Statement on Objects

Across one category after another, people are being drawn toward things that have been overlooked, superseded, or outright rejected. You can see it across fashion, furniture, and electronics, as people shop thrift and vintage, restoring and revitalizing jackets, chairs, and MP3 players alike. You can see it in new products as well, with the reissue of classic models of wristwatches and sneakers, and the resurgence of legacy media like VHS tapes, vinyl records, and even CDs. Some new products tout their use of repurposed old materials—furniture made from reclaimed wood—or their grounding in a specific place and its constraints—hand-built goods from a shop too small to build them any other way.

This pattern can look like a mood—warm grain, crackle, and patina. But under the aesthetic is a set of standards running underneath objects as diverse as mechanical watches, film photography, and thrifted jackets: legibility, focus, and expression.

Legibility: it is what it is

A legible object shows you what it is. You can see how it works, or at least be assured that what you’re holding is the whole of it, not merely the smooth interface-layer over a service with misaligned interests.

A mechanical watch may be complex, but the whole system is right there. Fascinating and hypnotic, it’s a self-contained marvel of machinery. In contrast, a smartwatch is entirely opaque and slick, its interface a pure fiction, totally removed from the how of its operation. The fastest-growing group of mechanical-watch buyers right now is the generation that has grown up surrounded by smart devices.

The media of the CRT era was made to be seen through the glass of those monitors, in that particular glow. Playing VHS-era horror movies and classic console games on a CRT is arguably how they were meant to be experienced. CRTs may have been superseded technologically, but their value is in being legible—an honesty between an object and what it’s for.

Focus: demanding and rewarding attention

Some objects reward the attention you give them, while others are simply attention sinks. Some even turn your attention into a commodity—inflating it, leveraging it, and selling it onward. But an object that channels your attention toward what you actually intend can be grounding and fulfilling.

The resurgence of film photography has much to do with the question of where it puts the photographer’s attention. A film roll with only twenty-four frames, which takes time to develop and can’t be previewed, asks you to slow down. That slowness doesn’t turn your attention toward the camera, but to the light, the frame, and the subject. It sharpens your experience. A turntable asks something similar of a listener: no skip, no shuffle, just one side, in order. That’s the deal offered by a good object: the attention it asks for is repaid as presence, and it does so in proportion to what you put in.

In contrast, the smartphone is engineered to capture attention for its own sake and to sell it onward. The feed never resolves, and the notifications never stop asking for you. The people going back to simpler phones with limited sets of functions are refusing to let an object set the terms of their attention and bill them for it.

Expression: engaging and expanding your perspective

Expression can’t be bought and adopted as-is. It’s a relationship, and choosing the means of expression is only the beginning.

Big brands would prefer to sell pre-packaged identities: they do the expressing, and you pay to adopt it through consumption. Market consolidation narrows the options even further. But expression always finds a way. People are increasingly adept in expression beyond consumption, engaging with an object’s materiality and its history. Reclaimed, worn, or restored materials, and the marks left by a previous owner or by a manufacturing process that fell out of favour, are valued for the expressive potential they afford.

A thrifted jacket or a lamp carried home from an estate sale already has a history. It’s found, not made-to-order. You go looking without knowing what might be there, and what turns up is specific, so your discovery becomes part of that history. That context is fertile territory for expression because you’re not starting from nothing. The object already carries a story, and what you do with it continues that story rather than beginning one from scratch.

The mended jacket, the record slotted in among the rest of your collection, the watch that shows its scratches—these objects keep enabling expression after purchase. You can come to know them, and they change alongside you. This requires that an object has openness. Many modern products resist it. They’re designed instead to encourage relationships with the broader brand, the ecosystem of products and services, or their managed fandoms. As for the products themselves, you can’t get inside them, and they won’t take your marks, so they never come to feel particularly yours.

The Underlying Standard

An object honest enough to be legible, generous enough to repay the attention it asks, and open enough to take you in — that’s what people are actually reaching for, whether they do it through vintage fashion, retro tech, reclaimed materials, or revived craft. Nostalgia and romance may be how it looks from a distance, but it rewards the life you actually give it.