{"id":129159,"date":"2018-09-10T09:00:33","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129159"},"modified":"2018-09-11T12:08:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T16:08:20","slug":"ugliness-is-underrated-ugly-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/10\/ugliness-is-underrated-ugly-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Ugliness Is Underrated: Ugly Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. You can read the first installment, on ugly art, here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photos:\u00a0Ugly Design<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I covet a piece of technology that never existed and likely never will. I can\u2019t stop thinking about it. I covet the seashell e-reader from the 2014 film\u00a0It Follows<\/em>. The movie is one of my all-time favorites because it so fluidly combines three of my main interests: awkward sex, sudden death, and timeless design. Typically, when someone calls a car or a handbag or a piece of furnishing \u201ctimeless,\u201d they mean it will look just as classic and classy in a few decades as it does today. This is not what I mean about It Follows<\/em>. Here, the overall look is timeless in that it is outside time. The cars are ugly and retro\u2014low-riding, boxy boats that patrol the middle-class suburbs, emitting low, guttural growls. The houses are ugly, too, with brick lower levels topped by vinyl-sided second stories with a smattering of carelessly placed rectangular windows. This is intentional, according to the film\u2019s director, David Robert Mitchell. In an interview with Paste<\/em> magazine<\/a>, he says it was \u201cvery much part of the plan\u201d to \u201cmake the film exist outside of time in a way that it resembles a dream or a nightmare.\u201d This includes introducing \u201canachronistic production design elements,\u201d including things from various eras and \u201cthings that don\u2019t quite exist\u201d but could, somewhere, in some alternate universe or timeline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Still from It Follows<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The film is filled with uncanny objects, but it\u2019s the e-reader that nags at me. In a movie dominated by strange color combinations\u2014aqua and orange, pale pink and blood red\u2014this shell-shaped device is appealingly contemporary. It looks like an art object snatched from a shelf at The Wing or a prop from a Glossier campaign. It\u2019s the perfect combination of ugly (plastic, slightly tacky) and cute (it\u2019s pretty much a grown-up Polly Pocket). It isn\u2019t a real product, yet somehow it\u2019s still the most perfect example of contemporary ugly design that I can pinpoint.<\/p>\n

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If you scroll through the Instagram account Ugly Design<\/a>, you\u2019ll notice a pattern. There\u2019s an umbrella that looks like a head of romaine lettuce, a flip phone that looks like a miniature race car, a pair of flip-flops that look like silver fish, and a lounge chair that looks like a loaf of bread. \u201cWe are always looking for things that are inspired by other things\u2014objects that look like animals or body parts, or things that were designed to look like other things,\u201d Jonas Nyffenegger, who runs the account along with his colleague and friend Sebastien Mathys, tells me. When they first started posting three years ago, they tended to highlight objects that had bad proportions. They posted pictures of chairs that looked intolerable to sit in, lamps that were so lopsided they seemed about to topple over, home goods that were destined to wind up curbside, waiting for a garbage collector or a college student to walk by. At first, Nyffenegger and Mathys were showcasing objects they loathed, but as the project evolved, they began to realize two things. Not only did they actually like a lot of the pieces they were finding\u2014\u201cWe went from haters to lovers,\u201d Nyffenegger says\u2014but so did a lot of fashionable people. \u201cMore and more people are submitting to us, especially people who work in fashion,\u201d\u00a0Nyffenegger says.<\/p>\n

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As they began to fall in love with ugly design, Nyffenegger and Mathys started to refine their project. It wasn\u2019t enough for the object to be poorly made or unappealing; the object had to inspire questions. It had to feel absurd and a little unreal. \u201cEvery day, we see something and think, Oh my God, this exists? Why? Who did it?\u201d Nyffenegger says. \u201cIt makes you wonder where it came from and who would think to connect these two different shapes to create this one thing.\u201d Nyffenegger has a pair of fish slippers from Thailand that are a perfect example of the type of ugly design they\u2019re looking to feature. He can\u2019t really say why someone decided to make fish slippers or who came up with the idea, but wondering is half the fun. Like ugly paintings<\/a>, which inspire empathetic questions about the mind of the maker, the joy of these pieces comes from their opaque nature. Their aesthetics don\u2019t relate in any clear way to their function (slippers aren\u2019t necessarily more comfortable when they look like fish, and an e-reader isn\u2019t any more legible when it\u2019s shaped like a scallop shell), leaving consumers to marvel, Who came up with this, and why?<\/p>\n

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Bread chair image via Amazon.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The popularity of Ugly Design, the rise of maximalism, and the continuing creep of high kitsch<\/a> (an aesthetic that\u2019s moving, slowly but surely, from the digital realm into the lived one through locations like the Museum of Ice Cream and the Color Factory), indicate that we\u2019re on the cusp of a new aesthetic moment, one that breaks with the oppressively omnipresent Scandinavian-chic, Kondo-approved, gray-everything Minimalism. We\u2019re seeing a return to the gaudy and tacky design of the eighties, an era of excess and wealth that has been embodied and elevated to a dangerous level with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Yet while there\u2019s a new appreciation for highly decorative furniture (like this Laura Ashley\u2013esque couch<\/a> being sold at IKEA<\/small>), it doesn\u2019t seem to come from the same place as the wealth-worshipping rococo excess of the eighties. People have begun to spin maximalism as a political point of view, one that celebrates thriftiness and eschews the homogeneity of high-quality sparsity. Writing in Dame<\/em> magazine, Kate Washington<\/a> makes the argument that Minimalism is a \u201chard-to-achieve status symbol\u201d that oppresses women, who bear the burden of decluttering and recluttering, purchasing and purging. \u201cThe classism and privilege baked into minimalism are multilayered,\u201d Washington writes. \u201cBig Decluttering, by positing the streamlined home as a purely personal matter of choice and shifting women\u2019s attention to the domestic sphere, can distract from larger systems of oppression\u2014including the direct oppression of less-privileged women and, often, children, who are severely underpaid for the labor of making all the cheap stuff that more privileged women are taught to toss out of our homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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IKEA<\/small>\u2019s 2019 catalogue, featuring a hideous couch.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Of course, ugly design is also part of capitalism and consumerist culture. As Derrida says,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI<\/em>l n\u2019y a pas de hors-texte<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0For decades, we\u2019ve been told to buy beautiful, useful things, items that have clean lines and clear purpose, like bespoke wooden brushes and \u201cclassic\u201d white furniture. But once you have all the birchwood chairs and Apple products you need, what could possibly compel you to buy more? Trends exist because people get bored, but they also exist because capitalism demands that we continue to want. Now that maximalism is in, I suddenly feel compelled to purchase a fussy and ornate couch to replace my gray midcentury modern\u2013inspired IKEA<\/small> workhorse. I want painted chairs with turned wood legs to replace my Shaker-style pine. Instead of buying pretty pink cans of hipster-approved, grapefruit-scented La Croix, I\u2019m tempted to order a case of the new bubble-lettered beverage Ugly seltzer<\/a> and \u201cglug ugly,\u201d as the drink\u2019s marketing copy suggests. (As I\u2019ve written before, I\u2019m very easily swayed by trends)<\/p>\n

But this is what I love about truly ugly design: I can appreciate it without wanting to possess it (except for the shell e-reader\u2014I want that). Scrolling through the Ugly Design Instagram, I don\u2019t feel a terrible urge to clutter my house with these items. Instead, I feel a terrific joy at their stupid irrationality.<\/p>\n

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Photos: Ugly Design<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

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This is perhaps the key to ugly as an aesthetic category: it is nonsensical and lacks coherence. Good design, in contrast, follows the maxim set forth by the architect Louis Sullivan: form follows function. Since the dawn of the twentieth\u00a0century, our understanding of good design has had a slightly moralizing tone, even as it shifted from early Bauhaus to boxy midcentury modern and into the sleek, mass-produced, Apple-inspired white cubes of twenty-first-century Minimalism. William Morris writes that he would have nothing in his house he \u201cdid not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.\u201d This became the ideal expression of gorgeous taste: the purchase of items that are either useful or beautiful\u2014but ideally both.<\/p>\n

Ugly design is the exact opposite. These items might<\/em> be useful, but their utility is secondary. They\u2019re certainly not beautiful. People buy them because they\u2019re funny or interesting, because they inspire a spark of weird happiness (or they buy them out of irony, a motive that I find relatable, if boring). Nostalgia and kitsch merge with irrationality. These objects look like things from childhood, yet they also don\u2019t make sense, which creates a sense of discomfort. In trying to figure out the appeal of these weird products, I\u2019m left calling on a series of paradoxes: they\u2019re familiar yet strange, ugly yet appealing, contemporary yet nostalgic, tasteless yet cool.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that ugly design is so trendy. Ugliness isn\u2019t just a rebellion against the norms of good taste; it\u2019s also a fittingly chaotic aesthetic for a chaotic era of presidential tweets, alternative facts, and government propaganda. Culturally, we\u2019re experiencing a sense of slippage. Reality isn\u2019t as stable as it once was, and even serious outlets like T<\/em>he<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0have been playing with the idea that we\u2019ve somehow fallen into an alternate timeline<\/a>. In the \u201creal\u201d timeline, La La Land<\/em>\u00a0won Best Picture, Hillary Clinton is president, and a children\u2019s book called The Berenstein Bears<\/em><\/a> exists. In the nightmare timeline, we have Moonlight<\/em> (yay!) and Trump (boo!) and The\u00a0<\/em>Berenstain Bears <\/em>(eh).<\/p>\n

This theory reminds me of another indie movie, the nineties cult classic Clerks<\/em>,\u00a0in which the beleaguered protagonist greets each new misfortune at his sad day job with a refrain so whiny that it feels almost singsong. \u201cI\u2019m not even supposed to be here today,\u201d he cries, over and over. Much of America seems to feel this way. We\u2019re not even supposed to be here, making terrible wages for so much work, paying out the nose for health care, watching a bloviated reality-television star plan excessive displays of military might while children sit in cages at our borders. Something has gone wrong with our timeline, and we\u2019ve fallen out of order. And yet here we are, with so little control over the world and so many grievances, so much fear, so many unanswered questions. We might as well slip out of our elegant beige Muji house shoes and put on a pair of fish slippers instead.<\/p>\n

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Katy Kelleher is a writer who lives in the woods of rural New England. She is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Handcrafted Maine.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. You can read the first installment, on ugly art, here.\u00a0     I covet a piece of technology that never existed and likely never will. I can\u2019t stop thinking about it. I covet the seashell e-reader from the 2014 film\u00a0It Follows. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[36996,19522,36906,31375,216,19381,1710,36907,36909,36910,36994,36911,36995,6509,36993,36908],"class_list":["post-129159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alternate-timelines","tag-consumerism","tag-david-robert-mitchell","tag-derrida","tag-design","tag-donald-trump","tag-ikea","tag-it-follows","tag-jonas-nyffenegger","tag-kate-washington","tag-katy-kelleher","tag-laura-ashley","tag-maximalism","tag-minimalism","tag-ugly","tag-ugly-design"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUgliness Is Underrated: Ugly Design by Katy Kelleher<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The rise of maximalism indicates that we\u2019re on the cusp of a new aesthetic moment, one that breaks with the oppressively omnipresent Scandinavian-chic, Kondo-approved, gray-everything Minimalism.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/10\/ugliness-is-underrated-ugly-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ugliness Is Underrated: Ugly Design by Katy Kelleher\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 10, 2018 \u2013 This is the second of a three-part series on the aesthetics of ugliness. 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