Revisiting 'Ornament and Crime' By Adolf Loos.

What can an essay written in 1908 offer to a surface print designer working in 2025.

Recently, I revisited Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime, the essay often credited with launching modernism’s suspicion - and at times outright hostility - towards decoration. Loos argues that ornament is wasteful, culturally backward, economically inefficient, and morally suspect. He frames decorative labour as unnecessary drudgery and insists that modern society would be richer, freer, and more “civilised” if ornament disappeared altogether. You can probably imagine why this got my blood boiling!

There are, without doubt, aspects of Loos’ writing that have not aged well, particularly his deeply problematic characterisation of traditional and non-Western decoration as primitive or uncivilised. His framing of ornament as incompatible with a ‘progressive’ society reflects colonial and elitist assumptions that deserve sustained critique in their own right. Yet, as I read the essay, I was surprised to find myself both nodding in agreement at certain points and arguing with Loos in my head at the same time.

Writing in Vienna at the height of the highly decorative Art Nouveau movement, and alongside the similarly ornate Vienna Secession, Loos identifies some real problems that I too witness more than a century later: capitalism’s hunger for novelty, industry’s use of decoration to fuel boredom cycles, and the growing detachment between designers, makers, and the objects they produce. But his proposed solution - the elimination of ornament altogether - feels both extreme and, frankly, impossible.

For me, ornament does not obscure material; it enriches it. And the suggestion that only precious materials and exquisitely crafted objects deserve ornament is not cultural progress, but elitism.

What the essay ultimately reveals is a split still present in design today: the difference between soulless, trend-driven ornamentation, and meaningful ornament that carries craft knowledge, cultural identity, explores ideas and human presence.

Ornament, capitalism, and early lessons in planned obsolescence

The one part of Loos’ writing that does still feel strikingly relevant is his critique of how ornament can potentially fuel waste. He describes industry’s reliance on novelty, the churn of trends, the boredom with last season’s patterns, the encouragement of short-lived objects. This logic resonates with later critics such as Victor Papanek, who denounced design’s complicity in planned obsolescence (designing items knowing of their short lifespan), and other consumer theorists who map how ornament often serves as the surface-level mechanism for driving unnecessary consumption.

We want the newest colour. We want imagery that resonates right now. This tension represents one of the biggest internal struggles I have with the industry I love and one I am constantly trying to reconcile in my own practice.

In this sense, Loos foresaw how capitalism deploys ornament not as meaningful expression but as a tool for accelerating turnover. His warning about decoration being used to disguise cheaply made goods feels painfully familiar with fast fashion and mass production proving his point daily.

And yet Loos’ economic optimism, his belief that eliminating ornament would grant society more leisure and dignity, now reads as idealistic. In a capitalist system, efficiency gains rarely reduce labour; they intensify it. If time were saved through the removal of surface decoration, it is far more likely we would simply be asked to produce twice as much plain product in its place.

Where Loos missteps: Ornament as material meaning, not distraction

Loos insists that ornament distracts from appreciating an object or material in its ‘pure’ form. While I recognise the sentiment behind this claim, I ultimately take the opposite view. As a practitioner, I see ornament as a way to deepen our engagement with materials, to explore their behaviour, celebrate their qualities, and reveal the maker’s relationship with them.

Here, I am not alone. A substantial lineage of theorists supports the idea that ornament is inseparable from human making. John Ruskin and William Morris championed ornament as an honest expression of labour, imagination, and humanity’s relationship with nature. Alois Riegl, meanwhile, understood ornament as a vital and evolving artistic expression emerging from a fundamental human ‘will to form’. Together, these perspectives frame ornament not as superfluous, but as a site of meaning, skill, identity, and deep material understanding.

The elitism in Loos’ hierarchy of value

Loos claims that ornament can only be aesthetically valid when executed with the finest materials and highest levels of craftsmanship. This logic is not cultural progress, it is elitism. It dismisses everyday creativity, folk art and crafted decoration. It erases the meaning found in traditionally patterned domestic objects, items that have long carried identity, ritual, and social connection.

Contemporary writers like Glenn Adamson, emphasises that ornament is often the point at which people form emotional relationships with objects. It is where intimacy and memory are held. To claim that ornament “belongs” only to luxury materials is to misunderstand its social and cultural power.

The split Loos reveals: soulless vs. meaningful ornament

Although Loos attempts to ban ornament outright, what his essay really exposes is the difference between two types of decoration. On the one hand, there is soulless ornament: superficial, trend-driven, disconnected from material or maker, and used primarily to market products for short-term delight. This form of decoration is capitalist in its logic rather than cultural.

On the other hand, there is meaningful ornament, rooted in material knowledge, expressive of culture, identity, or place, and often arriving slowly and intentionally. This kind of decoration reveals human presence, care, and the communication of ideas.

This tension remains highly relevant today, visible in everything from fast fashion prints to AI-generated patterns, from craft revival movements to contemporary sustainable design thinking.

Why ornament still matters

Revisiting Ornament and Crime has been unexpectedly clarifying. It sharpens my conviction that ornament is not a crime but a carrier of meaning and ideas. Decoration can be shallow, yes, but it can also connect us to materials, to stories, and to each other. It can slow us down, draw attention to making, and make visible the human hand.

In my own design practice and that of my teaching practice within higher education, this question of why decoration exists feels increasingly urgent. I consistently encourage students (and myself) to step outside the trend cycle and ask more fundamental questions of their work: What are you trying to communicate? Why does this decoration need to exist? What does it reveal about your relationship to material, process, or culture?

In a world already saturated with objects and images, a sustainable approach to surface and ornament surely requires this level of reflection. Meaningful ornament, rooted in intention rather than novelty, offers one way of resisting the endless churn of meaningless manufacture.

Loos wanted ornament eliminated. I want it examined, reclaimed, and revalued. And perhaps that is the real legacy of rereading him today: not accepting his conclusions, but using his provocation to articulate a richer, more human understanding of what ornament can be.