In case you needed something else to feel insecure about, your home isn’t clean enough. Following in the footsteps of knitting and power yoga, the new obsession, apparently, is vacuuming—a development heralded by the opening of the Oreck Clean Home Center in Manhattan. The trend—one that began, perhaps, with the “A few thousand prototypes later, I had it” Dyson ads, which ran incessantly last year and promised new frontiers in vacuuming—will only gather momentum with this new store. The shop will evidently offer “upscale after-hours parties where trendy ladies will eat, drink and learn how you can remove permanent marker from wood floors,” according to a shocked and appalled Andrea Peyser in the New York Post. Yesterday, in fact, David Oreck himself gave a lecture about his vacuum cleaner and its role in the “cleaner, healthier home.” While we’re all for cleaner living, let’s hope this trend is halted before we all end up walking around with Kleenex boxes on our feet, Howard Hughes-style.

—Posted by Mae Anderson