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Even outfits like Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel, which have always had younger crowds, have had to adjust. "We used to always say our average age was 25 to 55," says Kahn. "We don't say that anymore. We feel the customer is getting younger."
A generation that watched its parents divorce and then saw technology increasingly elevate E-mail and faxes over the human touch finds itself yearning for the days not of its parents but of its grandparents. "You get constant change coming at you, and the reaction is to head to the things of comfort--family, religion, marriage, kids," says Chip Walker, director of global marketing for Phillips, the electronics maker.
Bradford Faye, a senior vice president at Roper, the polling firm, says he and others are advising clients that the way to get a slice of the $120 billion spent by twentysomethings is to stress tradition as much as individualism. Thus a company like Dewar's draws new drinkers to its Scotch by marketing it not as as an alternative choice but as your father's drink, a classic hallmark of growing up. "The value of the good old days has gone up a lot," he says.
The trend can baffle parents who have fought their own divorce wars. When America Ehnot, 25, a Seattle marketing rep, told her father she was getting married next spring, he blankly looked back and forth between her and her fiance. "Why?" he asked. "You've already got six marriages between you." But as kids took the shrapnel from their parents' breakups, the result was not wariness of marriage but a desire to try harder and do better. "And we don't want to start in our mid-30s," says Los Angeles bank manager Shannon Kowalewski, 27. "They saw their parents go through all these possessions--new lovers, new material goods, new sensory experiences--and saw that didn't do it," says cultural critic and author Naomi Wolf. "They learned from those mistakes and have different values and desires from their parents'."
Even those not on trend speak to how the culture and its expectations have flipped. Anne Stringfield, 24, works at a New York City publishing house, lives in the trendy East Village and moonlights on the side, typing for Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. But as she sits in a New York restaurant, dressed in black and adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses, she says she often feels unchic around her friends. She is single, while most of them are in serious relationships. Her apartment is in the expected dishabille, while their cupboards are filled with martini and highball glasses, their furniture is well selected, and their culinary skills are often on display. "They have all the accoutrements of domesticity," says Stringfield, who spent half an hour at a recent soiree talking about piecrusts, her one hook into what she sees as the prevailing culture. "We kind of joke about how middle-aged we've become."
--With reporting by Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles