Style

A personal account of how style develops, and a back-of-the-envelope survey of how style encourages, soothes and thwarts us.

Sep 20, 2024

Style is delicate. It’s a kind of trance created by the things done and undone, the ways in which they’re completed or left hanging. To talk about it too much is to put my own trance at risk.

Style versus taste

Taste is what you like and don’t like. Combined with certainty, it has the power to move others, or to be a terrible prison (see “Personal Cinematic Universes,” later this fall). Style is the expression of that taste. It shows up in everything you do.

Everything shapes your taste. And inversely, your style reveals everything about you - what you hate, what you think is possible, how well your digestive system is working.

But taste and style have an uneasy relationship. You may like fedoras, until you see one on your head. You may like a sentiments, until you hear it coming out of your mouth.

When starting this ongoing essay project more than a year ago, I had a sense of how to proceed, based on what I liked and what I didn’t. The past year has helped me see how that taste plays out in an essayistic style.

The No Homework manual of style

The dictates below are all ones I’ve violated in the past year. Maybe you can point my violations out. But I usually wrestled with the choice to do so. At the risk of demystifying my own style as an essayist, here’s what I have:

Don’t be a chatbot - ignore the burning questions of the day. Go after the questions that aren’t being asked.

Don’t be Wikipedia - skip the preamble. Assume some intelligence about the basics.

Don’t copy-paste - if it’s out there already, leave it out.

Don’t talk over yourself - no links in the text.

Don’t buttonhole - state your case and move on.

Don’t justify - rethink any statement that requires autobiography to support it.

Don’t hedge - if both sides have a fair point, don’t bother.

Don’t mystify - go deep and go crazy, but keep sight of the shore. Offer a subhead where a reader can rest their weary eyes.

When style works

Music is one area where style is paramount, and where you can see style operating with autonomy. This could be the phrasing of a Miles Davis solo, or the ambiguity of a Pavement or MF Doom lyric, the interplay of lines in a Bach fugue.

In each case, there’s enough space or ambiguity for the listener to fill in the blanks, and enough sound or lyrical clarity to keep those blanks from overflowing. There’s enough logic to think you can anticipate the next step, and enough madness that you’re wrong often enough to keep listening.

The style of no-possibilities

So far, I’ve been referring to the style of an individual. But there are free-standing styles in the world. Today, minimalism is the dominant one in design, technology, architecture and so on. It became preeminent with the iPhone in 2007, which more or less shocked and enervated all culture ever since.

At the time, that form of minimalism was a personal style. It was Steve Jobs’ insouciant revolt against the nerd-busy tech world of the time, in the same way his flamboyant, colorful desktop computers were an insouciant revolt against the corporate-bland computers of the time before.

Minimalism, however, feels very different now that it is the default visual mode, deployed as an aesthetic shoulder shrug in every tech-accessory knockoff, upscale hotel breakfast bar, uninspired sedan design and fake-fancy Airbnb. It feels like austerity, like a withholding of possibilities. And it creates a physical environment that coldly enforces the widespread sense that other possibilities - political, personal, technological and political - don’t exist.

Styles do die

I’ve long been enamored of Art Deco. I feel like it never got a full hearing in our nation’s cities, for two reasons: fascists and costs.

With its shallow relief, flattened and simplified mechanical, human and animal forms, Art Deco was a mix of highly streamlined modernity with the nearly prehistoric sensibility of the Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian empires. It reached past European history to far-ancient vistas to soothe the badly dislocated and overstimulated people of those early years of electricity. It’s also a beautiful style, bold without being simple and ornate without being obscure.

It was also an encouraging vision of human striving and human virtues persisting and ennobling the incredible technological advances of those days, which held out real hope of eradicating both hunger and darkness.

Rockefeller Center and the Texas State Fair Grounds in Dallas are some great examples in the U.S. At the beginning of the 20^th century, Art Deco was big in Italy and Germany, too. That seems to have been part of the problem.

Maybe Art Deco soothed and encouraged people too effectively. Rather than girding themselves to face the historic insecurity of a species on the wobbly cusp of unimaginable prosperity, decency and wisdom, people felt all too comfy in the traditions of pack-hunting genocide.

After the Second World War, the style had an understandable stink to it. It never recovered, though, mostly because it was more expensive than the glass rectangles of the international style. By comparison, people still buy and drive around in Volkswagens, a company directly founded by Adolf Hitler, and in Mercedes Benzes, whose logo is all over a still-famous movie about Hitler driving around and waving from one.

I don’t say this to rouse outrage, just to say that we can also stop being such tasteless tightwads when it comes to architecture and give Art Deco another chance in our cities.

No style

Having no style is a condemnation usually reserved for teenagers to use against parents, teachers and dowdy peers. But it’s become the state of the world these days.

Look at the buildings. Listen to the music that’s on when you don’t get to choose it. Try to watch most TV shows. No style at all. A remake, reboot or sequel may be stylized, but it has no style. Rather it’s a style by which people in the entertainment industrial complex keep their jobs.

Instead of style, we see styles that never developed because the person’s intention wasn’t clear. Or we see something that started as a style but was destroyed by the committees and concerns that go into making almost anything we actually experience in the world today.

Without style, everything is predictable. Without style, everything that’s not predictable makes no sense at all. This alternation of boredom and panic typifies the flavor of public life in the past decade.

Style versus despair

Fine, so things don’t look or sound so great. There’s not much style. So what? Who cares? People do, even if can’t articulate why.

Style brings the known rhythms of life into a dialogue with the unknowable. It’s not a plan or a philosophy, but it’s a start. Having a style will keep you from complete bewilderment.

Style is a dual focus - on what you’re doing and on the people you’re doing it for. When people see it - in a song or a building or someone’s cool outfit - they appreciate the care that person or institution took to anticipate them.

The absence of style is the absence of human intention, the absence of human care. When encountered here and there, a lack of style is funny, and indicative of the human failings we all share. When omnipresent, however, the absence of style is cause for despair.

Style and the strut

There was a moment in my life when I wasn’t feeling so hot. A creative project into which I’d sunk my energy, hopes and money had failed to generate much attention or money. I was thrust back into an office environment on a regular basis.

In my zero-style business-casual camouflage, I walked a lot at lunch, to and from the train, or just out to get outside the building. On the sidewalks, I didn’t feel like I had much panache or potential.

My knees felt like rubber. Walking with the pedestrian flow, everything bent too much, gave way like overcooked meat on the bone. My hips dropped and bobbed with each step. My steps grew longer. My arms swung like they were ready to fall off my shoulders. And just like that, I wasn’t walking, or commuting or running out for lunch. I was strutting.

Heaven only knows what it looked like. But it was something. It had style. And it felt good.

Share No Homework