Everything new is old again.

Rejuvenation Electrical and Hardware, 2003

Here’s a 21st century catalog selling 20th century products.

By 2003, catalogs have been around long enough so that they now carry items inspired by catalogs from decades earlier. Certainly furniture companies have long reproduced cabinetry from earlier centuries. The 20th century presented design via mass media (movies, TV) so thoroughly that new styles started showing up every decade. Catalogs started reproducing designs from our childhoods instead of ancient kings.

These two pages present a mid-century-inspired kitchenette with atomic-age lighting and hardware, all purchasable new through Rejuvenations. They certainly get the look and feel right. Other pages covered hardware back to the 1890s, including reproduction electric lights that Edison might have fooled Thomas Edison.

Rejuvenation started in 1977, and was bought by Williams-Sonoma in 2011. Appropriate for a company specializing in antiques, in 2018 they still print catalogs.