The Sameness Of Things — By Paul Goldberger

• April 6, 1997

At the San Francisco headquarters of Williams-Sonoma, Gary Friedman operates what amounts to a mass-market taste laboratory. Several dozen designers and buyers work here, surrounded by vases and chairs and picture frames and glasses and clocks, charged with turning the things they see in the world into objects they can sell through the company’s various holdings, which include Hold Everything and Pottery Barn. It is the opposite of alchemy: money is made not by rendering each object more valuable but by rendering it less valuable and less rare, so that it can be owned by anybody.

‘’We travel the world, looking for inspiration,’’ Friedman says. ‘’Then we edit it down to what we think is most appropriate for our customer. But it’s what we like — we are all the customer.’’ Friedman, who is the chief merchandising officer, takes his buyers and his product development people to places that he thinks will inspire them. He flew them all to South Beach in Miami to see Philippe Starck’s Delano hotel, for example, which led to the increased presence of whiteness in the Pottery Barn’s spring product line: from cutting edge to mass market in a couple of years.

‘’We sit down around a table and talk about what we see, what’s happening in design, what any of us has seen that’s excited us,’’ he says. ‘’Then we try to boil that down to a target. Someone will say a modern thing is happening. Someone else will interrupt to say, ‘But everyone still cares about being soft and comfortable.’ And we will distill all of that into a general product direction.’’ Eventually this ‘’general product direction’’ becomes a set of products, organized in compatible combinations that are photographed for the catalogue and displayed in the stores in more or less the same arrangements, crafted to enhance their allure.

If all of this sounds slightly, well, corporate, it is supposed to. Gary Friedman and the Pottery Barn — along with his major competitors

like the Chicago-based Crate and Barrel and clothing merchants like the Gap and J. Crew — have raised standardization to a high art. Together, these companies have brought to the mass marketplace a level of design quality that once existed only at a high price.

Nothing, of course, comes free: the cost of this achievement is that while everything may be better, it is also increasingly the same. The khakis and sweat- shirts the Gap sells in Dallas shopping malls are the same as the ones it purveys along Columbus Avenue in Manhattan — in nearly identical stores. Perhaps even more to the point, they are not so different, esthetically speaking, from what’s available at Benetton or J. Crew.

Call it the ubiquitous middle-class American taste culture. It manifests itself in everything from the white-slipcovered sofas of Crate and Barrel to the solid-colored polo shirts of A/X Armani Exchange; its symbolic church is the Gap, whose president, Mickey Drexler, may have had a greater impact on the quality and look of design in the last 20 years than anyone else in the United States. Drexler is the man who transformed the Gap from a chain of stores selling jeans to teen-agers into what is probably the most effective mass-market design engine in the world. Its volume is not the largest in American clothing retailing — the Limited and the TJX Companies, parent of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, take in more than the Gap’s $5.3 billion in annual sales. But the Gap, with 1,682 stores in the United States, has been the driving force behind the shift in American taste toward the simple.

‘’I have never understood why certain things in America can’t be available to everyone,’’ says Drexler, 52, a short, wiry man who combines the enthusiasm of an undergraduate with the passion of a missionary. Sitting in his San Francisco office, dressed in his usual Gap bluejeans, a white Gap T-shirt and a striped Hermes dress shirt, he looks out at the Bay Bridge and explains that he envisions the Gap not just as a purveyor of clothing but also as a brand name that can be used to sell design to the masses.

Indeed, the Gap, along with its upmarket cousin Banana Republic and its new low-priced brand Old Navy, throws itself into standardization with almost military enthusiasm. The Gap stores — sleek combinations of pale wood, white walls and brushed aluminum — are, like the clothes, modern and yet relatively classic, unambiguous and easy to look at. Warmth and accessibility come before innovation and challenge, managing the neat trick of appearing to celebrate casualness and spontaneity even as they honor continuity.

A directive from headquarters to Banana Republic store managers, for example, presents in photographs an environment for ‘’Men’s Relaxed Style II’’ and reads in part: ‘’The shirt cabinet has been formatted so that every other shelf houses a bright color program, with the blue shirt styles housed on the shelves in between. Placing the colored shirts in the same order on each shelf reinforces the color expression and creates a very straight-forward presentation.’’

Mass marketing has been transformed from a business that depends on sheer volume into one driven, like high-end clothing sales, by image: buy the T-shirt, get the life style. What was once communicated by, say, highly styled photographs of beautiful young people in rural settings in the J. Crew catalogue is now also communicated by the ambiance in the store. Ralph Lauren pioneered this approach in 1986 when he transformed the Rhinelander Mansion into a temple of retailing designed to evoke an aristocratic upbringing. The one-woman conglomerate of Martha Stewart plays a part in selling an identity along with the goods, as do designers like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. But what stores like Urban Outfitters, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn and the Gap have done is to create a taste machine, a veritable assembly line of esthetics that knocks off both high-end, innovative design and eccentric, subculture notions, spitting out objects that appeal to people with sophisticated taste but that are also priced within the reach of a huge segment of the population.

Twenty years ago, there was little consistency and almost no design quality to moderately priced clothing; you pushed your way through the messy racks at Kmart or Wal-Mart or made do with the stock of a local merchant, and the best that could be said was that it was cheap. If there was any style at all, it was the kind that had trickled down slowly, getting more garish with each step. In household goods, it was the same story: dowdy imitations of traditional objects, and the more fake-wood-grain laminate, the better. Modern design was seen as something rarefied; stores like Design Research in Cambridge, Mass., and New York, or Bonnier or Georg Jensen in New York sold modern furniture to a small, upscale audience, while progressive design was sold almost exclusively through special showrooms open only to decorators. The whole system seemed organized to prove the point that high design was the province of an elite.

In one sense, the new taste factories represent the triumph of the long-frustrated dream of the Bauhaus, which was that modern design would be available to everyone, and would erase, as it were, class distinctions. That dream didn’t have a chance in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when the Bauhaus first began to bring modern design to the German public, but ended up producing expensive objects of limited appeal. And it didn’t happen in the 40’s and 50’s, either, as mass-marketing expanded its reach, but not enough to bring good design to a broad public.

But the 1960’s brought stores like Azuma in New York, whose brightly colored plastic and rattan modules seemed to merge a modernist utilitarianism and counterculture breeziness, perfect for college dorm rooms and starter apartments. The bigger and longer-lasting Pier 1 began importing examples of modern design, bringing bentwood rockers and Indian print pillows to market cheaply, just as places like the Door Store and Workbench began selling imitation Marcel Breuer dining chairs or bentwood Prague chairs to baby boomers eager to show that they were no longer undergraduates.

It took the convergence of several trends — homogenization, mass communication and the arrival of a new, more visually sophisticated young professional class — to make design marketable in the way that it has become today. Now, class distinctions are pretty much besides the point: the moment I realized that the Gap was truly a broad social and cultural phenomenon was when I heard Brooke Astor tell someone that it was her favorite place in New York to shop.

The consumers who are now in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s share an esthetic that brings them toward things like black T-shirts and khakis and (except as a kitsch exercise) away from television sets with fake-wood Formica casing, ‘’Mediterranean’’ kitchen cabinets or avocado-colored refrigerators. They take their visual cues from advertising, magazine layouts, CD covers, movies — all orchestrated by itinerant stylists who serve as the messengers of what is cool, hip and appropriately ironic. The well-oiled design machine then cranks out facsimiles of crumbly Ionic columns (to use as TV or plant stands), rotary-style phones with touch-tone pads (for a faux-40’s film-noir effect) and other design accents suggesting a critical ‘’eye.’’ The machine has no allegiance to any particular style, and its vigor and longevity lie specifically in its pre-emptive adaptability: no trend is too extreme or idiosyncratic for it to co-opt.

Sir Terence Conran saw much of this coming in 1977, when he opened his first Conran’s as the baby boomers were hitting their 30’s. Though his American stores were not nearly as sophisticated as his Habitat stores in England, the idea still worked, at least for a while, and surely set the stage in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s for Crate and Barrel, Ikea (whose vast, blue-and-yellow stores combined European design with the American superstore concept) and the various outposts operated by Williams-Sonoma. Every one of these has become a brand name, selling a kind of cozy minimalism that is far from the cutting edge but consistently high in quality.

But there’s a downside, connected to the global homogenization of products and culture and shared with McDonald’s, USA Today and Starbucks: the stuff may be good but it ain’t special. As the floor of design quality is raised, the ceiling comes down a bit, too. Everything seems more and more the same, wherever you are. Eccentric and idiosyncratic things fill the shelves of these mass stores, but they have been devalued by their very accessibility. The truly special and inventive is harder and harder to find, unless you are very, very rich or have lots of time to look. Since the new common denominator is high, maybe it doesn’t matter much. Still, we pay the price in a gradual but very real loss of individual variation: our houses and our wardrobes, like our entertainment, become part of mass culture, wherein we all increasingly consume and display the same thing.

Choice — the most bewildering thing to the consumer — is rendered magically simple. Everything looks (and is) acceptable, and almost everything goes with everything else. The white shirt goes with the sweater, which works with the khakis, which look fine with the denim shirt, all of which sits nicely on the slipcovered sofa next to the forged-iron coffee table, which looks good beside the metal picture frame and the brushed-metal lamp.

All merchants edit; the merchants of the new mass-taste culture edit especially heavily. They are like small boutiques where the owner’s taste is the chief attraction — only here the taste is generic and the boutique is a multimillion-dollar business operated worldwide. There was a time when good taste was something earned, something that signified a worldliness born of education and travel. These stores offer a shortcut.

‘’One of our home accessories buyers found a pocket watch in a London flea market, and she had this marvelous idea to turn it into a bedside clock,’’ says Friedman. ‘’So we designed a stand and found a manufacturer willing to make the clock in a big size and bring the whole thing to market for $29. Now we’ve sold thousands of them. Who else could do that?’’

Friedman picks up a beaded-shade lamp. ‘’I’ve always loved these, and I wanted to buy something like this for my house but it turned out to cost $800. So I went to our lamp buyer and I said I have a challenge for you, you are going to be the first person in the world to bring a lamp like this to people at a price they can afford. The buyer found a factory in India that made beaded emblems for British school blazers. One of our designers had the brilliant idea to do a modern base that works just right.’’ The lamp, with a handsome cast-metal base, now sells for $129.

‘’It took a while, though,’’ Benno Duenkelsbuehler, one of Friedman’s lieutenants, says. ‘’This is the first beaded shade they produced’’ — he holds up what looks like a green Slinky — ‘’and when it came I was totally depressed.’’

The failed lamp has no place in the Pottery Barn, of course, but neither does the eccentricity it represents. That’s the sad thing: that as uniformity becomes more and more what stores are selling — uniformity of presentation as well as uniformity of merchandise — a kind of high-level blandness begins to take over. The beaded lamp is a lovely little thing, and more power to Pottery Barn for letting us all have it. But it is now a mass-market object, no longer capable of providing a spark of original magic in a room.

Is there such a thing as too much good taste? It’s easy to think this is exactly what has happened in the retail world. You begin to yearn for some off-note, something wrong, something even a bit vulgar, just to show individual sensibility.

Paradoxically, these stores often market themselves as vehicles for creative expression: shop at the Gap and be yourself, buy your furniture at Pottery Barn so that you can discover the real you. But is the real you quite so much like the real me? Somehow I doubt it. Truly creative design has almost always come from breaking molds or finding new patterns, from someone doing something different from what has been done before. My house isn’t supposed to look like your house. After we both finish shopping at the Pottery Barn, however, it probably will.