Boring Digital Grayness Has No Home in Lansing’s Mega Mall

Lansing — Hop online and you’ll see endless complaints about the aesthetic poverty of our current age. Why is everyone dressed worse than they used to be? Why do old cars look so cool and new cars all look the same? Why are all the new houses gray?

To answer these questions, you need to seek out America’s more colorful past. Mega Mall, Lansing’s biggest vintage shop, is your place to step back in time.

The Mega Mall is patriotic, inside and out. You’re greeted by a blow-up Statue of Liberty at the entrance, and American flags hang from the ceiling inside. The vibe is pure Americana and extremely Michigan, with items hearkening back to our past cultural icons.

“Mall” is the right term for the place; it’s far larger than your usual vintage shop—40,000 square feet, to be exact. Every bit of it is filled with cabinets, tables, and shelves covered with practically anything you could imagine from the last 100 years of Michigan’s history, all available for sale.

The first long aisle holds stuff from the 1990s and 2000s: Pokémon cards, game systems, figurines, VHS tapes. Farther down the aisle, there are old film cameras, ranging from ’90s point-and-shoot models to accordion-style leaf-shutter models from the ’50s.

The first thing you notice is how ornate everything is. We’re so used to minimalism, and everything there is maximalist: brightly colored N64s and game cartridges, comic books, glassware, old license plates, posters. Everything stands out. Nothing is sparse.

An old Vernors cooler bag caught my eye. It stood out in bright green, with white zippers and straps and a giant Vernors logo on the front. So incredibly Michigan. Imagine pulling up to a backyard barbecue with one of these bad boys in the ’80s, filled to the brim with Michigan’s finest ginger ale (or perhaps some harder stuff).

They drank more in the past; that much is plainly evident at the Mega Mall. Giant Miller lamps in the shape of beer bottles and vintage cans of beer and liquor bottles litter the shelves.

Just imagine drinking a beer in a wood-paneled, shag-carpeted ’70s basement without thinking about how it needs to be “updated.”

The past was more outwardly lewd, too. Vintage Playboy magazines are all over the Mega Mall, with several cabinets and shelves dedicated solely to them. Notable issues, with some celebrities on the cover, are housed in a protective glass case.

Playboy is an iconic, historic brand for a reason. These magazines stand out, and it has little to do with erotic fixations. The nudity is practically chaste by modern standards.

No, the sad ubiquity of internet pornography has rendered Playboys into fine-art pieces. The line between porn and art has shifted with our increasing digital excess, and vintage Playboys have landed on the tamer side of things. They’ve been rendered aesthetic objects, sublimated by a culture whose depravity has exceeded them.

It’s the same with old posters. There are wall-scale photographs of nice-looking ladies, including the iconic Farrah Fawcett posters from the ’70s. Fellas used to put those on their walls as statement pieces, signaling desire and intent. You don’t see that much anymore.

Which isn’t to say these impulses don’t exist. They certainly do; they’ve just been shuttered into the digital realm. Dudes don’t hang up posters of Farrah Fawcett; they just subscribe to girls on OnlyFans.

That’s the true irony. These impulses and desires for aesthetic maximalism, for the possession and consumption of glittering objects, still exist. We’ve just locked them away in our phones.

People consume more media than ever, and the amount grows year over year. Our movies and pornography are ultraviolent, the erotic content out there disgustingly depraved.

Our descent into the digital world has left the physical world duller than ever. All the excess is contained, while our exterior environment is left as mere framing. Colored walls and carpets would clash with the light from your giant TV.

No one seems satisfied with this state of affairs, and we keep reaching back to old forms to find something genuine. Enthusiasts photograph with film, collect vinyl records, set up old CRT TVs—not because the old forms and methods are superior, but because they’re imperfect.

Imperfection, like the noise on an old TV, is genuine; it’s real. Aesthetically, it feels more at home in the physical environment—there’s no alienating mind-body dualism like you feel when you get sucked into a loop of Instagram Reels for an hour and finally remember your body exists.

Analog objects from the past are three-dimensional, while the aesthetics of the digital age are flat, confined to screens, angular shapes, and surfaces. Everything now is figuratively flat, with gray, colorless, neutral tones—and contextually flat, with little originality, needing to reference past ages and aesthetics to have any soul.

Consider our own aesthetic legacy that we’ll leave to future generations. When vintage shops 50 years from now display items from the 2020s, what will there even be? Old iPhones with batteries long since dead? LED TVs with dead pixels? Labubus?

The Labubu craze, those garish Chinese dolls, is a positive change if you think of it as a yearning for physicality. Zoomers live more online than anyone, but they’re also sick of it.

Perhaps they need to visit the Mega Mall. There’s a reason places like this are increasingly popular and vintage shopping is on the rise. The past feels more real than the present. And there’s something here that fills the void of digital life.

In other words, we must return to tradition. Embrace the cultural heritage and traditions of America, celebrate them, see them around you, and perhaps the real world won’t feel so far away.