In Jonathan Adler’s world, there’s a giant Lucite mushroom glowing somewhere in the corner — a symbol, perhaps, of what he calls his current state: “I’m living in a trippy glam-rock fantasy.”
It’s a fitting, though perhaps unlikely image, for the designer whose career took off as the AIDS crisis was finally waning in the early ’90s. Adler’s response to surviving this era would emerge as a global lifestyle empire built on technicolor irreverence and unapologetic glamor. Adler offers a confession that complicates his image. “I have a joyful output and a joyless outlook,” he tells me.
That’s to say the “happy” in Adler’s decades-long “happy chic” credo — what he now calls Modern American Glamour — is not only deliberate but forged.
“I hope I wasn’t too bleak,” he says at one point, half-joking, half-checking himself. Then, with a laugh: “Yeah, I’m amazed. For someone who’s dead inside, I really appreciate that I could pull that off. I have a very pessimistic outlook. I think it’s part of the nature of being creative to be intensely analytical, self-critical and uncompromising. It’s hard to be a successful creative person who’s peppy and upbeat.”
That tension between dark sensibility and exuberant output traces back to when Adler came of age: the postmodern era, which he absorbed growing up in New Jersey. Aesthetically, he saw that period as an invitation — a chance to “have the freedom to mash different styles up, sample and unapologetically blend myriad influences.”
“Conceptually, the idea was that maybe we lived in a world in which everything had already been done, and so our role as creatives was to comment on it and play with it,” he says. “That postmodern sensibility is totally reflected in my work. I’m a culturally voracious consumer and thinker, and that appetite shows up in what I create.”
His style mirrors what he admired in music at the time: sampling — the art of building new sounds from old riffs. He describes that creative cross-pollination as “mind-blowing.” His anthem of the era was the Love and Rockets’ 1987 post-punk song “No New Tale to Tell.” “It really said it all for me,” he says. “Though as it turns out, I’ve told plenty of new tales in my life.”
This eclectic sensibility became the foundation of Adler’s professional work. Wit and optimism have infused his work since 1993, when Barneys New York purchased Adler’s first pottery collection. After Barneys, he expanded into furniture, home decor and opened a store in Soho in 1998, growing into a global design company built on playful luxury. His aesthetic — glossy surfaces, punchy geometry, high-glam irreverence — became unmistakable and remains widely accessible today, available at high-end department stores such as Neiman Marcus, more accessible retailers like JCPenney and online through Wayfair.
But that buoyancy didn’t emerge in a vacuum. For a gay man coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, creativity wasn’t just self-expression but survival. The AIDS crisis ravaged the community, reshaping friendships, futures and any easy sense of permanence. Seen in that context, Adler’s exuberance reads less naïve, more defiant.
The giant Lucite mushroom may signal glam-rock fantasy. The lacquered surfaces may scream joy. But neither tells the whole story. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a drug-addled [artist],” he tells me. “If anything, I’m actually a very conventional and bourgeois person, to be honest, so I would say I don’t really conform to any stereotypes of ‘artist.’ I’m neither tortured nor particularly crazy. I’m actually just a very bourgeois, workaday person.”
Beneath the gloss is something quieter and harder-earned: a gay man who remembers when making things was a way to stay sane — to stay grounded, to step out from under grief, even if only for a few hours.
“I’m very lucky to have missed the worst of HIV when that was a true overwhelming crisis in a way I don’t think young gay people could possibly even understand, if I’m being totally honest,” he says. “It was just an existential threat of a different order of magnitude.”
Then he makes it personal. “Imagine if all of your 28-year-old friends were getting sick and dying. It’s a different order of magnitude.”
During that time, he found his way back to the studio. “Going into the pottery studio was a way to avoid thinking about the horror,” he recalls. “I got completely lost in my creative process.”
For LGBTQ+ creatives, that kind of resilience is lived. Adler, now 59, says the design world itself has long been welcoming. “Design has always been a haven for the gay community,” he says. In that sense, he’s felt lucky. More broadly, he adds, “During my life, I’ve seen life as a gay guy get much easier and better.”
“I think it’d be tough to be straight in the design world,” he adds, laughing. “It’d be like being straight on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’ One guy did it and I’m like, did he?”
That deep absorption — the tactile, grounding experience of working with clay — has sustained him personally. It’s why he bristles at what creativity has become in the age of social media. For him, it’s the difference between “productive versus performative.”
“I think social media is a complete blight because it’s not a productive rabbit hole down which to go,” Adler says. “Creativity is a productive rabbit hole down which to go, and I would exhort people to do that rather than engaging with social media. Being creative is a very private, personal experience. It’s a refuge.”
Then, with characteristic candor: “Oh, thank god I started before social media. I can’t even imagine. I’d be a completely different person. I mean, not to suggest that I’m living the ‘authentic life,’ but whatever my life would be, my brain certainly would’ve gotten a parasite from social media, and I would be a completely different person and definitely a worse person.”
Maybe the real throughline of his work has been a deliberate decision to create beauty despite, well, everything.
On the question of guiding younger creatives, Adler is characteristically contrarian. He credits not mentors but “tormentors” — bosses whose behavior he resolved never to mimic, critics whose dismissiveness pushed him to think differently. Even people who didn’t like his work had something to offer. “Listen to your tormentors and think about what you can learn from them.”
“I guess in my case, it was people whose behavior I chose not to mimic,” he explains. “I saw some of my original bosses. I was a young kid and I’m sure I was a terrible employee, but I resolved never to scream at my employees.”
What he learned along the way, ultimately, was his own standard: “If your heirs won’t fight over it, we won’t make it.” The bar, he says, is both that simple and that high. “I know when something is really unusual and singular. ‘This doesn’t really exist in the world — therefore the world needs this.’”
In a world he views without illusion, Adler still chooses exuberance — not because he believes in it, but because he builds it.