Rating: 
Summary: Simple yes, simplictic no.
Review: To all the reviewers that think Virginia's premise is simple and obvious may be right. Look around us and we see greater numbers of "nice things." This topic, like aesthetics itself, is seemingly simple. But never has a single book been able to capture the cultural, social and economic (one version of the triple bottom line) impact designers have on our lives and the companies that employee them to create a better customer sensory experience. Design has always been viewed as an afterthought "a nice to have" to corporate america. Never has there been a manifesto for the power of designing written by someone NOT from the design community. While it may obvious to look around and see evidence of Virginia's premise, it is far from obvious to corporate america as to how we got here and how we recognize the aesthetic value of things. As she reminds us, Starbucks is the poster child for the total aesthetic experience. No big TV campaigns, no discount programs, instead all 5 senses being excited and satisfied conveniently and consistently. Profound stuff. To view this as obvious and only worthy of an artcle misses part of her point. Creating, managing and even valuating this stuff isn't easy or simplistic. A common metrix of design and aesthetic value is not a simple topic to be patted on the head and called obvious. That's where we've been. If it were so obvious, we'd have a lot more companies like Starbucks or GoodGrips or Target. Bean counters and engineers have final decision making power over designers because it's NOT obvious to or valued by most. (Try selling design services, it ain't easy) This book is an important step in creating common understanding and even household recognition for both sides of the design table. It gives design the respect it deserves.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Look at How and Why Style Matters
Review: Upon first hearing of Virginia Postel's new project, I confess I was somewhat taken aback. After her fascinating analysis of political thought in The Future and Its Enemies, what was she doing writing about something as ephemeral as style? I therefore approached her new work with some trepidation, as I wasn't sure where she might take such an odd (to me) topic. I needn't have worried.The Substance of Style is one of those books that is almost annoying, because in it Postrel has identified a trend that is so pervasive that once you've read the first few chapters, you look around you with new eyes, noticing things that have been there all along but that you accepted as simply part of the backdrop. As products have become better and better, Henry Ford's famous dictum (You can have any color as long as it's black) can no longer hold. When the average product can easily accomplish its intended purpose, function no longer holds the same relative importance. Form, once an afterthought, becomes more and more important, because we can afford to consider it. And so we face a world where we can change the color of our cell phones and lap tops to match our mood, and Apple's latest computers are seen as works of art as much as functional systems. Better yet, Postrel ties this age of aesthetics to her prior work in The Future and Its Enemies. As in politics, she identifies the aesthetic conflicts between those who want to leave people free to determine what works best for them, and those who prefer to determine 'one best way,' whether in housing, fashion, style, or whatever else. Postrel clearly comes down on the side of those who prefer fewer constraints, and she defends her position very well, particularly when noting how many things we all take for granted today were spawned by the near free-for-all of dynamic creation and competition. Postrel's writing is concise and clean, making the book a very easy read. Through her use of numerous contemporary and familiar examples, she is able to tie her points to common experiences, making the work that much more powerful. Like it or not, the age of aesthetics is upon us. If you have any interest at all in understanding how it will affect you, read and enjoy this terrific work.
Rating: 
Summary: Po mo Schmo Mo
Review: Virginia Postrel is onto something and that is something. And why not an editorial rather than reportage. So is she right? Yes it keeps many consumers happily spinning their wheels and many businesses busy. Yes it is a new kind of Soma, information add-ons to every day products, but as any kind of philosophy it isnt. It is not about real variety or diversity (the only things a post modernist permits itself to prescribe). When form becomes part of function there are ever tighter circles of self-referential styles, tounge-in-cheek hipness, and mind boggling conformity. There is a strange attractor in the center and it is not necessarily pretty. It is a safe and familiar center about which controlled stylistic twitches and teaks are carefully mapped. It is not aesthetic in any sense of the word. Nor does it stem from Frankfurt school fear and shock of the new, to question why this book about the present future did not ponder the environmental consequences of hyper consumerism. The future will see our existential angst and grabby escapism as the mad dance of the logo sporting grasshopper before the winter. The future will have to be about big ideas, big government, less is enough, and real design inventiveness in the battle for survival.
Rating:
Summary: Substance, Style, and More
Review: Virginia Postrel was editor of Reason magazine during its best decade. You could always tell when she wrote a piece - if it was charming, forceful, and subtle enough to effortlessly and painlessly slip big ideas directly into your brain. Her new book is no different - I read it in two nights, and came away both educated and entertained. The premise of Virginia's book is, "How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness." What interested me most, being the capitalist pig that I am, was the commerce angle. Postrel tells the story, from back when pagers were still the big thing, about how Motorola was for a time able to charge a $15 premium for their units. Why? Because instead of being the same dull black as everyone else's pagers, Motorola's were a cool toothpaste green color. No extra features. No extended range. Just different plastic - green plastic which didn't cost them one dime more to manufacture than the plain black stuff. Cool matters. Aesthetics matter. Look & feel matter. Motorola discovered those facts a decade ago. In her book, Virginia explains how those things are reshaping everything in the postmodern economy, from what we buy, how we buy it, and how it's all increasingly tailored to our individual tastes. That's the substance of Virginia's latest book. So how about the style? Same as she ever was - charming, forceful, subtle, and a joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: Are We Having Fun Yet?
Review: Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" is smart, fun to read, and correct. She tells us that we have entered the "Age of Aesthetics," a time when beauty and style are to be found everywhere, at least for market economies. Every product, every place, and every experience now is supposed to offer a touch of the aesthetic. The reason is simple: increasingly wealthy and sophisticated customers demand "an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world." (p.4) The book surveys a wide variety of trends -- from fashion to cosmetic surgery to restaurant design -- and shows how they fit this common pattern. We hear about Martha Stewart, Starbucks, the iMac, fashion magazines, tiled floors, nice salad bowls, and the Michael Graves brush from Target. The age of Wonder Bread is gone, and the middle class can now buy a sense of style previously reserved for the wealthy. Postrel declines the enterprise of demarcation and does not try to draw a boundary between art and the pleasures of daily life. Some of the best passages concern globalization. In Turkey the number of interior design magazines has number from one to forty in a decade. Japan is becoming a fashion capital, while South Korea and Singapore are becoming centers of design (p.14). Any reader of my own works, which stress how commerce brings us plenty, diversity, and creativity, will not be surprised how thoroughly I agree with Postrel. So I will spend the rest of this review outlining my primary worry with the book, noting that my own research is open to the same questions. To put it bluntly, sometimes I wonder just how much these aesthetic developments make us better off. No, I am not advocating a return to Mao's gray pajamas. I believe in market-oriented capitalism, including for the arts. But could the baroque proliferation of the aesthetic, in all of its manifestations, be an unimportant epiphenomenon, distinct from the main success story of capitalism? Could "the Buff Revolution," as we now describe the new and growing obsession with male bodies, be a temporary and not very effective antidote against our underlying boredom? Postrel (pp.74-77) does an excellent job arguing against Bob Frank's relative status idea. We want beauty for its own sake, and not just to look better than others. I will add that the interiors of American homes, over the last few decades, have improved much more than their exteriors, contra to what Frank's hypothesis would predict. But does beauty make us much happier? Perhaps we get used to our frame of reference and quickly take new beautiful objects as part of our assumed background. Postrel's own text points to some of these worries. We are told "Design that was once cutting edge is now a minimum standard, taken for granted by customers." (p.19) Later she writes: "The aesthetic age won't last forever. The innovations that today seem exciting, disturbing, or both will eventually become the backgrounds of our lives. We won't notice them unless they're missing." (p.189) A broader literature, focusing on the psychology of happiness, questions whether new gadgets, beautiful or not, make people much happier. Daniel Kahneman suggests that people mistakenly forecast what will make them happy (search our archives at www.MarginalRevolution.com). And after the fact they overestimate the happiness value of fleeting aesthetic experiences, leading them to seek out those experiences again and again, with little real satisfaction. I can think of a few lines of response. First, an aesthete might argue happiness be damned, and advocate "art for art's sake." Unlike many economists, I have sympathies for this attitude, but only when it applies to Mozart and Michelangelo. The first sentence of the book blurb mentions "airport terminals decorated like Starbucks" and "hair dye among teenage boys," which are much harder to defend in these exalted terms. A second possibility is that we use the aesthetic to promote ourselves. Maybe blue hair dye per se makes no one especially happy, but it helps teenage boys signal their identities and thus to form the appropriate peer groups. The psychological literature stresses that friends are a good source of real happiness. Our interest in the aesthetic may be an indirect path to better and better-matched sets of friends. In this case, however, it is less clear how well the modern world is doing. Robert Putnam stresses that, instead of being happy with friends, we are moving to a society of "bowling alone." I will review Putnam's new book soon, but in any case this is a tougher debate than what Postrel takes on. And if we defend the aesthetic for instrumental reasons, suddenly Putnam, not Postrel, is addressing the more relevant debate. Third, we may choose to side with "meaning" rather than "happiness." Postrel (pp.190-1) argues that material manifestations of the aesthetic bring meaning into our lives. Modern design serves artifactual functions, above and beyond its use as a source of pleasure: "When we too are dust, our descendants will have Fashid's curvy plastic trash cans." What we own is, in part, what we are and what we will be. Postrel closes the book on this note, and we cannot help but notice the self-referential character of the assertion. I liked not only this book, but also its dust jacket.
Rating:
Summary: Are We Having Fun Yet?
Review: Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" is smart, fun to read, and correct. She tells us that we have entered the "Age of Aesthetics," a time when beauty and style are to be found everywhere, at least for market economies. Every product, every place, and every experience now is supposed to offer a touch of the aesthetic. The reason is simple: increasingly wealthy and sophisticated customers demand "an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world." (p.4) The book surveys a wide variety of trends -- from fashion to cosmetic surgery to restaurant design -- and shows how they fit this common pattern. We hear about Martha Stewart, Starbucks, the iMac, fashion magazines, tiled floors, nice salad bowls, and the Michael Graves brush from Target. The age of Wonder Bread is gone, and the middle class can now buy a sense of style previously reserved for the wealthy. Postrel declines the enterprise of demarcation and does not try to draw a boundary between art and the pleasures of daily life. Some of the best passages concern globalization. In Turkey the number of interior design magazines has number from one to forty in a decade. Japan is becoming a fashion capital, while South Korea and Singapore are becoming centers of design (p.14). Any reader of my own works, which stress how commerce brings us plenty, diversity, and creativity, will not be surprised how thoroughly I agree with Postrel. So I will spend the rest of this review outlining my primary worry with the book, noting that my own research is open to the same questions. To put it bluntly, sometimes I wonder just how much these aesthetic developments make us better off. No, I am not advocating a return to Mao's gray pajamas. I believe in market-oriented capitalism, including for the arts. But could the baroque proliferation of the aesthetic, in all of its manifestations, be an unimportant epiphenomenon, distinct from the main success story of capitalism? Could "the Buff Revolution," as we now describe the new and growing obsession with male bodies, be a temporary and not very effective antidote against our underlying boredom? Postrel (pp.74-77) does an excellent job arguing against Bob Frank's relative status idea. We want beauty for its own sake, and not just to look better than others. I will add that the interiors of American homes, over the last few decades, have improved much more than their exteriors, contra to what Frank's hypothesis would predict. But does beauty make us much happier? Perhaps we get used to our frame of reference and quickly take new beautiful objects as part of our assumed background. Postrel's own text points to some of these worries. We are told "Design that was once cutting edge is now a minimum standard, taken for granted by customers." (p.19) Later she writes: "The aesthetic age won't last forever. The innovations that today seem exciting, disturbing, or both will eventually become the backgrounds of our lives. We won't notice them unless they're missing." (p.189) A broader literature, focusing on the psychology of happiness, questions whether new gadgets, beautiful or not, make people much happier. Daniel Kahneman suggests that people mistakenly forecast what will make them happy (search our archives at www.MarginalRevolution.com). And after the fact they overestimate the happiness value of fleeting aesthetic experiences, leading them to seek out those experiences again and again, with little real satisfaction. I can think of a few lines of response. First, an aesthete might argue happiness be damned, and advocate "art for art's sake." Unlike many economists, I have sympathies for this attitude, but only when it applies to Mozart and Michelangelo. The first sentence of the book blurb mentions "airport terminals decorated like Starbucks" and "hair dye among teenage boys," which are much harder to defend in these exalted terms. A second possibility is that we use the aesthetic to promote ourselves. Maybe blue hair dye per se makes no one especially happy, but it helps teenage boys signal their identities and thus to form the appropriate peer groups. The psychological literature stresses that friends are a good source of real happiness. Our interest in the aesthetic may be an indirect path to better and better-matched sets of friends. In this case, however, it is less clear how well the modern world is doing. Robert Putnam stresses that, instead of being happy with friends, we are moving to a society of "bowling alone." I will review Putnam's new book soon, but in any case this is a tougher debate than what Postrel takes on. And if we defend the aesthetic for instrumental reasons, suddenly Putnam, not Postrel, is addressing the more relevant debate. Third, we may choose to side with "meaning" rather than "happiness." Postrel (pp.190-1) argues that material manifestations of the aesthetic bring meaning into our lives. Modern design serves artifactual functions, above and beyond its use as a source of pleasure: "When we too are dust, our descendants will have Fashid's curvy plastic trash cans." What we own is, in part, what we are and what we will be. Postrel closes the book on this note, and we cannot help but notice the self-referential character of the assertion. I liked not only this book, but also its dust jacket.
Rating:
Summary: Get in front of marketplace change with this book
Review: Virginia Postrel, ex-editor of Reason Magazine and a columnist at the New York Times, has been writing prescient, well-researched analysis for years now. Her penetrating book "The Future and its Enemies", with its powerful recasting of the political landscape from Left and Right into "stasists" versus "dynamists" now has a worthy successor in "The Substance of Style". (Simply put, politics is really about people who oppose change versus those who embrace it.) I was particularly struck by its observations of incremental improvements in manufacturing and increases in trade that, taken together, are having a revolutionary impact in the marketplace (for example, how India and China have driven down the cost of natural stone, or how businesses have learned to tailor their manufacturing to fit narrower and narrower market niches). In particular, I was blown away at how everything has changed since the EIGHTIES. I don't think this message gets out enough. People are too busy shopping to understand or care about the plenty being stocked in front of them, and the non-economically minded (like anti-globalization leftists etc.) discount or ignore it entirely. None of us have perspective (until it shows up in textbooks a decade or so from now). If they are not being won over already, I see a growing market for Postrel's ideas in "non-political" business majors and entrepreneurs who are typically concerned only with micro-level details and don't have a refined political philosophy. If anything, dynamism is an excellent strategy for understanding and winning in the marketplace. Postrel shows that political ideas about free markets and how our society is organized are directly connected to the very nature of the products we enjoy -- a wake-up call to business people who have stepped back from politics in disgust. I really enjoyed the book. It's written well, has tons of evidence to support the views it holds, and didn't waste my time. I recommend it unreservedly.
Rating:
Summary: Get in front of marketplace change with this book
Review: Virginia Postrel, ex-editor of Reason Magazine and a columnist at the New York Times, has been writing prescient, well-researched analysis for years now. Her penetrating book "The Future and its Enemies", with its powerful recasting of the political landscape from Left and Right into "stasists" versus "dynamists" now has a worthy successor in "The Substance of Style". (Simply put, politics is really about people who oppose change versus those who embrace it.) I was particularly struck by its observations of incremental improvements in manufacturing and increases in trade that, taken together, are having a revolutionary impact in the marketplace (for example, how India and China have driven down the cost of natural stone, or how businesses have learned to tailor their manufacturing to fit narrower and narrower market niches). In particular, I was blown away at how everything has changed since the EIGHTIES. I don't think this message gets out enough. People are too busy shopping to understand or care about the plenty being stocked in front of them, and the non-economically minded (like anti-globalization leftists etc.) discount or ignore it entirely. None of us have perspective (until it shows up in textbooks a decade or so from now). If they are not being won over already, I see a growing market for Postrel's ideas in "non-political" business majors and entrepreneurs who are typically concerned only with micro-level details and don't have a refined political philosophy. If anything, dynamism is an excellent strategy for understanding and winning in the marketplace. Postrel shows that political ideas about free markets and how our society is organized are directly connected to the very nature of the products we enjoy -- a wake-up call to business people who have stepped back from politics in disgust. I really enjoyed the book. It's written well, has tons of evidence to support the views it holds, and didn't waste my time. I recommend it unreservedly.
Rating:
Summary: Iconoclastic, Sweeping, Convincing
Review: With her latest book Virginia Postrel once again wades into an area of intellectual study in which conventional wisdom has sorted the debate into convenient, pat, and yet ultimately unsatisfying dualities - superficial versus substantive, authentic versus phony, the "purely artistic" versus the "crudely commercial" - and proceeds to use her keen eye and open mind to assemble facts and theories that have the power to stand the debate on its head. In "The Substance of Style" Postrel chronicles, explains, and ponders what she perceives as "the rise of aesthetic value". She first recounts, through an array of statistics, media reports, and other evidence, what she perceives as a rapidly increasing role in society for elements of the aesthetic - style, design, look and feel. Not only is the size of style-related industries rapidly increasing, but style-related issues are reaching into ever more of our life, and taking a role of more and more importance in our choices. Though she acknowledges that relative fascination with styles comes and goes, this time, she argues, something different is happening. She attributes this sea change to greater power over our surroundings and selves due to technology, greater consumer affluence and freedom, resulting in increased demand for choice and customization, and greater cultural exposure. Postrel then trains her guns on the tired prevailing conventional views on design, style, and the aesthetic. In particular she attacks the twin theories that our pursuit of fashion, style and accessory stems from either being victims of corporate manipulation, or from a gnawing internal dissatisfaction that of course can never be realized no matter how many material goods we acquire. Interest in style and appearance, she argues, is tied deeply with our sensual natures, our biological drives, our neurochemistry and the nature of our perception. Postrel argues that even fashion, an industry whose constant cycles cast it as pure superficiality to so many, is a natural, healthy, and pleasurable outgrowth of our nature as both social and biological beings. This high-minded ideological defense of fashion is the type of argument only Postrel could give us and stands as a high point in the book. Ultimately, she asserts, our coming "age of aesthetic" is a novel, emerging synthesis to the age-old dialectics of substance versus appearance and artistic versus commercial. Just as fun as Virginia's ideas is the palpable sense of delight she takes in the facts and observations that fuel her theories. She gleefully juxtaposes neo-Gothic architecture and dreadlocks to show the unexpected parallels between the development of these two trends, speculates how Calvinists or the Frankfurt School might feel about the rise of PowerPoint, and surveys the many visceral reactions the public has had to the societal Rorschach test of Hillary Clinton's hair. Such incandescent details cram every page not as frivolity but as argument after argument for the larger ideas that drive the book. In the aggregate, such data give Postrel a unique and powerful tool to argue her positions, one that the great minds of social theory she takes on would be hard pressed to match: those theories of Daniel Bell and Abraham Maslow may look good on paper, but how do they stand up to a slew of evidence on Afghani nail salons or megachurch architecture? Postrel knows, and her ability to ground her positions so thoroughly in even the most mundane aspects of our existence adds to their persuasiveness. The scope of her arguments creates ample opportunity for the ideas in this book to be used as jumping-off points into other fields. For Postrel, the critique of style and design is a gendered one: such disciplines used to be considered "frivolous and feminine", and with the rise of women in society, and the loosening of traditional gender roles, these disciplines are finally winning a place of respect and legitimacy. It is also one of class order and struggle: a people's aspiration for material things, she notes, can be viewed by authorities as a dangerous sign that they are not happy with things as they are. And in exploring the way our accessories and surroundings impact our very sense of ourselves, even into our neurological makeup, she points towards pioneers in the field of ecological psychology such as Gregory Bateson and Edward S. Reed, or the cognitive neuroscience of Esther Thelen. As with her last book, to be persuaded by Virginia's ideas means to find oneself repositioned at a right angle to many of the conventional concepts and viewpoints that we encounter in our everyday exposure to media, ideas and discussions. This will doubtless prove too unsettling for many who sit complacently on one side or the other of our current wisdom: many devotees of Hume will have little initial interest in a discussion of garbage cans at Target, and few professional hair designers will immediately gravitate to the theories of Adorno. However, for those willing to follow Virginia with an open mind through her extraordinary account of contemporary life, the rewards and opportunities are well worth the trouble. And just as her previous book developed a cult following among the radical innovators that drove Silicon Valley, so too is this book likely to resonate with the minds on the forefront of tomorrow's cultural transformations.
Rating: 
Summary: The obvious, served up with lots of style
Review: Yes, Virginia, style does matter. This is hardly a revelation. Anyone who has seen someone spend $10,000 more on some nameplate car rather than a nearly identical non-status car (Infiniti vs. Nissan) knows people will spend a lot of extra dough for image. (Or, to reverse it, Mazda marketed its excellent 929 luxury sedan by pointing out it didn't have to charge as much because the car wasn't made my a separate luxury division. A smart idea, but people didn't buy it, and Mazda no longer makes the 929.) And yes, style adds value to the GNP: any car salesman will tell you the new models move faster; that's why they change styles every few years. The book in general tells us something that I at least think is painfully obvious: style is important. The multitudes of examples and various anecdotes the author cites in this book are redundant, and serve to just beef up a thin and obvious premise. It's as though someone just now wrote a book and said, "We live in the information age!" Well, duh. When I read this book, I was reminded of kids in school padding their science and history and literature papers to get them up to 20 pages, or whatever the requirement was. This would have made a nifty magazine article, but it's not enough for a book, even a small book with large print and wide margins such as this one. (Books pay more than magazine articles, however.) There's not enough substance to your style, Virginia!
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