I was reading Face Paint by Lisa Eldridge, a book about the history of makeup, and it includes this criminally good visual comparison between “old” and “modern” makeup packaging, and immediately my brain went oh no, here we go, because once you see it you can’t unsee it.
The old packaging is SO much fun. It’s playful, it’s dramatic. It’s doing the absolute most in a very charming way. There’s a tiny suitcase shaped compact (ICONIC). A Phone dial shaped one (INSANE). Illustrated faces looking straight into your soul. “Evening in Paris” themed face powder like Paris actually meant something and not just a Pinterest keyword. You look at these objects and they feel alive, like they had hobbies, opinions, maybe even a little scandal.
This is the kind of visual attitude people now romanticize when they talk about vintage branding, even if they don’t always have the words for why it hits harder.
The object isn’t just holding product. It’s flirting. It’s performing. It’s saying pick me without being a pick me girl (lol).
Then you look at modern packaging and it’s like… okay??? Branding that is clean. Fine. Inoffensive. Designed to survive a committee meeting. Technically good, visually restrained, emotionally distant.
I’m obviously using makeup as the example here, but this applies to pretty much everything. Interior design, architecture, everyday objects. And yes, branding. The entire visual environment we’re marinating in.
And before anyone starts clearing their throat to say “well obviously design evolves,” yes. Of course it does. No one is asking to go back to manufacturing things exactly like it’s 1903 and electricity is just a rumor. That’s not the point, and vintage branding isn’t really about copying the past anyway.
The point is asking why so much contemporary design feels muted. Why minimal, sleek, anonymous design became synonymous with “elevated” and desirable. Why personality slowly got reframed as clutter, something you should proooobably tone down just in case.
Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
How things are designed, aka how they look, feel and work, always reflects what’s happening socially, economically, culturally.
So to understand how we moved from rich, decorative, expressive design to sleek, composed minimalism, you have to zoom out.
Before early 20th-century modernism, decoration, symbolism, ornamentation and excess were normal. Objects were allowed to be expressive. This is the era that many people now reference when they talk about vintage branding, even though what they’re really responding to is freedom of expression, not nostalgia.
Then modernism entered the chat.
Efficiency became the priority.
Design had to adapt to fast-evolving industries and technologies.
Anything not strictly functional started being labeled wasteful. Decoration became suspicious. References to the past were frowned upon. Form followed function, and function had to be rational, scalable, repeatable, preferably beige.
And to be clear, at the time this made sense. The economy was changing. Mass production was rising. Resources were limited. The world needed functional, replicable design.
This mindset stuck. And then it compounded.
- Postwar mass production doubled down on standardization.
- Corporate branding in the late 20th century needed things to scale globally, so sameness became safer.
- Globalization rewarded familiarity.
- Tech culture in the 2000s fetishized cleanliness, neutrality, frictionless everything.
- Then social media and DTC brands optimized visuals for scroll speed, templates and immediate legibility.
And that’s how we ended up here: obsessed with sleekness and minimalism, with branding that looks good but often says nothing.
Which brings me to the actual point.
The real lesson of vintage branding isn’t that “old is better”. It’s that we took the “functional” part a bit too far and we need to strike a better balance.
The perfect balance between function (what is commercially smart? What feels like the right kind of premium? What’s easy for you to implement and apply to multiple areas of your business? What positions you exactly how you want to be perceived?), and the maximization of your flavor, your attitude, your vibe is what I take pride in and what truly makes my branding work different.
I don’t mean the usual “branding that feels like you but with strategy.”
I mean strategic attitude maximization. Two very different things. Two very different flavors.
There’s a difference between something tasting “fine” and something tasting the right kind of spicy, salty and sweet because you know how to work your condiments.
One gets you “ok” branding.
The other gets you museum-piece branding so iconic it still gets discussed in books 100 years later.
