Kitsch

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Kitsch is a German word that has entered every language to describe bad taste: objects and images that imitate art in a naive, exaggerated or sentimental way, such as souvenirs of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, garden gnomes, snow globes with the Madonna, paintings of sunsets and kittens. In the history of design kitsch matters because for almost a century it was the great enemy to be fought, before surprisingly becoming a source of inspiration.

The origins of the word

The term was born in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and 1870s, to describe cheap prints and little pictures that were easy to sell to a growing middle class wanting to furnish its homes with something "artistic". This was the age of mass industrial production: for the first time decorations, figurines and period-style furniture could be copied in series, in cheap materials, and sold to everyone. It was against this invasion of fake ornament that the reformers of the Arts and Crafts movement reacted.

What kitsch is: the theorists

In the twentieth century kitsch became a subject for philosophers and critics. The Austrian writer Hermann Broch argued that its essence is imitation: kitsch copies the beautiful without caring about the good and the true. In 1939 the American critic Clement Greenberg, in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, described it as the opposite of avant-garde art: a product of mass culture offering easy, ready-made emotions. In Italy in 1968 Gillo Dorfles published Il Kitsch. Antologia del cattivo gusto (published in English as Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste), a collection of examples that became a classic, and the Frenchman Abraham Moles devoted a psychological study to kitsch, translated into Italian with an introductory essay by Alessandro Mendini. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera gave a famous definition: kitsch is an aesthetic ideal that excludes everything in human existence that is unacceptable, and it can become a tool of totalitarian regimes.

The enemy of modern design

For the Modern Movement kitsch was the sin par excellence. In design and architecture kitsch came to be defined as "any object whose form does not derive from its function": useless ornament, fake materials, past styles applied to new objects. The "good design" of schools and museums, from the Bauhaus to the Good Design exhibitions, was also meant to teach the public to get rid of it.

The revenge of bad taste

From the 1960s things changed. Pop design looked kindly on popular culture, and the designers of Radical design used kitsch as a provocation against bourgeois good taste. In the late 1970s Studio Alchimia and Mendini turned it into a true design language: the Proust armchair (1978) is a fake Baroque armchair repainted in brushstrokes. Then came Memphis, with its bar-counter laminates, and Postmodernism. Since then the line between kitsch and designer objects has become thin, and many objects born as a "bad taste" joke are now in museums.