All that pink. All those plants. All that white. It’s so clean!
Everything’s fun, but not too much fun. And there, in the
round mirror above the couch: It’s you. You know where you
are. Or do you?
Search your brain. Swap out the monstera leaf for waxy red
anthurium, work hard & be nice to people for good vibes
only. Maybe the pillows were succulent-print; maybe the
ceramics had boobs. it was all a dream, says a neon sign in
schoolgirl cursive. You hadn’t noticed that before.
Maybe it is a dream, this room you do and don’t know,
assembled from cliché and half-recollected spare parts; a fever
dream—or, no, that’s too much. This room functions more like
a CBD seltzer, something you might buy in a salmon-pink can.
There’s not a lot of distinctive taste, but still, it’s hard to resist
when you’re on a permanent search for ways to feel better. The
ambience is palliative—simple but not severe. Even the palette
faintly suggests a medicine cabinet: powdery pharmaceutical
pastels, orange pill bottles, Band-Aid pink.
Now imagine that the white room isn’t a dream; it’s behind a
velvet rope in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Perhaps it’s a home, or a store, or maybe the two cases
blur—a store designed to look like a home, a home in which one
might shop. An interior filled with recognizable products.
“Peggy” sofa (ca. 2015): A mid-price offering from the chain
retailer West Elm, the model’s name evoked the heroine of pop-
ular television dramaMad Men,widely admired for its re-
creation of the previous century’s design. (Discontinued 2017,
following a viral essay titled “Why Does This One Couch From
West Elm Suck So Much?”)
The future museumgoer would naturally require some sort
of digital experience—some screen—to fill in the view from that
couch. So in lieu of an audio tour, mounted nearby there’s a
replica rose-gold iPhone 7. Swipe for a selection of other clean,
white, curvilinear interiors. There’s a place to do laundry that
looks like a spa, a place to get therapy that looks like The Wing,
a boutique newsstand that sells scented candles and has an app.
A dental clinic called Tend provides “curated, seasonal tooth-
paste” in what’s billed as “The Brushery”: a “swishy, swirly room
just for freshening up” (it has marbleized turquoise concrete
sinks). And then there are advertisements, making up a visual
world of their own. The products on view—cookware, supple-
ments, stretchy clothes—occupy blank pastel landscapes
manipulated by a diversity of hands. These aren’t ads that bel-
low or hector; they whisper, in restrained sans-serif fonts, or
chastely flirt, in letters with curves and bounce. They’re ads,
sure, but they’re so well designed.
In this era, you come to understand, design was the product.
Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design,
and all the design looked the same.
EVER SINCE MODERNISMbrought industry into design, tastes
have cycled between embracing and rejecting what it wrought. A
forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial
appeal will give way to one that’s backward-looking, handmade,
authenticity-obsessed—which will then give way to some new
variation on tech-forward mass style. (Furniture dealers joke that
“brown” goes in and out with every generation.) It’s a logic that
gets filtered through the reliable d r the world the way it
looked when we were young, and is has meant looking
back 30 or so years to the Memph ected pastel pop of the
’80s and ’90s. We might call the latest iteration of the cycle the
“millennial aesthetic”—not to say that it was embraced by all mil-
lennials, just that it came to prominence alongside them and will
one day be a recognizable artifact of their era.
Consider a previous youth-style shorthand: the hipster, pre-
eminent cultural punch line of the aughts. Bothhipsterandmil-
lennialwere terms that drifted away from strict definitions
(hipsters being subcultural, millennials being generational) to
become placeholders for “whatever fussy young people seem to
like.” It is strange, now, to remember a time when chunky-
framed glasses were understood as a hipster affectation; today
they just look like Warby Parker. The hipster aesthetic harked
back to a grimy past: Its spaces were wood-paneled, nostalgic;
perhaps they contained taxidermy. Behind lumberjack beards
and ’70s rec-room mustaches, there was a desire for something
preindustrial or at least pre-internet.
The hipster wasVice; the millennial is virtue, or at least virtuous
consumption. The hipster aesthetic was capable of rendering even
plain cotton T-shirts a little gross under the gaze of Dov Charney—
the grossness was, indeed, part of the appeal. The millennial aes-
thetic, meanwhile, could take something disgusting and attempt—
through sheer force of branding—to make it cute and fun. One
such product, called “Come&Gone” (sans-serif logo, pastel website,
friendlygifs), attracted notice on Twitter last year. Essentially a
sponge on a stick, it was marketed as an “after-sex cleanup” device
by a start-up “on a mission to ban the dripping, forever.”
Sometimes the hipster flirted with racism and misogyny,
couched as irony or provocation—a certain performance of exclu-
sivity (even just daring your audience not to get the joke or know
the band) was central to the hipster aesthetic’s appeal. But the
millennial aesthetic aims its appeal at everyone. Propagated by
brands and advertisements, it is a fundamentally commercial
aesthetic—and why alienate any potential customer? Millennial
marketing showcases models of many races and body types, and
the products on offer are obvious in their charms. Every sofa and
soft-cup bra presents itself not as evidence of distinctive taste but Soft ColorsMotivational
Ad CopyPhotogenic
Domesticity54 THE CUT | MARCH 2–15, 2020
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF EQUAL PARTS (COOKWARE); COURTESY OF EAT CANDID (FOOD); COURTESY OF SUPER RURAL (POSTER); COURTESY OF MARTA MORZY (PARADISO IBIZA HOTEL); COURTESY OF BLOOMSCAPE (PLANTS)