Obscene Beauty: Design’s Affair with Luxury

This panel will explore the relationships between decadence, excess, and monstrosity as manifested in designed objects. Through case studies in fashion, graphic, product design, and other areas, the panel will examine how design pushes the boundaries of impropriety. From bespoke commissions to small-scale coveted collections, quiet minimalism to lush and saturated visuals, design has been a means of manufacturing desire and constructing value beyond a product’s inherent offerings.

Design allows consumers to express the wildest aspirations of their own identity, a longing for the forbidden, unattainable, and extravagant. While modernist notions of “good design” have emphasized simplicity and ideas about cleanliness and purity, which have become coded as expensive, there have always been alternative modes of expressing exclusivity and expense. Designers and consumers have always resisted these restraints, expressing appetites for forms that boldly embrace excess. We welcome papers that analyze designed objects contemporary or historical in the context of race, gender, queer theory, ecocriticism, or other methods adjacent to design practice.

We are looking for papers that explore the aesthetics of luxury, from materials to textures, bold typography, or opulent color palettes. Papers might consider packaging for “vice products” such as alcohol and perfume that entangle refinement with impropriety, blurring the line between elegance and excess. Papers on Maximalism might explore how design weaponizes extravagance or embraces excess with over-the-top production techniques. Papers exploring limited edition collectibles might analyze how design signals exclusivity and scarcity through these designs. This panel welcomes papers that deal with luxury design broadly defined.