In the age of NFTs and metaverses and timelines and whatever a parasocial relationship is, sometimes it can be nice to just hold something in your hand. Something special or solid, with a little bit of spirit, something made by someone else's hands. The past year everyone was baking bread and gardening and trying their hands at some sort of fiber art or bizarrely getting really into jigsaw puzzles. Or at least we all watched people get into making things on our phones and then talked about how the pandemic and the growing technological disconnect has us all craving real experiences and a return to a bucolic lifestyle none of us have ever really lived. Mass manufacturing and the proliferation of Direct-to-Consumer brands has led to a sort of flattening when it comes to consumer goods. It’s a double-edged sword. There’s so much more aesthetically good stuff available at more accessible price points, but so much of it looks exactly the same. The same fonts, the same sort of algorithmically processed MCM design cues, even the same happy and bright but monotone styling. It’s led to an almost clinical, personality-less aesthetic. One thing that makes our technological hubris more palatable is that every new epoch of industrialization and its concomitant alienation of both worker and consumer often engenders a renewed appreciation of craftsmanship and tangible relationships. It’s happening now, it will happen again, and it happened in the late 19th and 20th Centuries.
In the 1920s, a Japanese thinker and writer named Yanagi Sōetsu founded the Mingei Movement that, along with the Arts and Crafts Movement that slightly preceded it, has helped inform everything from the slow fashion movement, the cool new ceramist you’ve discovered on Instagram, to the Craftsman style bungalow you saved on Zillow at 3:45 in the morning.