When your decor is a romantic deal-breaker: a female visitor fled upon seeing this NYC lawyer’s sheets. My sister, by the way, had those exact sheets. When she was 12. Via the NYT where there’s also a really gratifying condemnation of Klimt posters.
I’m anxiously awaiting the 2009 NYT Trender tool so I can see how things have changed since 2008, a year in which Cassandra, oddly, ended on the decline while Pollyanna was on the ascendant. Maybe that’s just because of December’s holiday spirit? @derekg, I certainly hope you plan to update this tool for 2009, because it offers hours of amusement. There are less than two weeks left to get it up and running.
That’s according to the New York Times, and since nostalgia seems to work in 20-year cycles, I guess anyone could have seen it coming. If, as the article says, the 90s were the sci fi thing and the Breeders, then excellent, but … what is that orange outfit! Do I not remember the 90s correctly? No matter what they were, though, anything is better than the 80s, the decade that just makes me go Reagan Thatcher Reagan Thatcher Reagan Thatcher Shoulderpads in a loop. I realize this view is unpopular. Sorry. From the NYT’s blog The Moment :
Show after show this week in London, the Y.B.D.’s were designing like it was 1995. Topshop’s Unique collection, in the hands of the stylist Katie Grand, mined the junkyard-rave aesthetic of the cult classic “Tank Girl” to mixed results. Charles Anastase’s “autobiographical” collection paid homage to the unsung icons of grunge — think the D.I.Y. style of Kelly and Kim Deal, of the alt-rock band the Breeders, and Rayanne Graff, the too-cool-for-school character played by A.J. Langer on the teen drama “My So-Called Life.” Chances are that only the hipsters who crash his shows will be savvy enough to appreciate this.
This graph shows the occurrence of the terms “decor” (blue) and “interior design” (red) in The New York Times between 1984 and 2009. What happened to the word “decor”? It fell out of usage in approximately February, 2001, maybe a result of a change in editorial style policy? When we first saw this we wondered if it had to do with some sort of anti-French sentiment, decor being French in origin, but then we realized that its drop in usage came about seven months before 9-11. This was one of many surprising discoveries we made when we asked Jer Thorp to make some graphs for us. Jer, a digital artist and also man about our studio, recently wrote some software for graphing the occurrence of certain words in the newly-opened NYT text database. The NYT only recently made its entire text archive searchable online, beginning with the year 1981. Jer had made some beautiful graphs of various word occurrences, and we asked him to build some for us based on a few design-related keywords. Choosing design-related search terms is hard just because so many design terms have such broad usage, and are common to so many different fields, that a search for them doesn’t tell us much – “design,” for example, or “modern.” So we decided on some slightly more specific search terms: midcentury modern, modernism, Eames, Corbusier, retro, vintage, interior design and decor. We were just curious to see whether there would be a noticeable rise in interest in modern and modernist design, as we thought there might be, and if so, we wanted to see if it was a slow or a steep rise. Of course, the NYT is a very specific publication speaking to a relatively specific audience, and those things have to be taken into consideration when looking at these results. Note: The NYT database isn’t yet fully complete between 1981 and 1984, so we just searched 1984 onward. Tip: each bar is one month. Click on each graph to find a larger version in our Flickr. We may ask Jer to make a few more of these – any suggestions?
Above is the instance of “vintage” (the jade green) vs. “retro” (yellow-green). The near-absence of the word “retro” in the 1980s was surprising. Even more surprising, and it’s a little hard to see here, but over the past year and a half the word “retro” has all but disappeared, while “vintage” maintains its steady rise.
This graph shows the slow, steady increase in interest in “modernism” (red) and “midcentury modern” (orange), with the two almost perfectly mirroring each other. Mentions of the word “Eames” (yellow) and “Corbusier” (pink) were similar. I’m not sure what we were expecting – we thought that perhaps an American designer would be mentioned more often than a European? – but the latter two are about the same. Many more of Jer’s graphs, on a variety of topics, are here.
That’s the title of an interesting article in the NYT last week. By “design” the writer obviously means design itself, and not the world of commercial design which is in fact suffering during the current economic crisis. The article’s author Michael Cannell argues that design benefits both in terms of social responsibilty and aesthetics during times of austerity, because working within constraints is often a spur to both the creative process as well as to a more considered, thrifty use of materials. He points out that the high points of modernism were born from such constraints. We don’t want to be puritan about this, but he’s probably right in thinking necessity produces excellent inventions. There are dissenters, though, too. Read Murray Moss’ rebuttal “Design Hates A Depression” in the designobserver.
It’s worth reading the whole article, but in terms of designers on this continent who worked out of the austerity of the 1930s and 40s, Cannell mentions American designers Russel Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, both of whom who produced classic furniture and other design objects from inexpensive available materials like resin and plywood. In Italy, it was the impoverished post-WWII era that saw a flourishing of classic Italian design.
Photos: Top, Eames brochure explaining moulded plywood chair, 1946. Middle, Lounge Chair Prototype, designed 1945, molded plywood and rubber. Bottom, beautiful Eames sculpture made in studio during experiments with molded plywood, then a new and cheaper material. More from Cannell’s article below.
