TIME EUROPE
June 26, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 25
The Redesigning of America
High style isn't highbrow. In fact, it's everywhere, for everyone, in everything from can openers to CD racks to cars
By FRANK GIBNEY JR. and BELINDA LUSCOMBE
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Back in 1960, an obscure Dutch cultural critic named Constant Nieuwenhuys predicted that someday we would all become architects. Stuck in a world where everything looked the same, he suggested, we would be so alienated from our environment by technology that we would constantly redesign the space around us just to recover the joy of living. Nieuwenhuys was wrong about only one thing. Americans are not alienated at all. Here they are, roaring into the 21st century, powered by the longest economic boom in U.S. history, wired to the Web and to one another, thirstily consuming new technology even before they know how to use it. Amid this frenzy they want to re-create the space around them, not as their only joy but because they can. They're snapping up translucent blueberry-tinted computers, bubbled cars and little chrome cell phones as fast as they're produced. They are fully employed, and want something to show for it, even if they aren't Internet billionaires. So where design used to be considered vaguely precious, the province of the Sub-Zero industrial refrigerator-owning élite, it's now available to all — from the crowd that shops at discount retailer Target to those aesthetes who can pick out an Enzo Mari from 20 paces. If Americans learned anything from the barbaric old '80s, they learned that more is not enough. They want better — or at least better-looking. Ladies and gentlemen, may we present the design economy. It is the crossroads where prosperity and technology meet culture and marketing. These days efficient manufacturing and intense competition have made "commodity chic" not just affordable but mandatory. North Americans are likely to appreciate style when they see it and demand it when they don't. "Design is being democratized," says Karim Rashid, designer of the Oh chair by Umbra and winner of a 1999 George Nelson award for breakthrough furniture design. "Our entire physical landscape has improved, and that makes people more critical as an audience." And more willing. Says Mark Dziersk, president of the Industrial Designers Society of America: "This is the new Golden Age of design."
Make that platinum, because design has become big Big Business. Nobody is quite sure how big, but just consider that Americans spent some $6 trillion on goods and services last year, and roughly one-fifth of it went into buying stuff for their homes. The stunning success of the colorful iMac, for instance, not only helped save Apple but has also inspired a raft of whimsically styled, low-cost personal computers from firms like Dell, Gateway and Compaq. The New Beetle rescued Volkswagen's image two years ago and became a catalyst for change in the auto business. Carmakers are finally putting a premium on how their products look because they know that otherwise we won't buy them anymore.
So it is with makers of just about everything. "When industries are competing at equal price and functionality, design is the only differential that matters," says Dziersk, echoing the credo first spouted in the '30s by Raymond Loewy, father of industrial design. Loewy was the man who gave America the Lucky Strike cigarette pack and the sleek Greyhound bus, and when he added a flourish to the Coldspot refrigerator, to make it look just a little more streamlined than its 1934 competitors, sales at the department store Sears skyrocketed.
Loewy used to say that the most beautiful curve was a rising sales graph, and that notion has driven design since he was in shorts. Good design married commerce during the Great Depression, and Loewy's career took off then because he made products irresistible at a time when nobody really wanted to pay for anything. In the '50s, Charles and Ray Eames led a cohort of Californians who used postwar manufacturing capacity to create sleek, efficient domestic environs. In the '60s, however, industrial design seemed to lose its way and end up in the mire of an American consumer sensibility that simply wanted more products for less money, from which it began to emerge only in the '90s.
Now, instead of one Raymond Loewy, the design world is humming with an eclectic mix of impresarios and entrepreneurs intent on earning a living from making the beautiful things in your life. There are big corporate players, like Sony and Ford and Philips, the European electronics consortium. There are architects and designers — iconoclasts like Philippe Starck and young upstarts like Jasper Morrison or Marc Newson. And of course there's lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who has parlayed her sense of style into a multidimensional billion-dollar role as America's spokeswoman for taste. Martha's line of home furnishings helped wipe the red ink off the bottom line of the discount department chain K Mart.
If anyone believes in America's new appetite for design it is Terence Conran, Britain's style impresario. Twenty years ago, Conran launched in the U.S. a chain of furniture stores in his name, but he jumped ship early in the '90s. Now he's back to catch the new wave. In December he opened a 2,100-sq-m store in Manhattan. Like its counterparts in London, Paris and Tokyo, the Terence Conran Shop is a design bazaar, with everything from $17 digital watches to $3,550 violet-colored lounges. Says Conran: "There really is a wind of change here now. America is about technology, being proud of achieving so much and confident about having a culture that reflects that."
Americans' appetite for design is flourishing at least partly because America is. The housing-construction boom has reached historic proportions, and people need to fill those new homes with stuff that defines who they are. It used to confer status to have an expensive designer couch; now it's important to have something that's personal, whether it's from the flea market or a chic boutique like B&B Italia. Like the Mosquito Table, which looks like an aircraft wing. Or the Conrad (not Conran) chair, made from something called Bora Bora bark.
Entrepreneurs across the U.S. are thriving on people's design whims. The clothes may have made the man in ancient times, but now the man carries an iBook, a magnesium-encased Sony Vaio or a sleek black Apple G3. It's in his tools too. Does he use the cool new Husqvarna mower or Fluke Corp.'s i410 clamp meter? And his bathroom: currently a hot piece of furniture is the all-stainless-steel toilet (yes, including the seat) designed originally for prisons.
In New York City's SoHo district, retailer Murray Moss has built a very profitable little empire dealing in well-designed objects of every description. Working in Italy's fashion industry several years ago, he noticed that Europe had a lot of hot product designers too. So was born Moss, a museum-like shop that doesn't so much display merchandise as venerate it. There are flexible rubber vases, a light made of milk bottles and a $385 zinc-and-steel ironing board that folds as flat as a pancake. Success? In five years Moss has quadrupled the size of his store, and he claims last year's inventory turned over 11 times (most retailers are happy if they empty theirs four times). MORE>>
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June 26, 2000
COVER
The Redesigning of America
High style isn't highbrow. In fact, it's everywhere, for everyone, in everything from can openers to CD racks to cars
One Designer to Watch
Marc Newson wants to curve the world
EUROPE
The Big Chill
The arrest of one of Russia's most outspoken media moguls casts doubt on Putin's promised "rule of law"
Wit That Hits Home
Puppet on a short string
Identity Crisis
Greek church and state clash as new ID cards drop religious affiliation
Tell — But Don't Show
A new law will change the look of French journalism
AFRICA
"Whatever I Do, It Will Never Be Good Enough"
An interview with King Mohammed VI of Morocco
The Warm Embrace
Europe is showing signs that it's keen to better its often uneasy relations with the Maghreb nations
MIDDLE EAST
Chance for the Son To Shine
Syria's Bashar Assad can better his father's miserable legacy
BUSINESS
The Missing Link
A $4 billion engineering feat fulfils a century-old dream of joining Sweden and Denmark — and business is set to boom
Workers of the World, Speak Up
At last, people on the factory floor have entered the globalism debate
TRENDS
Wheelie Good Fun
Shiny, compact and cool, scooters have become Europe's ubiquitous accessory
THE ARTS
The Talented Mr. Ridley
Gladiator director Ridley Scott, enjoying a long-awaited thumbs-up from the crowds, talks about life, death — and why filmmaking is a blood sport
Déjà View
Some leading contemporary artists offer a fresh take on the old masters
Too Many Variations
A fine performance by Donald Sutherland can't save a flawed work
Irreconcilable Differences
Twins recount their lives on opposite sides of war
DEPARTMENTS
World Watch
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