If you've recently wandered the glossy aisles of a major department store, hoping to be moved, surprised, or seduced, you likely emerged with two things: a faint headache from LED lighting and the sinking realisation that everything is beginning to look like everything else.
Welcome to the Beige Age. A world where even the shop assistants, dressed in tonal linen and glued to their phones, seem like hired extras in a minimalist theatre production titled Aisle of Numb.
You wander, you browse, you try. You hope to turn a corner in your soul. Instead, you’re met with another rack of oatmeal knitwear and a muted poster of a model staring wistfully into a grey wall.
And here’s the strange part: it’s not that everything’s bad. It’s that everything’s... fine.
But "fine" is killing us.
We are designing ourselves into a corner, and that corner has a curved edge, is Pantone Warm Grey 2C, and comes with a minimalist sans-serif logo embossed in blind deboss.
Yes, it's a real word. Carcinisation is a peculiar evolutionary phenomenon where crustaceans, entirely unrelated ones, independently evolve into crab-like shapes. Nature just loves a crab. It's the ultimate convergent outcome. Over time, everything starts to squat, flatten, and scuttle sideways.
Brands are doing the same. What began as a love affair with elegant minimalism has congealed into a global epidemic of tasteful tedium. Fashion. Beauty. Hospitality. Cars. Even the toothpaste boxes now whisper rather than sing.
Tom Ford once said, “Dressing well is a form of good manners.” But after decades of razor-edged refinement, he cashed out (for $2 Billion) perhaps because good manners finally bored him to death. You can only polish a tuxedo so long before the buttons start to weep.
Where is today’s Vivienne Westwood RIP, clomping down the catwalk, shredding convention with every platform step? She once said, “The only reason I’m in fashion is to destroy the word conformity.” You could argue that conformity just won.
Even Pablo Picasso, who did everything else, never got around to designing bikinis for his gorgeous girlfriends. A pity. Imagine the twisted lines, the unexpected straps, the glorious chaos of it. A whole beach reborn.
And Dalí? He would’ve given us toothpaste in the form of a melting clock, scented with tangerine and existential doubt. Instead, we get "charcoal activated" in matte packaging that looks like it was designed by a committee of insurance actuaries.
AI doesn’t help. It’s a mimic, not a maverick. Feed it a thousand logos and it gives you... a crab. Beautifully average. Every corner optimised. Every risk removed.
And averaging is carcinisation's cousin. It is the death of drama, the enemy of surprise, the silent flattening of human appetite.
This is why every car now looks like a frightened bar of soap. Every house has white walls and black tapware. Every pop song feels like you’ve already heard it in an Uber.
And still; we accept it.
But perhaps, just perhaps, this is the moment of rebellion.
• Be the lobster, not the crab. Step sideways, but stand out.
• Be the brand that dares to shout when the world is whispering.
• Build a product that makes people feel something, even confusion is better than nothing.
• Create a logo that doesn’t fit the grid. An idea that breaks the mood board.
The challenge for brand-makers is not just to be good. It is to be impossible to forget.
Let’s bring back the Cadillac tail fins. The inconvenient silhouettes. The spontaneous, the serendipitous, the flawed and fabulous. Because the shelves are getting neater, yes; but the soul is getting harder to find. If we don’t do something soon, we’ll all be drinking the same mineral water, wearing the same linen pants, and agreeing blandly that we feel “seen.”
We don’t need another crab.
We need a pink armadillo in a feather boa, ordering a dirty martini and redesigning the world.
