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Feargus O'Sullivan. "Trump’s Gilded Design Style May Be Gaudy. But Don’t Call it ‘Rococo.’", Bloomberg 7/3/2025:

The US president’s taste for gilded decor is often dismissed with comparisons to an ornate European style of the 18th century. But the real Rococo deserves a second look.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.

As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.

For a linguistic angle on the stylistic issues, see "Elaborate interiours and plain language", 6/3/2016, along with the links therein.

But today I'm wondering about something else. Never mind for now whether rococo is a fair description of Donald Trump's taste in interior decoration — where does the word come from?

The OED dates rococo to 1830, with the gloss

Designating furniture, architecture, etc., characterized by an elaborately ornamental late baroque style of decoration prevalent in 18th-cent. Europe, with asymmetrical patterns involving intricate motifs and scrollwork.

and offers two different etymological ideas. The first one is

< French rococo (adjective) old-fashioned, outmoded (1825), designating furniture, architecture, etc., characterized by an elaborately ornamental late baroque style of decoration prevalent in 18th-cent. Europe (1828), (noun) denoting an 18th-cent. style of art, architecture, and decoration (1828), irregularly < roc- (in rocaille, with reference to the rocaille ornaments frequently featuring in 18th-cent. artwork) + ‑o suffix, with reduplication of the second syllable; Italian barocco baroque adj. may have acted as a partial model for the French word. The style in question came to be perceived as needlessly elaborate and old-fashioned by early 19th-cent. French writers and critics; hence the mildly depreciative uses of the word.

But then there's also

For an alternative etymological suggestion, which derives the French word < roc- (in  rocaille n.) + coq- (in coquillage shellwork, transferred use of coquillage mollusc, shellfish + ‑o suffix, see C. T. Carr in Forum for Mod. Lang. Stud. vol. 1 (1965) 266–81.

[Wiktionary tells us that rocaille is "Artificial rockwork made of rough stones and cement, as for gardens", or "The rococo system of scroll ornament, based in part on the forms of shells and water-worn rocks", or "A seed bead".]

The OED's reference is to Carr, Charles T., "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY II. ROCOCO", Forum for Modern Language Studies, Oxford University Press, 1965. And Carr offers historical evidence that undermines Feargus O'Sullivan's attempt to defend "rococo" interior design from Donald Trump's alleged misuse.

O'Sullivan argues that rococo style "dances lightly on a tightrope over a boiling cauldron of vulgarity, but has the grace to never fall in". But Carr 1965 starts like this:

"The jumble called rococo is, in general, detestable. A parrot seems to have invented the word, and the thing is worthy of his tawdriness and his incoherence." These words of Leigh Hunt, written in 1866 after a visit to an exhibition of French art at Gore House, reflect both the disgust of the majority of nineteenth-century art critics at Rococo art and their bewilderment over this curious French word which Stendahl in 1829 had already called "un mot bas".

Carr goes on to note that

Vulgar though the word may originally have been, it had already been given official recognition by 1842 when it was included in the supplement to the 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de I'Académie, where two meanings are distinguished :

Il se dit trivialement du genre d'ornements, de style et de dessin, qui appartient a l'école du regne de Louis XV et du commencement de Louis XVI.

II se dit, en général, de tout qui est vieux et hors de mode, dans les arts, la littérature, le costume, les manières, etc.

And piling on the negative citations:

The first known occurrence of the word in a literary source is to be found in two passages in Stendahl's Promenades dans Borne (1829), both of which refer to Bernini's sculptures in St Peter's, the first in a section dated 24 Nov. 1827 and the second 26 March 1828 :

(i) Le rococo, mis a la mode par le Bernin, est surtout exécrable dans le genre colossal.

(ii) Me permettra-t-on un mot bas? Le Bernin fut le père de ce mauvais goût designé dans les ateliers sous le nom un peu vulgaire de rococo. Le genre perruque triompha en France sous Louis XV et Louis XVI.

So by 1827, trendy writers like Stendhal already characterized the rococo style as execrable bad taste, clearly (in their opinion) failing to avoid falling into the "boiling cauldron of vulgarity". And by 1847, the Académie Française agreed.

You're entitled to form your own opinions, of course…

 

July 6, 2025 @ 10:20 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Etymology, Style and register

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