Why the Sweet, Sweet Strawberry Motif Never Goes Out of Style

In early March, in the absolute dregs of Northeastern winter, Jonny Carmack walked into a HomeGoods and spotted a giant strawberry—a bright red strawberry stool, to be specific.

"It was like $70 and I was like, do I need a giant strawberry?" he recounts now. He decided no, but then couldn’t stop thinking about it, so much so ("I couldn’t sleep. Something about this damn strawberry is pulling me back!") that he woke up the next morning and went back for it. A vintage reseller and interior designer who shares his cotton-candy-pink, ’80s-homage home on Instagram as VintageShowPony, he’d begun experimenting with "go shopping with me"-style TikToks but hadn’t gotten much traction—until he made a video about the stool. It went viral, quickly taking on a life of its own. People were wild for the strawberry stool (and not even for the first time, either).

Carmack gained 20,000 new followers, some of whom began bombarding him with requests to source the stool for them. "People were like, I will pay anything for you to find me this and ship me this," he says, and so for a while in the late winter, he was constantly driving around the tristate area, hunting the stool. "I had people tell me, ‘I went to 12 different HomeGoods stores in one day’—that’s a lot of time and gas!" One woman dropped everything to come and meet him outside the restaurant where he was going for dinner one evening; when she arrived, he says, she was jumping for joy, before tenderly buckling the stool into her car for safe passage home.

But this isn’t the story of just one stool. Once you start looking, the ruby red strawberry is everywhere. There’s the similarly viral strawberry vase sold by The Golden Webshop out of the Netherlands, or this retro little version from Ban.do. It can be "grandmillennial," with tiny wild strawberries peeking out from vintage-inspired sheets and curling around Wedgewood pieces, or it can be big and bright and a bit kitschy, popping off a Baggu towel, or it can be Arts and Crafts–inspired, appearing on the iconic, ubiquitous Strawberry Thief print by William Morris or on the wall as a framed print.

But the strawberry’s history in visual art and interior design is older than you might think. It even predates the modern strawberry (the result of 18th century crossbreeding between two American varieties). Larisa Grollemond, Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at the Getty Museum, described them as "kind of ubiquitous in medieval art—you see them all over, in paintings, in manuscript borders, in tapestries, in sculpture."

There was a symbolic weight to those strawberries, though, she cautions, "It’s always hard to say the strawberry means this one thing in medieval art when you see it. It’s always contingent." But there were definitely a bundle of associations at work. "There’s this sense in the Middle Ages that the natural world is reflective of God’s divine plan, of his will," Grollemond explains. And so the strawberry’s tripartite leaf becomes a natural expression of the holy trinity; the color evokes Christ’s blood; the five-part flower, his five wounds. Strawberries and strawberry vines show up in depictions of the Virgin Mary, too, associated with her purity and virtue.

But it’s worth pointing out that part of it may be as simple as visual appeal, which the artists of the 15th century recognized as well as we do now: "They may just be decorative, too," Grollemond says. Contemporary viewers want to interpret things, she says, but points out that strawberries are also just pretty, and something that would have been available and familiar to people in medieval Europe. "They have this interesting visual quality to them. And the color of them is also really nice, and so seeing them in manuscripts and things to me is not surprising, because they make such a lovely border."

Strawberries were also a popular motif in tapestries, particularly in Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, when a style called the mille-fleur or thousand flower tapestry was popular—any scene, basically, took place in a dense network of plants. (The most famous example being the unicorn tapestries at The Cloisters.) The strawberries are less recognizable than they appear in the illuminated manuscripts, though: "You can read almost anything that is red and round and has that green strawberry top as a strawberry," Grollemond admits.

Those tapestries are the type of medieval art that heavily introduced the man behind one of design’s most iconic strawberry patterns: William Morris. Strawberry Thief—which you can currently acquire as a washable rug, budget-priced Roman shades, Spode mugs, and a pillow from Rejuvenation, in several different color variations—was originally inspired by thrushes raiding the garden at the iconic 19th century Arts and Crafts designer’s idyllic country retreat, Kelmscott Manor. His strawberries are the tiny, jewel-like variety, popping out of the indigo background that gave him so much trouble to perfect. "I’m sure he gets some of his strawberry motifs especially from tapestries, because they’re very accessible" in the 19th century, Grollemond says.

Strawberries—despite the extremely prolific way they vine, in reality, and their frankly slightly lurid shade of ruby red—aren’t aggressive.

But the strawberry really shone as a cheerful, mass-market accent over the course of the 20th century, as American homebuilding boomed and the country entered an era absolutely dominated by the obsession with creating the right home. Looking to perk up your kitchen? "Mm mm mm, my strawberry kitchen looks good enough to eat!" chirps the housewife in an ad for a high-tech fabric by Firestone that appeared in the February 1949 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. "See how I framed that awkward bay window with two cottage sets of luscious strawberry Velon film curtains." The ad goes on to add that she raided the attic for an old table and draped in the "delectable-looking, tough-wearing" stuff. Modern fabric technology reframed by the good, old-fashioned, beloved berry.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the strawberry over the course of the 20th century is just how many different ways it worked. In the ’40s and ’50s, you see simple, cheerful repeating patterns of bright red strawberries in tablecloths and wallpapers. In the 1970s, you see wild strawberries in iridescent Fenton carnival glass, and more subdued and earth-toned strawberries in Mikasa’s Berry Patch pattern—part of their "country store" line. Even Francisian Dinnerware—of the ubiquitous desert rose pattern—had their own take (Strawberry Fair, if you’re interested.) And the strawberry morphs again in the 1980s and early 1990s as a dreamy, shabby chic, pastel element of linens and wallpapers by Laura Ashley.

One thing Carmack has noticed, though, is that the older pieces aren’t quite so in your face: "They’re more subtle in the design, they’re more realistic looking, as opposed to now it’s more of like, not a cartoon but almost. A very exaggerated strawberry, which is interesting." It’s worth pointing out that a housewife picking wallpaper for her kitchen in 1940 would likely have a lot more firsthand experience with agriculture generally and growing strawberries specifically than the modern HomeGoods shopper. (Ads for strawberry garden kits and supplies pop up in women’s magazines in the first half of the century.)

There are several factors that could be driving the current trend. Carmack points to the popularity of cottagecore, and even the influence of Harry Styles. Then there’s the simple fact that people are consuming more and more home content via algorithmic platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where pink rooms the color of strawberry ice cream with vivid pops of red look really, really good, good enough to stop your scrolling in its tracks. (It’s hard to see the Franciscan Dinnerware ’70s version of strawberries getting a foothold—it’s not orange enough.) Trends move through online platforms like wildfire, and it’s easier than ever to go flying down a design rabbit hole, finding people who share your specific aesthetic obsession. (It’s a really nice time to be a fan of linocuts and woodblock prints, for instance.)

But there’s also the simple fact of their vibe. A 2017 New Yorker piece about the market dominance of Driscoll strawberries has a funny little moment, where the reporter spots a slide mapping "psychographic associations" with different fruits: "Strawberries floated between Freedom and Harmony, in a zone marked Extrovert, above a word cloud that read ‘Social, pleasure, joy, balance, conviviality, friendship, warmth, soft, natural, sharing.’"

Carmack describes the strawberry as "fun and flirty," with a vibrant, rich color. It looks a little bit heart-shaped. It doesn’t have the hint of warmer faraway shores or intense horticultural resources that the lemon does. Blueberries have a cooler aura that’s inseparable from the state of Maine. The apple says autumn, and it screams 1980s early American and gingham. Peaches and cherries are a bit risqué and, as emojis have shown us, even downright horny. (Wallpapering your kitchen in peaches would be an aggressive move.)

Strawberries—despite the extremely prolific way they vine, in reality, and their frankly slightly lurid shade of ruby red—aren’t aggressive. They’re cheerful and happy and their appearance (in nature, or at least more cheaply at the grocery store) means that wintertime is over but it’s not sweltering, either. "I was saying at the time, I’m manifesting spring, because Connecticut winter, it’s frigid," Carmack explains of his decision to go back for that stool (which now has a glass top and serves as a table in an entire fruit-themed room). "There’s no color, everything’s bleak, everything’s dead. That probably contributed to me wanting to buy it, too." 

 Carmack has tried to parse the appeal of the stool for himself. "Strawberries represent abundance, and I’m very maximalism to my core, that’s my vibe." We’re in a maximalist moment generally, and a moment where a lot of people want whimsy. And strawberries deliver: "I think people are really looking for unexpected joy in their homes. The world outside your house is scary and dark and, you know, crazy at times. You want to be in a place where you’re surrounded by things that you like, things that make you smile, things that make you happy," he says. "The whole strawberry thing makes me happy."

Top Photo Courtesy of Happy Wall

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