The borrowed eye

Posted on: 15 October 2026

Most people who walk into Liberty think of it as the home of the floral print. It began in 1875 as half a shop at 218a Regent Street, which Arthur Lasenby Liberty leased after thirteen years at Farmer & Rogers across the road, where he had been turned down for a partnership. What he sold was ornaments, fabric and objets d'art, most of them from Japan. Victorian London had discovered Japanese taste and could not get enough of it, and within a generation the shop's name had travelled so far that Italians still call Art Nouveau stile Liberty.

Eighty-five years later an American editor went to Japan looking for a word that London had never needed, because it had been too busy buying the things.

The word was shibui and it starts in the mouth. The shibugaki is a persimmon that cannot be eaten when it is picked, because its tannin is so concentrated that it dries the tongue like an over-stewed cup of tea. In Japan they peel it, hang it under the eaves and for several weeks someone passes by every day to knead it between their fingers, until the flesh shrinks and a white bloom of sugar comes up through the skin. What comes out is the hoshigaki, which ends up among the New Year decorations as a wish for a long life.

From that astringent taste comes the adjective. It goes back at least to the Muromachi period and it is still the opposite of amai, sweet. Somewhere along the way it moved from the palate to the eye and came to mean a sober, slightly rough kind of beauty that does not give itself away at first glance. Outside Japan almost nobody had heard it until August 1960.

The editor was Elizabeth Gordon, who ran House Beautiful from 1941 to 1964, at the time America's leading magazine of home and decoration. She was less an editor than a teacher of taste. After the war she used the magazine to show the American middle class what a modern but liveable house should look like, building prototype homes for her readers to visit and running a long project on how houses should be adapted to their climate. In 1953 she published an essay that linked the International Style of European modernism to totalitarianism. It cost her the goodwill of most American architects but apparently pleased the State Department, which, according to at least one architectural historian, nudged her a few years later towards a major feature on Japan, a country that had to be made palatable to Americans as a Cold War ally.

She went out for the first time in April 1959 with three of her staff. There were no books on the subject, so Gordon fell back on fieldwork. She walked through department stores and asked the sales assistants whether a particular object was shibui, or jimi, which is merely plain, or hade, which is loud. The answer interested her less than the reasoning, because the whole criterion lived in the why. In December, back in Japan, she met Yanagi Sōetsu, and he gave her the six principles that would end up in the magazine.

The August issue promised its readers the word for the highest level of beauty and described shibui as a deep, quiet feeling, something with hidden qualities that it does not put on display. It sold out quickly. When Gordon went back to Japan in the middle of the month, the issue was causing a sensation at home.

Her advertisers had been sceptical, and she had brought them round with a promise that the following issue would be about American products. It was. In September the magazine came out as "How to be shibui with American things", and four American firms put into production a coordinated line of paint, wallpaper, furniture and carpet, designed from the objects and fabrics Gordon had bought in Japan. Between 1961 and 1964 a touring exhibition took shibui to eleven museums across the United States, and Gordon gave a lecture at every stop.

Told like that it sounds like the story of a clever operator, and I think it was nearly the opposite. Gordon had done the work and believed she was giving Americans something deeper than the European minimalism she loathed. The trouble was the promise to the advertisers, because once the magazine had explained shibui, the September issue had to tell its readers where to buy it.

This is where Yanagi comes back in, because he saw it in an entirely different way. He was a philosopher, born in 1889, who had never thrown a pot or worked a loom, yet he had spent his life defending everyday objects made by craftsmen nobody had heard of. He founded the mingei movement, a word that means roughly the art of the people, and in 1936 he opened the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo. For him shibui came out of those anonymous hands, made for use rather than effect, from a potter who while making the bowl thinks about the bowl and nothing else. He believed no other culture had developed anything equivalent, because, as he wrote, the lack of the word means the lack of the idea and the fact. Gordon's September issue did the reverse of everything he described. It took what for Yanagi could only happen by accident and turned it into a target, complete with a colour chart.

The British reader may already have spotted the joke. Yanagi had been shaped in part by the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and Morris in turn had admired Japanese decorative art, much of which had reached him through shops like Liberty's. The taste Gordon crossed the Pacific to find had already done at least one round trip through London.

I have told this story because a code of taste works only for as long as reading it requires something that cannot be bought, usually years spent looking and getting it wrong. The moment someone translates it into a list of products, it becomes legible to anyone with the price, and from then on it stops telling people apart. Those who practised it without naming it move on, while the name stays stuck to the carpet.

I have watched it happen with the Rolex. It began as a working instrument for people who trusted it with their lives, divers with the Submariner and pilots crossing oceans with the GMT-Master, and it has become so common that it no longer means anything except an aspiration to a certain place in society.

The irony is that Gordon had the answer in front of her from the first trip. The sales assistants in those department stores did not consult a list to tell shibui from jimi, because the line between a sober object and a merely dull one lies in the person looking more than in the object, and it is learnt the way you learn to recognise a corked wine, by getting it wrong many times in front of someone who knows. That knowledge lived in people. You cannot ship it.

In the spring of 2023 it happened again, on almost the same schedule. Gwyneth Paltrow's wardrobe during her trial in Park City over a skiing accident, and the Roy family's in the final series of Succession, put quiet luxury on every cover, cashmere without a logo at prices no logo would have dared. Robert Burke, a luxury consultant, explained it to the Associated Press by saying that when you know, you know, and that this was rather the point. Within months the high street was selling cheaper versions of the same beige, which without its secret had gone back to being just a colour.

Britain has always had a sharper instrument for this than America. On 17 June 1987 Alan Clark recorded in his diary a remark by Michael Jopling, the former chief whip, about Michael Heseltine: "The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture." Clark himself thought it snobbish, and it was. It assumed the eye comes with the furniture, handed down with the house, which is the oldest English answer to the question and probably the wrong one. Heseltine went on to spend decades planting an arboretum at Thenford, in Northamptonshire, which is about as slow and unbuyable an education of the eye as exists. But the jibe did understand one thing, which is that a bought signal and a trained eye are not the same object, even when they look identical on the mantelpiece.

Gordon left the magazine in 1964 and her papers went to the Smithsonian, including the notes on those conversations with Japanese sales assistants, the only part of the whole enterprise that could not be put on sale. The rest ended up in the shops, because a catalogue sells credit rather than objects. Whoever bought the shibui carpet in 1960, or the logo-free cashmere jumper in 2023, was not acquiring taste, because taste does not change hands at the till. They were borrowing someone else's eye, which for a few years let them pass as someone who knows, but like every loan this one has a maturity date, and it falls due when everyone has the same list. By then the people who had the eye have already moved on, while the ones who only had the catalogue are left with a mud-coloured carpet and can no longer explain why they bought it, much like a Rolex.