The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness
Number among those few, however, Virginia Postrel, the former editor of Reason magazine. She revels in such billboard moments when everything comes together: impeccable design, the triumph of style over crass utility, and our seemingly shrewd detachment from the ads that succeed in winning us over. And she’s prepared to renounce others among those same few who would lament all of this as so much frivolity, characterizing them as paternalistic fuddy-duddies and cynics who want to paint the world in drab, egalitarian monochrome because they think they know what’s best for us. It’s an odd characterization, though. Those fuddy-duddies are only counseling caution in how we let our buttons get pushed as consumers because they know we’re smarter with our pocketbooks than we sometimes let on. Folks like Postrel suggest that it’s enough just to get those buttons pushed effectively, however naive we remain to the process. Just who’s the cynic here?
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But once you’ve read it, such an appraisal of The Substance of Style doesn’t seem all that inappropriate. It’s this very “look and feel,” Postrel argues, that have evolved as the key evaluative criteria by which we rank the various things that satisfy our wants–home furnishings, planned communities, and, yes, books. This, we learn, is the age of the “aesthetic imperative.” Where once we were content with mere functional utility and serviceable workmanship, we now demand–and get–pizzazz. It’s a revelation that flatters the subcultures of urban sophisticates for whom what’s on the dinner plate may be less important than how it’s plated, but Postrel’s point is that the reign of look and feel now extends to Wal-Mart and Wendy’s as well.
The Substance of Style is a verbal slide show of vivid images: $400 toilet brushes, a GE Plastics wall of 4,000 tiles in unique color samples, idle $7,000 Viking ranges that preside over the home kitchens of people who dine out nightly (the ranges, we’re told, are for looking, not for cooking). It’s this astute trend-watching that both keeps the book readable and accessible and provides the foundation for Postrel’s nominal case that style is now
This misses the point. To claim that our purchases are at least occasionally intended to tell others something about our lifestyle is not to equate taste with status. We are drawing distinctions between ourselves and others, to be sure, but not necessarily to align ourselves with the cultural elite against the boorish masses; it may well be to identify with those masses. The rabble are not defined simply by an absence of bourgeois refinement. Nor is their more conspicuous consumption necessarily marked by lofty aspirations for such refinement or its caricature in gaudy ostentation. Class lines have always been reinforced by taste simultaneously from both sides of the divide. The comfortable classes affect “sophistication,” yes, but the hoi polloi are no more likely to mimic this than to renounce it as pretentious and cultivate their own “unaffected” preferences. Marketers have exploited this as effectively as they’ve exploited snob appeal–just look at beer ads. Selling a lifestyle requires consumers to understand they’re purchasing–and thus broadcasting–a lifestyle. This was a pillar of class distinction long before Bravo made it a matter of being straight or gay.
In the end, Postrel is confident that a widespread heightening of aesthetic sensibilities will usher in a period where the fetters of taste regulation can fall away like a vestigial sixth toe. “Now that people increasingly care about look and feel in their private choices,” she writes, “aesthetic regulation is less necessary to control blatant public ugliness.” One might have thought that several decades of heightened awareness in the analogous case of ecological damage would have obviated the need for environmental regulation by now as well. Go figure.
