ACTUALITÉS

We Need Blobs Now More Than Ever

The pared-down, ascetic Kinfolk look had a long run, with its muted colors and Scandinavian minimalism.  But thankfully, after overstaying its welcome as the de facto “Millennial aesthetic” and peaking with the unappealing drabness of spaces like Kim and Kanye’s confusing minimalist mansion, it’s dying out. The tides appear to be changing in favor of more lived-in, colorful places where you’d actually want to spend time and abandon the unrealistically neat, all-white spaces where you would live in constant fear of spilling your coffee. Now, homes on Instagram actually look fun again, as blank walls and concrete give way to maximalist combinations of colors and shapes on popular interior design accounts like @getclever, @2LGstudio, and @__sitio. We need levity anywhere we can get it right now, and as a result, we want homes that look playful, personal, and generally more visually interesting—and wiggly lines and colorful, freeform blobs are just about as different from bare white walls as you can get. Instagram has become inundated with artists and sellers embracing this goofy, expressive play on form. From sellers with names like Lotta Blobs and Wiggle Room, there are curvy mirrors shaped like amoebae and others surrounded by squiggles, chunky or thin; wiggly tables whose edges undulate without a single corner; couches shaped like puzzle pieces or oversized organs; pillows bent into chubby knots; and plump, cloudlike candles. Now, it seems, we need blobs more than ever. In 2018, New York Magazine declared that “the future of design is chubby,” describing the look of “elephantine” chunky shapes,  and examining the shift from the angular, geometric shapes of the early 2010s to rise of the blob and its cartoonish compatriots. Vox highlighted the rise of the “blobject” as home decor that same year, with writer Eliza Brooke concluding that the soft, childlike…