Sure, we like to laugh when the fashionistas announce every fall that black is the new black. But something manages to take the edge off our twee, self-congratulatory awareness, and in more revelatory fashion than any tech-sector upheaval. Maybe it’s that whiplash moment we come to, in Caban, and discover ourselves falling over one another, breathlessly panting out our need for moment-appropriate décor—the ideal table coordinate for our freshly endorsed A/X mock turtlenecks.
Time was, observations like this had some critical bite. Today, consumer abandon is one more oops-I-did-it-again badge in the hipster’s regalia: think Dave Eggers, punch drunk in the ball room at Ikea. Everyone is a slave to fashion, conventional wisdom seems to reassure us at every turn. So why fight it?
Why, indeed. As Matthew Mallon expertly noted last week, the fashionable whiff of design these days—design in everything and everwhere—has more than just a little potential for enslaving us all.
Then again, humans being what they are, many (or those who can afford to) seem to take delight in the sport of it all. The entire fame of some celebrities—say, indie it girl Chloe Sevigny—is firmly premised on precious little more than a widely hailed sense of fashion. All the fun of fashion, however, is quickly drained when we find ourselves staring witlessly into the business end of someone else’s infinitely more refined tastes. How does one wear a Radiohead concert t-shirt; what’s the appropriate setting on our disaffected ennui dial today? This posturing can get tedious, and quickly.
Looked at this way, the preeminence of design in pop culture has a terrible, enfeebling aspect. Design in this case is more than the whimsy of a Chrsyler PT Cruiser, as Mallon explains: it’s the set of assumptions, self-entitlement and savoir-faire that go along with possessing one. Mallon seems encouraged by the thought of a backlash against the present vogue of design in everyday life. (Here I humbly suggest the casting of Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn, reprising the part of Naom Klein.)
If only our interaction with the world of design were as simple as an opt-out clause. Design is not merely the new rock n’ roll, some tastemaker’s fashion accessory. Even withholding design from the larger continuum of visual communications—which includes its better known, more invasive cousin, mass media advertising—is deceptive to just how influential it has become.
For better or worse, design is a primary aspect of everyday life these days. And it’s much more widespread than the rise of snotty haute lifestyle magazines. From American politics to our cultural moment, and finally to some very local scuffles here in town, issues and elements of design have taken a starring role in current affairs.
• Balloteering. As Pamela Swanigan coolly observed in these pages last November, it’s not going too far to suggest that the American presidential election was won, in part, by a queer choice of graphic design: the infamous butterfly ballot. Today, no one is unfamiliar with the aesthetics of ballot design or the intricacies of hanging chads.
• Tech-savvy boosterism. Where would the New Economy be without its flagship magazines, which helped shape the image and tenor of dot.com chic? Fast Company and Shift were a revelation of magazine art design in the late 90s.
• Designer celebs. Speaking of the Web, the design profession took a huge leap forward in cachet and employability with the development of the Internet. In Vancouver, flashy firms like Blast Radius and Vancouver Film School are considered post-grad school for Emily Carr alumni.
• Designer celebs, Part II. Emily Carr Institute itself has become in past years perhaps the definitive intellectual-cultural center of Vancouver. Douglas Coupland has in turn given us City of Glass, a design-conscious meditation on the form and feel of our town.
• Jeremiads R Us. Vancouver’s own Adbusters took up the call of designer chic by excoriating the trade for its complicity in commercial culture—and then urging designers to sign its First Things First manifesto. As many have mentioned, Adbusters itself has recently adopted a heightened design-centric look to suit the times, complete with the dewy-lipped covermodel bedecking last winter’s issue.
• Designing a debacle. Meanwhile, Vancouver Magazine took the cake locally for its leaky condo cover last November, which stretched further than ever before the tenuous magazine commerce argument that Maxim chicks can sell us any harrowing story, even “the naked truth about real estate.”
Clearly, design has taken a confident step further into our lives and popular culture. The brio of the Vancouver cover did not go unnoticed, and even the New York-based media world took pause to admire the brio and gall of the magazine’s derring-do.
Mallon’s concerns are thoughtful and commendable—but I don’t see any practical escape from the clutches of design. Design is a powerful element to what we see, what we do, and certainly what we read. What makes the point more blatantly, after all, than last week’s redesign of MIX?
end.
