#TeamFAKE
When fake is the point: artifice in spaces and brand design
In my house there's a bathroom with a wall covered in gold-framed mirrors and a shower nobody uses. Inside the shower there's a 1960s mannequin and a gold column. When you walk past the mirrors, you catch the mannequin looking at you.
I'm fascinated by the playful and the unexpected, especially indoors. The outside world makes us serious; our own space should set us free. Nobody mistakes that mannequin for a person, and that's exactly why it works.
Artificial things get a bad rap just for being artificial. We say a smile is fake when we don't buy it, and that suspicion spills over into materials, colors and bodies. I see it differently. There's the kind of artifice that shows itself and invents something nature can't offer, and the kind that disguises itself as natural. The first expands what we can imagine. The second ends up making us all alike, and today it shapes much of how spaces and brands are designed.
The Decades That Dared
Some eras wear their artifice proudly. Two interest me most: the fifties and the eighties.
After the war, kitchens filled up with plastic, enamel and pastels, and laminate became one of the stars. Formica was born in 1913 as electrical insulation, and its name says it all: it was a substitute "for mica." A material named after the thing it replaced. In 1950 the brand launched Skylark, the famous boomerang pattern: abstract shapes floating on a plain background, making no attempt to pass as wood or stone. That laminate was proud to be plastic, and so was its era, a time convinced it could make something better than what nature provided.
The eighties, my decade, did it again with more irony: my pink tape recorder, pastels next to neon. In 1981, in Milan, the Memphis group showed furniture clad in plastic laminate, the stuff of cheap countertops and diners, printed with colors and patterns no tree ever produced. What had been cheap became design, and those pieces now sit in museums.
Both decades shared something I find essential: they trusted what they could make, and they showed it. Artifice was proof that we could go beyond what we'd been given.
Nature, Now in Porcelain
It amazes me how these cycles repeat, driven by the collective psychological need of the moment. After every era of artifice comes a craving for contrast, a return to balance, and nature steps in. Laminate went through this itself: in the seventies, Formica lost ground to a growing preference for real wood, which felt more honest.
But the nature that comes back is rarely nature. As early as 1927, the company had patented a process for printing laminates with wood grain or marble veining, and over the years imitating wood and stone became one of its strengths. Today the same trick is everywhere: porcelain tile that copies travertine, the preserved-moss wall in the lobby, the beige wellness lounge. These are manufactured materials that look best from a distance.
So I see the pendulum differently. More often than not, it swings from artifice that shows itself to artifice that hides. When the time for balance comes, what disappears is the pride in having made something. The artifice stays.
One Face
The body follows the same pattern. Nature is astonishing, and so is our ability to change how we look: extensions, fillers, Botox, surgery. We can reshape ourselves almost any way we like. And yet, in trying so hard to stand out, we end up looking alike.
The industry has already named the next phase. In March 2026, Allergan Aesthetics, the company behind Botox and Juvéderm, announced what it calls the "undetectable" era, backed by its own survey: 74 percent of consumers say they want results that don't show. The template is still there; the new promise is that nobody will notice it. It's the porcelain-tile trick, applied to a face.
What anyone does with their own body is their call. What interests me is the pattern: when artifice hides, it stops inventing and starts copying a template, and a template copied by enough people produces interchangeable faces. Brand spaces are heading the same way.
Artifice as a Brand Decision
Picture the brand space that shows up by default today: beige tones, porcelain that imitates stone, a wall of preserved moss, warm light. It sells itself as nature and wellness. It works, it bothers no one, and if you took the logo off it could belong to a bank or a sneaker brand.
Simulated nature has become the safe language of experience design. The problem is, it has no author. No one has to defend picking a travertine that isn't travertine, because it doesn't look like a choice at all.
Honest artifice demands the opposite. A pastel pink palm tree doesn't grow anywhere: someone had to decide to put it there and own that decision. In my ideal world there are pastel pink palm trees and glass blocks, and that fantasy doubles as a design criterion for me. Every fake that admits it's fake forces the question: what world are we building, and why here? That's a concept-stage question, one to answer before the renders and the materials list.
Memphis understood the business case, too. Its first collection was, in part, a product-placement exercise for Abet Laminati, the Italian manufacturer of its laminate, which sponsored the show. A materials company got its most ordinary product into museums by letting it be plastic.
There's one more reason to defend this kind of artifice now. These days, "artificial" mostly refers to intelligence, and any image can be generated in seconds. A brand experience that lives only in the photo competes with millions of images of places that don't exist. Physical artifice takes up real space, and you have to move to find it.
The mannequin is still in the shower. To meet its gaze you have to walk past the mirrors, and in that moment you know exactly what it is. I'll take that over any nature that asks me not to look too closely. //SC