There is a particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with geography. It is the ache for a rotary dial you can hear clicking back into place, for a doorframe carved with more flourish than function demanded, for the memory of a landline ringing through a house the way thunder announces rain before it falls. I grew up meeting the tail end of that world: not fully Victorian in its excess, but close enough to its ethic to understand the patience it asked of us. And I have since migrated, as we all have, into an era where the telephone shrank from a box you pressed against your face to a sliver you slide into your pocket, and now, almost, to a whisper in your ear that requires no hands at all.
That migration is not just technological. It is aesthetic, and it is emotional, and for those of us who make a living inside the orange economy, thinking critically about culture, brand, and creative expression, it is a daily negotiation.
The Schism
I like to name the tension honestly: a schism. On one side sits the Victorian instinct, the gold leaf, the humongous pillar that serves no structural purpose beyond declaring that someone cared enough to build it anyway, the effigy, the smudge of paint left deliberately imperfect, the drip that was allowed to run because the artist decided imperfection was itself a kind of honesty. On the other side sits the postmodern minimalist, the clean line, the negative space, the design that has been edited until only the essential remains.
I sit closer to the minimalist end of that spectrum myself. Some of it is temperament. Some of it, if I am honest, is a touch of the obsessive in me that finds peace in symmetry and a few well-placed things on an otherwise empty table. But proximity to a preference is not the same as blindness to its opposite, and that is where the real thinking begins. Because the person beside me may not mind the smudge. They may love the drip. They may find more truth in excess than I find in restraint, and neither of us is wrong.
What Sleekness Costs Us
Here is the part that keeps me up at night, the part that turns a personal aesthetic preference into a civilizational question. Cars are now built for sleekness, engineering pared down to the wind’s approval. Cities are racing toward a kind of visual efficiency where ornament reads as inefficiency. And there is a version of the future, a utopia of ultimate simplicity, where we arrive at a place so clean that we forget what texture felt like. We lose the memory of fabric under fingertips. We lose the argument color used to make on our behalf. We lose the excess that has, for as long as humans have made things, been one of the primary ways we told each other we were alive.
Abstraction will never hold everybody’s appreciation of art, and it should not have to. A world edited down to its most efficient expression is not automatically a world improved. Sometimes it is simply a world quieted, and quiet is not always the same as peace.
Why We Should Pace It
This is where I speak most directly as a creative director. Brands, cities, and cultures are all racing toward the same minimalist horizon because the market has decided that is where value now lives. I do not think that race is wrong. I think it is inevitable. Urban expression will get bigger, cleaner, more distilled, because that is the direction complexity always resolves toward once it matures. But inevitability is not the same as urgency, and I believe we are allowed, even obligated, to pace ourselves on the way there.
There is a version of progress that lets the Victorian and the postmodern sit at the same table without one having to defeat the other. We do not need to abandon the classic to earn the sleek. We can let both live long enough to teach the next generation something neither could teach alone.
And the classics keep moving, which is the part I find most humbling. For a Gen Z creative, the classic era might be the nineties, might even be the two thousands. For those of us shaped in the eighties, our own classic is a different decade entirely. Every generation gets to nominate its own golden age, and every generation eventually watches a younger one call their present tense the past.
The Real Work
The real work, I think, is not choosing a side of the schism. It is learning to coordinate the transition, to let the pace of change be intentional rather than merely fast, and to treat that coordination itself as a kind of cultural literacy. A people who can hold both the ornate and the minimal, who can appreciate a Victorian flourish and a clean modern line in the same breath, are a people who have learned something valuable about time itself: that it does not have to be a straight line from more to less, from complex to simple. It can be a spiral, returning us again and again to the same questions, dressed differently each time.
That is the conversation I want to keep having in this space, and it is the exact conversation that leads into the next one. If this piece was about why we should slow down and hold onto the ornament a little longer, the next is about the opposite pull, the seduction of sleekness itself: why modernity feels the way it feels, why speed has its own kind of beauty, and why we got here in the first place. Look out for The Sexiness of Technology.
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Nia’Bari Fakae
www.fabadora.com