Virginia Postrel on 'Substance of Style'

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 (UPI) -- Virginia Postrel on "Substance of Style"

By Catherine Seipp

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 (UPI) - William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Virginia Postrel sees a world of aesthetic value in a cup of Starbucks.

The New York Times columnist and former Reason magazine editor's new book, "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness," sees the ubiquitous chain selling predictably excellent coffee in attractive surroundings as "to the age of aesthetics what McDonald's was to the age of convenience or Ford was to the age of mass production."

Postrel, who also writes a column for D magazine in Dallas, is a brainy, glamorous blonde who can turn the (mostly male) writers at right-wing journals into Tex Avery wolves pounding the table in appreciation whenever they mention her.

She can chat easily about anything from Straussian political philosophy to the economics of nail salons.

Besides being a non-geeky egghead who nevertheless has a deep understanding of Silicon Valley propeller-head talk, she's got a knack for making the unexpected connection.

Anyone, for instance, can throw tomatoes at easy targets like Susan Faludi or Pat Buchanan. But it took Postrel to point out, as she did when Faludi's book "Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man" came out, that the feminist author would make the perfect running mate for the conservative isolationist.

They are both "filled with nostalgia for the world of anonymous industrial labor and stable social roles," Postrel noted.

Postrel herself has no patience with this sort of nostalgia...or indeed with any sort of backward thinking.

Her first book, "The Future and Its Enemies: the Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress" was a critique of the forces working against "dynamism," to use Postrel's favorite buzzword.

Her new book, "The Substance of Style," grew out of "The Future"'s examination of how social order can arise without design.

"And to understand that," Postrel said, over a cup of coffee at (where else?) Starbucks, "you have to understand conscious design."

Postrel's latest book is an enthusiastic look at a world transformed by everything from Michael Graves housewares at Target to cheaper, better beauty products.

As Postrel puts it: "Artificiality is no longer suspect. Does she or doesn't she? Of course she does. In the next ad, she'll have yet another hair color."

Postrel often visits Los Angeles from her main home in Dallas, where husband Steven Postrel is a business professor at Southern Methodist University. The Postrels still keep a condo near UCLA.

Not everyone loves Starbucks, of course. The company has inspired particular wrath from those who see easy luxury for the masses as yet another corporate evil.

"They hate commerce," Postrel said, discussing Starbucks and its enemies. "Bascially, the notion of giving people things they really enjoy and making money from it offends them. It's an old anti-market critique."

But it's also outdated, she added, stemming as it does from a time - the Industrial Revolution in the 19th-Century, along with its ugly smokestacks and urban blight - "when cities were growing faster than we figured out things like sewage systems, and you still see that today in the Third World."

Despite the success of TV makeover shows like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," there continues to be a primly disapproving, anti-aesthetics, anti-pleasure strain in American punditry.

The week Postrel and I met over lattes, anthropologist Lionel Tiger had written a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece arguing that "Queer Eye" was an affront against men's natures, an argument we both found idiotic.

As other examples of this disapproving sort of Miss Grundyism, Postrel cites Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen, who tsk-tsked at the sight of newly liberated Afghan citizens going on shopping sprees.

And then there's Naomi Wolf, who railed against women trying to look attractive in her book "The Beauty Myth."

Or the current politically correct notion that parents should discourage teenaged girls from thinking about their appearance.

"When a father tells his teenage daughter that looks are 'meaningless,'" Postrel, who has no children, notes in "Style," he "is inadvertantly agreeing that she looks bad, exacerbating her sense of failure."

"We do not respond similarly to teenagers who wish they were stronger, more musical, or better in school; we coach them on how to build on their natural gifts," she continues in the book.

"Yet somehow we believe that looks are different, that appearance must be worth either everything or nothing."

"People like Naomi Wolf are trying to enforce an anti-beauty, anti-grooming CARTEL," Postrel said, laughing at the notion. "Because wouldn't it be so much easier for the rest of us if everyone were just SLOBS?"

But she does admit that occasionally an obsession with design goes too far.

"One of the issues I talk to designers about is that they can suffer from movie critic's disease," she said.

"They see so much design that they get bored, and so they like things that are very outre. We need designers to push the envelope, but designers on some level need to know when their notions about style aren't realistic. It's the same way you wouldn't want a theoretical physicist to make your car."

Postrel was dressed stylishly, but is no fashion victim: She was wearing a cheap black top from Express, expensive black pants from Armani and her usual metallic blue fingernails.

She began writing extensively about nail parlors in the mid-90s, when she began investigating how entrepreneurial jobs that don't require much education benefit from the free market.

She makes a compelling argument that an interest in appearances is not superficial or trivial but a healthy example of how democracies encourage individuality and choice.

"In liberal societies, we take... pluralism and competition for granted in most aesthetic realms," she writes in "The Substance of Style."

"Only repressive societies try to dictate dress by law. Only centrally planned economies try to decide without competition what furniture or dishes people should want."

In fact, one of the hallmarks of a free society, as Postrel repeatedly puts it in what might be her new motto, is the freedom to say, through our aesthetic choices: "I like that; I'm like that."