What Is Beautiful Now?

Beyond the fashionable surface

A room can be photographed beautifully and still be unpleasant to inhabit. A chair can make a striking silhouette and punish the person who sits in it. A jacket can appear effortless precisely because somebody else’s difficult work has been kept out of view. Beauty becomes more interesting when it has to survive use.

This is an editorial proposition, not the result of a survey of designers: the beautiful object is one whose appearance, purpose and consequences can be discussed together. A pleasing surface is a beginning. It is not the whole judgement.

Three tests for a lovely thing

First, ask what happens when it meets a body. Does the handle fit a hand? Can the room accommodate someone who moves differently? Does the garment allow its wearer to breathe, work and sit? Good design notices people whose needs are easily left outside the photograph.

Second, ask what happens over time. Some materials acquire a wonderful patina; others merely peel. Can a worn part be replaced? Does the maker explain how to care for it? A thing designed to remain useful has a different kind of elegance from a thing designed to become last season’s embarrassment.

Third, ask whose skill is present. Naming the craftsperson, workshop or designer changes an anonymous purchase into a relationship with work. It also makes a claim of quality easier to examine.

A different vocabulary of taste

These tests do not demand that everything be beige, austere or expensive. Delight matters. So do colour, surprise, excess and the ridiculous object that makes an otherwise serious room laugh. The question is whether the pleasure remains once the initial novelty has passed.

Choose one thing you already own and describe why it has stayed. Its proportions? Its useful weight? A memory? That explanation is a more revealing account of contemporary beauty than another list of products to buy.