Minimalism Implodes

There is something altogether peculiar about the modern obsession with sterility. This preoccupation with smoothness, with the anaesthetized surface, with that high-strung attempt to impose mathematical rigidity into a world that is swiftly losing its substance. Minimalism, a symptom of a culture that has mistaken sterility for sophistication, that has confused subtraction with refinement, that believes, in its profound ignorance, that if it simply removes enough, purifies enough, flattens enough, it will finally arrive at something true, something pure, something absolute. It supposes that we might create a world in which the spirit, [some would say the soul] might find peace. But man, in his desperate bid to tidy up the world, has, quite without realizing it, begun to erase himself. And it is at this moment that one must pause and ask: Is this the pinnacle of human achievement? Is this where all the great wonders of civilization have led? After centuries of art, of philosophy, of architecture, of music, of poetry. After Michelangelo, after Shakespeare, after Beethoven, after Laozi and Rumi and Bashō, has it all come to this? Have we at last decided that the most beautiful thing in the world is nothing at all? Life in all its glorious forms is not minimal. It is not arranged in neat little grids, nor does it move in straight lines. It writhes, it coils, it spirals and pulses and folds upon itself in unapologetic contradiction. So what solemn and joyless crusade did man set off on to flatten the infinite into a neat and orderly rectangle? A Provocation.

It is one of the great ironies of human history that the species which has spent centuries creating the most unfathomably rich expressions of beauty should now find itself terrified of its own handiwork. A barbarian force is waiting at the gates, salivating at the prospect of defilement. True creativity is a feral beast, born in the depths of disorder.

Minimalism, as it stands today, is nothing more than an aesthetic manifestation of a deeper pathology: the neurotic fear of complexity. The terror of contradiction. The repulsion towards that which does not conform to a neatly delineated system of understanding. It is a psychic defense mechanism, a desperate attempt to rid the world of its own unconscious depth. But the mind seeks chaos. And yet, modern design has been built upon the absurd premise that the best way to capture attention is to eliminate everything that might actually deserve it. They call this clarity.

The Enlightenment, with its cold and calculated rationalism, gave birth to the Romantics, those wild, fevered poets and painters who sought to reclaim emotion from the dead hands of logic. The neoclassical severity of the 18th century, with its rigid insistence upon balance and restraint, was shattered by the swirling excesses of the Baroque. Modernism, with its strict adherence to function and grid, collapsed under the anarchic irreverence of Postmodernism. Every age that has attempted to impose perfect order upon the world has, sooner or later, found itself overwhelmed by the Dionysian tide that comes rushing back in.

So what does Carl Jung have to do with Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy or Louboutin’s red soles? Everything. Because at the core of this aesthetic anarchy lies the Shadow Self, Jung’s unnerving theory that our suppressed desires, impulses, and dark instincts are the very things that drive innovation in this sterile environment. The eye lingers upon the thing that does not belong, that cognition itself is sharpened by contradiction.

Minimalism is not failing because it is ugly. It is failing because it has become a totalitarian system, a self-defeating obsession with absence. The Brutalist revival in web design, with its aggressive asymmetry and raw, unpolished aesthetic, is but the first symptom. The resurgence of maximalist fashion, the reintroduction of ornate typography, the deliberate uglyfication of branding. The cracks are already forming. The unconscious is reasserting itself. The shadow is rising.

A 1stDibs survey of 600 interior designers showed minimalism’s popularity crashing from 34% to 21%, while maximalism surged to 33%. Scandinavian modernism? Also in decline, dropping from 37% to 21%. Pinterest’s 2025 trend report reveals skyrocketing searches for “vintage maximalism,” as people abandon sterile spaces for something that actually feels human. Talker Research’s survey of 2,000 homeowners confirms the shift; 38% of Gen Z embraces bold, eclectic design over the soulless white boxes of the past. Even history is in revolt for the 28% of designers who are resurrecting the ornate grandeur of the 1920s and 1930s. The shadow is rising.

The Dentsu Creative Trends 2024 report highlights how brands, artists, and consumers are embracing surreal, over-the-top expressions in response to an anxious world. Dopamine dressing, absurd advertising [like Fiat’s war against grey: “Fiat says it wants to be "the brand of colour" and claims it will only offer "bright colours" inspired by "Italy's Sea, Italy's Sun, Italy's Land and Italy's Sky"], and the rise of whimsical, unpredictable design choices are dismantling minimalism’s dictatorship​. The shadow is rising.

Silicon Valley optimization, and the aspirational aesthetic of productivity. Now, the "soft life" and “lazy girl jobs” trends are dismantling the grindset mentality, rejecting the aesthetic of sparse, hyper-functional workspaces in favour of something more indulgent and deeply human. The shadow is rising.

The closer something crawls toward flawlessness, the more it reeks of the inhuman. Meta learned this the hard way when its avatars, engineered to be sleek and seamless, instead became digital corpses, their eerie smoothness so repellant that the company was forced to resurrect imperfection just to make them tolerable. The Ikea Effect lays bare another truth: friction is value. A thing means more when we wrestle with it, when we leave fingerprints on its surface. Hyper-optimization, with its bloodless efficiency, strips away that meaning, leaving behind an object so frictionless it slides right out of memory. And this is why personalization is expensive. The mass migration to Dark Mode is a collective subconscious rejection of the blinding sterility of the all-white.

Even the worst of Indian couture is a massive fuck you to the western silhouette.

In the end, it’s hard not to mock the last, clueless devotees of minimalism. Wandering their empty, lifeless spaces, still clinging to the fantasy that emptiness is a projection of  enlightenment. They built their temples to rationality, to control, convinced that if they stripped the world bare, they could cleanse it of the irrational. How naïve. And what is most repressed, as any student of the unconscious should well know, returns with a force proportionate to the violence of its initial suppression. The shadow is rising.