Nantucket Forever Issue No. 004
ON INFLUENCE
This week Sylvia Antiques and the Four Winds Craft Guild hung a new quarterboard. Two words, carved and gilded the old way: No Influencers. Jess’ photograph.
The response? 5000 new followers and an outpouring of support.
A shop that has spent nearly a century [100 years next year] selling Nantucket friendship baskets, marine antiques and folk art declined the entire influencer economy in a single gesture, and the internet rewarded it with the very thing influencers are paid to deliver.
The quarterboard is not about being contrarian or unwelcoming. It is about knowing exactly who we are and standing in our integrity, and dare we say, humble good taste.
Nantucket has always understood this. As writer Annie Davidson Watson put it in a single word this month; Nantucket exercises “restraint”. Nantucket does not chase. She lures. Scarcity is not a strategy here. It is a way of life that happens to photograph beautifully and resonate well beyond our shores.
What Four Winds and Sylvia Antiques understands, and what the smartest island brands understand, is that provenance is timeless [old and new] influence. A quarterboard carved by hand carries more authority than a thousand gifted posts. The audience can feel the difference.
The irony, of course is that refusing so-called modern influence turned out to be the most influential move of the season. But it only works when it is true. You cannot fake a hundred years.
That is the island and the standard of old world excellence the new world seeks.
