Have You Also Become a Carrier of the Gentrified-Aesthetic Virus? | 100 Big Questions About Life

If the essence of humanity is a broken record, then the essence of human taste might be… a photocopier.

People who fly between big cities all the time have probably had this moment: you're dragging a suitcase through an airport and, for a second, you have no idea which country or which city you're in, because the fittings and the interior design around you look too much alike to tell apart.

The French anthropologist Marc Augé once called these ever more identical airports "non-places" — places with no personality, cut from the same pattern, sealed off from their surroundings and unable to give anyone a sense of history. And these "non-places," scattered across the world yet strangely alike, keep multiplying.

The New York artist Laurel Schwulst, hunting for decorating ideas for her own home, found that the interiors of many houses on Airbnb looked stamped from a single mold — you couldn't tell whether they were in Brooklyn, Rio de Janeiro or Osaka. A house with any local character is hard to find; one QDaily reader says they once went through a full 10 pages of Airbnb listings without turning up a single Japanese-style room in Tokyo.

A German traveler named Igor Schwarzmann found on business trips around the world that the cafés his apps recommended had startlingly similar decor, whether he was wandering around Texas, Los Angeles, Beijing or Seoul. These weren't Starbucks or Costa Coffee outlets working from one assembly-line design; owners in every corner of the world had, without consulting one another, all landed on the same look — a universal café uniform of "wood tables, brick walls, vintage Edison filament bulbs and succulents."

Beyond Airbnb and cafés, there are the creative parks converted from disused warehouses, the pop-up shops pairing neon colors with white tile, the startup offices papered in all-caps motivational slogans, the Instagram-famous restaurants copying one another, even dumpling joints that have started to look like small European cafés… These places that leave you unsure where you are cross physical distance to form a separate, seamlessly connected global cloud space.

In 2016 the American tech outlet The Verge published a long feature, Welcome to Airspace. Its author, Kyle Chayka, simply called these places "Airspace." Travel the world, he wrote, and you can go the whole trip without stepping outside Airspace, surrounded the entire time by minimalist furniture, industrial lighting, craft beer and avocado toast — a set of objects that stand for comfort and quality.

Inside Airspace, everything speaks the same aesthetic language: home colors are Morandi, food is plated for an air of refinement, and the internet elites passing through wear Issey Miyake T-shirts and smell of niche salon fragrances blended by perfumers using old methods. The photos people take here and post to social media all look effortlessly casual in the same way, as if everyone had agreed on it in advance — a sleeve pulled down to half-cover the hand holding the cup, the lower face hidden, the eyes gazing into the distance.

This has even produced a kind of (false) stylistic unity: if you can't appreciate it, you must have gotten something wrong; if you can, you are a distinguished citizen of Airspace, and your taste keeps being reinforced as you move seamlessly through it, telling yourself again and again that a decent, quality life could hardly look like anything else.

But people haven't always defined a quality life this way. Middle-class taste became the urban mainstream only in the past few decades. Urban sociologists have studied a process of city development called "gentrification," which we explained in detail in an earlier article.

London's Islington and Shanghai's Tianzifang both went through similar but separate processes of neighborhood gentrification. What "Airspace" represents now is something larger and far more tightly connected: a global gentrification of taste.

How did this convergence of style get pushed so forcefully across the world? Silicon Valley deserves much of the credit. Social networks such as Facebook and Instagram let people copy each other anywhere on earth without friction — from chairs to light bulbs, anything you can see online you can easily track down in the same version. Ever since the Hawaii-themed Liholiho Yacht Club in San Francisco showed off the Hawaiian greeting "aloha" spelled out in mosaic tile, the same mosaic has spread worldwide in "hi," "Bonjour" and other languages. And the imitation cycle keeps getting shorter: a Brooklyn café posts a new latte-art design, and a professional barista in Kazakhstan can copy it perfectly after a little practice.

Airbnb is another standout among the tech companies working to flatten geographic distance. Its earliest web design was strictly utilitarian — offhand photos of houses and streets, and a pitch that came down to "better than a cheap hotel." By 2012 Airbnb had turned into the version we know now: high-resolution photos in the manner of a home-décor magazine, laid out as "house porn" the way a porn site lays out its own. Airbnb has never issued a style guide, yet the same IKEA furniture is easy to spot in popular listings all over the world. In a sense Airbnb has become a display of globalized atmosphere, and an interactive lifestyle magazine.

Set aside these outside conditions and nudges, and the aesthetic elements themselves — the brick walls and wood tables, patterned tile and brass, concrete floors and geometric rugs, IKEA Eames chairs that turn up in guesthouses, cafés and offices everywhere — all behave like viruses. They spread easily on their own.

What makes them viral is this. They are basics, like Uniqlo basics: they meet most people's basic needs while leaving room to improvise, so they can be personalized without excluding anyone. They carry no obvious local markers, so they look out of place nowhere. And they are conspicuous and photogenic. Patterned tile is the classic case — textbook Instagrammable, it catches the eye fast even when it isn't the subject, and shooting it without posting it feels like a waste.

Most important, these popular elements cost little but come with a built-in "looks expensive" buff. Marble and brass roughly equal opulence; geometric patterns roughly equal a sense of design; and both opulence and a sense of design roughly equal expensive. Normcore — the sexless minimalist look, for which a cheap substitute was always within reach — went global back then, while pricier fashion trends rarely escaped their niches. Real luxury is hard to copy, but elements that merely look "high-end," used well, not only don't cheapen you, they also carry an elegant note of "I'm young and I know what's what."

Piergiorgio Odifreddi, author of The Dictionary of Human Stupidity (《人类愚蠢辞典》), writes in his notes on memes that besides the theory of evolution, Darwin also proposed an analogy between biological genes and cultural genes, or memes. Just as he argued that organisms do not reproduce through genes but genes reproduce through organisms, cultural genes pass between people not by copying but by imitation — and the cultural genes that survive are not the "better" ones but the ones better "adapted" to spreading.

In that sense, humans are not the ones spreading gentrified taste. Gentrified taste is using humans to copy itself, whether or not it actually improves anyone's life, because the part people play in all this is only that of a container.

QDaily Research Lab looked at three of the most representative Airspace samples, to walk you through the 11 elements that now govern human taste:

Cafés and Instagram-Famous Restaurants

For any restaurant chasing internet fame, everyone knows that photographing well can outrank tasting good. In a contest decided on looks, the backdrops that have come out on top are:

1. Wood Tables

How universal is the wood table? Café "owner-operators" (a gentrified stand-in for "manager") may never have considered an alternative. When a partner floats the idea — "let's open a café" — the list runs: pick the espresso machine, hire the baristas, find the storefront, then "get some solid-wood tables," or if money is tight, "get some wood-grain tables." Nobody says, "What material should we make the tables out of?" Marble tops are coming up fast, but they haven't shaken the big brother.

2. Pure White Mosaic Tile

Mosaic tile's career — promoted from bathroom fashion to contemporary restaurant fashion — is enough material for an inspirational autobiography. Its history of employment in the bathroom didn't hold it back; on the contrary, its strong association with cleanliness makes it a perfect fit for minimalism and lets it conjure an almost operating-room sterility with no effort. Restaurants adore it, and it still fields the occasional offer from fashion flagship stores and installation-art booths large and small. As old man Steve Jobs put it, the dots you think are meaningless in life connect later on, and every one of them counts. "That line goes on the title page," mosaic tile decided quietly.

3. Edison Bulbs

The OG of light bulbs. Hanging alone and casually is fine, paired with a geometric fixture is fine, but best of all is an open fixture that shows the glowing tungsten filament (or an LED doing an impression of one). That is where humanity's most primal industrial nostalgia lives.

4. Brass

Also a metallic yellow, but less saturated, brass reads as understated luxury, without the nouveau-riche (genuinely expensive) air its distant relative gold gives off. Its medieval-European whiff crushes the everyday quality of stainless steel, and next to fashionable millennial pink it cuts the sweetness. No wonder that after replacing the first stainless-steel faucet, brass went on to copy itself onto mirror frames and picture frames, lampshades and flowerpots, table and chair legs, even light switches — using humans to spread from one place to the next at speed.

5. Patterned Tile

In a restaurant with patterned tile, photographing your shoes against the floor is plainly more important than eating. Once retro patterned tile has moved into a Turkish sandwich shop, or even your own kitchen, who still remembers its Italian bloodline? Patterned tile belongs to the world!

Airbnb Rentals

Airbnb has no unified home-décor guide, but even its plain home-improvement suggestions get copied line by line by professional hosts as a reference manual.

Under "Show your personality," the guide says: "Improving your listing doesn't have to mean tearing out walls or floors. You can start small — repainting, reupholstering a chair, or simple changes to soft furnishings…. Feel free to add more personal color to your listing, for example by displaying trinkets you've collected on your travels, books you recommend, or painting one accent wall in your favorite color." The result: you can turn up a dozen listings with a world map on the wall and pushpins in the cities the host has visited, a dozen with macaron-colored walls, and another dozen with a copy of Kinfolk or Monocle on the coffee table.

Other elements you can collect a dozen of just as easily: solid-wood furniture, capsule coffee machines, IKEA Eames chairs, open shelving…. "Recreate mid-century industrial style as much as you can, just don't let it look too old or grubby," advises Natascha Folens, a Washington, D.C. interior designer and Airbnb consultant.

6. IKEA Eames Chairs

Eames is a classic, IKEA is cheap. Between them they let a plastic chair become a permanent guest in guesthouses everywhere — a low-key operator with a steady rate of screen time.

7. Open Shelving

Practically built for short-term rentals: someone dusts it every day, and there's no need to pile it with the clutter of daily life. Before this trend it belonged only in furniture-store showrooms. The moment you get the wicked idea of installing one at home, you find it looks nothing like the clean, tidy version in the listing photos — it collects dust constantly, ends up a mess, and loses all its appeal. It's like the clear PVC bags that were fashionable not long ago: only particular objects in a particular order look good, and the moment you sling the bag over your shoulder and let it swing a few times, the whole effect is gone.

8. Kinfolk

A home-display element that happens to exist in the form of a magazine, and an obligatory prop for the affordable-luxury restaurants known for their decor rather than their food, for boutique guesthouses and for lifestyle stores. When it appears on an Airbnb coffee table, you don't need to work out "what style is this place going for" — Kinfolk means Scandinavian, and these days it does more work than a mounted deer head.

Co-working Spaces

Shared offices, with their signature neon lights, big slogans, brightly colored wallpaper, clear glass and cubicle-free work areas, have become the face of the gentrified aesthetic. They do have an anti-gentrification side. Sharon Zukin, the urban sociologist mentioned above, has pointed out that co-working spaces led by WeWork have not only driven into the core of gentrified, upmarket neighborhoods; they have also, in the process, let the young entrepreneurs, city drifters and other "losers" squeezed out by gentrification retake space downtown, restoring, to a degree, an atmosphere of making things and getting work done.

In practice, though, the users WeWork wants are the gentry themselves. WeWork now likes to point out that 30% of its members are large companies such as HSBC, IBM, General Electric and Bank of America — currently its fastest-growing customer group. Renting a co-working desk has instead become the choice that lets a big company look young without losing face.

To follow that strategy, they have moved co-working into premium office towers. On April 1 this year, WeWork's fourteenth co-working space in China opened for business, taking the 15th floor of Shanghai's most expensive office building, the Lujiazui International Finance Centre (IFC). At the same time they work hard to keep the markers of the gentrified aesthetic in the decor: a 24-hour open drinks station with beer, tea and coffee; motivational slogans, which can be reduced but never eliminated; and the dropped ceiling, which absolutely cannot be kept.

9. Slogan Wallpaper

The community's designated atmosphere officer — though nobody can say exactly what positive effect "Do What You Love" on the wall has on a job you already settled for and can't undo.

10. Recessed Spotlights

They meet the need for ample, point-to-point lighting, and give every employee stationed beneath them the self-awareness of an exhibit.

11. Exposed Ceilings

The dropped ceiling is the natural enemy of our age, the root of all evil behind ideas that won't come and deals that won't close. Take down the dropped ceiling, paint the bare ceiling and ductwork white — whether in a co-working space or a café being used as an office, humanity now firmly believes that only by returning the ceiling to the light of day can your career and your life win the blessing of the gods of taste and start looking up.

The fashion scholars Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark write in their book The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization (《文化的纹理》) that the gentrification of taste has cut the new world order into two nations, the fashionable and the unfashionable. Either you are a world citizen who lives permanently inside Airspace, or you are part of the invisible population outside it.

If you are a young person in a city, then when a holiday comes around your WeChat Moments fills with displays of wandering through Airspace: street-style shots from cities at home and abroad, museum visits, gallery strolls, afternoon tea at a café. Your mother's nine-photo grid from a day trip to the countryside sinks under all of it — you could scroll past three times and still not see it.

But even once you are a citizen of Airspace: is it you who likes all this? Or do you like the illusion of being immersed in middle-class taste, having ended up living as a carrier of the gentrified-aesthetic virus?

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya

*[100 Big Questions About Life] is a newly spun-off column that pays attention to the small but enormously important developments in contemporary life — the kind of subject you raise with friends by saying, "Hey, have you noticed lately…" Follow along.