Get in losers, we're going catalog shopping.
Marie Kondo x The Container Store and the pitfalls of cultural essentialism.
To be perfectly honest—barring something truly thrilling like a last-minute (post-pandemic) jaunt to Palm Springs, or an offer to write a deluxe coffee table book about the history of Formica—for me, a gigantic gift certificate to The Container Store would be hard to top. I have always loved containers. I read and re-read The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room as a kid, wondering what magic I could wield on my dress-up box, art supplies, and book collection with a smartly painted peg board and some neat hanging baskets. I read Martha Stewart Living as a college student, and began a life-long habit of stashing “textiles” in under-the-bed fabric zip-up storage bags with cedar inserts.
These days, our living room (where the Zoom meetings happen) is reasonably organized, but my office, which is really just an ephemera library, is a controlled mess. Early 1960’s issues of House Beautiful, paper goods, pens, antique Christmas ornaments, and several Kallaxes worth of books are the primary culprits. Like generations of New Yorkers I was raised on tales of the Collyer Brothers, and I do make an effort to keep the overall impression one of order and control, but it’s not camera-ready. And the thing is, it’s fine. Better than fine, even: I know where everything is—every plastic bin full of Osterizer Blender manuals from the 1970s—and if I need any of those things, I can access them with just a little digging.
But if I were to take a month off from work to devote myself to thoroughly Kondo-izing my office space, there’s a capsule collection for exactly that purpose: Marie Kondo has joined forces with The Container Store. You want to click on it right away, knowing in advance that it’s almost too good, too neat, too minimalist to be resisted. You can clearly imagine a row of Ted Muehling earrings tucked inside a linen-lined jewelry box, or imagine sifting your collection of different baking flours into clear canisters rather than softly Tetrising them into a row of paper sacks sealed imperfectly inside ziplock bags.
The nomenclature of the Kondo x TCS collection seems designed to evoke a general sense among western consumers that the people of Japan are preternaturally organized, understated and spare, and don’t have dining tables covered with mail and old receipts or overflowing recycling bins. This is as untrue in Japan as it is anywhere else; Clutter in a consumer society is endemic and inevitable, though smaller living spaces in Japan make controlling the detritus of daily life much less forgiving as things pile up. The TCS x Kondo collection includes a lot of bamboo, several products with a wooden lattice surface described as “shoji,” and use of atmospheric words like “ink” and “cloud” to describe pleasant but perfectly ordinary ceramics. I am certainly the last Westerner on earth who would begrudge any person an abiding love of Japanese craft and design, but there is something...odd about classifying neatness as a cultural trait, then using that cultural association to commodify it.
It’s certainly true that on average, there’s a tidiness to public life in Japan, especially in large cities, that’s very different from what most Americans are used to (case in point: there are few public waste baskets, because you’re supposed to dispose of your trash at home, near food stands, or in stores, then go about your day.) Yet Kondo herself is presumably leading the charge, and if she can build a lasting neatness brand among American consumers by working with The Container Store, I don’t think I’m in a position to criticize her.
I’ve written about how her Netflix reality series was a lovely departure from typical makeover shows because she doesn’t prescribe taste, opting to simply help people unburden themselves of the clutter that was keeping them from fully enjoying their homes. On the series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, some homes were light-filled and chic and some were ho-hum, but all of them were the sites of real breakthroughs for the families that lived in them. What feels different about her Container Store collection is that here, taste looms large: her products are anti-McMansion storage solutions, smooth and geometric, subtle in color, and not overly ornamented. In truth, I’m a fan. But I hope that in browsing this collection, consumers in America don’t make assumptions about Japanese design, or the people of Japan, or Americans of Japanese descent, that are influenced by tropes about a certain mysterious and understated elegance that casts them as somehow different from other human beings.
The living spaces of any person with many enthusiasms—from any part of the world—can easily slide from a state of managed disarray into a full-blown hot mess express. We just need the right accessories to contain ourselves. Rubbermaid bins, even at their best, will not evoke the finest Japanese carpentry or ceramics of the Edo period, but get a stash of nice stacking clear ones, and you’ll never be at a loss for your favorite back issues of House Beautiful again.