The “cool” in “rustic cool”
SEPTEMBER 16TH, 2016 — POST 256
Go into any coffee shop worth its salt and there’ll be something you’ll notice they all share. More than cold brew or nitro pulled from taps, for the most part these shops will all look the same. Their tables are made from raw and reclaimed wood propped up on naked metal, something like plumbing. Their lights will be affixed with 19th-century-style incandescent bulbs. And a wall of each will be a section of exposed brickwork. The “rustic cool” aesthetic has infected coffee houses the world over — from Reuben Hills in Sydney’s Surry Hills to Stumptown Roasters in Manhattan.
The Verge a few months ago published a feature by Kyle Chayka about Silicon Valley’s export of this aesthetic — with companies like Airbnb and WeWork — and seeks to locate the reason for its ubiquity in tech-driven globalisation. Driven by social media, Chayka argues, taste becomes globalised. Chayka argues:
“If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases.”
However, Chayka doesn’t provide a case for why the specific elements of this aesthetic — Eames chairs and Edison bulbs — become iconic of a globalised taste.
If taste has become globalised across digital spaces, its worth interrogating the aesthetic composition of these spaces. Our online spaces — YouTube, Google, Facebook — look bright and feel light. White backgrounds abound, bright colour pops a norm. If we want to seek out the online equivalent of an Airbnb aesthetic, starting at Airbnb’s website is not a bad idea. Cutesy iconography, proud typography, and flatness: these are the shared aesthetic elements of our online spaces. You need only look at Product Pages — a showcase of renowned tech product websites — to see the varied yet unified instantiations this aesthetic gets.
Compared with our online spaces, retro cool is antithetical. Cleanliness online is weathered offline. Perfect gradients generated by computers are transposed for the natural grain of wood. Every pastel and semi-fluorescent accent colour — from Medium’s green to Airbnb’s pink-red — is swapped out for earth tones in tan leather and the rust orange glow of low-power incandescent light bulbs. Despite being able to make the argument of a globalised, and as Chayka does, gentrified taste, we seem to be after two wildly different things online and offline.
Most evident in the difference between what we seek online and what we seek offline is the place of texture. We’ve long moved past any industrial desire to replicate real-world textures in digital spaces. Apple’s iOS 7 redesign, and Google’s Material Design guidelines, dramatically shifted design trends away from skeumorphism, instead seeking to embrace the implicit “digitality” of digital spaces. That digitality fetishises the sheer perfection capacity of software. The “rounded line” style so popular at the moment is born from the perfection Adobe Illustrator and similar vector programs are able to achieve. The “roundness” doesn’t work hand-drawn. It has to be a computationally perfect semicircle.
Our retro cool obsession is then a necessary remedy to digitality. What unifies the woods, metals, leathers, marbles, ceramics of the retro cool coffee shop is they most manifestly bear the texture of naturality. Marble was conceived of the earth and the countertop of Le Pain Quotidien on Bleeker St bears the evidence of the material’s nativity. But more than that, these materials bear a history. The scratches and stretches of a leather couch, the sensory associations of incandescent light, and the rust on wrought iron stools, these all measure the generational passage of time that digital spaces just don’t bear.
As such, our online and offline are set up as polar inversions of each other. Digital perfection demands natural imperfection. It might be brute countervailing force to negatively reflect our digital spaces in our physical world. But it’s one of the few forces we’ve got.
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