Two industries have shaped architecture more than most of us tend to notice: the automobile and fashion. Their influence reaches us psychologically, socially, emotionally, and most often implicitly, which is why it’s so easy to mistake for personal taste.

The car did not influence architecture by way of style. It rewrote the brief. Le Corbusier modeled the Dom-Ino structural system on the iterative car platform, one chassis, infinite variations.¹ Villa Savoye’s ground floor was dimensioned to the turning radius of a 1927 Citroën.² A century later, the influence runs the other direction. As electric cars eliminate the combustion engine, manufacturers have stopped calling the interior a “cockpit” and started calling it the “third living space.”³ The car is becoming a room. Soon rooms will borrow back, acoustic dampening, zonal climate, programmable light. Hotel suites and residences are likely next.

Fashion’s influence is more recent and more measurable. According to Savills, branded residence schemes have grown more than 160% over the past decade, with the global pipeline expected to nearly double by 2030.⁴ Fashion, automotive, and design led brands now show the strongest pipeline growth among non-hotel operators.⁵ Armani, Bulgari, Versace, Margiela, Pininfarina, and Missoni are no longer only style references. They are also developing the briefs, with brand equity and distribution that any spatial practice can learn from.

Beneath both forces runs a faster transmission system, the trickle from screen to specification. A car color in a blockbuster, a coat on a celebrity, a set design on Netflix. These are not atmosphere. They are inputs. The 2023 Barbie film offered the cleanest recent example. Production designer Sarah Greenwood told Architectural Digest that the set construction depleted the global stock of Rosco’s fluorescent pink, a claim she later clarified was partly a product of pre existing supply chain issues, though Rosco confirmed the film “used as much paint as we had.”⁶ Search interest in “Barbiecore aesthetic room” on Pinterest still climbed by triple digits in the months around the film’s marketing rollout.⁷ Netflix’s Wednesday produced a parallel effect at the opposite end of the palette, accelerating dark academia into a dominant interior trend through 2022 and 2023.⁸

Pantone’s annual color selection draws openly from films in production, fashion, art collections, travel, and social conditions, and within days of the December announcement, paint, textile, cosmetic, and even scent manufacturers ship matching product.⁹ The chain from cultural event to specified material can now run in under twelve months. Architecture, with construction cycles measured in years, arrives last and stays longest. The cost of riding the cycle is structurally higher here than in most downstream disciplines.

The older pattern is the more instructive one. Streamline Moderne in the 1930s borrowed aerodynamic curves from cars and aircraft and applied them to fridges, toasters, and buildings, curves that had no functional role on a refrigerator.¹⁰ They signaled speed at a moment when speed read as the future. Every era has its borrowed signifier. The current ones might be the EV lounge, the wellness retreat, the “third space,” borrowed from automotive renderings and tech store interiors. The question worth sitting with is not whether to use a borrowed signifier. It’s whether we can name where it came from.

Which leads to a quieter question, one I find myself returning to.

Any community of practice, designers, architects, developers, anyone, eventually develops shared vocabularies, references, and assumptions. Conferences, social platforms, peer circles, and trade publications all serve a valuable coordinating function. They also tend to align us. The people in the room often arrive already half agreeing with the speaker, the speaker confirms it, and everyone leaves a little closer to each other than when they walked in. This is not a failure of the format. It’s what the format does. The cost is that distinctiveness becomes harder to maintain the more time we spend inside it.

Those of us in creative fields may be particularly exposed, because the identity claim, I think independently, can quietly close the door on auditing where our thinking actually comes from. The discipline is rarely the best place to look for what’s next in the discipline.

None of this prescribes a response. There is no view from nowhere. Refusing trends is also a position, “timeless” is its own trend, and this essay itself is one more framework that might end up shared in the same way it describes. The honest move, if there is one, is not to find the right framework. It might be to keep the framework unstable, cycling inputs, sitting in rooms where we’re the wrong audience, reading the trade press of industries we have no business in. Comfort can be a signal worth noticing.

Cars and clothes have always shaped buildings. The transmission has only gotten faster. The defense, if defense is even the right word, is probably not better forecasting. More likely it’s wider inputs, slower decisions, and a quiet curiosity about where the next reference actually came from.

— Truong Ly

Notes

1.Rethinking The Future, “Le Corbusier: Understanding the Design Philosophy,” January 25, 2022. re-thinkingthefuture.com
2.ArchEyes, “Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier (1931): Plans, Photos & Five Points,” February 24, 2024. archeyes.com
3.Messe Frankfurt Automotive, “Everything new: The revolution in car interiors,” December 16, 2025. automotive.messefrankfurt.com
4.Savills, “Branded residences, going for growth,” October 12, 2023. savills.us
5.Branded Living, “The New Shape of Global Luxury: A Branded Living Analysis of the Savills Branded Residences Report 2025/2026,” December 4, 2025. brandedliving.co
6.Sarah Greenwood, interview with Architectural Digest, as reported by Fortune, “Barbie movie pink paint shortage was real,” June 5, 2023 (fortune.com/2023/06/05/barbie-movie-pink-paint-shortage-was-real); clarification reported by Cinemablend, December 1, 2023. cinemablend.com
7.Axios, “‘Barbie’ movie inspires more playful interior design trends,” July 15, 2023. axios.com
8.Fig Linens and Home, “2023 Interior Design Trend: Dark Academia & ‘Wednesday,’” December 9, 2022. figlinensandhome.com
9.Laurie Pressman, Pantone Color Institute, quoted in People Magazine via AOL, “Pantone Announces Color of the Year for 2026,” December 4, 2025. aol.com
10.Wikipedia, “Streamline Moderne.” wikipedia.org

← Notes