the.com/plainness
the dress code of things confident enough to skip the costume.
means The quality of being plain — simple, unadorned, or unembellished, whether in appearance, manner, or speech.
from From 'plain' plus the noun-forming suffix '-ness.' 'Plain' came into English from Old French 'plain' (flat, even, clear), which traces back to Latin 'planus' (flat, level) — the same root that gives us 'plane' and 'plan.' The sense traveled from physically flat to figuratively unadorned: a level surface has nothing standing up on it, and plain things have nothing put on them. '-ness' is a homegrown Germanic suffix, old as English itself, that turns a quality into a thing you can name.
- Quaker roots
- Once a moral stance against vanity and excess
- Design power
- Apple built a trillion-dollar empire on it
- Brain science
- Familiar, simple things feel truer to us
- Shaker furniture
- Plain craftsmanship now sells for fortunes
- Plain language
- US law mandates it for federal agencies
shaker furniture — 18th-century american sect known for minimalist designs with zero ornamentation
bauhaus movement — german design school (1919-1933) that made simplicity and function the core aesthetic
agnes martin grids — american artist's pencil-drawn grids on canvas, deceptively simple works from 1960s-2000s