When Covid hit, Herman Wakefield’s industry was turned upside down. Prices for midcentury antiques skyrocketed because of the home improvement frenzy, and uneducated new dealers were everywhere, ruining furniture and hawking fakes. You could make more money, but you’d have to work harder, improvise, and deal with a lot of idiots along the way.
Wakefield, who is in his early 40s, had been selling vintage furniture for four years—and been a fan for nearly 20—and he needed to “blow off some steam.” Though he’d never made a meme before, on November 3, 2020, he pieced together a “starter pack” making fun of new vintage dealers who didn’t know what they were doing. The goal wasn’t to go viral but just to make a handful of other seasoned colleagues laugh.
What Wakefield didn’t expect was that two years later, @northwest_mcm_wholesale would have more than 37,000 followers. (His name online is a portmanteau of designers Herman Miller’s and Heywood Wakefield’s, inspired by dealers on Craigslist who get their names crossed. As with many others interviewed for this piece, being anonymous is a key part of his strategy.) The biggest shock is that half of Wakefield’s followers “probably don’t know a goddamn thing about design. I get people messaging me, ‘What is Eames? Who are Eames?’”
It may sound ridiculous, but a meme about having sex with a Mario Bellini sofa can sometimes lead to a real appreciation for design. “I have had people write to me and they’re like, ‘When I followed your account, I didn’t know anything, and now I just bought a Saarinen coffee table.’ That makes me feel good, because the memes have made people interested in the history of design. They wouldn’t have even known about it
