Foll your eyes as much as you like at qualifiers like “artisanal,” “small batch,” “heirloom,” and “bespoke.” Chuckle knowingly, and a little self deprecatingly, as parodies like Portlandia and the spoof Tumblr Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table turn them into their own punch lines. These words are big business.

In my neighborhood looms a billboard advertising a mega developer’s “hand crafted” luxury apartments and townhouses installed in a repurposed nineteenth century brewery. He’s probably laughing hardest of all.

The ongoing turn-of-the-last-century nostalgia spell, fueling contemporary markets for mustache wax and obscure herbaceous liquors — excuse me, tonics (tonics that I find delightful, by the way) — shows no sign of waning anytime soon. Yet as others have argued, this obsession with the artisanal production of yesteryear is hardly unproblematic, ignoring as it does the widespread racial, gender, and class oppression that it entailed and still perpetuates.