I have been thinking a lot about beige lately.
Not because I hate beige. I don't. Beige can be beautiful. So can black and white. So can minimalism, clean lines, empty space, restrained palettes and a room with exactly three objects in it.
That isn't the point.
The point is what happens when one aesthetic stops being a choice and starts becoming the choice. When individuality becomes clutter. When ornament becomes unnecessary. When color becomes unsophisticated. When "taste" quietly stops being personal and starts becoming a social expectation.
The Beige-ing of Fascism
Not because fascism is necessarily beige. It isn't. Beige as in flattened. Beige as in homogenized into non-descript sameness.
Fascist aesthetics have historically been all over the place. Monumental classical architecture. Stark modernism. Ancient Roman imagery. Futurism. Uniforms. Flags. Spectacle. Carefully controlled symbolism. Fascist regimes have borrowed from very different artistic traditions when those traditions could be bent toward a particular political vision.
The point isn't the aesthetic itself.
The point is the prescription.
Fascism requires compliance. It requires conformity. It creates an approved way to belong, and that means defining what is appropriate, what is respectable, what is beautiful, what is patriotic, what is traditional, what is feminine, what is acceptable and, eventually, who is acceptable.
It tells you what the world is supposed to look like and flattens who you are allowed to be in it.
We are living through a fascist moment in which that demand is increasingly visible in the aesthetics of American life. It is showing up in the prescribed version of patriotism, in the idealized version of masculinity and femininity, in the way history is being contested and institutions are being pressured to present an approved story, in the physical remaking of public spaces and government buildings, and in the growing insistence that there is a proper way to look, behave and belong.
Black & white minimalism. Neutral colors if you want to be tasteful. The polo and khakis. The polished, controlled version of masculinity. The carefully packaged version of femininity. The carefully packaged version of trad-wife femininity. The nostalgia for an imagined traditional America. The cold stone replacing the garden. The rewriting or removal of historical facts that the current administration finds inconvenient for their narrative.
And that weird Mar-a-Lago plastic-surgery look.
No one said it has to make sense. No one said it has to be great.
It just has to signal who is us and who is them.
Because fascism is extraordinarily interested in defining the acceptable.
What are people permitted to make?
What are they permitted to wear?
What are they permitted to decorate?
What are they permitted to preserve?
What are they permitted to destroy?
What counts as tasteful?
What counts as respectable?
What counts as excessive?
What counts as patriotic?
What counts as proper?
What counts as traditional?
The Beige-ing
Greigification is what happens when difference gets sanded down until everything starts looking acceptable, legible and interchangeable.
Greigification doesn't ask nothing of the individual. It asks everything. It asks you to submit your own expression to the accepted aesthetic, identity and role assigned to you.
The aesthetic itself can be anything. Grey everything. A military uniform. Monumental architecture. Patriotic imagery. Classical realism. A culture pushing a specific trad-wife feminine ideal.
It doesn't matter.
The point is that you are expected to conform to it.
That is why color is such a useful way to talk about this.
Color is inherently expressive. It can be loud. It can contradict itself. It can clash. It can be joyful for no reason. It can carry memory. It can be political. It can be irrational. It can reference another piece of art or design.
It can simply be:
I like this pink.
No five-page justification required.
A free person is allowed to like and showcase the pink without a moral judgement attached.
The Nazis understood the power of prescription
Nazi Germany is useful here precisely because it destroys the idea that fascist aesthetics have to be literally drab. The point is that aesthetics have to CONFORM to the mandate.
The Nazi regime worked aggressively to control culture. Art, music, literature, film and architecture were brought under political supervision. Modern art that the regime considered ideologically unacceptable was attacked and removed, while approved art was promoted as an expression of German national and racial ideals.
The regime also dictated what women were supposed to be and society reinforced it.
Girls were educated toward the roles of wife and mother. Nazi women's organizations and propaganda reinforced those expectations, and Nazi population policy elevated marriage, motherhood and baby making as women's contribution to the national community. Traditional German rural dress, including the dirndl, was promoted as part of the preferred feminine aesthetic.
It wasn't simply that every German woman was forced into the same dress. Reality was more complicated than that, and fashion never stopped being fashion.
But the message was clear:
This is what a good German woman looks like.
And that is very different from:
This is what I happen to like wearing.
That distinction matters now.
Contemporary trad-wife aesthetics aren't inherently fascist. A woman can love linen, flowers, bread baking, a quiet kitchen, modest clothing, natural materials and a beautiful home. There is nothing inherently authoritarian about any of those things.
The politics become interesting when one particular version of femininity stops being presented as a choice and starts being presented as the correct order of things.
A woman can be feminine and powerful and domestic and sexually autonomous and a terrible cook and an engineer and a mother and a mechanic and an artist and completely uninterested in being anybody's obedient little anything.
Femininity does not equal submission.
Those are not the same thing.
Domesticity is not servitude. Softness is not weakness. Ornament is not frivolity.
A woman can choose softness, domesticity, adornment and all the things that have been coded feminine without surrendering an ounce of her autonomy.
The problem isn't femininity.
The problem is being told what femininity is allowed to look like.
Beauty versus imposed taste
I think we've gotten ourselves into some very strange cultural territory around the word "taste."
We've somehow started treating tasteful as though it means quiet. Neutral. Restrained. Minimal. Unobtrusive. Nothing too loud. Nothing too colorful. Nothing too weird. Nothing too personal.
Again, there is nothing wrong with liking those things.
There is a difference between I like this and this is what good taste looks like.
There is a difference between this is how I want to dress and this is how a good woman dresses.
There is a difference between I love neutral, minimalist decor and good homes should look like this.
Maybe we should pay attention to the moment when "taste" stops being merely personal and starts becoming a cultural expectation.
The marketplace is one of the places culture becomes physical.
Walk through enough stores and you'll notice how quickly an aesthetic becomes ubiquitous. Colors repeat. Shapes repeat. Materials repeat. The same visual language appears across furniture, clothing, packaging, restaurants, houses and social media.
Some of that is fashion. Some is economics. Some is manufacturing at scale.
But there is a cultural expectation underneath it too:
This is what tasteful looks like.
Neutral is elevated. Minimal is sophisticated. Ornate is excessive. Colorful is unsophisticated. Labels with literal images are cheap.
Taste is being dictated with an agenda toward conformity.
When the acceptable range gets narrower, we can still feel like we're choosing.
There are fifty shades of beige! Look at all the options!
But you cannot exercise individual choice if the choices have already been removed.
You can take choices away by saying "you may not," or you can take them away by making sure there is nothing else.
The first one is obvious.
The second one is much harder to see.
You don't have to ban beautiful things to reduce the choices available to people.
You can simply stop making them.
The politics of the unnecessary
This is why ornamentation matters to me.
Walk down any given street in New York and look up. Chances are, you will see some absolutely unnecessary mind-blowing architectural details. The buildings are covered in things nobody needed to put there. Cornices. Carved stone. Ironwork. Gargoyles. Faces. Flowers. Animals. Mosaics. Tiny details tucked into places most people walking below will never even notice.
None of it was necessary.
That's the point.
Human beings make unnecessary beautiful things because we're human beings.
We carved things that didn't need carving. Painted things that didn't need painting. Wove patterns into things that would have worked perfectly well without them. Built elaborate ceilings when a flat one would have done. Put flowers on things. Put faces on things. Put ridiculous little animals on things.
We have always done this.
Because we are not machines.
We don't just want things that function. We want things that mean something. We want memory and beauty and humor and weirdness. We want to leave evidence that somebody was here.
A free person is allowed to make excessively gorgeous things for themselves and others to enjoy.
The capacity for specificity
Right now, I am hunting for a printer that can still make our candle labels the way we designed them. The family printer we used was absorbed by a larger company. Our plates and artwork disappeared. The new minimums are five times what we used to order. The industry is increasingly moving away from physical hot foil stamping into cheaper digital foil that peels and only on low quality plastic-y substrates. Smaller runs of high quality labels are discouraged by most printers, regardless of cost.
That's a printer problem.
But it's also something bigger.
It's a capacity-for-specificity problem.
There is an entire industrial infrastructure between imagination and the thing that eventually sits on a store shelf. When that infrastructure gets consolidated around scale, efficiency and standardization, unusual things become harder to make.
Not prohibited.
Just harder.
More expensive.
Less available.
Eventually, perhaps, gone.
And that matters.
Because availability is a form of freedom.
We don't make things to disappear
There is sometimes a division in people's minds between our Rebellious Women Candles and Night Sun Candles.
As though one is making a statement and the other is simply making something beautiful.
I don't see the distinction.
They're both statements.
Rebellious Women Candles yells. Night Sun Candles resists aesthetically.
One might make you laugh. One might make you remember somewhere you've been. One might be loud and one might be lush and atmospheric.
All of it comes from the same place.
We believe beauty matters. Art matters. Authenticity matters. Self-expression matters. The freedom to make something that looks like you, feels like you, smells like somewhere you've been, or simply makes you ridiculously happy for no particularly good reason matters.
That's why our labels are colorful and highly detailed. That's why our soaps aren't all the same neutral rectangle. That's why our candles have personalities. Every Night Sun Candle, including the little ones, has its own visual expression of the fragrance inside it.
We aren't interested in making things that disappear politely into the background.
We want things that inhabit a space. Things with a point of view. Things that make you look twice. Things that make you smile. Things that make a room feel like someone's actual life is happening there.
This isn't really about candles.
It's about what we believe ART is allowed to be.
We are maximalists on purpose
A colorful world is not automatically a free world. Maximalism can become prescriptive too, and that would defeat the entire point.
This isn't about choosing the correct aesthetic.
It's about whether there is room for choice. Room to diverge from the norm. Room for excess. Room for contradiction. Room for the thing that doesn't match. Room for the woman who doesn't fit the approved version of womanhood. Room for the house that doesn't look like everyone else's house. Room for the object that exists for no reason other than that somebody thought it was beautiful.
We are maximalists in an increasingly minimalist world. On purpose.
We make art. Intentional art.
We intend to keep making beautiful things. Colorful things. Excessive things. Specific things. Slightly ridiculous things. Things that smell like somewhere. Things that remind somebody of somebody. Things that make a room feel inhabited. Things that don't match. Things that don't disappear. Things that make absolutely no sense on a spreadsheet but make perfect sense in someone's hands.
Not because beauty will save us.
Because the freedom to make something beautiful that belongs to nobody but you is part of what makes freedom worth having.
You can be feminine without being obedient. Soft without being weak. Ornate without being frivolous. Colorful without being unsophisticated. Specific without asking permission.
You can make something nobody else would make.
You can want something simply because you want it.
You can be different.
You can refuse to conform.
You can refuse to beige out your creativity and love for the unexpected.
We are not going to mistake what is easiest to manufacture for what is most worth making. We are not going to mistake what is easiest to categorize for what is most worth being.
We are going to keep making the funky thing, the beautiful thing, the excessive thing, the unnecessary thing.
If the world keeps getting greiger, we will keep adding color.
Nobody gets to beige that out of us.