I used to think maximalism was just about throwing more stuff at a wall until something stuck.
Turns out, the maximalist movement that emerged in the 1960s and 70s was actually a deliberate rejection of minimalism’s austerity—a pushback against the idea that less is inherently more. Artists like Frank Stella and sculptors working in the post-minimalist vein started layering patterns, colors, and textures with an almost defiant intensity. They weren’t just decorating; they were making a philosophical statement about abundance as a legitimate aesthetic principle. The movement drew from baroque traditions, from Victorian excess, from the kind of visual density you’d find in a Moroccan souk or a maximalist Indian temple. It was messy, yes, but it was intentionally messy—a reclamation of ornamentation that modernism had spent decades trying to erase.
What’s fascinating is how this translated into interior design by the 1980s and 90s. Designers like Dorothy Draper had already been playing with bold patterns decades earlier, but maximalism as a named movement gave people permission to mix florals with stripes, to hang gilded mirrors next to contemporary art, to embrace what one designer called “visual noise.”
Here’s the thing—maximalism isn’t actually chaos, even though it looks like it sometimes.
There’s a structure underneath all that ornamentation, a kind of curatorial eye that distinguishes a maximalist space from just a cluttered one. You’re balancing color theory, scale, repetition—wait, maybe that’s what makes it so exhausting to execute well. I’ve seen rooms that nail it, where every layer of pattern and texture somehow coheres into this rich, immersive environment. And I’ve definately seen rooms that don’t, where it just feels like a vintage store exploded. The difference often comes down to intentionality: maximalists are collecting and arranging with purpose, even if that purpose is to evoke excess itself. Contemporary practitioners like Kelly Wearstler or Jonathan Adler build spaces that feel abundant without tipping into visual overload—though honestly, the line is thinner than most design magazines want to admit.
Anyway, the movement’s resurgence in the 2010s coincided with a broader cultural fatigue around minimalism’s dominance.
After years of white walls and capsule wardrobes, maximalism offered an alternative that felt more personal, more expressive—maybe even more honest about how most people actually live. Social media amplified this shift; platforms like Instagram rewarded visually dense, colorful content that photographed well. Suddenly everyone was talking about “more is more,” about embracing pattern clashing and gallery walls and shelves crammed with objects. Critics argued it was just consumerism dressed up as aesthetic philosophy, and I guess there’s some truth to that—maximalism does require acquiring things, lots of things. But proponents insisted it was about intentional curation, about surrounding yourself with items that carry meaning or joy or visual interest, roughly the opposite of mindless accumulation.
The tension between those interpretations still defines the movement today. Is maximalism liberation from minimalist dogma, or is it just another aesthetic trend that’ll cycle out in another decade? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s given a lot of people permission to stop apologizing for liking ornate things, for wanting their spaces to feel full and layered rather than sparse and serene. And maybe that’s enough.
