as the most elegant, economical, and ethical solution to the prob-
lem of sofas or soft-cup bras. Simplicity of design encourages an
impression that all errors and artifice have fallen away. The mil-
lennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have
only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at
the objectively correct way for things to look.
If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford
any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing,
risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it
clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then
released into an economy where achievement held no guaran-
tees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a
little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes
basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of
special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed,
inhabited temporarily or virtually. At the very least, you can
stay a few hours in a photogenic co-working venue. At the very
least, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build your
own presentable online home.WHEN SARAH SHERMAN SAMUEL DECORATEDher first pink
room, she assumed she was doing something sort of daring. But
no: Pink was a crowd-pleaser, Samuel soon learned. Or, it was
crowd-pleasing when she tempered it with the warmth of wood,
something to cut the sugar high. Samuel is an interior designer
employed by clients like Mandy Moore, born 1984. (Moore’s
house, with its pale terrazzo floors and upholstery in pink and
ocher, was on the cover ofArchitectural Digestin 2018.) Pink
became a crucial ingredient in the serene millennial dreamscapes
with which Samuel has made her n
No account of the millennial a could fail to address
pink: For the better part of a deca lennial pink bedeviled
anyone a color could bedevil. When Facebook rolled out a corpo-
rate rebrand last fall, the lead image in the press release showedthe new logo—breezily spaced sans serif—in a muted shade
somewhere on the ham-to-salmon spectrum. Samuel keeps
wondering when people will get sick of the color, but they don’t;
almost every client asks for pink. She thinks this is because it’s
soothing. They want houses that remind them of vacations, sug-
gest Mediterranean idylls.
“It kind of feels like a binky,” Deborah Needleman, the former
editor ofT,WSJ., andDomino, says of millennial interiors. (Boob-
print pillows and bath mats are perhaps the most literal expres-
sion of a general tendency toward the comforts of babyhood.)
Needleman sees not a trip to Greece but something more like
childproofing. “It’s like it has no edge or sense of humor or sense
of mystery,” she says. “There’s no weirdness. There’s nothing that
clashes. It is very controlled.”
Pink is not the only soft color in the millennial palette. There’s
green, often in the form of plant life—it has a wholesome appeal
next to the pink—and then an expanding array of colors simul-
taneously saturated and chalky, muted even when not actually
pastel: seafoam, terra-cotta, lavender, and (especially) ocher. In
explaining the appetite for colors that soothe, we might gesture
vaguely in the direction of Now More Than Ever, anxiety, the
news. A more direct explanation would probably be that other
stalwart of millennial pop sociology: the phone, now the basic
tool with which we view, record, and disseminate images of the
world. All that time spent staring into a glowing screen makes
the prospect of something gentle—something literally easier on
the eye—enticing. The millennial palette is the opposite of glare;
onscreen or off, it’s color softly veiled.
Pink is a color with baggage, of course. It arrives trailing associa-
tions of repressive femininity from previous eras of pastels: the
1950s, most pointedly, but also a childhood of 1980s and ’90s
Barbie plastic. Millennial pink mutes those bright bubblegum col-
ors, chews them up a little, leaves them faded. In doing so, it sug-
gests a slight, winking self-awareness, albeit one that stops shortBeveled EdgesText EverywhereCurated Messes
Sans SerifMARCH 2–15, 2020 | THE CUT 55Gratuitous Fruits Generic Houseplants