Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

Embracing and Evolving the Tiki Style

·34 min·2 clips

Elvis recorded most of his last two records in the Jungle Room, and the 2016 box set is called Way Down in the Jungle Room.

Sven gets checked first. The tiny joke sets the room temperature before Elliot and Todd get back to their tiki series, with pineapple juice nearby and exotica cued on the imaginary jukebox. Then the design history starts to move. They treat tiki as a style that could be exotic adventure, goofy gimmick, lowbrow entertainment, and oddly polished at the same time. Purity is not the point. The fun is watching professional designers grab that contradiction and send it through graphic design, interiors, fashion, products, and architecture. Restaurants had a hand in it, too. Supper clubs and cabarets borrowed the mood and built rooms that could make the fantasy feel real enough for dinner and drinks. Todd and Elliot are especially good on the small stuff: postcards, coasters, cocktail napkins, matchbooks, swizzle sticks, placemats, and the ever-tempting tiki mug. Those pieces were cheap enough to walk away with, and that mattered. They left in pockets and purses, then kept selling the place after the last drink was gone. The coaster turns into a billboard. A matchbook passed along becomes a little brand ambassador, silly phrase and all, but it works once you picture it. That is where the episode clicks. It treats restaurant ephemera as design infrastructure instead of clutter, then ties those little surfaces to the spread of tiki look and feel. There is a tsunami joke, because of course there is. Under the riff sits a sharper point: tiki did not need one famous typeface maker or a clean roster of stars to look coherent. Repetition did the job. Interiors, souvenirs, and themed details made the fantasy easy to read anywhere another bar or supper club wanted the same spell. By the end, tiki turns outward as an American-filtered exotic export, headed back toward places like Europe with booze, fruits from other lands, and a final punch line about wallet pain.

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