Style is Not a Four Letter Word

There has been a long and continuing feud in design between style and content, form and function, and even pleasure and utility, to which Charles Eames answered,“Who would say that pleasure is not useful?”¹ Maybe we should call a truce, since it doesn’t seem like anyone is winning. Animosity towards style is pretty much a given in the design rhetoric of the twentieth century. But where did this antagonistic relationship between design and style come from? And more importantly, what has it done for us?

At the end of the stylistic excess and confusion of the Victorian era, the architect Adolf Loos led the way to a simpler, progressive, and more profitable future. In 1908 he proclaimed, “I have discovered the following truth and presented it to the world: cultural evolution is synonymous with the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.”² In his polemical and now famous essay “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos established what would be the prevalent attitude towards ornament, pattern, decoration, and style in the twentieth century. He explained, “Shall every age have a style of its own and our age alone be denied one? By style they meant decoration. But I said, don’t weep! See, what makes our culture grand is its inability to produce a new form of decoration. We have overcome the ornament, we have won through the lack of ornamentation.” Far from being a period without style, or new ornament,the end of the nineteenth century was inundated with ornament and style. The Jugendstil, Vienna Secession, Wiener Werkstätte, Art Nouveau, and Arts and Crafts were all in various stages of development. Loos was frustrated because a consensus on style no longer seemed possible, and he believed that “those who measure everything by the past impede the cultural development of nations and of humanity itself.” Sounding like an early example of “compassionate conservatism,” he explains, “I suffer the ornament of the Kafir, that of the Persian, that of the Slovak farmer’s wife, the ornaments of my cobbler, because they all have no other means of expressing their full potential.” Loos’s condescending conceit became “received wisdom” in modernist design, in which “the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power.”

That Loos’s ideas continue to resonate today is unquestionable. But that an elitist, deceptive, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, money-grubbing rant would inspire such allegiance is troubling, to say the least. Once ornament was supposedly done away with, or at least “rehabilitated” into modernist dogma, one could have expected that it was only a matter of time before design itself would be recast as a crime against culture. And Hal Foster’s diatribe Design and Crime does exactly that. Loos condemned ornament for “damaging national economy and therefore its cultural development.” Conversely, Foster claims today’s design is “a primary agent that folds us back into the near-total system of contemporary consumerism.”³ Foster claims that Art Nouveau designers of the past “resisted the effects of industry” but “there is no such resistance in contemporary design: it delights in postindustrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of architecture and art to the manipulations of design.” And that “today you don’t have to be filthy rich to be projected not only as designer but as designed—whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery), or your lagging personality (designer drugs), your historical memory (designer museums) or your DNA future (designer children). Might this ‘designed subject’ be the unintended offspring of the ‘constructed subject’ so vaunted in postmodern culture? One thing seems clear: just when you thought the consumerist loop could get no tighter in its narcissistic logic, it did: design abets a nearperfect circuit of production and consumption, without much ‘running room’ for anything else.”

Foster acknowledges that Loos’s “anti-decorative dictate is a modernist mantra if ever there was one, and it is for the puritanical propriety inscribed in such words that postmodernists have condemned modernists like Loos in turn. But maybe times have changed again; maybe we are in a moment when distinctions between practices might be reclaimed or remade—without the ideological baggage of purity and propriety attached.” Now that the early modernist dream of “art into life”⁴ has succeeded, Foster (like Loos before him) would like to take it back out, and into the protective custody of the art world. Maybe instead of going back to the bad old days of art with a capital A, Foster should realize that we are entering an era of design with a capital D. Is it actually possible that people are looking at the museum’s architecture, and browsing its gift shop instead of the galleries, because the design is not only more fun, but more meaningful to them? Or are they just stupefied by the spectacle of commodification? In “The Age of Aesthetics,” isn’t it design and style that will matter most? And does that mean that ideas and meaning are out? Not according to Virginia Postrel, who says in her book The Substance of Style that you can be “smart and pretty.”⁵

Postrel is an economics columnist for The New York Times, and a past editor of Reason magazine. She has spoken at a number of design venues, including TED 2004. Far from being an “old school” economic critic like Thorstein Veblen, she puts a positive spin on “conspicuous consumption,”⁶ and admits, “In a sense my book is a defense of the consumer society.”⁷ Thus, conservatives tend to be predisposed to listen to her, and liberals of the Adbusters type do not. Her reception by designers has been lukewarm at best. It is ironic that designers were more supportive of Naomi Klein’s No Logo8 book, in which the best advice she could muster for them was that they should quit. Postrel has a much better grasp of design in context, and is an advocate for design, if not designers. And as an economist and libertarian, she starts from the assumption that free markets and free choice are, as Martha Stewart would say, “good things.” Postrel explains, “Globalization has brought a wide assortment of formerly exotic-seeming styles and products into the mainstream. The challenge is to learn to accept that aesthetic pleasure is an autonomous good, not the highest or the best but one of many plural, sometimes conflicting, and frequently unconnected sources of value.”

Postrel breaks up the old bipolar debates between style and substance, or as designers say it, form and function, by recognizing that pleasure is an equally important part of the equation. Artists have been talking about the value of pleasure since day one, but to have an economist say that pleasure is an important value in design—well, it’s a lot more than most designers have been willing to say. She takes it even further by warning us against “falling into the puritanical mind-set that denies the value of aesthetic pleasure and seeks always to link it with evil.” She believes designers should be asking themselves “How can I provide pleasure and meaning?” Pleasure is not exactly a hot topic among designers. I don’t think today’s information architects and media directors are ready to admit to such sybaritic impulses. Problem solving, communicating, informing, identifying, or branding: yes. Pleasure? No. But as Postrel points out, “Everyone else is also solving problems and contributing to strategy. The question is what problems can you uniquely solve? Where’s your value-added? If you try to sell yourselves as another sort of engineer, the engineers will just scoff at you— and rightly so.”⁹ It is as if she pointed out that not only does the design “emperor have no clothes,” but he is pleasuring himself as well.

In his book on postmodernism in graphic design, Rick Poynor explains that “No More Rules’s central argument is that one of the most significant developments in graphic design, during the last two decades, has been designers’ overt challenges to the conventions or rules that were once widely regarded as constituting good practice.”¹⁰ By using the cliché of “rule breaking,” Poynor effectively restricts postmodernism in design to its reactionary emergence and validates the popular misconception that postmodernism ended once its initial shock was absorbed. This reflects the current feeling in design that since there are no more rules, we have arrived at a post-postmodern, post-taste, poststyle, and postdesign free-for-all. In a somewhat nostalgic-sounding tone of resignation, Poynor says, “If fundamental systemic change feels unlikely, then this tends to suggest that the postmodern condition will be our reality for the foreseeable future, imposing operational constraints or ‘rules’ of its own, whether we like it or not.” But the ideas that designers started exploring in the eighties and nineties, like deconstruction, appropriation, technology, authorship, and opposition, which Poynor skillfully outlines in his book, seem more like an attempt to establish new rules, practices, and disciplinarity in place of the “received wisdom” of modernism. Not just rule breaking, or a discarding of rules, but an exploration, expansion, and redefinition of the boundaries of design as a dynamic self-organizing system of possibilities, instead of a top-down hierarchy of rules. It was a project that was “stampeded” by the dotcom “gold rush” and “branding round-up” that seem to have changed the design profession’s priorities.

Poynor concludes No More Rules by asking, “Given some of the problems of postmodern visual communication discussed in the book, what forms in terms of style might an oppositional graphic design assume at this point?” Setting aside the question of why style has to be “oppositional,” my answer is a style that continues to develop and deploy the critical, pluralistic, decentered, postmodern strategies outlined in his book. A style that celebrates the aesthetic pleasure of the unique, idiosyncratic individual through ornamentation, pattern, and decoration, as well as celebrating community and social responsibility through historical continuity. A style that resists easy codification and assimilation with strategic and formal complexity. Okay? But talk is cheap. Designers want to be shown, not told. And that is exactly the problem. Until designers get past their “monkey see, monkey do” approach to designing, they will just be going around in the same old circles, doing the same old “new” work. That is why designers need to think about some different (if not new) ideas about style that come from “outside” the usual discourse. Like Virginia Postrel, who says, “We can enjoy the age of look and feel, using surface to add pleasure and meaning to the substance of our lives.” And James Trilling, who says that designers should use “the transformative power of ornament” to “affirm a pervasive, age-old dissatisfaction with structural necessity as the sole determinant of artistic form. The primary function of ornament—and it is a function, make no mistake—is to remedy this dissatisfaction by introducing free choice and variation into even those parts of a work that appear most strictly shaped by structural or functional needs.” It’s time to “decriminalize” ornament because “communication need not be symbolic, any more than function need be mechanical. Before one even selects a pattern or motif, the decision to use ornament conveys a wealth of meaning, no less real or powerful for being inchoate.”¹¹ The problem is, most designers’ ideas about style and ornament have not advanced much since the beginning of the last century.

Modernism made the issue of style much easier for designers to deal with, since it gave them a style that they could pretend was not a style. But technology, multiculturalism, globalism, postmodernism, and the “democratization of taste” are demanding a more sophisticated response. Digital technology has made it clear that graphic design is not just about the technical production of objects and information. Now almost anyone with the right software can produce a newsletter, book, Web site, font, or animation. I would argue that a lot of what designers consider specialized knowledge is increasingly becoming part of basic literacy (and software). For example, I just had one of my typography essays reprinted in a very interesting anthology called Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook.¹² This book is not intended for designers but for writing or composition students who have “begun to engage the visual more seriously as part of the pedagogy.” And why wouldn’t they? In the information age won’t everyone have at least a basic literacy in design? But will everyone have good taste, talent, skill, and a sense of style?

Instead of marginalizing their relationship to style, designers should be capitalizing on their role in developing it. Although they are unlikely to admit it, designers are implicit stylists and tastemakers. If they don’t articulate this role explicitly, they won’t have much to offer in the age of aesthetics. Culture is expressed and understood through style, which is mostly created and evaluated by designers. In terms of aesthetics, art pretty much had the run of the twentieth century. Now in the twenty-first century, it’s design’s turn. We don’t need a new style or a clearly defined “period style.” Nor do we have to proclaim there are “no more rules” or that we should all go off on our own little “autonomous” way. There is no shortage of marginalized artistic geniuses in the world. But if there are going to be design experts in the twenty-first century, what will they be experts in? Graphic designers claim that their expertise is in problem solving, communicating, organizing information, and branding. So to whom should people go for style and taste? Isn’t style too important to be left in the hands of amateurs?