56 THE CUT | MARCH 2–15, 2020
of irony or critique. It’s pink that’s sweet even though it knows
better. And something of the tension captured in that color—a
placid surface and a knowing attitude—seems to mark the millen-
nial aesthetic at large. It is a constantly self-conscious sensibility,
that of someone who is always performing, always watching them-
selves be watched: Maybe that was once primarily the condition
of women, but it seems increasingly to apply to us all.
If the millennial aesthetic crystallizes most clearly in realms
associated with femininity (style, beauty, wellness, domestic-
ity), it has diffused outward to goods and businesses of all
sorts. The design is soft in its colors and in its lines, curved and
unthreatening—not unlike the iPhone, as Jessica Helfand, the co-
founder and creative director of Design Observer, points out. It is
beveled, as are all the little logos for apps that inhabit it, framed by
smoothly rounded edges. “The bevel by its very nature suggests
‘friendlier’—like, easier, softer,” Helfand says. “True modernism,
true minimalism, would be the square.” Minimalism, however,
demands severity, and the millennial aesthetic has none.
To Needleman’s eye, the effect is anomalous, ahistorical. “It feels
like its own little bubble,” she says. It’s possible to pick out vague
references here and there—the cleanness of mid-century modern,
the selfie-optimized pink glow of an Ultrafragola mirror. Needle-
man points to the curvy furniture of designers like Vladimir Kagan
or Pierre Paulin as precursors. “But none of this has the design
rigor that those things had,” she says. “Everything now just seems
saccharine.” Styles that might once have been provocative or chal-
lenging become palatable and easily understood. They conjure, if
anything, some bygone idea of the future—somehow looking nei-
ther forward nor back.
ONE OF THE FIRST SOFT, PINK HARBINGERS of the millennial
aesthetic appeared in 2004, created by Tracy Jenkins, then a
graphic-design M.F.A. student at Yale. It was a poster printed in
red ink on cheap, pale-pink paper: ice-cream-scoop clouds and
above them, in fat block letters, the words (overheard from a
student) for like ever.
Jenkins’s professor—steeped in the elaborately designed post-
modernism of the ’80s and ’90s—hated it. But for Jenkins, pop
simplicity was the point. “I think big and dumb is valid,” she says
now. After graduation, a classmate encouraged her to print up
more copies. Jenkins and her husband gave them away to clients
at their type foundry; sometimes they’d sell one on its own for
$10. Then one of those posters wound up framed in a home on
the cover of Domino. This was 2006, and for like ever went
viral, insofar as going viral was possible at the time. By 2018,
Apartment Therapy included the poster alongside succulents
and sheepskin as a square in “Millennial Apartment Bingo.”
Today, Urban Outfitters sells a pink-and-red poster that says
cool to be kind and another that says bae bae bae. A voice
of chatty positivity, conveyed via fun typography, pervades
walls, ads, and social media. The text is casual, friendly, and
impersonal—the verbal equivalent of a beveled edge. And per-
haps all those words are just the logical end point of a broader
tendency to prize legibility. Instagrammable is a term that does
not mean “beautiful” or even quite “photogenic”; it means
something more like “readable.” The viewer could scroll past an
image and still grasp its meaning, e.g., “I saw fireworks,” “I am
on vacation,” or “I have friends.” On a basic level, the visual
experience of a phone favors images and objects that are as
legible as possible as quickly as possible: The widely acknowl-
edged clichés of millennial branding—clean typefaces, white
space—are less a matter of taste than a concession to this fact.
Before Samuel began working on interiors, her training was
in graphic design, which has proved to be an advantage: “I think
about it in all the different points of view—how it will look flat
in a photo as well as how it moves as a space.” The summary of
services she provides clients in her contract promises “Insta-
gram-ready interiors.” The millennial aesthetic flows freely
between physical space and flat image, between brands and the
people who buy.EMILY HEYWARD REMEMBERS when she sensed that everyone
was becoming more aware of design. Heyward is the co- founder
and chief brand officer at Red Antler, the Brooklyn-based brand-
ing firm behind companies like Allbirds, Burrow, and Prose. A
couple of years ago, friends started asking her: Why do so many
brands use sans serif? Heyward thought about fonts all the time,
but she was unaccustomed to interest from nonwork friends, let
alone familiarity with the jargon.
Heyward and her company often take on clients that are still
embryonic; they started working with the mattress company
Casper when Casper didn’t have its mattress yet. The approach
is deliberate; it means design and branding become a part of
the company early on, so Red Antler helps shape the way a
company does business, not just its logo and name. Red Antler’s
clients sell steak, scented candles, antacid, premium bus travel,
engagement rings, and insurance, among many, many other
things. Visiting recently, passing through the industrial-design
team’s area, I saw a stack of orange bins. These were for the
disaster-preparedness start-up Judy, my guide explained. Once
stocked, the bins will retail for $250 and contain 72 hours’
worth of survival supplies—including a first-aid kit, meal bars,
and water—to sustain a family of four. It had not previously
occurred to me that the millennial aesthetic might come for the
apocalypse, but I was not entirely surprised.
It was roughly 20 years ago that companies like Target and
JetBlue found success with a new kind of marketing strategy.
They weren’t selling luxury, but they weren’t hawking bargains
either; instead, they were using design as a way to address
potential customers as discerning and savvy. The new crop of
direct-to-consumer brands (among them Red Antler’s clients)
pick up where companies like these left off, while relying on
design in a more essential way. For an unknown start-up cutting
out the middleman on sneakers or shampoo, design performs
the work of salespeople and stores: It’s the hook, but also the
promise of legitimacy. And as companies devise offerings that
are less about innovation than about making familiar experi-
ences more pleasant, design looms ever larger.
Heyward is emphatic that no business can succeed on the
strength of good design alone. Not long ago, for example, her wife
bought a nightgown from a brand on Instagram that “looked
really cool.” But the shipping was slow, the customer service unre-
sponsive, the packaging (when the nightgown finally arrived)
poor. So: “She’s not going to buy another thing from them ever
again.” The Red Antler philosophy is that real success requires
that a brand offer the customer something “magic.” Without that,
Heyward says, “someone else is gonna pick a similar font, and
there’s going to be no way to tell the two apart.”
As the millennial aesthetic grows omnipresent, as its consum-
ers grow more design-fluent, our response grows more complex.
We resent its absence (Why is this restaurant website so crappy?)
but also resent its allure; we resent that knowing the term sans
serif does not make you immune to sans serif ’s appeal. The
desire for individuality rebels against its sameness, even as the