Why Ugly Was The New Beautiful
The best objects of the last decade are ugly. Not accidentally ugly. Deliberately, specifically, carefully ugly.
The Salehe Bembury Crocs look like something found at the bottom of a river. They sell out in minutes. The Balenciaga Triple S was described by the fashion press as the ugliest shoe ever made when it launched in 2017. It changed the direction of footwear for the following five years. The Bottega Veneta Pouch has no structure, no handles, no logical reason to hold its shape. It became one of the most influential bag designs of the century.
These are not objects that succeeded despite being ugly. They succeeded because of it. The ugliness is the argument.
The argument is that beauty, in the conventional sense, is a form of agreement. A beautiful object agrees with existing standards of what beautiful means. An ugly object refuses that agreement. It says: I am not here to please you immediately. I am here to make you think about what pleasing actually means.
Demna understood this at Balenciaga. The Triple S was not a mistake in proportion. It was a question about proportion. What if the sole was too thick. What if the upper was too busy. What if the shoe looked like it was trying too hard and that trying was the point. The answer turned out to be: then it sells out everywhere and every brand copies it within eighteen months.
This is how the best design works. It looks wrong until it looks inevitable.
The Crocs collaboration with Bembury, the Triple S, the Rick Owens platform boot, the New Balance 990 in its original era of being considered ugly before being considered correct — these are all objects that required time before the market understood them. The ugliness was a feature not a flaw. It created the distance between the object and easy consumption that gives it meaning.
Beautiful things are easy to want. Ugly things require you to understand them before you want them. That understanding is the point.
The best objects do not make you want them immediately. They make you think about why you eventually do.
~ 9.95
