A generation of Americans responded to the Great Depression by adopting a functional European design style known as modernism, which expressed the frugal spirit of the day.

If design is a gauge of cultural mood, then how will it reflect this period of economic collapse and anxious recovery?

One answer may be glimpsed in “Undecorate,” a new book by Christiane Lemieux. Ms. Lemieux, founder of the home-furnishings firm DwellStudio, coined the term “undecorate” to describe the surge of riotously eclectic amateur design that rose up during the recent recession. Whereas modernism represented an ideal of frugality for lean times, the undecorate movement offers a kind of populist authenticity in opposition to the polished trappings of a design establishment. The “democratization of design” has been a fashionable phrase for years. It may finally have arrived.

The economic downturn killed a dozen decorating magazines, and the survivors suffered a 30 percent drop in advertising pages from 2007 to 2010, according to the Media Industry Newsletter.

A new breed of self-curating, design-smart amateurs has been spurred to resourcefulness , assisted by the Internet in finding materials and furnishings at deep discounts. The result is an outpouring of homegrown inventiveness - sofas upholstered with burlap coffee sacks, stereo speakers made from Ikea salad bowls, party decorations conscripted as permanent ornamentation.

On design Web sites , the grassroots novices have upstaged the experts. The amateurs “aspire to a certain level of interior design, but professional help is beyond their reach,” Ms. Lemieux said. “ Now they’re the authorities.”

The movement takes subversive pleasure in breaking the rules. Harmony and balance are passe. Excess is encouraged. Fabrics are mismatched. Wallpaper spreads over ceilings.

Anything goes: a Chicago couple parked an Airstream trailer in their loft. While modernism demanded formal orthogonal lines and a rigid color palette, undecorating delights in residential anarchy. “There’s no longer any good or bad,” said Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, a founder of Apartment Therapy, a home design blog. “That new openness is the story. We’re all swirling around together.”

The central tenet of the undecorate movement is that personal expression matters more than professional polish. The undecorators’ aesthetic hero is Todd Selby, a photographer whose Web site, the Selby, has become an indie version of Architectural Digest.

“It’s still in the underground phase,” Mr. Selby said of his sensibility, “but it’s starting to break through.”

Will future generations recognize this post-recession moment? Perhaps not. Unlike modernism, which looks frozen in amber, the roughedged amateur aesthetic of the moment acknowledges that real life is in flux. The only guiding principle is that there is no guiding principle.


By MICHAEL CANNELL