From top: Gucci Heritage Collection bag; La Mini D de Dior watch; Chanel no. 5 Parfum; Minox Leica M3 Classic digital camera
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Indeed, if all art aspires to music, then all design, of late, aspires to the iPhone. The constant companion you pet with your finger is not only intimate, portable and stylish but also superhumanly powerful, setting the heart aflutter from the palm of the hand, as perhaps once a Porsche or train travel might have. Microtechnology has made the tiny mighty, not to mention sexy and full of status. It's the latest rock star. And small is the new black.
In fact, new technology has so transformed modern life, suggests Jeff Jarvis in his recent book What Would Google Do?, that ours is a "world that has changed radically and forever." Thanks to revolutionized communication and a newly empowered individual, "that world is upside-down, inside-out, counterintuitive and confusing. The old rules of old industries ... are now blown apart. Small," Jarvis writes over and over again, "is the new big."
What's small is now considered personal rather than scarce, for one thing, even in architecture. Among fashion retailers, once convinced that acres of square footage equaled opulence, pop-up shops are all the rage. Maria Cornejo has one in Paris. Hermès has one in East Hampton, N.Y. And Fendi has reportedly signed on for one at the Super Bowl in Miami.
Sean McPherson, a co-owner of the Maritime and Bowery hotels and the Waverly Inn restaurant in New York City, recently opened the Jane Hotel, a onetime residential hotel whose petite, 50-sq.-ft. rooms are bedecked with flat-screen TVs and DVD players. "They're finished with as fine a detail as our other projects. They simply are smaller," McPherson says. Rooms come with a shared bathroom down the hall and a miniature, two-digit price.
So microchic are the portions at the 16th-floor restaurant of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago that waiters are instructed to give especially hungry-looking customers "the spiel," says chef Frank Brunacci, essentially suggesting the 10-course tasting menu. Brunacci talks about each dainty dish, however, as though he's discussing the layers of a painting and sees every bite as a "minuscule bit of intensity," he says. The carrot dish alone — a rainbow of purple, yellow, gold and white carrots — takes 12 hours to prepare.
That kind of élite experience is the idea behind limited-edition collections like Barneys' 22-piece collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent and the wine industry's microcuvées, which are cult favorites from Paris to Napa.
After all, brevity is cool. The White Stripes ended their last tour with a one-second concert. A recent Super Bowl featured an ad that ran for half a second. And text-message speak is seeping into everyday language, all of which inspired the Tate Modern museum in London to host the Shortness conference in June, in which speakers gave very short talks on the growing phenomenon of shortness in modern life.
But can a thing be too brief? British microsculptor Willard Wigan, whose work is so infinitesimal it fits on the head of a pin — he's done Henry VIII and his wives and, recently, the Obama family — once made an Alice in Wonderland so tiny that when his cell phone rang, he inhaled it. Even so, "I want to go smaller and smaller," says Wigan, whose work, which is viewed via microscope, is touring the U.S. and whose recent TED talk got a standing ovation. "I like giving people a different perspective on the world."