For some reason we now seem to be rather uncomfortable with patterns. I am reading a book on the Arts and Crafts movement, and it is full of splendid concoctions by William Morris and Charles Voysey. Other art movements seems similarly endowed with a real sense of style and swagger.
Although the culture of today probably has an air of austerity about it, a slightly joyless feeling that we should all be guilty about our crimes against the environment or about the financial excesses that we are currently paying off, there is much to be grateful for. I am perhaps in a lucky position, luckier than many, but it seems to me, that an awful lot of things that I might have longed for a few years ago have now come to pass. In sports, Britain hosted a much admired Olympics, British athletes compete at Wimbledon and in the Tour de France with real panache. The economy is at least on an even keel, a great many businesses are operating well. Politically Britain is coping well with diverse views, there are no riots in the streets, basically the state is operating reasonably well, the celtic fringes are adopting a slightly more socialist tinge, but rather than creating tensions, things are managed with a good humour and tolerance.
But perhaps more than ever, we don’t really seem to have a firm national vision of where we have come from or where we are going. Arts and Crafts was mostly about the past, except about when it was about the utopian future, Bauhaus was about the future, as was modernism. Some movements are about an imagined elsewhere, for example the Victorian Japonisme, or the modern minimalist wabi sabi aesthetic.
But the prevailing taste seems to have no strong vision to it at all. Shopping for clothes, the retailers are differentiated, but no so much so as to be radically different. The surf bum stock from Fat Face is not much different from the outdoors look or the Gap casual, or even terribly far from much of the formal (Charles Tyrwhitt) or country wear. None of it would look terribly out of place in John Lewis, a place which offers a pleasantly bland middle class taste that is unlikely to offend.
An inoffensive functionalism seems to have taken over from taste, we are happy enough to pull wheeled suitcases, wearing clothes from Gap that could be expensive, or could be cheap, you cannot really tell.
I don’t think that taste and fashion should change to celebrate luxury or go all punk. But it should regain some strength of feeling. I like things that show that a degree of effort has gone into something. Things that have a degree of authenticity. Things like living in a converted industrial workshop, while retaining the old fittings, the Drew Pritchard / Salvage Hunters aesthetic of found objects, the hipster delight in the odd and distinctive, fonts that are an optical illusion, the timorous beasties patterns that look all very tasteful until you realise that they are scenes of urban decay.
Perhaps it would be no bad thing if people were to save up for clothes or furniture, designed just for them, rather than buying more and more bland disposable items.
We should perhaps try to care more about a few possessions, rather than care less for very many, and not be so afraid to stand out from the crowd.
