MARCH 2–15, 2020 | THE CUT 57sameness feels reassuring, feels good. In the 2019 book How to
Start a Revolution, Lauren Duca complains on behalf of a mil-
lennial cohort about politicians’ “refusing to cater to us as politi-
cal customers.” Market to me better, she demands: “Assembling
the stock crap that my generation is drawn to doesn’t require a
marketing genius. You get a potted plant, a neon sign, and a nice
bold sans-serif font, and boom, you’ve got a subway ad for the
latest disruptive millennial brand.” She seems to be saying that
she does indeed want politicians to assemble that stock crap, but
still, it’s hard to miss the note of contempt.
Today, the Elizabeth Warren campaign sells pastel sans-serif
posters, displayed in its online store alongside a fiddle-leaf fig.
The Pete Buttigieg campaign provides supporters an extensive
online branding-and-design tool kit: Its “brand story” calls him
a millennial twice in three sentences, and its color palette
(“deeply rooted in Pete’s hometown”) includes mustard, muted
orange, and rosy beige. If anything, the Buttigieg campaign’s
strenuously millennial design efforts seem to have primarily
inspired millennial disdain.
The millennial aesthetic can be enlisted to try to sell any-
thing, as has quickly become apparent. In the midst of an orga-
nizing drive at NBC last year, an anti-union Instagram account
briefly appeared. The account shared slogans like dues are for
the gym on pastel backgrounds; women’s health care would be
“subject to negotiation,” warned one post, with cartoon hands
in a range of skin tones and nail-polish shades making peace
signs along the border. “Millennial Pinkerton,” commented art-
ist and writer Molly Crabapple.
The legitimating power of clean lines is one thing when
applied to meal kits and face wash, another applied to politics
and people. “This is a thing keeping me up at night, actually,” says
Helfand. “To what degree does design confer false authority on
anything it touches?”
IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE ourselves growing old—to imagine the
time, nearly upon us already, when “millennial” no longer means
“young.” Likewise, it is hard to
imagine how the millennial
aesthetic will age. Its blank,
clean surfaces aspire to a
world without clutter or
scuffs, unmarked by the pas-
sage of time. In this aspira-
tion, the millennial aesthetic
is somewhat democratic—
anything can be new, for a
while. It is a style that looks, in
its ideal state, like a purchase.
When I try to imagine the
millennial aesthetic someday
becoming the past, I think of
the work of artist Sara
Cwynar. Trained as a graphic designer, now working in still pho-
tography and film, Cwynar (a millennial) is interested in the way
advertising and advertised objects decay. Her 2017 filmRose Gold
places the rose-gold iPhone, produced between 2015 and 2017,
alongside older artifacts of taste.
“I keep buying these plastics called melamine,” says the voice-
over, panning over a row of pastel cups. Melamine is another
past that once looked like the future; Russel Wright, the indus-
trial designer whose ceramic dinnerware brought modernism
to millions of postwar homes, sold melamine dishes, too. Their
ovoid plastic forms, in colors like salmon and pale blue, today
look both dated and contemporary.
In Rose Gold, Cwynar piles her melamine in yard-sale heaps
alongside millennial-pink Acne shopping bags. “This product was
marketed as indestructible,” the voice-over says, as pink cups crash
to the ground and shatter. Her mid-century plastic and its faded
guarantees are evidence of an era like ours, when bright surfaces
and new conveniences presented an appealing alternative to exis-
tential dread. Looking back, their inadequacy is obvious. But pink
hits a pleasure center, a promise sounds good, and in the moment
perhaps you don’t resist. “I love the rose-gold iPhone,” Cwynar
admits. Rose Gold ends, and the film reverses; shattered pink
melamine cups reassemble themselves and float.
What the millennial aesthetic sells, it sells through the promise
of novelty. This is true even when the product on offer is not appre-
ciably novel: cat food, Dutch ovens, and generic drugs are repack-
aged, redesigned, as if millennial buyers required a version all their
own. Jessica Walsh, a graphic designer and founder of the creative
agency &Walsh, dates the style to the last five years and sees its
expiration date approaching already. “Everyone wants to look like
the Casper, Warby Parker, or Aways of the world,” she explains,
which has made branding increasingly interchangeable. “People
are tired of the sameness and already craving something new.”
When the time comes—when smooth pastels start to feel a little
tacky, when brown starts looking good again—what will be saved?
As in any era, most of our belongings will be lost, but fewer than
ever seem worth trying to preserve. In her article “Why Does This
One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?,” author Anna Hezel
asks employees in a West Elm store how long that “Peggy” couch
was, ideally, supposed to last. One to three years, they inform her.
Last year, the interior-design start-up Homepolish collapsed;
last month, Casper made its disappointing IPO; last week, Out-
door Voices CEO Tyler Haney stepped down amid reports that her
company, based on tastefully colored leggings, was losing cash.
Design created an astonishing amount of value in the last ten
years, and increasingly that value looks ephemeral. I remembervisiting WeWork corporate offices in early 2016 and telling a
friend that the space already felt period—larded and spackled
with efforts to look designed ca. 2016, which now sounds like a
very long time ago. Of course, I can also look around my apart-
ment and see what threatens to wilt: boob poster, pink blanket,
plants. We have lived through a moment in which design came
to seem like something besides what it was, like a business
model or a virtue or a consolation prize. The sense of safety
promised in its soft, clean forms begins to look less optimistic
than naïve. ■“There’s NO WEIRDNESS.There’s NOTHING that CLASHES.It’s very CONTROLLED.”