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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump's Dictator Chic (Politico article by author of book on autocrats' design tastes)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-style-dictator-autocrats-design-214877Every 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, loudor, depending whom you ask, gaudy and fake. In person, the Trump look is that distinctive hair, oversized suits (apparently from the expensive Italian clothier Brioni) and long, shiny, red ties. Architecturally, its 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.
Trumps design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with Americas 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 doesnt mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, its aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallelsnot with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trumps look, Id 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 picturesfrom across the continents, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21stand trying to pick out the features they had in common and what those features said about their occupants. I ended up with 16 case studiesstrongmen from Mexicos Porfirio Díaz to Serbias Slobodan Milosevicand most of them, I concluded, obeyed 10 defining dictator chic rules.
The first: Go big. Dictators building projects are almost always ludicrously overscaled. In the 1980s, the seriously short Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanias longtime president, and his wife, Elena, started building what was to become one of the largest government buildings in the world. They called it the Peoples Palace, and they knocked down a good chunk of old Bucharest to make room for it. There was a huge, impressive, yet hideous facade and, inside, quite intimidatingly large public rooms. The Ceausescus were executed before the building was finished, and even today, it reportedly is mostly emptytoo large for an entire country to fill.
-snip-
Trumps design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with Americas 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 doesnt mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, its aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallelsnot with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trumps look, Id 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 picturesfrom across the continents, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21stand trying to pick out the features they had in common and what those features said about their occupants. I ended up with 16 case studiesstrongmen from Mexicos Porfirio Díaz to Serbias Slobodan Milosevicand most of them, I concluded, obeyed 10 defining dictator chic rules.
The first: Go big. Dictators building projects are almost always ludicrously overscaled. In the 1980s, the seriously short Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanias longtime president, and his wife, Elena, started building what was to become one of the largest government buildings in the world. They called it the Peoples Palace, and they knocked down a good chunk of old Bucharest to make room for it. There was a huge, impressive, yet hideous facade and, inside, quite intimidatingly large public rooms. The Ceausescus were executed before the building was finished, and even today, it reportedly is mostly emptytoo large for an entire country to fill.
-snip-
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Trump's Dictator Chic (Politico article by author of book on autocrats' design tastes) (Original Post)
highplainsdem
Mar 2017
OP
tblue37
(65,487 posts)1. K&R--but you will need to cut this back to 4 paragraphs, to protect DU from
being accused of copyright infringement.
gordianot
(15,243 posts)2. Trump would have got along "fabulously" with Saddam and his boys.
Think of all the fun they could have had, Trump's sons would have understanding older mentors.
Saddam and Trump appear to have so many similar tastes.
dalton99a
(81,570 posts)3. "Think French" - Dead dictators seemed to forget a simple French design
L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)4. Coming for Spring fasshion season, the new headless French look.
Meanwhile for the cold winter months, "Let them wear tees."
logosoco
(3,208 posts)5. Ugly and impractical!
I took one look at that canopy framing over the bed of Marcos and thought
"there is no way i would sleep under that!" But I live in Missouri where I have spent most of my life knowing an earthquake could happen at anytime.
I cleaned houses for a couple of years. Sometimes it was really hard not to go into the richer people's homes and say out loud "OH how tacky!" I guess I just don't have dictators taste!
uponit7771
(90,364 posts)6. Bet Vlad would love Benedict Donald's taste