This is the design that means Design in the public mind. Minimal, functional, and clean with a serious guy on a mission to turn the world into a purposeful box. That style, the international style. This thing has not been relevant for quite a while but it still speaks to an eternal type (the ascetic type) and there is nothing else (yet) to replace it. This is why it is here to stay. Yes it is true that the international style made sense then and it doesn't now but the current market doesn't require sense, it requires an audience and this style has a huge audience.
Take a stroll through Pinterest and see it more alive (but formulaic) than ever. There is an endless supply of new ascetic minimalism to make anyone look "designy" if they can afford it. Never mind modernism was about good affordable products for everyone because the market transforms every revolution into a product for the highest possible price. Visit the Vitra catalog to laugh, cry and desire.
Whatever the price, the chewed-by-consumerism international style works as symbolic taste in the information economy. The invocation of Dieter Rams is a great addition for any curated wall. It makes you look pure, deep, aesthetic, and very respectable.
Everybody is a designer, we all build our identity through taste and we all need to belong. I collect a Vignelli and a Rams and I can become a modern via Tumblr posting. Curation and production are the building blocks of identity. For the professional designer, symbols are the tools of the trade: I create/curate/produce and this convinces my clientele. Modern symbols still make you look "professional designer". The value of a Vignelli for a professional designer is the shortcut to an audience's heart. Going pro means understanding taste, detaching oneself from taste and using it.
Despite the truth of taste as tool, no one can really detach from taste. Zizek said personal change is violence against the ego and detaching oneself from taste is almost ego erasure, too much violence. Not advisable to try. but it's not all bleak sociopathy, we can take relief in conceptual art: it is not about the object, it is all about the idea we paint in the audience. That helps with emotional survival but still, it all feels fake and it sure as hell is. Nobody in their right mind should buy a 10k table designed for "the people".
There is nothing authentic about the XXI century and for the most part we have all become sociopathic conceptual artists. This is the zeitgeist, post-post-everything, no scape from inauthenticity. Don’t blame the player, blame the game... I guess. Taste is the tool. Whether this is positive, sustainable or transformative is something I leave to cultural critics but the economical imperative remains: Taste is what we are and what we do. We must use it ironically or in total seriousness, modernism never dies and we can't afford it. Save a modern in your Pinterest board, that we can afford.