The NYT ran a couple of stories about what I thought were some weird trends lately. Here are gift links to each. Perhaps you don’t think this shit is as weird as I do.
Story about people, mostly apparently young women, wearing their shorts/pants/trousers unbuttoned.
My impression is that social media is responsible for all of this weirdness.
I saw a young woman in Boston with her pant button and fly open. I didn’t realize it was a trend until I saw that article. Very strange.
New low rise style for women. Two kitchens have been common in Italian-America families for a long time. The butter board is a new one on me, sounds like a good idea in the right circumstances.
I think article explained why the back kitchen is different from the two kitchens in Italian-American families you mentioned. (The spare kitchen mentioned below seems to be what you’re thinking of.)
The ultrarich have long had their “Downton Abbey”-style chef kitchens, fully equipped industrial spaces, out of sight and the domain of caterers and personal cooks. But the back kitchen is not meant to replace the main kitchen. Nor is it the spare kitchen sometimes found in the basements of modest homes, used to roast Thanksgiving turkeys, make Sunday gravy or prepare Passover meals. It is instead an extension of the main kitchen, cropping up in new homes that cost from around $1 million to $5 million to build and in kitchen renovations with five- to six-figure budgets, according to builders and designers.
So it looks like they’re just extending their kitchens when they have the space and the money. Maybe a trailing sign of the pandemic and people concentrating more on home activities like cooking, even though for the rich people who can afford it this will be mostly used and cleaned by the help. But the motivations stated are the same, they want a kitchen that’s always clean to hang around and maybe eat in. The traditional second kitchen isn’t used just for roasting turkeys, it’s used for all possible cooking and meals so the main kitchen stays sparkling clean when you have guests.
“Not buttoning your pants” sounds like a step up from “Wearing your pants so low the waist is below your ass cheeks,” which has been a style for at least twenty years now, so I think I’m okay with that one.
The butter board sounds reasonably tasty. Don’t see the problem with that at all.
The two kitchen thing makes me want to start eating the rich.
With butter, I assume?
I would expect a resurgence of suspenders to accompany the unbuttoned look. Are they unbuttoning regular old jeans, or jeans specifically tailored for the look?
All the news that’s fit to print, huh?
I thought it was “fits in print…”
That has not been my experience of the traditional Italian basement kitchen. In my experience, the basement kitchen is almost exclusively used when guests are present , as the only place you could fit forty or fifty people for dinner is the basement room that runs the full- length of the house.
What you are describing is something almost like what some of my in-laws (who are not Italian) used to do .But they didn’t just cook in the basement, they lived in the basement and the rest of the house was for show.
In order of the articles
Kids do something vaguely scandalous to make themselves look different / sexy / outrage their parents. See young adult trends every 10 years since the dawn of time. 
Some rich people have more money than sense, and like posting pictures online of their conspicuous wealth to support their sense of entitlement. They probably don’t want their fancy kitchen cluttered up with the easy to make meals they actually cook when I can be bothered. See also pretentious wanks.
Butter board. I would do it if I was in the mood for an attractive way to serve a good butter (Kerrygold or better) and a nice crusty bread, but sounds like a lot of work, and mostly for the folks who instagram every meal. See also pretentious foodie wanks (but low grade). Not that I’m not ALSO sometimes a pretentious foodie wank.
So, nope, none of those strike me as either ‘news’ or ‘weird’. Just humans being human.
Some homes I’ve seen with a downstairs kitchen were like you say that would handle a lot of people like that. I was talking of keeping the upstairs kitchen looking brand new for when a few friends and family came by. Or even for a party where a meal isn’t served but the kitchen becomes a hangout for some of the guests. Not every second kitchen has the space to seat a lot of people, depends on the style of house.
Funny, my wife just showed me about “butter board.” From social media.
Too rich.
Those butter boards look freaking awesome* and something I would definitely bring to a dinner party. The “grazing tables” mentioned in the article also look amazing. But I’m a big fan of communal dining.
*the simpler ones. I don’t love the ones that look like a flower truck overturned nearby.
I think the unbuttoned jeans look is a welcome fashion addition. Until its invention, the only ways to modify jeans to appear creative were to wear cut/torn ones or wear them with one leg up and one leg down.
Reality catches up to science fiction again. A story in Galaxy (I think) in the early 1950s showed people doing all their home entertaining in the bathroom to keep the rest of the house clean. A simple extrapolation from living rooms where the couches all had plastic slipcovers to keep clean. This might have been a Long Island thing, but I know someone whose mother did this.
So I understand the kitchen deal.
Croutons and baco’s (TVP) over a light vinaigrette. Maybe a dusting of myzithra.
It used to be fairly common in Midwest farming communities to have a separate kitchen in an unheated shed or leanto attached to the back of the house, Often called a ‘summer kitchen’. As indicated, it was used during the summer to keep the heat from cooking out of the rest of the house (pre-air conditioning). Also used a lot when you were preparing preserved foods (canning or blanching), which involved a whole lot of boiling water and lots of heat.
But I doubt that’s happening in these McMansions the OP is talking about!