A Different Voice 08: Tim

Is the Naïve Chic design movement past its sell-by date?

Meet Tim:

There’s a great Mark Twain quote that states that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. So as we emerge, squinting at the light from the darkened cave of a Trump presidency, you’d be forgiven for concluding that we’re creeping back to an age where plain speaking and truth will make a welcome return, and those globe-trotting fibs Twain referenced will have their wings comprehensively clipped. In the world of branding and advertising, what you’ll see is what you’ll get. No more airbrushed perfection. No more fakes. We’ll all have counselling to address our questionable relationship with truth. Real will be the new fake, and imperfection the new perfection. We’ll all be going back to vinyl records to celebrate the dust and scratches that fought tooth and nail to defeat the digital remastering that stripped the soul from our Soul.

Things may not, however, be that neat. But before going there, let’s take a step back and get a couple of things on the table. Firstly, with talk of brands, a question: what is a brand? Answer: it’s no more, and no less, than a promise. When we commit to a brand we enter an agreement to allow that promise to provide for us. In this respect, brands represent micro religions existing in enclaves of our wider experience. Like their religious counterparts, these brand faiths have their promises and values – propositions and manifestos. As such, faith is required on the part of the consumer that promises will be kept. These faiths are ignited by devices such as product design, brand identity and a host of other tangible brand experiences. And, in these heady days of instant adoption, they gain our following as express converts that ‘skip intro’ and need do no more than ‘hit subscribe’, to belong. Modern day idolatry.

But let’s not forget that brands reside within design movements, and movements are a reflection of the zeitgeist: The Futurists celebrated the birth of mechanism in the early 20th century; the Arts and Crafts movement sought to shed the yoke of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century; the Punk movement – the Sex Pistols to be precise – kicked the prevailing ‘Status Quo’ (literally) of 70s rock squarely in the Buzzcocks. I imagine that if the Sex Pistols were to read this, they’d be appalled by the idea that they represent a brand, but their condemnation would make it no less true.

Back to the subject of truths: it’s clear that the supply has been pretty skinny in recent times. In this context, I’ve observed a movement that I call Naïve Chic, which deploys visual design cues to convey a sense of truth. Where, historically, design polish sought to validate, we are presented with grit. You know the stuff: elegant typography…smooth colour blends…metallic inks… They give way to recycled paper…relaxed typography…hipster narrative. In short, a masterclass of un-design and conspicuous under-production.

Feigning innocence.

One of the first examples of this was arguably Innocent Drinks. In 1998, the brand was set up by three guys, a shedload of fruit and a marked absence of conventional graphic polish. Its proposition and visual look was intentionally simplistic and its core stance was one of honesty – it even has a halo as its symbol! Innocent’s absence of superfluous elements, a refreshingly genuine narrative tone of voice and an overall simplicity, made for a presentation that lived up to its name. Except that it’s now owned by Coca-Cola (since 2009), with a net worth of circa $500 million. As such, it’s tough to reconcile its purest roots with such success.

The wolves of Naïve Chic.

Although Innocent didn’t strictly represent the granddaddy of Naïve Chic, it certainly played its part as a “role model” in heralding the arrival of the brands that followed. Brands such as Oatly and Nakd are now major FMCG players of significant value, but they speak as though they’re anything but. They deploy a narrative that’s cynically directed at their audience. A tailored sociolect that tells the consumer exactly what they wish to hear in their language. Brands have historically endeavoured to behave bigger than they are, but we now live in an age where they seek to convey the opposite. By not being seen as classic monoliths that arouse our suspicions, they gain our trust and buy-in. Wolves in disingenuous clothing seeking to behave smaller than they are.

So here’s my problem. There’s nothing remotely naïve about these presentations. The presence of apparent recycled paper is invariably a printed facsimile of ink on an industrial, mass-produced substrate. That hand-crafted typography is, in fact, comprehensively considered in every detail to convey a sense of spontaneity, rather than a product of actual spontaneity. That folksy back-of-pack narrative is contrived and shaped to speak in direct address to ‘you’. No different to the sociolect of Ronseal as it campaigns the straight-up virtues of doing “exactly what it says on the tin”. The limited colour palette, designed to infer natural cues, so often masks the opposite. The indictment is that these expressions are not the product of actual friends, but the vacuous expressions of marketeers seeking to represent friendship in order to sell.

Moreover, these ‘Trust Me’ postures of honesty and purity are arguably more dishonest than brands that present themselves through more conventional expressions. Their pitches are insidious – like discovering your hipster neighbour is an international arms dealer. If they’d donned the camo and been straight up about what they do in the first place, you might have far more respect for them in the end (while still calling the estate agent in blind panic to put your house on the market!).

Thank you, next.

Make no mistake – my accusations lie not with the contents of the packaging. I make no comment on the nature of the product. That’s an entirely different argument requiring more column inches and more time. I’m no dreamer that pursues a world of worthy offers and virtuous products – just a seeker of transparency and honest intent.

In the end, the friends that you keep are the ones that present you with the actual version of themselves, not the one they’d have you believe, or the one they wish they were. Because to present a lie is to insult. It states that one doesn’t believe the audience is worthy of knowing the truth of what is, whilst simultaneously encouraging it to buy into the untruth of what isn’t.

So I call time on this movement of Naïve Chic. Any diet that remains unchanged and repetitive ultimately becomes a challenge to digest. Every movement has its arc and we’ve been cynically served up the same meal of faux recycled paper, hand-drawn dishonesty, fake hipster doodles and disingenuous tone of voice for too long. I don’t buy it anymore and, moreover, I’ve got indigestion.