Nantucket Has Main Character Energy | Ginger Sparks No. 32
Why the Nantucket Lightship Basket, a Peacock Series, and a “No Influencers” Sign All Point to the Same Island
Truth be told, Nantucket wasn’t really on our radar. It occupied the same mental filing cabinet as Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, and other expensive New England destinations that felt vaguely interchangeable unless you happened to own a boat or be Kennedy-adjacent.
To us it was all whitewashed shingles, inherited money, and the same tasteful nautical stripe…very Americana, very preppy, insert your chosen Muffy reference here. Was this a place Ralph Lauren made up? Surely his team must scout there.
Admittedly, Michelle also genuinely thought Martha’s Vineyard had something to do with Martha Stewart. Why wouldn’t it? Both names conjure the same white linen, old-money shorthand. But over the last few weeks, this tiny New England island has become the conceptual charming main character in what seems to be one plot point after another. So we decided to do some investigating.
The Hunt for the Nantucket Lightship Basket
At the beginning of summer, leafing through Town & Country Magazine, Michelle found Todd Plummer’s piece, There Once Was a Shop on Nantucket, which examines why thrifting on Nantucket has turned so cutthroat. It was the first of many Nantucket signals this summer. What caught our attention wasn’t the thrifting itself, but what everyone was actually hunting to find. Buried in the stories of collectors “jockeying outside the Hospital Thrift Shop like it’s a contact sport,” extremely Brimfield Market coded, was our introduction to the Nantucket Lightship basket. It’s a handcrafted cane-and-rattan basket, often finished with a carved scrimshaw lid, and it has become one of the island’s most recognized symbols.
Then came the line that really caught us: “A worn Lightship basket elicits more praise than a Birkin.” Hard stop…..what in the Jane Birkin is this basket!? It’s not lost on us that Jane Birkin carried a basket for years before Hermès ever named a bag after her. Naturally, we looked up the price. Ahem, sticker shock!
At Sylvia Antiques, real provenance starts around $750 and climbs past $5,000. The Etsy versions are made by second-career weavers working in the tradition rather than on the island. ShearwaterBasketsCo sells a 6-inch round basket for $325 and a 9-inch purse for $825, while NantucketWeavers offers a 6-inch cherry wood version for $385. Similar techniques and materials, slightly different lineage—hence the gap between prices. Those versions had us daydreaming about swapping our Dragon Diffusion Market Tote for one, before common sense stepped back in. For the record, the 6-inch holds a phone and a lip balm and not much else, so the 9-inch is the only one doing any real work at the farmers market.
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Ginger Spark: We admit it outright, these baskets are absurdly expensive, yet we understand the appeal anyway. Having the perfect one is considered slightly gauche. The dream is really to stumble across one at a Nantucket estate sale or inherit one from a fabulous rich auntie who summered there.
The provenance carries as much weight as the object. Owning one matters less than “getting a nod of approval” from the club of people who can identify one on sight. Which is also the risk. Writer Amy Odell has been asking whether the Birkin has become overexposed, and the Lightship basket may be on the same path, with TikTok doing the work that decades of celebrity sightings did for Hermès.
The Five Star Weekend
Jamie recommended we watch Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend, and it did what a good Nantucket story does: make everyone want to go. Jennifer Garner plays Hollis, a food influencer who invites three friends from different eras of her life to her vacation home, joined by a social media follower who somehow ends up on the guest list. Chloe Sevigny, Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden, and Gemma Chan round out the cast, though we would argue the real eye candy is Timothy Olyphant. The aesthetic is a Pinterest board given a production budget: quiet luxury interiors, weathered shingle, and Coastal Grandmother filtered through Summer House.
Costume designer Susie DeSanto built the wardrobe from Simkhai, Frame, Ralph Lauren, Reformation, and L.L.Bean, and Lilly Pulitzer followed with a shoppable capsule organized into six themed categories tracking Hollis’s actual itinerary, from the arrival cocktail party to the farmstand run. Lilly has done this before from the other side, dressing Kristen Wiig in an original tangerine shift in Palm Royale, where Alix Friedberg built the whole club palette around Lilly and Pucci prints, then curated a RealReal edit of 600-plus vintage pieces. Believe us, we have put Palm Royale in presentations and on mood boards ourselves.
This isn’t the first time we’ve written this article. Santorini, Miami, Nashville, and Montana have all had their turn, each one arriving as a sociocultural cue, color palette, and a silhouette before it arrived as a plane ticket. The White Lotus runs the same play with a bigger passport, and the Four Seasons Koh Samui reported bookings up 40 percent after season three (watch the French Riviera for Season Four). WWD reports 53 percent of global travelers are interested in screen-inspired getaways, with set-jetting projected to hit $8 billion in the US alone. Nantucket is the domestic version, and the ferry is considerably cheaper than a flight to Koh Samui.
What’s new is the speed to market. Places like this used to be raw material for trend and creative roles, mood boards built around a specific place that took months to reach a consumer through a season of design and production. Now someone can watch the house, screenshot the dress, price the ferry, and order the capsule in one evening.
Nantucket did try to hold the line. In 2006, residents voted overwhelmingly for a Formula Business Exclusion Overlay District to keep chain stores off the island, grandfathering in only a handful, including Ralph Lauren and Lilly Pulitzer.
Ginger Spark: A destination is intellectual property now, licensed in layers from the streaming rights to the capsule collection to the hotel booking. Nantucket wrote a law to keep chains off the island, then watched a show and a resort-wear collection sell the aesthetic to everyone who will never get there. The only question left is which island is next.
No Influencers
There are many shops on the island to note, but the one everyone is talking about this summer is Four Winds Craft Guild, which has been selling handcrafted baskets, purses, artwork, and carvings since 1948. The shop’s actual history stretches back further: John Sylvia’s grandfather founded Sylvia’s Antiques in 1927 (yes, the same one we mentioned up top regarding Lightship bags), which later merged with Four Winds to form the business Sylvia runs today. Earlier this summer, Four Winds posted a photo of a permanent wood sign hanging inside the store reading “No Influencers,” captioned “Came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade.” Sylvia insists he made it for people walking past the window rather than for the internet. The internet found it anyway, and the post cleared 10,000 likes before getting reposted across Reddit and by small businesses everywhere.
Influencer Paige Paul, founder of lifestyle brand Dairy Boy, pushed back in the comments almost immediately. She has her own storefront on the island now, Dairy Boy’s flagship and its first-ever retail location, which opened on Federal Street over Memorial Day weekend to a line of teenage and twentysomething shoppers snaking down the brick sidewalk. Paul isn’t there purely for the foot traffic, though. Her grandparents kept a house on Nantucket, and she has been visiting her entire life. She told ELLE Decor the island “shaped my understanding of summer, home, tradition, and East Coast culture,” and called it the most special place in the world. Two businesses, one selling since 1948 and one open since May, both betting everything on the same island, and both agree that it’s worth fighting over.
She may not have been there since 1948. Still, she’s not a total outsider either, and she’s selling the same nostalgic Americana as Four Winds, just through gingham and lily-of-the-valley pajamas (they’re actually quite cute) instead of woven baskets. “If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a ‘No Influencers’ sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why,” she wrote, noting how strange the message reads coming from a store built on a craft with a rich history of women shaping the island and its economy.
A side note worth pondering, because we’re always pulling strings: Paul’s argument has merit. Women make up roughly 70 to 80 percent of all influencers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and they earn about 40 percent less per collaboration than men do, partly because the categories they dominate get written off as oversaturated. This island trades heavily on old-school, traditional values. So why does one form of women turning heritage skill into income, basket weaving, get celebrated as craft, while lifestyle influencing gets mocked as lesser? Maybe it’s simpler than gender entirely: one old-school shop vying against newness in the market. Is it the same undercurrent running through “tradwife” discourse, where women monetizing anything domestic or aesthetic draws outsized scrutiny?
As the backlash built, Four Winds posted a follow-up, framing the sign as an invitation to conversation, not a ban: “This is a cultural discussion, one to talk about openly and honestly in your own community.” One verified commenter turned the whole argument around, pointing out that astronomical hotel prices, months-long reservation waits, nonexistent parking, and small businesses steadily converting into chains have done far more damage to the island’s charm than any influencer could possibly instigate.
Four Winds’ Instagram picked up about 8,000 new followers since the sign went up, and per the shop’s own account, the drama also brings in business. Paul’s answer landed Tuesday: a photo from her own Dairy Boy storefront, with a sign of its own. “Everyone Welcome.”
Ginger Spark: Whatever resonates with you—old or new—on an island trading in authenticity, the most honest thing anyone said was “it brings in business,” and that is exactly what happens when an island becomes a brand. There’s really nothing more American than that.
Okay, we are officially all Nantuckered out. What do you want us to look at next?
🔄 Restack if you have ever coveted something purely because someone told you that you could not have it.
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Summer on the island, own a Lightship basket, or have thoughts on the sign? Email us at gingergeisty@gmail.com. We read everything.
Absolutely love how much Nantucket is giving the world!