Raforno Art, Design & Culture Through a Sharp Lens

Raforno

Art, Design & Culture Through a Sharp Lens

Latest Articles

Ugly Is the New Cool: How Gen Z Broke Design's Golden Rules and Won
Design & Culture

Ugly Is the New Cool: How Gen Z Broke Design's Golden Rules and Won

Forget clean lines and muted palettes — a generation of creators is building massive followings by making things that look, on purpose, kind of terrible. Anti-design isn't a glitch in the system; it's a full-on rejection of it. Here's why deliberately crude aesthetics are having their biggest moment yet.
The Velvet Rope Is Gone: What Happens to Culture When Anyone Can Declare Themselves Legitimate
Art & Commentary

The Velvet Rope Is Gone: What Happens to Culture When Anyone Can Declare Themselves Legitimate

For decades, a handful of institutions decided what counted as real art, real fashion, real cinema. Then TikTok happened. The old gatekeepers are scrambling, a new generation of creators is rewriting the rules in real time, and the question nobody wants to answer out loud is whether we actually traded up — or just swapped one set of gatekeepers for a quieter, more algorithmic one.