Knowing Your Design History is Crucial to Aesthetic Innovation

Miranda's Lesson

In the most iconic scene of The Devil Wears Prada, Andy (Anne Hathaway) nonchalantly dismisses two nearly identical blue belts in a room full of fashion forward elites. Andy’s icy, terrifying boss Miranda (Meryl Streep) retorts with a diatribe so full of vitriol that it effectively knocks Andy down a peg. It also illuminates Andy’s own naive contributions to the very stylistic machinery she so blithely critiques: Miranda traces the origins of Andy’s “lumpy blue sweater” all the way back to the explosion of the color cerulean in Oscar de la Renta and Yves Saint Laurent’s early 2000s runway shows, before filtering down to department stores and eventually discount retailers where Andy “no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.” 

A Wheel of Style

Miranda’s acerbic history lesson sets into motion Andy’s transition from frumpy intern to uber-glam fixer, but it also does a favor for anyone interested in visual culture. The past offers a wellspring of formal, conceptual, and philosophical inspiration, making a deep knowledge of design history necessary for stylistic innovation. Knowing design history gives context to our contemporary visual culture—we can use the past to decode the present and forecast a stylistic future.

One of the best blueprints of this idea is Lorraine Wild’s “Great Wheel of Style,” which charts how style repeatedly drifts in and out of high and low culture like an undertow. In an interview for Eye Magazine in 2000, Wild suggests that style and a universally agreed upon notion of “good design” are intertwined: Good design creates intrigue and gets consumed by the mass market, which hijacks and superficially proliferates form devoid of its context. This results in cliché, embarrassment, then death, followed by fetishism, revival, and curiosity. 

But what is good design other than a subjective and inherently flawed concept? When design and context are inextricably linked, it is good. When design detaches from its context, we are left with cliches, embarrassments … deaths. Wild’s Great Wheel of Style plays out as design oscillates from the intriguing to the unimaginative. It’s a helpful reminder for designers and design students today: if you borrow from a certain style, it’s important to know where that style came from, as well as the social and cultural contexts that gave that style its rise.

Revival & Renewal

Per Wild’s wheel, the style had surpassed mass market to embody cliche and embarrassment. Fast forward twenty years, and a Memphis rebirth thrust it back into the public consciousness. Christian Dior fetishized the look in his 2011 runway show. Supreme released Memphis-inspired skateboard decks. Retail outlets like American Apparel regurgitated the iconic and kitschy geometry. Today, London-based graphic artist, Camille Walala, represents the logical endpoint to Memphis’s style evolution, elevating the work back into high culture with her refreshed Memphis-inspired interior design at high-end boutique Opening Ceremony in Tokyo. 

Tracing the work of Walala—or Christian Dior, or even Supreme’s uninventive rip-offs for that matter—to its origin sheds light on the market’s influence on style and form. We all know that style goes from high to low and high again, but identifying a style’s context breeds visual literacy and shepherds innovation. And it’s not just necessary for aesthetic innovation, it’s also necessary for good design. We can only avoid Andy’s faux pas in The Devil Wears Prada when we consider context. 

For designers who may feel like everything under the sun has already been done, the cycling of style contains a strange type of reassurance: it has been done, and it will be done again. Understanding this underscores the importance of design history. Knowing your history nourishes originality and edifies creative disruption—a prerequisite for our contemporary postmodern, hyper-exposed and hyper-accessed context. The burden remains on us to translate the past to be good innovators.