Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: Now, it may shock you to hear that I have never really been a trendy guy.
Speaker: I totally skipped out on bell bottoms and trucker hats, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about trends from the past.
Speaker: And another term for trends from the past is art history.
Speaker: Now, one of the fun questions you can ask about art history is why did the artists do it this way?
Speaker: And why did people like it that way?
Speaker: What made Art Deco happen when it did?
Speaker: Why did everyone go nuts for Roman architecture in the late 18th century?
Speaker: And the answers to those questions sometimes seem to have a lot in common with the answers to similar questions that we could ask about contemporary trends.
Speaker: You know, why did minimalism explode in the 90s?
Speaker: What made everyone fall in love with Scandinavian design?
Speaker: Why did men's brooches start to make a comeback?
Speaker: And actually that last question is especially apropos because today's curious object is a brooch.
Speaker: And joining me to talk about topsy-turvy trends
Speaker: And about this brooch in his collection is Dan Rubenstein.
Speaker: Dan is a design journalist and happens to be a podcaster himself hosting the Grand Tourist podcast where he interviews influential people across the world of design and art and fashion and lifestyle.
Speaker: Dan, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: So it's always such a treat to be on someone else's podcast.
Speaker: So I'm always super excited for this.
Speaker: Are you prepared for some rapid fire questions?
Speaker: I am.
Speaker: I am 100% ready.
Speaker: We'll see about that.
Speaker: What design trend did you see coming before anyone else?
Speaker: Before anyone else?
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: Don't be modest.
Speaker: I would say I'm going to go with brooches.
Speaker: I would say that I got a lot of emails and DMs from people kind of saying, you know, sending me articles from the New York Times saying, you know, that extol the era of the brooch.
Speaker: for gentlemen, whether or not it was, you know, at the Met Gala or what have you, or some award show saying that, you know, I had gotten there first.
Speaker: So I will say that as a sort of fashion design trend, maybe I was a little bit ahead of the curve on that.
Speaker: What was your last international trip?
Speaker: My last international trip was to Milan in April for Milan Design Week and the Salone del Mobile.
Speaker: And I go every year.
Speaker: I've been going since, gosh, something like 2010, 2009 maybe.
Speaker: Okay, this next question may be redundant with that, but what city right now has the most dynamic culture around design and craftsmanship?
Speaker: I'm going to switch gears and say Paris.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Mostly because you mentioned craftsmanship.
Speaker: And I think as much as Milan is the city of design, there's a lot of craftsmanship that still takes place within Paris and the Paris city limits and greater Paris than perhaps Milan does itself.
Speaker: Most of the furniture made in Italy is...
Speaker: made in Northern Italy, but it's not necessarily in the city of Milan.
Speaker: So if I were to say the city that has really a lot of craftsmanship and a sort of spirit of beautiful design, I would say Paris.
Speaker: There's always that Paris is kind of like New York in the sense that a lot of Europeans tell me like, oh, I love New York because you guys still have a shop that sells nothing but buttons in the Garden District.
Speaker: And I think in Paris there are still, you know, there's still that one atelier that does something that no one else really does anymore and they're still kind of chipping away at it, at some craft, at some little bit of expertise or some gallery somewhere.
Speaker: And I think Paris is still a sort of stronghold for all of that to come together.
Speaker: Yeah, although tragically, that famous button store, I think it was called Tender Buttons, actually closed not long ago.
Speaker: So we may be falling off that list.
Speaker: It's the end of the world.
Speaker: Okay, what's your favorite chair?
Speaker: I feel like every design person has to have one, right?
Speaker: I am a design omnivore.
Speaker: I like everything.
Speaker: The longer that I've spent in design, the more agnostic I've become about all different types of design options.
Speaker: People ask me, like, who's your favorite designer?
Speaker: Like, if you could design a house, then who would design it for you?
Speaker: I could live in almost any style of home.
Speaker: I could live in a mid-century Connecticut white box glass house modern home.
Speaker: I could live in a Rococo fantasy.
Speaker: I could live in an English country estate.
Speaker: I could live in a 80s postmodern high-rise New York apartment.
Speaker: I could live through any of it.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: The other factors that affect how I actually live are usually space, my husband, my budget, all of that put together.
Speaker: But yeah, I've covered design in so many different eras now and for so many different publications that I really have grown to appreciate it all.
Speaker: So I can't say that I have a single favorite.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, that's a very diplomatic answer.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: What's an Instagram account that we should all be following?
Speaker: Oh, I'm really obsessed with this.
Speaker: I have no idea who runs it.
Speaker: I don't know anything about it.
Speaker: I just started following them.
Speaker: They don't follow anyone back.
Speaker: So it's very much a mystery to me.
Speaker: It's called Jet Set Classics.
Speaker: And it's nostalgic, ultra classy, escapist worship of wealth.
Speaker: And sometimes it goes very vintage and very bizarre.
Speaker: and sometimes not.
Speaker: And so it's, it's kind of a, it's definitely a sexy mood.
Speaker: And I'm staring at the screen right now.
Speaker: And, you know, there's like a picture of a young Berlusconi, like in a private jet from like the eighties or something.
Speaker: Like it's all very kind of Euro centric wealth with nostalgia, kind of all mixed together, whether it's like a Ferrari or it's a,
Speaker: you know, a classic bistro in Paris from with a photo from the 90s or something like it's it's kind of nostalgic mixed with luxury.
Speaker: What's one book that listeners should read about design history?
Speaker: I'm currently looking around my large volumes of books that surround me every day at home on my wonderful Vitsu shelving, which I recommend anybody who owns a lot of books to convert their library using Vitsu shelving.
Speaker: Let me take a look around here.
Speaker: Oh, God, when you have 5,000 volumes, I can't really say that there's anyone that... I know, I know.
Speaker: I didn't say these were going to be easy questions.
Speaker: They're not easy questions.
Speaker: Oh, I would say one of my favorite design books that I have is The Best of Nest.
Speaker: Nest was sort of a cult classic magazine.
Speaker: It had a short run.
Speaker: It was sort of a revolutionary interior design, you know, shelter title, but it's super bizarre for its time.
Speaker: It had, you know, sort of die cuts, meaning like the, it wasn't just a perfect rectangle.
Speaker: It was, you know, it had all sorts of cuts to it, to the paper.
Speaker: Today, you know, when we look at magazines like, you know, Apartamento that have a very particular look, casual look on things, Nest kind of took...
Speaker: the very polite idea of like an architectural digest home and kind of turned it inside out.
Speaker: This book is, it came out from Fiden a few years ago.
Speaker: It's something everyone should have, especially if you're like an interiors aficionado.
Speaker: What's your favorite museum to visit?
Speaker: The museum that I'd love to visit, being a New Yorker, is still the Met.
Speaker: They're really, to me, everything else is, I love all the museums in New York, but the Met to me is still, if I could only visit one more museum before I die, it would be the Met.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I want to give you a series of fashion and style trends and just get a quick thumbs up or thumbs down pro or con.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: These are truly rapid fire.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Cargo pants.
Speaker: Thumbs down.
Speaker: Sneakers.
Speaker: Thumbs up.
Speaker: Scandinavian furniture.
Speaker: Always thumbs up.
Speaker: Oversized blazers.
Speaker: Thumbs up for ladies.
Speaker: Thumbs down for men.
Speaker: Good nuance there.
Speaker: Skinny jeans.
Speaker: How skinny.
Speaker: That's the eternal question, isn't it?
Speaker: That's my answer.
Speaker: How skinny.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Shabby chic.
Speaker: Boo.
Speaker: And normcore.
Speaker: I would say it's past due.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's goodbye.
Speaker: We loved it, but goodbye.
Speaker: Good riddance.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: One last rapid fire question for you.
Speaker: What was the last object or work of art you saw that gave you goosebumps?
Speaker: So I don't know the name of it, but it's a large painting by Walton Ford from Casmin Gallery that I saw at Tafoff.
Speaker: And Walton is going to be, at the time we were recording this, he's going to be my guest on the podcast next week.
Speaker: And it's just this amazing photo of one sort of big sort of animal probably –
Speaker: I think it's a wolf or another dog with like another animal in its mouth.
Speaker: And it's like super evocative and colorful.
Speaker: And it really just kind of grabs your attention no matter what.
Speaker: And it's just this incredible work that I think kind of speaks to everything that he, that Walton, you know, sort of stands for.
Speaker: And he's having such a moment.
Speaker: And I think his work is really fantastic.
Speaker: Terrific.
Speaker: Well, with that, I will release you from the rapid fire questions.
Speaker: And we will be right back with Dan Rubenstein.
Speaker: And first, I just want to say thank you for listening.
Speaker: I would be really delighted to hear from you, especially if you have ideas for episodes you'd like me to do.
Speaker: Y'all have introduced me to so many curious objects, and I love them all, so please keep them coming.
Speaker: You can email me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: You can find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: And of course, I really appreciate it when you leave a five star rating and a review for the podcast on your podcast app.
Speaker: Someone recently wrote, I've been listening to Curious Objects for several years and always enjoy coming back to hear great stories about beautiful and interesting objects.
Speaker: I'm not a collector of fine things, nor am I an academic, but I always feel like this podcast is meant for anyone that enjoys learning history from things.
Speaker: really warms my heart.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: And it means a lot to hear that you're enjoying the show.
Speaker: These reviews also are a really big help in bringing new listeners to the podcast.
Speaker: So, Dan, I wanted to talk with you about trends because you're very active in the contemporary design world.
Speaker: I'm very active in the antiques world.
Speaker: I feel like there's a cloistering that happens that can be kind of counterproductive.
Speaker: I mean, even the word antique has this legal definition of 100 plus years old.
Speaker: You know, of course, these things weren't antique when they started.
Speaker: In fact, they were very trendy.
Speaker: And you can look at these trends year by year and decade by decade, going back as far as you want.
Speaker: And what's happening with trends today might be a little different, but also maybe not that different from how they've come about in the past.
Speaker: So I thought we could talk about a few different trends and try to connect the past and present in some kind of way.
Speaker: And you suggested a curious object that I think is such a great example of trends layered on top of trends.
Speaker: So start us off by telling us, what is this piece?
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker: So the piece that I wanted to talk about today, and I'm really excited to chat about this with you because I purchase brooches from my own collection.
Speaker: It's never really about the amount of money that they cost.
Speaker: For me, it's all about, are they wearable for me?
Speaker: Am I going to enjoy wearing them for special occasions and things like that?
Speaker: So I tend to pick ones that are a little bit minimal, ones that are not too flashy.
Speaker: And one of the first ones that I bought during the pandemic, during lockdown, I believe it was, and it's a pewter brooch by Jorgen Jensen, who I believe was George Jensen's son.
Speaker: And it kind of looks like a medieval shield of some sort with kind of like a lip around the edges and some
Speaker: very basic kind of, like a motif on it that kind of looks like it could be, to my eyes, like some sort of Viking shield or something like that.
Speaker: I know very little about it.
Speaker: It didn't cost me very much money at all, but it really spoke to me and I do love wearing it.
Speaker: And as you're someone who knows a little bit about silver and that whole era, I was wondering if you knew anything about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, it's not really in my area of specialty precisely, but of course, as a silver person, I do encounter George Jensen silver all the time.
Speaker: And it's such an interesting entree into a conversation about trends because we all know George Jensen silver as this sort of epitome of Scandinavian modernism.
Speaker: It's this incredible simplicity, this geometric
Speaker: mentality.
Speaker: And yet this brooch, which is by the next generation, right?
Speaker: And it's not silver, it's pewter.
Speaker: But it's very different.
Speaker: You know, I totally agree with your assessment.
Speaker: It looks like a Norse shield.
Speaker: And I'm sure that's what it's referencing, which is such a cool thing to put on your clothing, right?
Speaker: And yet it couldn't be a more dramatic departure from the kind of spare, austere lines that you would expect from a piece of George Jensen silver of, you know, 20 years before.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that that just goes to show you that, you know,
Speaker: Even if you have a famous last name in a particular field, time moves on and people are looking for different references.
Speaker: And it's also just like a little bit of a curious bit of history that we know George Jensen, we don't necessarily, people don't know his sons or...
Speaker: other people in his family if you're not a total expert.
Speaker: And I just sort of love it.
Speaker: And a lot of the brooches that I collect just because they're not that valuable.
Speaker: A lot of them come from artists and designers.
Speaker: So many people have worked in jewelry that
Speaker: I don't know much about any of them and every once in a while you get someone that is just sort of kind of forgotten and to me that these brooches are, you know, the ultimate and curious objects because they're small, you're constantly sharing a little work of art with people, which is something that I think is nice because, you know, if you buy a painting or a sculpture, you bring it home, you put it on your wall, but, you know, wearing something like a brooch or any kind of jewelry,
Speaker: People are always able to point it out at a party and kind of say, what is that?
Speaker: Where did you get it from?
Speaker: Who made it?
Speaker: Or they touch it, which they shouldn't.
Speaker: But, you know, it's kind of like art that you share, which I think I kind of find interesting.
Speaker: Is there like a perfect party to wear this brooch to?
Speaker: I like to wear this in more casual situations sometimes with like a denim jacket only because the pewter is not very shiny.
Speaker: It's not very formal looking.
Speaker: But I don't sort of get into the Madeleine Albright mindset of like, the shield has to protect my heart, and so I only go into situations where I need to protect myself, or I don't wear a spider when I'm trying to be predatory or anything like that.
Speaker: I don't wear it when I'm around other rivals and things like that, or what have you.
Speaker: So I don't really prescribe to that sort of Madeleine Albright view of brooches, but her name does come up a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, I would say it's more casual.
Speaker: And I think sometimes it's nice to wear things like a little brooch that's not very ornamental or too fancy for slightly more casual jackets and things like that.
Speaker: I saw Jill Biden the other day walking into lunch, and she was actually wearing a brooch that I wish I had gotten a closer look at, but it looked like an American eagle, a bald eagle in gold clutching a big pearl.
Speaker: And I'm so curious, maybe some listener will know what that piece was.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any question that the brooch has come back in force.
Speaker: And you said earlier that you were really ahead of the curve on that one, which your collection gives a lot of evidence to support.
Speaker: So I'm curious, I mean, what happened?
Speaker: I mean, if we're trying to understand how trends work, like what happened with the brooch trend to make it a trend?
Speaker: I just think it's a matter of like,
Speaker: Jewelry for men has been something that has been evolving for so long.
Speaker: And in the past 10 years, androgyny in fashion has become huge.
Speaker: You see more and more fashion brands being more unisex, trying to blur the lines between genders in fashion and what's appropriate.
Speaker: You see men...
Speaker: you know, holding small purses, you know, all of these things have been kind of, these lines have been blurred more and more and more.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, it's hard for a lot of men to wear jewelry that isn't very expressive.
Speaker: And I think brooches are great because you can just wear a black blazer or you can wear a tuxedo and really, and a watch,
Speaker: And don't have to worry about anything and just put one brooch on it that, you know, maybe your stylist picked for you if you're going to the Oscars or something.
Speaker: And voila, you have jewelry.
Speaker: You know, obviously it's nothing that new because people have been, men have been wearing, if it's not a brooch, it's a medal.
Speaker: Or it's a flag pin or it's whatever.
Speaker: So it's not that hard to wear.
Speaker: They're really easy to wear.
Speaker: And so I think it's a nice point of entry into jewelry, even though I've always been told that watches and the watch world is just jewelry for men.
Speaker: But for those who want to kind of take the extra step, but they don't want to wear rings or things like that, that this is kind of a nice entry point.
Speaker: And to be honest, I don't even remember why I started.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Collecting pins or what?
Speaker: I think I was just looking at different things and then just realized that, wow, if you're collecting something during the pandemic and you're looking at stuff on your phone, pins are great, especially if you have a small New York apartment.
Speaker: You can collect many of them, put them in a shoebox and have dozens and dozens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so you're describing what sounds like a pretty organic process of the bridge sort of emerging because it fits in with larger societal trends with it's a practical thing for a lot of people to start to acquire and to put into use in their wardrobes.
Speaker: I mean, some trends really are organic like that and others feel a little bit more directed.
Speaker: I mean, there are historical examples of, you know, trends that are sort of dictated by authoritarian regimes, right?
Speaker: And so there's sort of the whole range from totally organic to totally inorganic.
Speaker: Look, I mean, on your podcast, you've talked with so many designers and artists who obviously as part of their work, part of their career, they're trying to identify trends or to set trends or to predict trends.
Speaker: I mean, have you found any general rules for how a trend emerges?
Speaker: I think some of the strongest trends in history just started with people being themselves and having a unique look.
Speaker: One person decides that they really love ceramics and they build a beautiful house and then they sort of interpret it in their own way and then it's in some magazine or in some newspaper and then all of a sudden everyone starts copying them.
Speaker: When it comes to trends and how they emerge, like I've never met an artist or a designer that ever talked about, you know, what they were doing was hot at the time and they decided, oh, I'm going to do that too.
Speaker: Like they are all, the reason why I'm talking to them is because they're very well known now and they're very successful.
Speaker: But I think successful people in the world of art and design, whatever they've created kind of came naturally to them.
Speaker: Sometimes that's them being at the right place at the right time in history.
Speaker: But oftentimes it's like from the 30,000 foot view, from a sort of a macro view, you see these trends emerge.
Speaker: But at the micro view, everyone is just kind of doing things that come naturally to them.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I would say from the Grand Tourist, I've interviewed dozens of artists at this point and designers.
Speaker: It's really coming from their own personal experience and then producing something in a specific way.
Speaker: Because the people I have are on the more successful end, they're the people who are copied rather than the other way around.
Speaker: But what I find remarkable is that, and this is only come into focus now that I've interviewed well over 100 people for the podcast,
Speaker: that there's actually way more in common in terms of like people's approach to life and work and career in ways that I didn't expect previously.
Speaker: So you could talk to an architect, a photographer, an artist, and, you know, interior designer or whatever, and kind of pull them into the same room.
Speaker: And there's a lot of commonalities in terms of like how they approach life and how they got to where they are today.
Speaker: That's really interesting.
Speaker: I mean, I think about, so for example, in the fashion world, you know, we hear about trends that are kind of set on the runway, and then, you know, that follow into a retail space the next season, right, or six months later, or a year later.
Speaker: And so in that sense, there is kind of a corporate structure that is, you know, led by designers and by a multitude of other people who come together to try to create something appealing, something fashionable, something stylish.
Speaker: And then it's kind of maybe a chicken or egg situation, but eventually that filters into the public market.
Speaker: And so people who know, who are watching the runway can kind of see what the trend is going to be.
Speaker: So it sort of raises this question about, for me, about whether trends sort of happen top down or bottom up, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Now, you've just described the idea of independent artists sort of working according to their own impulses and their own sort of creative interests.
Speaker: But if I think about historic trends, like in the antiques world, for example, there might be a wave, right, of interest in, say, you know, if we think of high Baroque style, right, which is very popular in the 17th century, but then it comes back in the Rococo period in the middle of the 18th century.
Speaker: Is that organic?
Speaker: Or is that because Thomas Chippendale published the
Speaker: the director in 1754 and everybody loved his work and started emulating him.
Speaker: I mean, how much of this is sort of driven by individual creativity and impulse and how much of it is sort of creators reacting to the spaces that they're living in?
Speaker: I would say that the only thing I would add, these are all valid questions.
Speaker: I would say what I would add to that is there's a kind of a wisdom of crowds going on.
Speaker: No one creative work, whatever it is, becomes successful on its own.
Speaker: So, you know, we talk about music and we talk about the Beatles, right?
Speaker: So yes, the Beatles themselves, like they are the ones that created the sound.
Speaker: It's just a limited number of them in a room, in a studio making an album.
Speaker: But we also have to not forget that there was probably someone at a radio station who decided to start playing some of the early ones.
Speaker: There is a record producer.
Speaker: There was a lawyer that got them the right contract at the right time.
Speaker: There was, you know, there is so much else going on around any sort of creative person.
Speaker: So in the design world, you have a designer who can design anything, right?
Speaker: Like let's take Philippe Starck.
Speaker: He can design furniture.
Speaker: He can design a lamp.
Speaker: He can design a boat.
Speaker: He can design a pen.
Speaker: He can do anything.
Speaker: But he has a huge studio.
Speaker: And of course, we always forget for a lot of artists in history, you forget that a lot of them had lots of help.
Speaker: It's not just one person.
Speaker: But there's like the brand, there's the marketing person, there's someone in sales that says, you know what, we need a chair.
Speaker: Can we get someone to design a chair before they even get to Philippe Stark?
Speaker: There's a brief that they might give to the designer.
Speaker: There's once the designer introduces the piece that maybe they worked on
Speaker: that piece with engineers to make it feasible, there were press that saw things that pushed it forward.
Speaker: Like, I think sometimes we have to remember that creativity and trends and like the way in which we kind of like live our lives aesthetically and culturally, it's, we sometimes give too much credit to just to one creator, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And with the podcast, yes, I'm the interviewer.
Speaker: I'm the commonality between all of my episodes.
Speaker: But for 99% of them, it's really not about me at all.
Speaker: It's always about the guests.
Speaker: The guest makes all of the decisions.
Speaker: They don't make all the decisions, but they're the ones creating 90% of the content.
Speaker: I'm just editing what they're giving me.
Speaker: And I can tell you, like after listening to so many people, so many really famous people can tell you like, this person saw my paintings and gave me my first show when no one else would.
Speaker: And those people sometimes are the ones you could say they created trends, not necessarily just the creator.
Speaker: And I think that's what makes our current moment in culture kind of fascinating is that we now have social media and so we rather than gatekeepers and we have to ask ourselves, is this sort of like the wisdom of the viral crowd, is that better than the individual gatekeeper who discovered someone and with one flick of their wrist make someone's career by giving them a show or what have you?
Speaker: rather than some people who are just famous for being huge on social media through some magic invisible hand of the market.
Speaker: So I think that's what's kind of interesting today.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and of course, how much of that power is now vested in the mysterious all-powerful algorithm?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Which determines what we're seeing in the first place.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So it's, you know, it's something that is constantly evolving.
Speaker: But I think we're in uncharted territory in terms of like,
Speaker: art and design and culture and how all of this is now being dictated in ways that we just never had before in civilization.
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Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: So I wanted to pick your brain about a couple of specific trends and we'll sort of see where we get with these, but just to have a couple of examples that we can point to and think about in the terms that we've been talking about.
Speaker: And the natural place to start for me, because I'm coming out of the antiques world, is minimalism.
Speaker: which is maybe the trend that has most infuriated antiques dealers above and beyond any other trend in history, because minimalism is almost by definition antithetical to their trade.
Speaker: And that's partly because, you know, we think about a lot of antiques as being very fussy, but of course, not all antiques are fussy.
Speaker: They're very simple geometric antiques as well.
Speaker: But if you're really embracing the idea of minimalism, it means fewer pieces.
Speaker: It means sparser rooms.
Speaker: It means, you know, less for an antique dealer to sell you.
Speaker: So it's bad for business.
Speaker: But that trend and all the hay that was made out of that seems to have kind of petered out.
Speaker: It's maybe been replaced by a reactionary...
Speaker: a kind of maximalism um although now i'm not sure if that's even really in vogue anymore it's i i don't feel like i have my finger very well on the pulse of this but there it does seem to me over the last couple of decades to have been a move generally speaking toward minimalism and generally speaking back out of it and i wonder if you think first of all if that's an accurate
Speaker: assessment.
Speaker: And, you know, if you have any intuition about what's really underlying that movement.
Speaker: I would say that sort of trends are largely dying more and more in terms of interiors and how people live.
Speaker: I think we're kind of almost post-trend at this moment, because if you want to set out to design a home, right, in this, let's say you did it in the 70s,
Speaker: The sources that you had available to you were antiques dealers that were local, the brands that sold furniture in your city or in your region.
Speaker: And your inspiration came from like one of three sources, right?
Speaker: You may have like, I don't know, Architectural Digest, the New York Times and whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Today, you have not just social media and an endless scroll of inspiration, but this idea of to the trade only is kind of largely dead at this point.
Speaker: The modern era of international trade and being able to go on a phone and buy something on a brooch from China.
Speaker: some auction house in Belgium and have it sent to you overnight from via FedEx is like a totally new phenomenon in history.
Speaker: And so you kind of can do whatever you want.
Speaker: There is no restriction on what you can do and how you can do it and where you get your stuff from.
Speaker: However, all that being said, like –
Speaker: I think now we're, we kind of had this maximalism moment.
Speaker: Now we're kind of coming back to center a little bit.
Speaker: Most of the homes that I see that I think are popular on Instagram are not minimal, not maximal.
Speaker: They're not, we're not, we're not all trying to be Renzo Monjardino anymore.
Speaker: Like we're, it's somewhere in the middle.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: I know a lot of young designers, interior designers, especially in New York, you know, I've interviewed many of them and they all mention, you know, Jean-Michel Franck in that era of sort of deco and where it's collecting was strong, but it wasn't too fussy, but it wasn't too minimal.
Speaker: It was somewhere in the middle, somewhere in between.
Speaker: And I think that's sort of striking a chord with people.
Speaker: It's more about people want to be able to touch on anything.
Speaker: I can say that a lot of interior designers want to do minimal anything.
Speaker: Architects always want everything to be super minimal and interior designers want things to be as maximal as possible because that's how they make their money off of percentages of what goes on.
Speaker: So I don't think minimalism will ever truly be there, but yeah,
Speaker: You know, I also think there is something to the pandemic and to the way we live our lives now when we're at home a lot more than we used to be.
Speaker: And it's very hard to raise kids or run a podcast from your home if everything around you is very uncomfortable and very austere.
Speaker: In the past decade, we've seen a lot of people returning to cities and not necessarily embracing a sort of suburban life anymore.
Speaker: Instead, we're kind of in this moment of the second home, right?
Speaker: Where sometimes the first home that people buy is actually a second home, not a primary residence.
Speaker: So I think all of these things have this sort of effect on, on how people choose to live.
Speaker: And I don't think it's about, I don't think it's possible really.
Speaker: It's very rare for me to find a home that's like truly minimal, um, anymore.
Speaker: Uh, mostly because let's face it, like real estate in cities are very expensive.
Speaker: They're small.
Speaker: It's hard to have own everything if you need to put it in a small space.
Speaker: So I would say we're, we're kind of post trend on that.
Speaker: Uh, uh,
Speaker: One of the problems we have in design is we don't have enough words to describe things.
Speaker: We keep using words like minimalism and maximalism.
Speaker: And it's really hard for us to really describe moments that we're in.
Speaker: And there used to be a time where every 10 years you had a new trend and it had a formal name because someone gave it a name.
Speaker: And we could all stick to that for a decade and then move on.
Speaker: But now there's so many trends out there, no one even bothers to name them anymore.
Speaker: And there's no authority in terms of who gets to name what.
Speaker: So that's interesting because I've sometimes thought, well, we have these major art historic periods that we think about.
Speaker: I mean, Belle Epoque or Art Nouveau or Art Deco or Neoclassical, Rococo, what have you.
Speaker: And a lot of these terms, they feel like the sort of thing that art historians have come up with after the fact to describe something analytically.
Speaker: And so I've sort of assumed that as we move far enough into the future, you know, we'll have art historians coming up with names for the trends that we're experiencing now.
Speaker: But you're saying maybe we're actually at a point where the vocabulary is just not sufficient to the task anymore.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And I also think the way, I think locality has a lot to do with it.
Speaker: You know, I remember when I was working at Surface Magazine, we were talking, it was, everything was about locality, Mexican design, Brooklyn design, London design, English design, like whatever it was,
Speaker: It was always very localized to a culture, to a city, to something like that.
Speaker: Or to the faraway land of Brooklyn, as it was like such a moment when there was such a thing as Brooklyn design.
Speaker: Today, like the only space that matters is sort of cyberspace.
Speaker: We're much more likely today for wealthy people today, or even just upper middle class people today, to have one home in one country and we're in one state and one in another.
Speaker: And so people of wealth, especially in the United States, they have a lot of wealth and there's this explosion of wealth.
Speaker: So when you have a lot of money and you have a lot of homes,
Speaker: the number of homes is for the upper one-tenth of 1% is really high.
Speaker: So you don't really have to think as much, especially if you're hiring an interior designer, because nothing seems final to you.
Speaker: Nothing you have to really truly live with if you have three or four homes, right?
Speaker: It's just however suits the mood of wherever you are.
Speaker: So if you're a New Yorker and you have a place in Paris and you have a place in New York and you have a place in the Caribbean, it's sort of like
Speaker: you're bringing your tastes to all these different places through these interior designers.
Speaker: Interior designers used to be much more localized to the region where they work, but now people fly all over the place to do things.
Speaker: And so that's just as like another nail in the coffin when it comes to trends.
Speaker: Like I could show you three apartments and one will be in London and one will be in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the other one will be maybe in Tokyo.
Speaker: And it may be kind of hard to tell the difference between some of them.
Speaker: Or way harder now than it was maybe 30 years ago.
Speaker: You know what that reminds me of a little bit?
Speaker: Having a large collection of brooches.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You can select one for whatever event.
Speaker: You don't have to be wedded to the same thing every day.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: You can try things on for size.
Speaker: pick your own trend for this particular evening.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And today when designing a home, you can really kind of do whatever you want.
Speaker: And you really, if you want to live in a home that is 100% 18th century Americana, like you can, like it's not that hard today to kind of embrace that.
Speaker: Whereas our parents, that wouldn't be possible for them.
Speaker: Well, let me try one more trend on for size and see what you have to say about this one, eclecticism.
Speaker: And so this is an idea, you know, the kind of, you know, mixing and matching of diverse materials that, you know, becomes very popular.
Speaker: I think of this in the context of the great Kunstkammerz of the 17th century, where there's this effort to find the most interesting things from all over the world and put them in the same room or even in the same cabinet.
Speaker: And then that sort of loses a little bit of steam for a while, but it picks back up again in the Victorian period and then maybe lose a steam again.
Speaker: But today, I mean, it's such a trope, the idea of, you know, designing a room that has both new and old.
Speaker: Sort of that whole idea has been so popular for so long, I feel like it's almost jumped the shark.
Speaker: I mean, you've got art fairs now like Tfaf that in New York last month presented this incredible array of modern and contemporary galleries, but then also a handful of antiquity galleries.
Speaker: And they've been doing that for a number of years now.
Speaker: And that's, I think, a really sort of extreme form of eclecticism that they seem to think works really well and the fair goers seem to think works really well.
Speaker: Are we in a, an eclectic moment now?
Speaker: That's really hard to say.
Speaker: I, I view it through a design writer's lens.
Speaker: So I can tell you that when we don't know what to call it, we just call it eclectic.
Speaker: Like we don't know what, if we, if something is just spare, spare, we just call it minimal.
Speaker: If it's something that has just a lots of stuff in it, we call it maximalism.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I can't say that we're living in an eclectic era, but I think if we're post-trend, right, then it kind of might be closer to eclectic rather than to minimal or maximal or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, it's one of the problems when you're kind of in a post-trend era is that like...
Speaker: one man's eclectic is another man's maximal or whatever.
Speaker: Like it's very, we sort of don't have enough words to describe what we're doing or what we're looking at.
Speaker: And so sometimes we just sort of use these terms because you don't really have a way of describing things.
Speaker: Or we're all used to talking about design in the way that we learned about art in high school.
Speaker: So we're used to learning about art where like first there was the Renaissance and then came Romantics and then was Impressionism and then was Modernism and then was whatever.
Speaker: And we could say like these paintings were this era and these statues were that era and everything has a little label to it.
Speaker: And then when we get into your design, you have like period art deco and modern mid-century modernism and post-modernism.
Speaker: And we're used to giving everything to fit in a neat little box.
Speaker: And then when it comes to this world now where our eyeballs are just sort of like
Speaker: inundated with images of interiors and rooms and architecture and products and objects, we're like, oh, I got to give this a label.
Speaker: And then we just kind of always wind up with calling it minimal, modern, maximal, eclectic.
Speaker: But like really words have started to fail us.
Speaker: And so we only, in English, we only have like three or four.
Speaker: And so that's, we kind of keep thinking about
Speaker: interiors like we think about art.
Speaker: And really it's not a great thing to do because it's just sort of, A, it's kind of irrelevant, but it's also the words don't really have any power or specificity like we did growing up, you know, maybe learning about the art world through a slideshow or someone's saying like, this is impressionism.
Speaker: This is romanticism.
Speaker: This is, you know, early Renaissance, you know, you go into the medieval wing of any museum and it's all, you know, small paintings of Jesus with gold on it.
Speaker: Like it's all the same.
Speaker: They're all kind of using the same techniques.
Speaker: They're all using the same materials.
Speaker: So words are kind of failing us.
Speaker: And I think I can speak for all design writers.
Speaker: We don't always have the right words to use.
Speaker: And it kind of makes these questions come up over again and again.
Speaker: Is it sort of, is it liberating to be in a post-trend world where you're not constrained by the mores that are sort of shared across your slice of society?
Speaker: I mean, art demands constraints, right?
Speaker: You have to have a set of rules to work within in order to express your creativity.
Speaker: I mean, are we just totally untethered and adrift far from shore?
Speaker: How do you see that?
Speaker: I think we're living in a personality economy where it's really the people that are driving the conversation, not the objects.
Speaker: The people are unique and the people's personalities and the way they communicate is what's getting transmitted, not how we transmitted all of these trends in the past.
Speaker: So I wrote Kelly Wurstler's last book, right?
Speaker: I couldn't tell you exactly what box she fits into with her interior design, but people just have to say Kelly Wurstler.
Speaker: Like it's her, it's her and only her.
Speaker: So all of the designers have a very unique background.
Speaker: outlook to their designs because we live in an era where everyone can kind of pull from anything.
Speaker: So, and this extends to media too.
Speaker: Like what's really popular in media is not necessarily a magazine like my old house and garden that I used to work for in the US, which no longer exists.
Speaker: But, you know, magazines that are like personality, they're driven by personalities.
Speaker: They're not necessarily driven by interior design and architecture magazine.
Speaker: It's very kind of like
Speaker: We're talking about people and social media and it's very personality driven.
Speaker: So I think that kind of is a big factor.
Speaker: Well, I have to say as an antiques guy, that actually feels very encouraging because if you want something that has personality and that can communicate personality and capture it, express it.
Speaker: you know, surely you want something ancient, something, something with that character, you know, something different from anything that anybody else can have, because there's only one of them.
Speaker: Yeah, you and I have talked about this in the past.
Speaker: I think what some of the great dealers now, it's not always about what you have, but how you present it.
Speaker: And I think that a lot of the design galleries and antiques dealers and...
Speaker: this is where a lot of the disciplines are starting to merge together, right?
Speaker: It's really about how you package and present and create a narrative around what you're showing.
Speaker: It's not just an object by itself in a white box, right?
Speaker: It's always about the sort of
Speaker: the narrative behind everything and how you're presenting them, that is part of your person, that is obviously comes from your personality.
Speaker: And that creates, that's what you're selling.
Speaker: You're not always just selling the object on its own.
Speaker: And when you wear that Jensen brooch to a party, you know, you're wearing both a piece of jewelry and a fashion accoutrement, but you're also wearing a ready-made story.
Speaker: And when someone asks you about it,
Speaker: You can pull that out and say, you know, there's something really interesting behind this.
Speaker: It's, you know, part of me.
Speaker: It's part of my biography.
Speaker: Now it's all about why things express your own point of view or what you saw in the art and how it connects to your own personality rather than just tell a story signifying how worldly you are or how wealthy you are, your status.
Speaker: It's now just reflecting your own personality.
Speaker: Well, Dan, before I let you go, any advice for listeners who might be thinking about putting together a brooch collection?
Speaker: be prepared to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of really awful tacky things, uh, in, in, on the apps.
Speaker: I use invaluable myself, uh, to, to peruse various different auctions, but, uh, yeah, be prepared to kind of find a bunch of stinkers, uh, before you kind of land on something.
Speaker: Sometimes you have to buy them in a group and then one is good and the rest you never wear.
Speaker: Um, but, um,
Speaker: it's great.
Speaker: You know, when this whole podcasting game is over, maybe I'll start my own, my own collection of brooches.
Speaker: Um, and maybe you could be my first client.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Something to look forward to.
Speaker: Well, Dan Rubensian, thanks so much for joining me on Curious Subjects.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited by Julian Minerva and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
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