Ding! The blooming trend: Colossal Instinct
Why is design embracing weight? Colossal Instinct predicts a 28% rise in popularity over the next year, from monumental art to oversized sunglasses.
Trend: Colossal Instinct
Prediction: +28% popularity over the next 12 months
Monumentality is experiencing a renaissance, and it has little to do with bigness. A growing number of creators, collectors, and consumers are reaching for physical and emotional weight, for art that commands space and demands presence.
Some consumers are buying weight in a literal sense: they choose stone over surface, treat walls as an object to be inhabited rather than painted, seek out sculptures that can be walked into, and opt for giant accessories that purposefully command attention. The appetite is for objects that stake their claim, and for the version of oneself that’s willing to commit to them.
The mechanism is the scarcity of weight itself. Years of flat, screen-native design have conditioned us to favour things that are light, inexpensive, adjustable, and endlessly revisable.
Mass is the opposite proposition. Weight has become rare precisely because the dominant aesthetic has spent fifteen years engineering it out. When nearly everything is designed to be light and provisional, an object with mass reads as a different kind of seriousness, one that doesn’t need to shout to be noticed.
For brands, the challenge is deciding what deserves to be made heavy, because weight cannot be applied as a finish. Value is shifting toward objects that a customer chooses to live with rather than around: single pieces priced as commitments, materials that accumulate the marks of time rather than resist them, surfaces elevated to objects, and spaces designed to be entered rather than merely passed through.
Facts:
Monumentality in Arts is forecast to become 51% more popular over the next 12 months.
Material Richness is projected to see an 82% rise in popularity over the coming year.
Interest in Sculptural Wall in Interiors is expected to climb by 44% over the year ahead.
Stone Sculptures in Arts are predicted to gain 19% in popularity over the next 12 months.
Oversized Sunglasses are set to gain ground, with popularity forecast to rise by 10% over the coming year.
This Column is curated by Elena Marinoni, Trend Forecaster at NextAtlas.
