Contemporary

The prevailing current idiom: clean-lined, unornamented, neither period-referencing nor doctrinally modernist.


Also called
None
Seen in the wild
None
Broader
None
Narrower
None
Usage
dominantin designshop room schemes, measured 18 Aug 2026
Provenance
evidenceddesignshop, materia, materialgraph, read 21 Aug 2026
Kind
Market idiomA category the trade converged on, defined by resemblance to central cases and by nothing else. There is no manifesto to appeal to, and asking for necessary and sufficient conditions misunderstands it.
Status
active
Material Semantics id
style.contemporary
Note
DELIBERATELY TIME-RELATIVE, and the only term here that is. What it denotes moves; the id does not. Consumers distinguish it from `modern` in practice - designshop's corpus carries both at similar volume - without anyone having written down how. `period.contemporary` is a different thing on a different axis; the prefix disambiguates.

Crosswalks

External mappings and dated negative results for Contemporary
SchemeIdentifierTheir label, or the searchMatch
Getty AAT300264737Contemporary (style of art)relatedMatch