The Substance of Style, and Its Prophet

The title of this post is borrowed from Virginia Postrel, who wrote a book by the same name: The Substance of Style. With the passing of Steve Jobs, everyone is pondering his legacy. Undeniably, one of the lasting legacies of Steve Jobs has been to make style and aesthetics matter in business for even the geekiest of the geeks.

Computers, you may or may not remember, were really ugly before Apple through the sheer force of market adoption made it a requirement that they be beautiful, elegant, and well designed. Phones, tablets, and MP3 players also looked rather shabby until Apple elevated them to objects of desire.

Behind all the exterior style is powerful, intricate, intellectually stimulating technology  hardcore engineering – the substance, if you will, that makes impossible feats possible.

In reality, however, style itself is substantial. Style is not just the case or the packaging in which substance resides. Beauty evokes a much more immediate emotional reaction than complex engineering. It can draw an immediate, often impulsive reaction from the wallet, something engineering alone can seldom achieve.

Postrel submits that style is essential for business. I concur. Steve Jobs concurred. Where do we go from here on the style dimension, now that we are no longer arguing that aesthetics matter? They do, as the prophet Steve has settled once and for all. And with that forever distorted reality, what, if anything, will we be doing differently?

I would like to hear your perspectives on the subject. I also suggest you read Virginia’s book as you think about this phenomenon.

To kick off the discussion, here are a few of my thoughts.

In the twentieth century, we experienced a brand of feminism that could be summarized as masculine feminism. Women were encouraged to suppress their beauty and femininity and act and dress like men. The intellect was worshipped, and other dimensions were dismissed. Hillary Clinton, Meg Whitman, and many others on the list of the world’s most powerful women belong to this generation of feminists.

I have never been drawn to this kind of feminism. Grace, beauty, style, and femininity were always integrated into my being, and it is something I never felt the need to apologize for. Nor, of course, did I feel any need to apologize for the power and force of my intellect or personality – something young girls often do to counter a perception that they are nerdy or bookish and so on.

Today, I see a healthier brand of feminism emerging in the world. It embraces multiple aspects of a human being – style and substance – and it will likely lead us to a more interesting, richer world.

Einstein acknowledges the role of aesthetics by saying: “Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.”

The other shift, also indicating a marriage of style and substance, is happening as right-brained and left-brained thinking comes together. The iPod would never have happened had it not been for Steve’s passion for Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Desktop publishing may have languished had it not been for his chance encounter with calligraphy at Reed College.

What products and services can we envision that draw equally from both sides of the brain, and make hearts sing?