This Under-$10 Party Essential Is the New Decor Staple

Last August, I began hosting a weekly Instagram talk show for something habitual to do in isolation. Several graceless attempts at using a green screen passed before I went to the party store and bought $20 worth of silver tinsel to line my living room. As performers took to Twitch streams and Instagram Lives during the pandemic, I noticed more metallic curtains appearing as defiant good-time backdrops against pale interior walls, offering a small moment of glamour in an otherwise unglamorous time.

James Veloria founder Brandon Giordano’s relationship with metallic tinsel curtains began with a dominatrix back in 2004. Upon moving to the Bay Area from Ohio, he lived with a friend’s mom, who separated her loft from her dungeon with Party City tinsel curtains. “I always thought about what was behind them,” he says. “There was this fantasy of going through the curtains and into this whole other world that we were definitely not allowed in.”

Ever since, Brandon’s apartments have featured a wall of metallic fringe—affordable glamour for around nine bucks a pop. The throwaway decoration has been popping up in retail, restaurants, and bars as our collective mood shifts from less to more. At James Veloria in New York, silver foil fringe curtains cover the wall dividing the store’s two rooms. Brandon and his husband—cofounder Collin Weber—liked that the fringe made the shop homier, almost like walking into a family member’s graduation party or a friend’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

Confetti System, a collaboration between friends Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen, started amid another global crisis. The originators of party-decor-as-art, they started making celebratory pieces such as tassel garlands and piñatas around 2008 after the economic crash. Longtime friends who met in college, the duo came together with a shared experience of being Asian-American and having a similar memory bank of visual references from ceremonial spaces and clubs. 

“[Julie] grew up going to raves in New York City in the ’90s, which I’m always in awe of, and I grew up in Hawaii around lots of flowers, lots of traditional craft, creating spaces out of things around you,” Nicholas explains. “Intentional ceremonial safe spaces, like, ‘I feel really good here, I feel like myself.’”

There’s a famous architecture book titled Learning From Las Vegas that deconstructs the appeal of casinos and nightclubs—any place meant for escapism. “The controlled sources of artificial and colored light within the dark enclosures expand and unify the space by obscuring its physical limits,” wrote architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. “You are no longer in the bounded piazza but in the twinkling lights of the city at night.” That’s the precise seduction of the metallic tinsel curtain: It conceals a room’s physical limits and refracts another possible dimension to the viewer. 

The effect is a childlike sensation of not having the full context of the place you’re in, just knowing there’s more you might see around the corner. “It occupies your eye in a gentle, comforting way when it’s done well,” Nicholas adds. “We kind of play with that aspect of it, changing it from being this very loud, garish ‘Happy New Year’ thing. You can use it in a way that’s still very loud, but you can work it into an everyday setting. It’s permeable, like a portal.”

Walking into James Veloria in New York’s Chinatown is a comforting rush. To begin with, you’re entering a mall underneath a bridge; then you find yourself walking through a maze of floor-to-ceiling glass windows until you find this spot with trompe l’oeil murals, deep purple carpet, and a wall of silver tinsel. Brandon emphasizes that the store’s intention is to make high-end designer vintage less intimidating. “I just wanted it to feel like you’re dressing up at your friend’s place before you go to a party,” he says. “There’s usually fun music playing. That’s the best part of your night out, really.”

At Rialto Grande, a new bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, gold fringe covers the front windows and entices people into the bar off the street. Jonny Sela, director of operations, says that the gold tinsel was “sort of a happy accident” that resulted when he and owner Andrew Bulger were designing the space. The bar channels everything from defunct Los Angeles haunts to classic New York dives and the kind of retro faux-fancy restaurants that “served, like, different kinds of baked hams.” When it came time to throw a soft opening for friends, they realized the wood paneling overwhelmed the room. The gold fringe was a last-minute fix that became a signature. 

“It says fun is happening here right now,” Jonny explains in an email. “That familiarity makes it naturally nostalgic and inviting. For us, there’s some of that athleisure wardrobe attitude. You wanna look good, but you don’t want people to think you made some big effort or that you take yourself too seriously.”

Nicholas and Julie dreamed up Confetti System as a “weird flipping” of the dollar-store decor they admired in Chinatown trinket shops. They wanted to hand-make piñatas, tissue flowers, and tinsel garlands, cutting out unfair labor practices and prohibitive wholesale minimums. At the time, party decorations weren’t as trendy and materials like Mylar and metallic paper were limited to holiday gift wrap and proms.

“When we started it was like, put all that away, take it down after your party’s over,” Nicholas concludes. “Those are beautiful things. We love having them up year-round. They age, they fade in the sun. It’s just that feeling of living with something and remembering that day of your birthday.”

Nearly a year after I bought them, I’m not sure where I’m living (long story!), but I have a grocery bag full of tinsel curtains ready to be hung up in my next space. It’s been a relief to spot them out in the world, a disco party we can experience together once again. Once you’ve tuned into the tinsel frequency, you can spot them anywhere—windows of nail salons, local banks doing a festive promotion, partitions in coffee shops. We’re all sweaty, feeling weird, and looking for things that sparkle. We’re no longer in the bounded piazza but in the twinkling lights of the city at night.

Multi-color Sequin Metallic Foil Fringe Curtains

$4 at Etsy

Iridescent Foil Star Curtain

$9 at Etsy

GOER 3.2 ft x 9.8 ft Metallic Tinsel Foil Fringe Curtains for Party Photo Backdrop Wedding Decor (1 Pack, Gold)

$10 $7 at Amazon

Gold Tinsel Fringe Garland

$20 at Meri Meri