The Substance of Style

The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel

Reading this book I couldn't help but to paint a visual of Virginia.   I see Ms. Postrel wearing an Indiana Jones hat, a light green tee shirt underneath a khaki shirt with a bunch of pockets, green shorts with even more pockets and 1980 style comfortable socks jutting out from a pair of hiking boots, sporting black frame glasses.  Is this typical of garb donned by anthropologists?  Or do archaeologists dress this way?  Virginia might frown at how my imagination styled her, but, in addition to the look,  I see her as an intellectual anthropologist who had gone back in time to perform detailed research and then came back to write a report on aesthetics and their affect on the human culture in the early Twenty-First Century.

Since discovering my right brain about ten years ago and since Dan Pink said it's okay for a normal Joe to appreciate design, I have become infatuated with design.  But not as an architect or design school student would be.  In Virginia's words, "I like that.  I'm like that."  My love of design isn't anymore complicated than that.  And I can say the same thing about The Substance of Style.

Virginia:

Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses.  It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look and feel of people, places and things.

I see Virginia using this statement as a torch, leading us through a world where people have embraced the beauty of things.  And whereby this love is changing commerce and culture.  Because she is so many rungs above me on the ladder of intellectuality, I struggle a bit when it comes to the people she references and their viewpoints.  For instance,

Informing many such critiques is a naive mid-twentieth-century view of how business operates: that producers can simply decree what consumers will buy, in a foolproof "circle of manipulation and retroactive need," as the Frankfurt School of Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put in an influential 1944 essay.

The clutch in my brain sort of stuck on this one and I really didn't feel like rereading it four times and cruising over to Wikipedia to figure it all out.  But Virginia's use of folks and viewpoints like these was not a hindrance.  More importantly, I was able to relate to her observations on aesthetics and design, relate to how I see them in my everyday life.

Tom Peters gives major reference to Virginia and The Substance of Style in his book Design.  What really syncs with me is that Tom is a "I like that, I'm like that," type of person.  Tom is not artistic but completely gets the economic ramifications of design.  ( OMG, like that's news ).  But his belief and the credence that he lends Virginia further solidifies my respect and admiration of her and her book.