Hardly. Over the centuries, the use of ornament (and its fraternal twin decoration, used here interchangeably) has waxed and waned. Perhaps it’s the association of pleasure with guilt; or of surface beauty with superficiality or even deception, but ornament’s street rep has always been uneven. Understanding the roots of the modern hostility to it, and its survival as an indelible, civilisational instinct — its Deep Design— may allow the modern man and woman an escape from this binary and the burden of history.

Over the centuries, the use of ornament (and its fraternal twin decoration, used here interchangeably) has waxed and waned…Understanding the roots of the modern hostility to it, and its survival as an indelible, civilisational instinct.

It took modernity to bring the argument against adornment to its present position, near the centre of high design discourse. The opposition to it acquired a moral tone by the mid 19th century.

In Great Exhibition of 1851, the world’s first trade fair, the products on display were flayed by reformist critics, and one called out their being “covered with…cornucopiate harvests from the vegetable kingdom.” Many made it to “Examples of False Principles in Decoration”, an exhibit at what became the V&A Museum in London. In 1908, architect Adolf Loos’ enormously influential, and vehement essay, revealingly titled “Ornament and Crime” declared it “a degenerative tendency”, and taking credit, by 1930, for “saving Mankind” from ornament by turning it into “a sign of inferiority”.

There are several strands to the opposition to ornamentation, not always moral, made by design criticism. The age of modern design is also the age of manufacture, implying productivity and efficiency by the economics thinking brought about after Adam Smith. A structural rationalism that emerged in Europe, which stressed standardisation also contributed to opposing ornament. (The French standardised typefaces and tried to geometrise them, for instance). This view makes decoration superfluous, a sign of excess and waste.

Yet the industrial revolution did not erase ornament, for ornament reminds us that a product is special, a sign of a good life. Instead, industry enabled the mass replication of ornament, albeit with some compromise of quality, giving access to ornamented products to classes that did not have them. Today, it’s difficult to conceive the social ordering role that ornament played for millenia in so many cultures—the type of ornament signified status, and regulated the decorations on the houses they built and the clothes they wore, by what are called sumptuary laws. By making ornamentation about money rather than status, industry and capitalism loosened the class grip on ornament.

A structural rationalism that emerged in Europe, which stressed standardisation also contributed to opposing ornament… yet the industrial revolution did not erase ornament, instead it enabled the mass replication of ornament, albeit with some compromise of quality.

In the 20th century, the ideological successors and companions of Loos, like the Bauhaus and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, created the international style. What Loos saw as an impediment to progress and evolution was lifted. An unadorned style became a norm, as standing for a universal notion of good taste. Its moral charter shifted from democratising ornament to seeing it as inauthentic and false.

The International style’s lasting influence created a world where we use ‘clean’ as high design value, almost a design essential. But ask: if ornamentation is a civilisational instinct, how did the unadorned fundamentalism of the International style escape being a bare cupboard, bereft of sensuousness? One answer is that ornamentation, no longer subject to sumptuary laws, nevertheless retained the idea of the sumptuous.

The International style’s lasting influence created a world where we use ‘clean’ as high design value, almost a design essential.

A new sumptuousness, facilitated by media, advertising and architecture, taught us a universal language of perfection. We learned to see beauty in planes of material: the grain of wood; the reflectivity of glass, the polish of steel, the textures of concrete and plastic. As the architect Le Corbusier put it: “Modern decorative art is not decorated.” Again money, not class, decides access. Less signifies luxury, with expensive materials, while ornament occupies a spectrum from middle class domesticity to vulgarity, creating a new, inverted system of class signification.

(A more leftist stance would reject ornament as a conveying a false recreation of a pre-modern ideal, but would be in broad agreement. Perhaps it would replace concrete with brick, ala Louis Kahn’s IIM Ahmedabad building and CP Kukreja’s JNU.)

The modern pushback against the banishment of ornamentation and decoration does not refute all of modernism. It may integrate decoration into structural features, like a building with superfluous non-structural columns. Its use of decoration might be humorous, ironic or camp. Its agenda might to be to promote multiculturalism, or appropriate other cultures. .

In graphic design, the computer makes possible an elaborate visual style that replaces laborious detail: fine lines and elaborate geometries abound. Products enjoy new materials, and techniques. Apple’s laptops feature an aluminium chassis carved from a single block of metal, by water jets. Precision replaces fine workmanship as the source of embedded value in the adorned object, and positions the whole solid as an ornament, rather than just its surface. 3D printers and computer aided visualisation, at any scale, permits the realisation of forms that would have been impossible to make or conceive not some decade ago.

The best way to navigate these waters is to view modern design as a pastiche; a set of containers in which anything can go. Surface decoration and solid three-dimensional form can live in holy incompatibility. All these opens the doors of the mind to decoration. In another way, it may be best to realise that modernity is not a point of arrival or a destination, nor a type of progress, but yet another wrinkle in an unending story.

view modern design as a pastiche; a set of containers in which anything can go. Surface decoration and solid three-dimensional form can live in holy incompatibility. All these opens the doors of the mind to decoration.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Gilt and Pleasure’ in Business Standard, 8 December in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Austere titling identifies the grass-green juice as cold-pressed Mojoberry, wild-sourced, and full of natural antioxidants. Mixed only with spring water, it promotes healthy metabolism, and is plucked by Melgrovian gatherer communities. Like it? Yes, especially when you learn that 1% of gross sales go to keep the intellectual property rights within the forester groups.

Perhaps we have reached a point where it may be incumbent on every food business to locate itself on an ethical spectrum, even if its product is 100% manufactured, and synthesised entirely from the purest chemicals. Deep Design probes the phenomenon and salutes with both a nod and a wink, the sea of new brands that concern themselves with bettering the human condition.

In a sense, it was always thus.

For selling food has always been about health and trust; no purchase or sale has greater consequence. If the last century of food is partly about packaged convenience, then it’s also about its malcontents—processing to enhance taste, texture and shelf-life often achieved at the cost of lower nutrient density.

Health / ethical brands can be viewed as a corrective to modernity, arising from the body of society, using modernity against itself, and running contemporaneously with it. As analogy, consider the human body, which can makes antibodies against pathogens, and hormones to digest a range of foods. It is exquisitely evolved to fight or adapt, and both the stressors and their anti-stressors go back many aeons.

Health / ethical brands can be viewed as a corrective to modernity, arising from the body of society, using modernity against itself, and running contemporaneously with it.

Like the analogy, the opposition has evolved along with the mainstream it seeks to correct. As early as the 1930s, Robert Bootzin (1914-2004, also ‘Gypsy Boots’), an early icon of fitness and natural living in America, lived with other ‘tribesmen’ in caves, wore long hair, and lived off seasonal fruit. A media figure, he likely opened the door to alternate living, California style: yoga, vegetarianism, abstinence and organic food. The title of his cult book “Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat” says it all.

Food processing, new materials and manufacturing (plastics and aluminium), and new distribution formats are by themselves, merely modern enablements. What turns them into the sort of profound, discontinuous change that characterises 20th century modernity is that they serve the large food companies which have changed what food means. Food is no longer local, and we are distanced from the growers; we consume brands and variants, not varieties. It is hardly perishable, tastier than nature could manage and standardised. Its critics call it Big Food.

Accordingly, Big Food’s packaging, and that of its followers, stresses a kind of screaming, base attractiveness, optimised for the shelf, and conveyed through images that strain to detail (un?)natural perfection, apart from corporate reliability.

As with bodily stressors, Big Food is resisted by multiple antigens: local food, slow food, organic food, sustainable farming. Let’s call it Small Food. Acting in concert are new-age spirituality, fair trade, the rise in status of traditional knowledge, multiculturalism, and the public scrutiny that’s a feature of the internet age.

Tying some of these strands together is a lurking distrust of the establishment, comprising government, corporations, media and sections of intelligentsia. It is seen by critics as a cartel of interests and opinion: buy, eat, and be happy. Big Food is compared to Big Tobacco, and even food science is suspected of commissioned research.

These perennial themes suggest the ways in which Small Food packages itself. A whole taxonomy of design approaches offers a rage of antidotes. The folksy strand takes the ideal of artisanship to an delightful extreme: hand lettering and intricate, irregular shapes. They stress their distant, wild, sources, often with carefully enunciated ‘ethnic’ values. Another kind professes to be a medieval or modern apothecary, a herbalist, who has merely labelled his potions in the plainest of packs. Then there are the sciency types, stealing a leaf from the multinational playbook with a pristine, minimal laboratory chic. Mojoberry, in paragraph 1, might well be an amalgam of all of these.

Perennial themes in Heath/Ethical brands — a range of antidotes. The folksy strand: hand lettering, intricate, irregular shapes, the medieval or modern apothecary strand: plain labels, and the science-y kind with a pristine, minimal laboratory chic.

Common to all of these is an ethical approach to identity. Sources are all important to food, but the logic of manufacture, scale and standardisation makes authentic origins hard to claim for Big Food. Small Food exploits this weakness and paints itself as a person or community you can know, and thus claims a kind of personal authenticity. Trader Joe, as a name exploits this: remember that Small Food isn’t necessarily all that small as business.

Each of these design styles implies a claim to innocence of marketing, branding and commercial slickness: the herbalist, scientist and local grower all strive to appear artless. Patanjali’s gauche packaging has been claimed to fuel its stupendous rise; on the other hand, the super successful brand Innocent is an archetype of an extremely artful artlessness.

Patanjali’s gauche packaging has been claimed to fuel its stupendous rise; on the other hand, the super successful brand Innocent is an archetype of an extremely artful artlessness.

It is now possible to look at these healthful heroes with a cynical eye, as the ethical bandwagon seems as full of pretenders as any other. Has the antibody started to resemble a virus, which the immune system cannot detect? If so, Big Food can launch or acquire ethical brands. Great bodies coopt small ones to survive: our cells evolved from simple bacteria.

Bite by bite, sip by sip, Small Food’s positive antagonism might yet strengthen the food trade, making it more transparent, fair and wholesome. At least we can hope: watch those packs carefully.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Big Food, Small Food’ in Business Standard, 17 February, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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