The Substance of Style

How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness

Virginia Postrel

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061852862
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comportement du consommateur

Whether it's sleek leather pants, a shiny new Apple computer, or a designer toaster, we make important decisions as consumers every day based on our sensory experience. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work. The twenty-first century has become the age of aesthetics, and whether we realize it or not, this influence has taken over the marketplace, and much more.

In this penetrating, keenly observed book, Virginia Postrel makes the argument that appearance counts, that aesthetic value is real. Drawing from fields as diverse as fashion, real estate, politics, design, and economics, Postrel deftly chronicles our culture's aesthetic imperative and argues persuasively that it is a vital component of a healthy, forward-looking society.

Intelligent, incisive, and thought-provoking, The Substance of Style is a groundbreaking portrait of the democratization of taste and a brilliant examination of the way we live now.

One

THE AESTHETIC IMPERATIVE

People don’t generally go to Selkirk, New York, to look for the future. Manhattan, yes. L.A., San Francisco, even Seattle. But not Selkirk.

There are a million people in a fifteen-mile radius, my host tells me, but you wouldn’t know it as we drive past snow-covered fields. The place looks empty. We’re a few miles outside Albany, in what might as well be rural New England. Western Massachusetts is less than half an hour away, Vermont not much farther.

The area is much more influential than the picturesque countryside suggests. Selkirk is smack in the middle of General Electric territory, snuggled between the research labs and power systems operations in Schenectady and the GE Plastics headquarters in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That means Selkirk is more than just another out-of-the-way place, because GE is more than just another big corporation. GE has been, year after year, the most admired company in the business world, an enterprise known for its technological prowess, consistent growth, and hardheaded management.

We turn up a narrow drive and park in front of a small building, the sort of corrugated prefab structure that might house a small construction company or insurance office. This modest site is the American center of a multimillion-dollar bet on the future. GE Plastics believes we’re entering an era in which the look and feel of products will determine their success. Sensory, even subliminal, effects will be essential competitive tools. GE wants to make those tools, and to help customers use them more effectively.

“Aesthetics, or styling, has become an accepted unique selling point—on a global basis,” explains the head of the division’s global aesthetics program. Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out. Quality and price may be absolutes, but tastes still vary, and not every manufacturer has already learned how to make products that appeal to the senses.

The modest building in Selkirk houses a design center that customers can visit to brainstorm and develop new products, inspired by the materials available to make them. Instead of just telling engineers and purchasing managers how cheaply GE can sell them raw materials, plastics managers now listen to industrial designers and marketing people “talk about their dreams.”

We enter through humdrum gray offices, walk through the plant floor where plastic samples are mixed with pigments and extruded, and open a bright blue door. On the other side lies an entirely different environment, designed for creativity and comfort rather than low-cost function. This end of the building proclaims the importance of aesthetics for places as well as plastics. Gone are the utilitarian grays of cubicles and indoor-outdoor carpet, replaced by contrasting blue and white walls, light wood floors, shelves of design books, and comfortable couches for conversation. Customers’ hit products are displayed in museum-lit alcoves: Iomega’s Zip drive in translucent dark blue plastic, the Handspring Visor in a paler shade.

The center’s most striking room isn’t “decorated” at all. It’s lined with row upon row of GE Plastics’ own products—about four thousand sample chips, each a little smaller than a computer diskette, in a rainbow of colors and an impressive range of apparent textures. Since 1995, the company has introduced twenty new visual effects. Its heavy-duty engineering thermoplastics can now emulate metal, stone, marble, or mother-of-pearl; they can diffuse light or change colors depending on which way you look; they can be embedded with tiny, sparkling glass fragments. The special-effects plastics command prices from 15 percent to more than 100 percent higher than ordinary Lexan or Cycolac. With that incentive, company researchers are busy coming up with new effects, having accelerated introductions in 2001 and 2002. “The sky’s the limit,” says a spokesman.

The Selkirk plant will mix up a batch of any color you can imagine, and the company prides itself on turning barely articulated desires into hard plastic: “You know how the sky looks just after a storm? When it’s late afternoon? But right at the horizon, not above it? When the sun has just come out? That color.” That’s from a GE Plastics ad. In the real world, designers come to Selkirk to play around with color, paying the company thousands of dollars for the privilege. That’s how the trim on Kyocera’s mobile phone went from bright silver to gunmetal gray. The project’s lead engineer told technicians he wanted something more masculine. “I figured that they would look at me as if I were nuts. But they didn’t,” he says. “They came back a few minutes later with exactly what we wanted.” Once you’ve got the perfect color, the Selkirk center will (for a fee) preserve a pristine sample in its two-thousand-square-foot freezer. More than a million color-sample chips are filed in the freezer’s movable stacks, protected from the distorting effects of heat and light.

At the end of my visit, GE managers talk a bit about their own aesthetic dreams. Already, researchers have figured out how to make plastics feel heavy, for times when heft conveys a tacit sense of quality. Coming soon are joint ventures that will let customers put GE effects into materials the company doesn’t make. Squishy “soft-touch” plastics won’t have to look like rubber. Cushy grips will be translucent and sparkle, to coordinate with diamond-effect GE plastics. And somewhere in the aesthetic future are plastics that smell. “I love the smell of suntan lotion,” says a manager, laughing at his own enthusiasm, “but that’s just me.” He imagines sitting in his office in snowy New England with a computer that exudes the faint scent of summer at the beach.

GE is betting real money on such imaginative leaps—on a future that will sparkle like diamonds and smell like summer, that will offer every color that delights the eye and every texture that pleases the touch, on a future of sensory riches. GE believes in an aesthetic age.

This is not a hip San Francisco style shop. These executives don’t get their photos in fashion magazines or go to celebrity-filled parties. They don’t dress in black, pierce their eyebrows, or wear Euro-style narrow eyeglasses. This is General Electric. Jack Welch’s company. Thomas Edison’s company. An enterprise dedicated to science, engineering, and ruthless financial expectations. A tough company, macho even. GE doesn’t invest in ideas just because they sound cool. When a trend comes to Selkirk, it’s no passing fancy.

The twenty-first century isn’t what the old movies imagined. We citizens of the future don’t wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get our food in pills. To the contrary, we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world. We want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, several different cuisines, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative façades on our supermarkets, auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell.

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

“We are by nature—by deep, biological nature—visual, tactile creatures,” says David Brown, the former president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a longtime observer of the design world. That is a quintessential turn-of-our-century statement, a simultaneous affirmation of biological humanity and aesthetic power. Our sensory side is as valid a part of our nature as the capacity to speak or reason, and it is essential to both. Artifacts do not need some other justification for pleasing our visual, tactile, emotional natures. Design, says Brown, is moving from the abstract and ideological—“this is good design”—to the personal and emotional—“I like that.” In this new age of aesthetics, we are acknowledging, accepting, and even celebrating what a design-museum curator calls our “quirky underside.”

This trend doesn’t mean that a particular style has triumphed or that we’re necessarily living in a period of unprecedented creativity. It doesn’t mean everyone or everything is now beautiful, or that people agree on some absolute standard of taste. The issue is not what style is used but rather that style is used, consciously and conscientiously, even in areas where function used to stand alone. Aesthetics is more pervasive than it used to be—not restricted to a social, economic, or artistic elite, limited to only a few settings or industries, or designed to communicate only power, influence, or wealth. Sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensifying.

Of course, saying that aesthetics is pervasive does not imply that look and feel trump everything else. Other values have not gone away. We may want mobile phones to sparkle, but first we expect them to work. We expect shops to look good, but we also want service and selection. We still care about cost, comfort, and convenience. But on the margin, aesthetics matters more and more. When we decide how next to spend our time, money, or creative effort, aesthetics is increasingly likely to top our priorities.

In this context, “aesthetics” obviously does not refer to the philosophy of art. Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses. It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look and feel of people, places, and things. Hence, aesthetics differs from entertainment that requires cognitive engagement with narrative, word play, or complex, intellectual allusion. While the sound of poetry is arguably aesthetic, the meaning is not. Spectacular special effects and beautiful movie stars enhance box-office success in foreign markets because they offer universal aesthetic pleasure; clever dialogue, which is cognitive and culture-bound, doesn’t travel as well. Aesthetics may complement storytelling, but it is not itself narrative.

Aesthetics shows rather than tells, delights rather than instructs. The effects are immediate, perceptual, and emotional. They are not cognitive, although we may analyze them after the fact. As a midcentury industrial designer said of his field, aesthetics is “fundamentally the art of using line, form, tone, color, and texture to arouse an emotional reaction in the beholder.”

Whatever information aesthetics conveys is prearticulate—the connotation of the color and shapes of letters, not the meanings of the words they form. Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea. Those associations may be universal, the way Disney’s big-eyed animals play on the innate human attraction to babies. Or they may change from person to person, place to place, moment to moment.

Although we often equate aesthetics with beauty, that definition is too limited. Depending on what reaction the creator wants, effective presentation may be strikingly ugly, disturbing, even horrifying. The title sequence to Seven—whose rough, backlit type, seemingly stuttering film, and unsettling sepia images established a new style for horror films—comes to mind. Or aesthetics may employ novelty, allusion, or humor, rather than beauty, to arouse a positive response. Philippe Starck’s fly swatter with a face on it doesn’t represent timeless beauty. It’s just whimsical fun.

Aesthetic effects begin with universal reactions, but these effects always operate in a personal and cultural context. We may like weather-beaten paint because it seems rustic, black leather because it makes us feel sexy, or fluffy pop music because it reminds us of our youth. Something novel may be interesting, or something familiar comforting, without regard to ideal beauty. The explosion of tropical colors that hit women’s fashion in 2000 was a relief from the black, gray, and beige of the late 1990s, while those neutrals looked calm and sophisticated after the riot of jewel tones that preceded them. Psychologists tell us that human beings perceive changes in sensory inputs—movement, new visual elements, louder or softer sounds, novel smells—more than sustained levels.

Because aesthetics operates at a prerational level, it can be disquieting. We have a love-hate relationship with the whole idea. As consumers, we enjoy sensory appeals but fear manipulation. As producers, we’d rather not work so hard to keep up with the aesthetic competition. As heirs to Plato and the Puritans, we suspect sensory impressions as deceptive, inherently false. Aesthetics is “the power of provocative surfaces,” says a critic. It “speaks to the eye’s mind, overshadowing matters of quality or substance.”

But the eye’s mind is identifying something genuinely valuable. Aesthetic pleasure itself has quality and substance. The look and feel of things tap deep human instincts. We are, as Brown says, “visual, tactile creatures.” We enjoy enhancing our sensory surroundings. That enjoyment is real. The trick is to appreciate aesthetic pleasure without confusing it with other values.

Theorist Ellen Dissanayake defines art as “making special,” a behavior designed to be “sensorily and emotionally gratifying and more than strictly necessary.” She argues that the instinct for “making special” is universal and innate, a part of human beings’ evolved biological nature. Hers may or may not be an adequate definition of art, but it does offer a useful insight into our aesthetic age. Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goals—solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available, increasing convenience, saving energy—we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. More people in more aspects of life are drawing pleasure and meaning from the way their persons, places, and things look and feel. Whenever we have the chance, we’re adding sensory, emotional appeal to ordinary function.

“Aesthetics, whether people admit it or not, is why you buy something,” says a shopper purchasing a high-style iMac, its flat screen pivoting like a desk lamp on a half-spherical base. He likes the computer’s features, but he particularly likes its looks. A computer doesn’t have to be a nondescript box. It can express its owner’s taste and personality.

“Deciding to buy an IBM instead of a Compaq simply because you prefer black to gray is absolutely fine as long as both machines meet your other significant criteria,” a writer advises computer shoppers on the female-oriented iVillage Web site. “Not that color can’t or shouldn’t be a significant criterion; in truth, the market is filled with enough solid, affordable machines that you finally have the kind of freedom of choice previously reserved only for the likes of footwear.” Computers all used to look pretty much the same. Now they, too, can be special.

A Salt Lake City grocery shopper praises her supermarket’s makeover. Gone are the gray stucco exterior, harsh fluorescent lighting, and tall, narrow aisles. In their place are warm red brick, spot and track lighting, and low-rise departments of related items. The “crowning glory” is the Starbucks in the front, which provides both a welcoming aroma and a distinctive look and feel. “The experience is a lot more calm, a lot more pleasant,” she says, “an extraordinary change, and a welcome one.” Grocery shopping is still a chore, but at least now the environment offers something special.

A political writer in Washington, D.C., a city noted for its studied ignorance of style, says he pays much more attention to his clothes than he did ten or fifteen years ago, and enjoys it a lot more. “One thing I try to do is not to wear the same combination of suit, shirt, and tie in a season,” he says. “It’s another way of saying every day is special.” Once seen as an unnecessary luxury, even a suspect indulgence, “making special” has become a personal, social, and business imperative.

How we make the world around us special varies widely, and one mark of this new age of aesthetics, as opposed to earlier eras notable for their design creativity, is the coexistence of many different styles. “Good Design is not about the perfect thing anymore, but about helping a lot of different people build their own personal identities,” says an influential industrial designer. Modern design was once a value-laden signal—a sign of ideology. Now it’s just a style, one of many possible forms of personal aesthetic expression. “Form follows emotion” has supplanted “form follows function.” Emotion tells you which form you find functional. A chair’s purpose is not to express a modernist ideal of “chairness” but to please its owner. “The role of design,” a venture capitalist tells a conference of graphic designers, “is to make life enjoyable.” The designers generally agree.

If modernist design ideology promised efficiency, rationality, and truth, today’s diverse aesthetics offers a different trifecta: freedom, beauty, and pleasure (the brand promise, incidentally, of the rapidly expanding Sephora cosmetics stores). We have replaced “one best way” with “my way, for today,” a more personal and far more fluid ideal. Individuals differ, and the same person doesn’t always want the same look and feel. Contrary to some assertions, we have not gone from a world in which everything must be smooth to one in which everything must be rough, from an age of only straight edges to an age of only curves, or from industrialism to primitivism. All these styles coexist, sharing equal social status.

Nor are we seeing the triumph of “beauty,” defined as a universal standard, although some observers identify the trend that way. They argue that the public is now rejecting both the canons of modernist design and the idea that tastes are personal and subjective. “Beauty is now proclaimed as being at the heart of a universal human nature—even at the core of the order of the universe, and the essence of life itself,” reports The Washington Post, declaring, “Beauty is back.”

It’s true that artists and critics are more willing to talk about beauty than they were a half century ago, and that psychologists have begun to document some aesthetic universals, such as a preference for symmetry in faces. But it’s absolutely not true that we’ve reached some sort of consensus on the one best way to aesthetic pleasure. Quite the contrary. Our aesthetic age is characterized by more variety, not less. Beauty begins with universals, but its manifestations are heterogeneous, subjective, and constantly changing.

Aesthetics offers pleasure, and it signals meaning. It allows personal expression and social communication. It does not provide consensus, coherence, or truth. Indeed, in many cases the rising importance of aesthetics sparks conflicts, since one man’s dream house is another’s eyesore; one neighbor’s naturally beautiful prairie garden is another’s patch of weeds. An employer’s idea of the dress and hairstyles needed to create the right atmosphere for customers may violate employees’ sense of personal identity or practical function. Today’s aesthetic imperative represents not the return of a single standard of beauty, but the increased claim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher