I've been wondering why everyone seems so obsessed with style. Why, no matter how complex a product is to design, to develop, what people notice in the end is the style. I don't have a clear answer, there are so many possible ones, after all, but I do have a few thoughts that might lead somewhere. This is one of them.
It is correct to say that we do live in a time where things are more than just things. A chair is not just a place to sit, a shoe no longer just a product that, when paired with its match, allows us to walk. A lamp no longer just a source of light. Objects carry emotion and signal identity. They are shaped not only by the hands of designers, but by the wishes of markets and capital.
This is not new, but maybe intensified? The old industrial promise: efficiency, utility, repetition, has not vanished; it has been reabsorbed, disguised beneath softness, storytelling, and style. We are told to feel something before we are told what the object does. Where the factory once prized the sameness of parts, today’s economy thrives on difference, or rather, on the performance of difference. A product shifts not because it must, but because it can. Because in a world saturated with perfection, with choice, difference is the hook. Novelty is not accidental, in fact it is engineered, marketed.
The result is a curious paradox: a system driven by calculations like data, margins, returns, that depends more and more on things that cannot be measured. Emotion. Imagination. Intuition. May we say that aesthetics, once a luxury, have become strategy?
If so, the border between art and commerce dissolves. Art becomes product. Culture becomes eclectic. And style, well, that one is a such a complex thing.