🪦 The Death of Detail…

Theres an obvious statement that needs to be made in a world of dupes and 2-day amazon deliveries: the things that take the most time, skill, and imagination to make are usually the things that age the best. They also nearly always have a serious premium at retail, as they should… 

A Patek Philippe minute repeater. A Tiffany Favrile glass vase. A Ferrari 250 GTO, with hand-hammered bodywork and no two panels exactly alike. These are objects where detail itself becomes the value. 

But if you zoom out on the past two decades, we’ve been living through what I’d call “The Death of Detail.”

I’d argue it started in at a very specific moment just before a generational economic collapse that shifted our entire perspective on value: the 2007 launch of the first iPhone. That was the beginning of “clean” design’s dominance: flat glass, black bezels, the soft blue glow of Helvetica. Suddenly, everything was supposed to look frictionless. Clutter was out. Minimalism was the new luxury.

And while it worked beautifully for technology (making navigation seamless, creating intuitive flows, elevating the experience, and all the other nonsense anecdotes startups used to describe mediocre design) it had an unintended cultural side effect. We stripped away the messiness -  the quirks that gave everything soul.

In this week’s installment of Shiny Thing$, we examine a bit of minimalisms past, with some encouraging cues for the future - a much more ornate and museum-ready one if present day is any indication… 

From Ornament to Absence

In the early 20th century, Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function” reshaped architecture, but it didn’t erase detail. The Chrysler Building still wears its crown of stainless steel arches, and Frank Lloyd Wright homes still drip with ornament carved directly into the stone. Detail was integrated into function.

But by the start of the 2000s, minimalism metastasized into sameness. Consumer goods wrecked the first to assimilate: cars began to look like rounded rectangles on wheels. Luxury handbags lost hardware and softened logos. Watches ballooned in size but lost the intricate guilloché dials that once required a master artisan.

The irony? In stripping things down, the “premium” aesthetic became almost infinitely replicable. By 2012, H&M had launched in the US and the first Zara NYC flagship store was opened in NYC. Fast fashion was now knocking off luxury, legally, at a $20 price point. Direct-to-consumer brands could carbon-copy the fashion houses that were once considered “the greats” simply because it was finally easy to copy. 

Suddenly, everyone’s living room looked like the same Scandinavian mood board, and every product photo lived on an off-white background.

Why Detail Creates Collectibility

Collectors know that the smallest quirks are often what make something enduring. A misprinted baseball card. A rare stone dial variant on a Rolex. The hand-stitching on a Hermès bag that only a trained eye notices (and one that requires 40 hours by a single tenured artisan no less). 

Detail does three things. 

First, it encodes time. Anything created by hand can easily represent hundreds of hours. That time can’t be collapsed by a machine. 

Second, it creates scarcity. Not because someone says it’s limited, but because the method itself limits production. You can’t fake enameling or engine-turning at scale. And actually, by definition, craftsmanship can’t be scaled. 

And third, maybe most importantly, it gives personality. Detail introduces imperfection. That imperfection is where stories live.

This is why ornate pieces in every category from Art Nouveau jewelry to pre-war Bugattis retain value. They resist commoditization because no two are identical.

The Smartphone Aesthetic

The iPhone didn’t just change how products looked, it rewired our tastes. Clean, flat, edge-to-edge. Apps like Instagram amplified it: photography became less about the subject and more about filters, symmetry, negative space. Even “luxury” followed suit.

Think about the Apple Watch. It’s technically a miracle. It can literally SAVE YOUR LIFE. But compared to a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, it’s a slab of glass with a rubber strap. It has zero romance. Zero permanence. When the new version comes out, the old one is obsolete. At Rally, we deal with a lot of collectors who will have everything from one-of-one Audemars Piguet to a sub $300 swatch in the same collection… not a single one has ever collected Apple Watches. EVER.

The good news is that culture always swings back. After 20 years of minimalism, we’re starting to crave detail again. 

Fashion tends to lead many of the charges toward a rebirth of once-revered style, and that move toward ornate design is already becoming prevalent. Gucci while under Alessandro Michele and now with his post at Valentino is piling on extremely ornate embroidery and embellishments that are near impossible to recreate at scale. Car culture is following suit - ‘90s Japanese tuner cars suddenly commanding huge premiums as we saw with the often-imperfect but cult-loved RAUH-Welt BEGRIFF (of which the 1 of 1 Daniel Arsham example sold out almost instantly on Rally last year).

Even in sneakers, the Jordans that find the most active and most expensive secondary market are often the completely reworked and limited-run brand-takeover 90s-era Jordans, while the standard releases are now more available at retail than at any point in Jordan-brand history. 

The Triumphant Return of Detail is Upon Us Though… 

2025 Auction Results are telling the story of why the ornate will soon dominate over the trend-of-the-moment. 

On the high end, the most expensive auctions are dominated by the ornate. Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona wasn’t collectible because it was “clean” - it was collectible because it was weird. The serifs, the dial, the provenance of being worn and beaten up. The same has been seen over the first half of this year with some of the most unexpected results in an often unpredictable market that has some auction houses on edge Some examples👇

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💰 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Double Pedestal Lamp: $7.5 million 

Designed in 1904 for the Dana‑Thomas House, this stained-glass lamp shattered expectations at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction in May 2025. With only two ever made—and one still in situ—it fetched $7.5 million, eclipsing its $3–5 million estimate and breaking a previous Wright record of $2.9 million set in 2023.

Why it matters: This isn’t just a lamp. It’s a handcrafted marvel with architectural intent, embedded with chromatic glasswork that refuses to be flattened. Its value derives from uniqueness, craftsmanship, and the story of its creation. That’sexactly the kind of detail minimalism erases.

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💰 François-Xavier Lalanne’s Grand Rhinocrétaire II: ~$16.4 million

At Sotheby’s Paris in mid-2025, this whimsical animal form sculpture - in the grand tradition of Lalanne’s expressive, ornate design - sold for $16.4 million, nearly five times its low estimate and placing as the second-highest price ever achieved by the artist.

Why it matters: Buyers are still chasing pieces that transcend decoration - objects that blur the line between sculpture, furniture, and art, rich with personality that you don’t get from a minimalist cube.

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💰 Maria Pergay’s One-of-a-Kind Dining Table: $490,000

Also part of that Sotheby’s design sale, Pergay’s uniquely commissioned 2007 table - a sculptural interplay of steel, copper, and gilt bronze tree‑trunk legs - sold for $490,000, more than double its high estimate.

Why it matters: Even relatively modern design, when richly detailed and one-off, commands a premium precisely because it resists mass replication.

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Detail = character = value.

What It Means for Collecting

If minimalism makes things interchangeable, detail makes things irreplaceable. That’s the core of why the most intricate objects, whether a medieval illuminated manuscript or a Ferrari built by hand, are the ones that last.

Collectors don’t chase smooth glass rectangles. They chase details no one else noticed until they did. That’s what transforms an object into a story, and a story into value.

The future of collectibility won’t be decided by how “clean” something looks, but by how much soul the detail gives it. 

If the last 20 years were about the Death of Detail, the next 20 may be about its resurrection.

(fingers crossed)

Until next week…