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By Michael Barone
Substance and style are often considered opposites. Substance is the real thing, the worthwhile, the essence of the matter. Style is surface froth, needless embellishment, frivolous decoration. Not so, says Virginia Postrel in her new book, The Substance of Style. Style–the look and feel of objects–matters to people, and rightly so. It is part of our biological nature to obtain pleasure from things that we consider beautiful and attractive, like symmetric faces and smooth skin. It is a biological need, certainly not the only biological need and not the most important one but a biological need nevertheless. Today, for reasons she explains, we are in a better position than ever before in history to satisfy this need. The results are all around us. "Aesthetics is more pervasive than it used to be–not restricted to a social, economic, or artistic elite, limited to only a few settings or industries, or designed to communicate only power, influence, or wealth. Sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized, and they are intensifying."

Postrel is a writer who, as former editor of Reason, as a business columnist for the New York Times, and as author of The Future and Its Enemies, has specialized in economics. She approached her subject here from an economic perspective. In the 1990s, in Reason she wrote about the flourishing of nail salons, run almost exclusively by Vietnamese women, in Los Angeles and in every large city across America. Most Americans used to get along perfectly happily without getting their nails professionally done. Now millions do, and pay for it, and would be displeased if the service were no longer available. More recently she noticed that a vast variety of toilet brushes are available. You can buy Rubbermaid's basic plastic brush for $3 or Target's Michael Graves brush for $8 or the sleek Oxo brush for $14 or Philippe Starck's Excalibur brush for $32 or Stefano Giovannoni's Merdolino brush for $55 or brushed nickel and chrome brushes for $400. Take your pick.

These things make money, or they wouldn't remain in the marketplace. A firm as hardheaded in the pursuit of profit as General Electric has a lab in Selkirk, N.Y., that develops new colors and finishes for plastics. Customers can go there to look at some 4,000 sample chips and to "talk about their dreams" to GE designers. No one needs these things, in the sense that we need food and water. But, Postrel argues, we do need them, in the sense that they satisfy real longings and make our lives more pleasant. The Future and Its Enemies divided the world into Dynamists and Stasists: Dynamists welcome change and individual choice; Stasists abhor change and want limits on people's ability to make choices. In The Substance of Style, Postrel identifies style, and the way styles change, as a form of Dynamism and the critics of changing style as Stasists. The latter come in all sorts of ideological and cultural forms, and Postrel spends much of the book doing battle with them. She takes on the intellectuals and cultural critics who sneer at people's desire for style and for new styles as conspicuous consumption and the accumulation of status symbols.

Thorstein Veblen in the 1890s and Vance Packard (The Status Seekers) in the 1950s argued that people obtained what they considered attractive objects only to impress other people with their wealth and success. Packard argued further that consumers were helpless, hapless morons who were manipulated into buying things by flashy advertising. But, Postrel replies, people are spending good money for attractive objects that their neighbors are unlikely ever to see. Who flaunts their toilet brushes? And the profusion of aesthetic goods and services now coming to the market proves that people do seek aesthetic pleasure. She doubts that status seeking was ever the main motive for consumption choices even in the 1950s or that advertising could manipulate people into buying products they didn't like: The Edsel, introduced in 1958, was a flop. It was just that intellectuals like Veblen and journalists like Packard thought that ordinary people should be content with unattractive utilitarian objects; anything else was somehow economically wasteful. Of course you can buy nothing but utilitarian objects if you want: The market offers that choice too, but increasingly Americans aren't taking it.

Then there are the aesthetes of movements like the International Style of architecture, who insisted that form follows function and that buildings should be made of plain materials without decoration. That is one style that some people have liked–the corporate heads and public housing bureaucrats who gave the International Style architects most of their commissions and some consumers and apartment buyers even today. But the Internationalists demanded more. They proclaimed in effect an end of style: No one should build anything except in the International Style ever again. But, as Postrel points out, people are different. Some consider International Style buildings beautiful; others think they're ugly or less beautiful than other buildings. It may not be a coincidence that some of the International architects, Philip Johnson here in the United States and Mies van der Rohe when he lived in Germany, were sympathetic to fascism. Like Adolf Hitler, they wanted all buildings built their way. As Postrel writes, "Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes."

Then there are the left wingers like Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen. "How depressing was it to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?" she wrote in December 2001, and went on to berate Americans for "uncontrollable consumerism." Presumably Quindlen thinks people should be spending their money on feminist novels of the sort she writes. But one suspects that she spends some of her royalties on the high-priced consumer goods she lists in her column. It's fine for her to have them, but Afghan women should do without.

Then there are the authenticity purists. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable sneers at "authentic reproductions." But Williamsburg reproductions are beautiful and beautifully crafted objects, which may remind buyers of the 18th-century past that Colonial Williamsburg does such a sophisticated and sensitive job of helping us to understand. For the overwhelming majority of consumers who cannot afford genuine 18th-century objects (and are they authentic if they still carry the detritus of 200-plus years or if they have been cleaned?) Williamsburg authentic reproductions may be a good buy.

"People are different," Postrel reminds us, and will have different aesthetic tastes. And there's nothing wrong with that. She spends some time chronicling disputes over architectural codes in cities and subdivisions and concludes that codes are all right as long as they cover only a small area, so that people can have a range of choices. In mid-20th-century culturally uniform America, advocates of different styles struggled for the pre-eminence of their favorites. In early-21st-century culturally diverse America, all kinds of different people can have the styles they want.

The Substance of Style is a celebration of some of the wonders of our country in our time. Postrel points out that demands for aesthetically pleasing goods and services have created jobs by the many thousands for designers, craftsmen, nail salon workers–jobs that probably give their holders greater satisfaction than the grim clerical jobs in giant corporations that mid-20th-century theorists thought we would all be consigned to today. And she also points out that the profusion of aesthetic products has made them cheaper: Women today accumulate much larger wardrobes out of much smaller percentages of their earnings than they did in the conformist 1950s. Here we rub up against one of the limitations of economics: It is hard to estimate, and easy to underestimate, how much better off we are than previous generations. Product improvement and enhancement of aesthetics are not fully measured by our statistical indexes. Just as we get much more computing power for the dollar when we buy a computer than we did in the late 1970s, so also can we get (if we want it) a much more attractive computer than the utilitarian boxes of a quarter century ago. And for some of us, it's worth it. You get choice. This is a book about style–and about substance.