MAKE INTERIOR DESIGN AGAIN
A Quarter Century Audit of the Design Industry
Having officially marked a quarter deep into the millennium, the time feels appropriate for a 21st century (so far) design culture audit: What has the design industry gleaned over the last 25 years, to help guide it for the next 25? Design, like all arts, is an ever-evolving dialogue. We must reflect to push the medium forward thoughtfully.
From the closed-door institutions of 20th century interior design, to Y2K-era’s hopeful pursuit for design democratization1, we have experienced a striking transformation to the design industry over the last quarter century, and possibly the most influential yet overlooked vibe shift in the history of the profession to date.
Today’s interior design culture is in flux, deserving inspection, clarity, and necessary CTA’s to save it from its current path.
[The Christopher Lowell Show, 1999-2003.]
How It Started
At the turn of the 21st century, in response to growing interest in the mainstream for home and lifestyle content, there was an intentional push by design leaders to open a historically closed-door interior design world to the masses. For those who can remember, the buzz term in the industry at the time was ‘democratization of design’. Initially an ideological agenda, the heavily coded, private world of decorating charted a new, more accessible and inclusive course.
The early 00s were an exciting time to be alive in design, full of experimentation, with the intention to enroll a newfound audience of design enthusiasts through a new form of media I refer to as Design Entertainment2:
It was delightful to witness the concept of the modern day ‘influencer’, born out of super fans of the Y2K blogosphere.
‘Collaborations’, now ubiquitous to the game, were innovative in the 00s, bringing pop culture into design.
How convenient it was to discover once rare archival imagery, now digitized and disseminated across Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram for public access.
Social media transformed design fairs, from a mid-level management grind, into exciting travel destinations for enthusiasts to learn, and to see and be seen.
For a golden moment, it appeared that we were on track to have interior design and decorative arts rise in the mainstream, to levels of engagement and praise associated with fine art, film, fashion, and music. Not one to gatekeep, early in my career I worked on projects that embraced the opening of the door. Many of my clients and colleagues were similarly excited to share their love of design on a bigger stage for farther reach. What we as a community did not realize, was that we were not opening a door per se, but rather Pandora’s box.
Before Design Democratization
Before design democratization, interiors were defined through the merits of authenticity and discipline, and judged through a binary of considerations: An interior designer created beauty or not. Quality or not. Comfort or not. Details or not. Ideas or not. Even within a wide-ranging spectrum of styles, top talents worked from a baseline of accepted rules, allowing for a strong foundation for the art form to build upon. Whether in dialogue or discourse, inspired design was felt by its rigor: This was good for interior design.
Before design democratization, the decorative arts influenced zeitgeist while functioning outside of the mainstream. Before there were infinite access points for civilians into the world of design, key markets held products in fortresses called design centers. Design centers were strictly ‘to-the-trade’, open to approved professionals only. This time-honored custom upheld the value of the craft of decorating, and the prestige of the interior designer: This was good for interior design.
Before design democratization, a client would not ‘collaborate’ with their interior designer. Rather than clients sharing mood boards, designers would formally present their schemes. A client could be chaperoned for a supervised visit to a showroom, but only to see pre-approved FFE. In turn, clients themselves elected not to be actively involved in the process of decorating. Interior designers of the time functioned with more boundaries, professionalism, and trust, delivering ‘reveals’ at project completion. The popularity of ‘turnkey projects’ in the prior century was the ultimate expression of decorators prowess and artistry. The concept of commissioning an interior was symbolic of the honorable role clients once played as patrons of the arts: This was good for interior design.
Before design democratization, the industry suffered from inequality. Interior design worked from a structure of exclusivity that kept many people out of access. There are explanations for why design was such a private field for so long, but nevertheless a significant consequence of the system was unfair privilege, class disparity and lack of diversity. In some ways, interior design was like polo, a luxury sport for the few who could afford a horse. This barrier to entry made some of the most inspiring interiors, furnishings, design objects, decorative arts methods, materials, and the very culture of decorative arts inaccessible to the general public. Media perpetuated inequalities for decades, by narrowly focusing on affluence and the western canon of beauty, thus promoting exclusionary practices that were at odds with healthy growth of the medium in the 21st century: This was bad for interior design.
Ultimately, the 21st century movement from exclusion to equity became one of the instrumental forces for the design industry’s paradigm shift. While it was important to rectify inequalities, our design leaders over shot the mark, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Our anything goes design scene of today is a reckoning of our industry’s discriminatory past. Design democratization became a vehicle to quickly level-up and embrace the public. While doing so, our leaders forgot to protect the essential tenets of the art form.
The mistake is not in the opening of the door, but in the execution of the opening.
[Beige Propaganda]
How It’s Going
It is universally accepted that ‘knowledge is power’, so it makes sense that mainstreaming of interior design began as a bipartisan mission at its 2000s start. Design decision makers generally felt that only good could come from educating and enrolling the masses. What was underestimated was the truth behind another adage: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Over the last 25 years, the design industry hopefully pursued a new category of members, without a long plan, a measured strategy, without proper dosage. In the void of checks and balances to protect honor for the metier, the industry gave birth to a generation of pseudo-experts, consumers rather than future shareholders of the true craft of design. Today, the once patron of the past has become the ‘influencer’–flattening, misinforming, and competing rather than supporting design.
In a blind rush to mainstream design, our industry leaders made bad deals with parasitic ‘partners’ that intended to extract IP and trade secrets, to commodify the art form into a consumer product. These partners emboldened an audience who are not enthusiasts at all, in fact, they have been actively chipping away at the integrity and time-honored traditions of interior design and decorative arts.
Over the last decade, we have seen the last remnants of promise of the Information Age fade away completely, replaced by an age of disruption. Technological advances that were once intended to resolve the industry’s challenges, have been replaced by even bigger problems, many of which are more difficult for interior design practices to navigate.
How did a new age that was fueled by the promotion of freedom of expression, so quickly lead to the suppression of personal style? In an increasingly vapid, disillusioned world, the next generation of designers and enthusiasts are becoming sheeple. They are led to believe an unbelievable contradiction–that individuality is achieved through consensus aspirations to buy and live with the same exact things. We have more design options than ever before, but there is no denying that much of 21st century interior design is a fearful space, suffocating from lack of new ideas, desperately clinging to likes over loves.
Design Entertainment Is Not Design Culture
Without a proper leadership body3 like CFDA, or a union like SAG, the interior design community was hijacked by Design Entertainment.
As a consumer-facing approach to design education, Design Entertainment was intended to be integrated into the culture, not replace it. Unfortunately, the last quarter century has led to fracture rather than integration. We have to believe that our former design leaders did not realize that the start of the 21st century was a fork in the road, between making design accessible or protecting the profession. If they had known, they surely would have added better guardrails.
In an age where the former patron is now the influencer, and the influencer is packaged as the expert, co-signed and endorsed by media, we have officially entered an upside-down world that is trivializing the interior design profession. In this dystopic era, the faker is the maker. CGI images are sold as real. What is derivative is presented as original. The better one steals the more applause is awarded.
All the while, some of the most gifted creatives are falling back, their voices unmatched to compete with an army of pretenders, holding loudspeakers in their hands, pushing slop content with confidence of ignorance.
Design Culture is in flux, and at odds with an industry that prioritizes Design Entertainment over education. Ask yourself:
Has the decades-long campaign to mainstream interior design increased honor for the metier, or rather diluted it?
Has an all-access pass to design led to greater appreciation of design objects, or more brazen knock-offs?
Has the free exchange of ideas on social platforms led to more innovation, or more sameness?
Did we achieve the goals that our former design administration put forth at the start of the century, or have we lost the plot?
Was it worth it? The answer for me is no. Design Entertainment is not design culture, just as fast fashion is not couture. We must get better at naming and recognizing these two entities for their disparate, often opposing purposes.
If we can give half as much oxygen to integral design as we do Design Entertainment, our culture could replenish itself after decades of neglect.
[“It’s cool to get on the computer, but don’t let the computer get on you” - Prince, 1999.]
Don’t Let the Computer Get on You
Platforms that were once embraced as commons for the exchange of ideas are no longer spaces for dialogue. Honest users will attest that social media is hardly social anymore, and an increasingly isolating experience. Advanced algorithms hold our attention, while holding us back from our true selves. Taking advantage of us by deftly playing with human nature. Farming our souls, turning us into data cattle. No wonder interior design is in the state it is in. Our domiciles have become a battlefield.
Interior designers know best, that our homes have the power to energize us or keep us down. Social media’s promotion of banality as taste, is designed to the keep the masses immobilized and transfixed into the screen machine.
25 years of education and access to interior design has led to a society that aspires for what? Pursuit of homogeneity? Each home like the other. Each Pinterest board referencing the same derivative source material. Pins that are often mislabeled, forever rewriting history of authorship that less and less people seem to find important.
Dupes For Dupes
On observation of Gen Z’s design content, it is hard to justify how a generation of youth more consumed with ‘mood’ and ‘vibe’ than any prior time, are equally obsessed with the glamorization of designer fakes they cutely call ‘dupes’.
By universal law, we know knockoffs cannot possess the energetic power and humanity of the real thing. Devoid of flair of the author’s stroke of hand, a dupe will never have the aura Gen Z is in search of. If the ‘wellness’ lifestyle that this younger generation promotes is anything more than a marketing ploy, these designers would not be able to stomach dupes, let alone embrace them as they currently are.
It appears these designers may be embracing dupes to virtue signal their stance against capitalism, but to use their slang ‘the math is not mathing’ on this explanation. The truth is fake attracts fake, in this surrogate design scene.
Praise of the dupe should be a wake up call, and the limit for the design community’s patience for Design Entertainment as the right path for the industry’s future.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.
Calling for the Return of Gatekeeping
We must gatekeep. Not as a regressive step back to the exclusionary practices of design industry’s past, but as a necessity for the survival and growth of interior design and decorative arts in the future. 25 years of observation is enough time to recognize, that we must abort mission on the myopic strategy of mainstreaming design.
Gatekeeping was wrong when it was rooted in exclusion, but there were merits to keeping the art and practice of design private. Content for the least common denominator may cast a wider net for some quantitative metrics, but over time it erodes the fabric of the art form. Design Democratization made it possible for more people than ever to understand the principals of interior design, but left to their own devices without leadership and guidance, consumers chose the alluring sell of conformity over individualism, commerce over art. It’s not their fault. Blame the parents, not the kids.
AI is not the issue either, but believing in the fallacy that it can threaten design is. The bigger problem is education. We have a generation so removed from humanity that is intrinsic to designing, that they believe artificial intelligence could replace the profession. If AI gathers collective consciousness, it will most likely create more blandness in design, not innovation.
As designer Oliver Furth once shared: “WebMD did not stop patients from going to doctors”. In fact, search results often include “seek medical attention.” AI should only reinforce the authority interior designers possess.
Rather than exist as unwitting victims of circumstance, I encourage professional interior designers to act with more integrity for their future selves, to limit their patience for what they put up with moving forward into this next design era. The moment members of our design community collectively recognize the need to nurture design culture over Design Entertainment, we can ignite a renaissance of profound appreciation for the art and craft of interior design and decoration.
Let’s embrace an Imagination Age, in contrast to our current industry’s misguided focus. Leading by a compass of curiosity, we can rebuild the engine that takes interior design into a positive next horizon.
Thinking for living,
Sean
PS: As I move forward into this year’s projects, I needed to take this time to meditate on where I stand in the current state of the design industry, and where I want to go. I hope this paper will similarly serve you, as a helpful exercise in reflection, and point of departure as you set your own intentions.
Email: info@theculturecreative.com
Website: theculturecreative.com
Follow Sean Yashar on Instagram
Follow The Culture Creative on Instagram
CB2 (2000), West Elm (2002), Pinterest (2010), RH goes public (2012), The Expert (2021).
Design Entertainment: A Y2K-era initiated approach for consumer-facing content, teaching general principals of interior design and decorative arts through edutainment.
My compliments to the Design Leadership Network team, who have been making big strides with educational programming in recent years.
Excellent insights. The desire to make good design accessible to all as opposed to only the wealthy has long created tension. Think William Morris (who wanted it but failed) and the Bauhaus compared to French Art Deco. It’s up to the design industry itself to reward good design as opposed to the “influencer collaborations” industry leaders pursue in an effort to rack up sales that result in work and products that are so often blandly derivative. Interior designers themselves promote the sameness dupe culture with the popularity of remote design and phone consultations. (Eg “The Expert”) Anyone with any knowledge of color theory knows you can’t choose a paint color unless you know the light in the room! Yet designers have flocked to these platforms. Accessibility is laudable in my view but must include foundational education in historical design styles and decorative arts, and not be limited to constant product-hawking and “like grabbing” that you see, even here on Substack.
Omg I wish I had written this - so good!! Two posts ago I also touched on the dupe culture of fashion coming for design, as “fashion people” set their sights on something more interesting and harder to get than their Walmart birkins. And fairs are starting to embrace that world more and more. 2013-19 era for me was such a special time, where one booth at one fair led to the entire world becoming obsessed with millennial pink, for instance, the industry was influenced by emerging design. Now emerging design is hidden by an algorithm of flattened AI rooms being sold to us by big name interior designers (christiane lemieux comes to mind - if that’s not AI I’ll eat my cool new interior design hat).