Hoes for Midcentury Modern
“We’re all hoes for Midcentury Modern,” or so I was told by a designer friend from RISD right before the world shut down. Her 200 square feet in the corner of a downtown Boston filing cabinet bore this out — all three pieces of furniture looked stolen from the set of “Mad Men.” At the time I assumed it’s just what happens when you give a consultant’s salary to a Millennial who credibly has taste, but after once looking at Craigslist while trying to furnish a Manhattan apartment, it’s really slapped me in the face. We Millennials are — to be crass — hoes for MCM (as it’s inevitably abbreviated.)
Why? I guess on one hand, something had to come into style. The friendly proprietor of the antique store across the street insists that it’s been in vogue since about the year 2000, when moneyed kids coming of age decided to revolt against the weird plastic 80s objects their parents decorated with. Matthew Weiner created “Mad Men” to capitalize on the retro appeal, not the other way around.
MCM is everywhere. I know that my weird Catholic friends post on social media about how they wish it were still 1959, but that always struck me as Reaganist triumphalism and it’s really not just them. New York Times real estate listings show off model homes that are decked out in those curvy geometric Viennese-cafe-looking chairs whose backs are only high enough to brace your waist. My touchy progressive (and even socialist) friends will confess that they can’t think of any other way to be “in” these days, and felt that they had to “resign” themselves to the style. Wayfair, the hot e-commerce player, has followed the Craigslist hoopla and their catalog is filled with the tag “MCM.” Every real-adult office building in New York City has restored its lobby to (modulo pandemic) party like it’s 1959.
It’s also personally appealing. As I — effectively a salaried consultant — put together my own apartment, a few explicitly MCM pieces included, I definitely felt a certain vibe. I felt like Milton Friedman just arriving in San Francisco. I felt like I should be drinking espressi with men in suits and talking about how the new report in the Wall Street Journal would affect our investment decisions. Like, “wow, I’ve become a thinking man whose thoughts can give people livelihoods.” I had tried very hard to avoid Wayfair and to instead collect used wood antiques, and my roommate had found a cheap Persian carpet that really tied the room together. We got a fruit bowl and an art deco bar cart and I began to teach myself tiki mixology. The goal was to escape from IKEA hell and have something that could possibly be a statement beyond “I have lots of plants and no life.” It got so, well, midcentury, that we had to get a large Velvet Underground poster to prove that we weren’t stodgy.
Well, the Velvet Underground reference brings one to free-associate also to “Fight Club”. The scene where Edward Norton flips through his mail-order catalog and a beautiful postmodern pastiche materializes around him, price tags included; There’s your end-of-century ennui! Maybe the MCM craze is a reaction to those glass bowls with asymmetrical bubbles in them so you know they’re made by the hardworking indigenous peoples of wherever. The desire to have something that could even mean anything. And man, once you have one piece — generally starting with that chair — you promiscuously eye the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Crassly, like a hoe.
The antique dealer’s is a helpful genealogical answer, but what about the content of Midcentury aesthetics is so appealing? And so broadly appealing?
I put on my salaried-consultant hat and decided to read very shallowly into the matter. The MoMA has a great couple exhibits on Midcentury aesthetics: some window work from Frank Lloyd Wright, a section on Chicago, an entire special exhibit on modernism and the failed quest to build dense, diverse planned communities — the kind where you could hear certain pretentious people murmuring audibly about Robert Moses and his racist freeways destroying what could have been. I flipped through a book of restaurants that changed American cuisine and found the section on the Four Seasons really expounded the Midcentury feel, and then through a book about San Francisco’s post-war facelift. I re-read Joseph Schumpeter and my roommate read Peter Drucker, his student.
Austrian economics landed on a partially satisfying answer. As we installed the rug, my roommate and I talked about Milton Friedman’s desire to have the economy reach a “steady state” and how libertarians who worship him can credibly claim to be anti-war. I glanced at the “Designing San Francisco” book sitting on the coffee table and thought about Friedman having retired there. Thomas, the other Friedman, still hangs out in the city, and loves to think in an aesthetically similar way.
Then it hit me. The Midcentury feel I’d been taking in is one of uniformity presented as triumph. Born in the early years of the Bretton Woods agreement, your Atlantic gentleman could sit down in his lounge suit and think about economic activity as one beautiful, abstract process. No more national politics or war to interfere with the beautiful machinery of commerce. To Friedman it must have felt like a kind of Newtonian moment: abstract principles introduced beginning fifty years earlier with Walras and his general equilibrium theory could finally be applied unrelentingly to every corner of the earth. What was once inhabited with idols like nations and faiths could finally be paved over with nice mechanical laws of supply, demand, and utility. Schumpeter’s 1945 book, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” paints a rosy cultural history of capitalism that triumphantly concludes with exactly this Midcentury vision.
Fast-forward to 2005, with the release of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat.” Friedman describes the dawn of the 21st century: an era of instant digital communication, labor offshoring, e-commerce, subcontracting, and globalized competition for higher education and high-tech jobs. Once again, a world in the frothy youth of a newly-connected global order. The software industry has created an entirely new lexicon and a neo-Austrian way of thinking about business. “Software is eating the world,” we would soon be told. We settled on a venture finance model. Entrepreneurs, just as Schumpeter would have dreamed it, can plan their careers in advance and graduate Stanford with an expected level of wealth after twenty years. VPs at software companies could credibly demand in board meetings that the firm “plan its innovation.” All economic activity was just waiting to become digital.
One can see how modernism becomes fashionably retro in such a world. We in the capitalist class like to see ourselves as clean, abstract, concretely futuristic types. Much like the late fifties, we live in an era of anxiety about social roles, and the abstraction and emphasis on progress help to suggest that the MCM gentleman is open-minded, not parochial, forward-looking. (I was recently informed that abstract art is mandatory because it helps convince guests that you’re “thankfully not a conservative.”) It’s a way to be retro without being reactionary. Single working women like my RISD friend can get into it.
I think the abstractness of it, too, takes the appeal beyond just the capitalist class. Socialists never fell out of love with modernism, and the demand today is louder than ever for US cities to get denser, repeal single-family zoning laws, and become truly inclusive. It makes sense that the aesthetics of neat, geometric, elegant and functional can embody a sentiment that lionizes diversity, abstract human rights, and density.
And above all, inclusion! Very possibly the word of the year 2021. Go to the Whitney or the SFMOMA and every placard will tell the same story about artists tirelessly breaking down barriers. Go on Clubhouse and everyone is an entrepreneur who has itemized, quantified, and listed out their (gender-neutral singular intended) interests, identities, and achievements. And gleefully! We love the flat world! Digital culture demands that we include and abstract every last soul. We find a sort of ecstasy in the process.
It’s the same ecstasy the salaried consultant finds in realizing that humans are able to organize into measurable processes, or that the activist finds in using public data to demonstrate housing inequities that landlords can’t just talk past. Measurements and abstractions rule our world and point us ever in the direction of ecstasy, of undefined possibility, in a way that one’s inner Freudian (I imagine the psychologist from the first episode of “Mad Men”) must compare to the libido. On that view, what hoes we are!
