Let the tackiness begin!
I would call the style of the gilded-by-Home-Depot cartouches that now festoon the Oval Office,
the convention-center-sized "Big Balls" Room soon-to-be under construction,
and the proposed (but you know he’ll build it) Arc de Trump, dictator chic.
Peter York is best known for his astute and acerbic observations about British culture and life. For more than 40 years, he has drawn on his background in market research to spot and analyse trends and tribes, from the Sloane Ranger to the hipster to the interior decor of dictators’ homes.
York hasn’t limited his culture critiques to the British. Before Trump rode down that golden escalator (no abrupt, inexplicable stopping in Trump Tower), York published a book in 2006, called Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots. Here is a taste, courtesy of Amazon’s online review:
Welcome to the fabulous lifestyles of the cruel and despotic. Running with the idea that our homes are where we are truly ourselves, Peter York's wildly original and scathingly funny look at the interior decorating tastes of some of history's most alarming dictators proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes. Mining rare, jaw-dropping photographs of interiors now mostly (thankfully) destroyed, York's hilarious profiles of 16 inner sanctums of the scary leaves no endangered tiger pelt unturned, from Saddam Hussein's creepy private art collection to General Noriega's Christmas tree to the strange tube and knob contraption in the Ceausescu bathroom. All your favorite dictators are here: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mussolini, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, each with their own uniquely frightful chic. An interior decorating book like no other, Dictator Style is a welcome tonic for a world in need of a good laugh at the expense of the all-powerful.
After Trump’s descent to the depths of the Trump Tower lobby and his ascent to the heights of the American presidency, York wrote a piece in Politico in 2017, in which he applied the dictator style to President Trump’s design (in)sensibility:
Every good brand needs a theme and an aesthetic, and President Donald Trump has spent decades cultivating both. The theme is success, wealth, winning, and the aesthetic is bright, brassy, loud—or, depending whom you ask, gaudy and fake. In person, the Trump look is that distinctive hair, oversize suits (apparently from the expensive Italian clothier Brioni) and long, shiny red ties. Architecturally, it’s gilt and mirrors, as in his famous marble-and-gold Trump Tower apartment, photographed many times over the years, with its canopy beds, fresco-style ceilings and colossal chandeliers.
Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallels—not with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style.
A decade ago, I published a book on exactly that topic: Fascinated by the question of what makes dictators’ houses so recognizably similar, I spent months poring over pictures—from across the continents, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st—and trying to pick out the features they had in common and what those features said about their occupants. I ended up with 16 case studies—strongmen from Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz to Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic—and most of them, I concluded, obeyed 10 defining “dictator chic” rules.
The 10 "dictator chic" rules are so simple, even a cultural boor living rent-free in the People’s House in Washington, D.C. or sharing classified information with foreign guests on the patio at Mar-a-Lago could follow them. (Text is from the Politico article; all photos are of Trump properties--oh, wait. WE own the White House):
Rule #1: Go big! Dictators’ building projects are almost always ludicrously overscaled.
Rule #2: It’s all about “repro.” Dictators might work in the grand styles of earlier centuries, but they don’t usually use old materials and furniture. Everything is brand spanking new.
Rule #6: Glass. After gold comes glass—the better to reflect one’s abundant opulence. Shiny surfaces, giant chandeliers with glass droplets and giant mirrors with—you guessed it—more gold in the frames.
Rule #7: Marble. And after glass is marble—floors, walls, tabletops, every square inch of the bathrooms. New, shiny marble, of course, not the worn, old stuff or the modern architect’s “honed” kind, and typically in bright tones—liver-colored, green, pink or black with gold figuring.
Rule # 8: Art. When it comes to art, dictators, given a choice, prefer big and bright 19th-century potboilers, or their modern equivalents.
Rule #9: Logos. Dictators prefer known-value items—things that people will understand instantly, aka brands.
York goes on to describe his first encounter with Trump’s New York apartment and then goes on to say why Trump's dictator chic shtick matters. I will quote expensively from his Politico article, because I find it illuminating, even though it is wrist-slashingly depressing:
Then, in late 2015, I came across a set of pictures with no identifying text. They appeared to show a gigantic apartment in what looked, from the windows, very much like New York. But I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold; there were the usual huge chandeliers, branded relics of famous sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, and mushroom-colored marble floors. There was relatively little in the way of paintings, but otherwise, the place reeked of dictator chic.
As it turned out, this familiar yet unfamiliar apartment—a familiar style to me by then, but in an unlikely location—belonged to Donald Trump, who by then was running for president. This was the penthouse of the potential leader of the free world. … the substantive current design had been done by one Henry Conversano, who designed extensively—and perhaps unsurprisingly—for casinos. No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.” This was the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche.
But if this is all just a matter of taste, why do the redecorated Oval Office, the "Big Balls" Room, and the proposed Arc de Trump matter? Here is what York has to say:
Why does all of this matter? Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people. With its marble-inlaid dining table, painted ceilings and gold flourishes quite literally everywhere, Trump’s aesthetic puts him more in the visual tradition of Turkmenistan President Saparmurat Niyazov, who erected a massive rotating golden statue of himself in Ashgabat, than the self-effacing gray-suited conventions of Western democratic leaders. Atop Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment projects a kind of power that bypasses all the boring checks and balances of collaboration and mutual responsibility and first-among-equals. It is about a single dominant personality.
This, of course, is a startlingly un-American idea. The Trump look is miles from the architectural tradition of Washington, D.C., a city kept deliberately low-rise in its center, and whose neoclassical public buildings evoke stability and trustworthiness through their restraint. From the White House to the monuments, the American capital was designed to avoid Europe’s autocratic excesses, projecting a message of simplicity, democracy and egalitarianism—precisely the opposite of the new brand in town.
(To view more of the President’s dictator chic hidey hole in Trump Tower, have a look at these photos from Maison Valentina.)
York was spot on with his aesthetic assessment of where Trump is coming from—and sadly-- where he is going. Trump is transforming the nation's capital into a gaudy caricature of wealth and power. He is building a world where casinos masquerade as stock markets; influence is bought with lavish emoluments and Bitcoin; luxury is Disneyfied; and corruption is just another word for having your finger in the till of the largest cash register in the world—the United States Treasury.
Gone are the days of restraint and reserve. Instead we have a low-life from Queens with his hands on the Federal Reserve.
Gone too are the days of wine and roses. Instead we have Coke (with real cane sugar!) and a patio sprouting umbrellas.
Keep it real!
Marilyn
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