The Next Big Thing Is Microluxury
For all its cutting-edge brevity, Twitter has nothing on the creative geniuses of modern history. Hemingway once wrote a haunting story using a mere six words: "For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." Rodin sculpted a series of tiny hands no bigger than the top of his thumb. And Matisse set out with a 3-by-4-in. canvas, a bottle of ink and a mirror to produce a miniature self-portrait that would vanish into your pants pocket.
Christie's deputy chairman Jonathan Rendell took particular notice, however, when the minuscule Matisse went up for auction two years ago, and competitive bidding drove the price to about 10 times its estimate, more than a quarter-million dollars. That event was followed this past February by the sale of Yves Saint Laurent and partner Pierre Bergé's rarefied belongings, where, among other tiny treasures, a 6.5-in.-tall Belle Haleine perfume bottle by Marcel Duchamp was also driven to sell for nearly 10 times its estimate, this time $11.5 million. "There was definitely a feeling that people wanted an object that they could hold in their hand," says Rendell, who oversaw the sale, "rather than something that screamed from the wall."
The art world isn't alone in its penchant for diminutive things. As if designers were carrying the mandates of their boardrooms to the drawing table, the latest products coming from the design realm are quite literally downsized. There are handbags the size of hands, toylike automobiles — General Motors is banking on five tiny cars in its upcoming high-stakes lineup — and furniture companies are showing abridged versions of their most sought-after sofas and chairs. The wine industry is agog over microcuvées, tiny batches of custom-made wine. Professional foodies are all about microchic portions. And in place of their once leisurely sprawl, luxury hotel rooms and retail shops are popping up in dimensions formerly reserved for dressing rooms.
Small is certainly the buzzword among industry analysts. The luxury market showed zero growth in 2008 and is expected to shrink 10% in 2009, while consumer confidence in the U.S. has plummeted 60%, according to Bain & Co. Even so, in its May 2009 luxury-brands survey, Abrams Research concluded that "Luxury is here to stay," provided companies pare down to a "stronger, smaller core." What luxury consumers want now, says Bain, is to spend less without compromising on brand names or quality. And they want their luxe treats discreet. So the economy is all but demanding small gems, as designers — in league, knowingly or not — render them fashionable and thus supremely desirable.
Accessories — top moneymakers until recently and now suffering least in the luxury realm — have exploded on the runway in new, bite-size morsels that only up their irresistibility factor. At Proenza Schouler, the PS1 shoulder bag featured a second, extremely small one that zipped off it like charming handbag progeny. The VBH clutch that Michelle Obama carried on the town in New York City was a sliver of blue satin that looked like a jewel. And Karl Lagerfeld drove the point home at Chanel, where the models carried clear plastic handbags, each embedded with a menagerie of microaccessories: a tiny quilted Chanel purse, a tiny bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, even a tiny Chanel iPod, all packaged together as if to accompany a brand-new doll.
"I think there's a very high level of intimacy that people need from their products at the moment," says marketing guru and product designer Peter Arnell, whose pint-size electric car, the Peapod, debuted this year. "Americans have always asked, 'How big is big?' Big cars, big houses. Now we've gotten into our heads that things that are small are powerful and good. It's the power of the chip, the gigabyting of our lifestyle, which is really powerful."
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."