I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.
Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.
And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.
Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
> It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.
That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
"Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim."
Well, I live in a house built in the Victorian era and I love my cornices and architraves decorated with classical shapes that go back to antiquity—astragals, cavettos and such—and my cedar doors, panelling, window sills, skirting boards again all shaped with classical mouldings—ogees, coves, ovolos, cymae, scotias, beadings, etc mostly together in various architecturally-pleasing combinations. And, yes, my house even has a finial on top.
These days, it's unfortunate that many of us never give much consideration to or take time to even look at these decorative shapes let alone examine them carefully. Shame really, as they aren't just fleeting fashion from the bygone Victorian era but are wonderful geometric shapes and curves that have stood the test of time, in fact they've been appreciated for at least several thousand years.
"Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded."
I don't consider my house to be exceptional by any stretch but still it's an ongoing testament to both good design and to the excellent skills of craftsmen who built it. That build quality is just not available today despite builders and carpenters having excellent timesaving tools not available in yesteryears.
Moreover, those classical geometric curves cut into the woodwork in my house weren't done with modern machinery (say a spindle moulder) but planed by hand with either a wooden hand plane or a combination plane like the Stanley No. 45†, and cutting mouldings this way is difficult and requires considerable skill (I know, I've had to do it when making repairs).
Unfortunately, as you've mentioned, modern CAD/CAM and other industrial tech has made manufacturing easier than ever and yet design (and often quality) have almost hit rock bottom. Whether it's building houses or computers and or any numbers of things, design is almost nonexistent; or little or no thought has been given to the ergonomics of how products are used (I'm continually whingeing on HN about the terrible ergonomics of much software produced these days).
These aren't isolated cases, recently on separate occasions I've purchased cargo-type work pants (different brands) and the special smartphone pockets in both aren't deep enough to do the zipper up, my normal sized phone protrudes about a cm above the zipper (it's a great feature to prevent phone loss but totally useless if it can't be zipped). How the fuck can something as obvious as that happen?
I've come to the conclusion it's a combination of manufacturers maximizing profit and the fact that too few complain, a general drop in aesthetic appreciation across society and our disposable throwaway culture: "who cares if it doesn't look good or it's buggy, we'll be chucking it out in a year or so anyway."
_
† I own a Stanley No. 45, if look carefully in these links you'll see numbers of its plane irons have curved cutting surfaces that conform to the geometry of those curves. https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-...
https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cut...
I also wonder if there's a element of tools and training.
Modern CAD tools have been horrible at "fiddly" ornamentation for decades compared to a hand drawn decoration. There was once an article about this but I can't find it now.
And then when architects spend careers building cubes and angular slab-sided and regular shapes they don't train their apprentices and juniors to be able to conceive, specify and draw a pleasing ogee and a proportional scrollwork around a window.
And there's definitely an element of can't-be-arsed about things. Riffing on your clothing example, I have an, IMO, outrageously expensive designer hoodie I was once given. It quickly failed because the kangaroo pouch was just sewn onto the single-layer front with no backing to reinforce the corner. Instant hole. Though there's some element of survivor bias there, as all the real shit from the 1920s fell apart immediately too, so it's not that everything was great.