribute the current colorful crate trend to the Danish homeware brand Hay, which launched them in Europe in 2018 and the United States in 2019 and provides crates to the aforementioned stores. As VICE editor Rachel Wilkerson Miller—who recently blogged about bendy candlesticks, which she posed inside pastel pink and yellow crates—told me, similar containers were all over Stockholm as of early this year, not exclusively from Hay. As a result, a rainbow of crates has popped up across Instagram pages focused on Scandinavian home design.
“Colour Crate was a market find, which came to us from Turkey,” said Hay co-founder and creative director Mette Hay. “It has always been my passion to find and give new life to existing products by adding beautiful colors and showing products in a new light.” In Turkey, Aykasa Polimer designed foldable crates for carrying produce, though the company’s color range expansion in 2015 made them well-suited for home decor, according to MoMA. To Mette Hay, the crates speak to her company’s core value of affordable, everyday design.
As with many things, the crates picked up in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Hay. “Right when COVID started, people were at home, they started organizing more, and I think that’s probably the reason why the crate just seemed to go off like gangbusters,” said Holly Hallberg, owner of Scandinavian design store Huset in Venice, California. After Hay stopped wholesaling to retailers in the U.S., she gets crates from Aykasa and sells them between $9 and $38 depending on the size; small crates and pink crates are especially popular, she said.
Unlike the clear plastic bins preached by The Home Edit and their army of Container Store-obsessed followers, these colorful crates offer utility but with more personality. Madde Pontin—who runs Pon in Rockport, Massachusetts with her mother Laura—was drawn to the vibrant crates she saw in Berlin in 2017 and then in the U.S. at the MoMA Design Store in 2018. She saw them as a “magical thing that could be used in endless ways,” and they decided to stock them at Pon.
There’s a childlike appeal to the color crates, Pontin said, comparing them to the containers in which she used to store Legos. Stacked together into their own, colorful little world, a collection of crates becomes something like a real-life play set to live in. The colors and names they selected for the crates all correspond to memories: “orange because of spilled juice, coconut milk because that’s how I take my matcha, fluorescent because of gooey childish slime, electric blue because of IKEA and the bright blue color of an internet link, baby pink because millennial pink is still a thing, and so on,” Pontin said.
Aside from that sense of nostalgic fun, the crates suggest a knowledge of current trends. “The mix of utilitarian and pastel aesthetics is effective and emblematic of a generation of apartment-dwellers who want to be Instagrammable on a budget,” said Helen Branyan, an interior design enthusiast who runs the home decor page @pearly_interiors. With 92,000 followers, Branyan curates aesthetic trends of young, creative types on Instagram, which are, at the moment, full of curvy furniture, pastel colors, tile grid tables, prints of Matisse’s Blue Nudes, abstract rugs, wiggle-shaped statement candles—and of course, colorful crates. Branyan now sees the crates so much on her feed, in fact, that it’s actually dissuaded her from buying them: “My aim has always been authenticity, and I figured my fans would chide me for falling into the ‘trend follower’ trap, rather than serving as an influencer/cultural compass.”
The homes Branyan shares are not aesthetics where a standard black milk crate would fit in particularly well, at least not without a coating of spray paint; the blue of a typical farm-approved vegetable crate isn’t quite the Pantone color of 2020. To Hallberg, that riff on a familiar format is part of the crates’ current appeal. “A lot of times when items that seem familiar to us, and seem like they’re old, are reinvented to have a new fresh face, they traditionally do really well because you have that connection,” she said. “You have the comfort of something old, but it feels modern and fresh because it’s being reinvented.”
Utilitarianism has, at times, become an aesthetic or even a sort of status signifier. The idea of “everyday carry,” which involved collecting pocket knives and Leatherman multi-tools, took off even among people whose daily lives didn’t, in fact, call for using gear everyday. More notably, workwear brand Carhartt transitioned from being exclusively durable clothes for farmers and construction workers to an “unlikely fashion darling” worn by celebrities, with its “humble authenticity” and sense of urban survivalism having also made it a “hip hop phenomenon,” Calum Gordon wrote in 2018. Accordingly, the crates have gone from farm staple to design inspo, with a price tag to prove it.
It turns out, all you need to make them go from the realm of function to fashion is cuter colors and a handful of Instagram influencers.
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