NOTICED:HYBRIDS

Ever since the phenomenon known as Tiger Woods burst onto the scene, and then of course, President Obama (I still get a thrill writing that), I have been wondering when the global fusion of humanity that these two highly evolved orchids represent will start making an impact on the culture. And then, watching the Oscars sweep of Slumdog Millionaire – a pop cultural hybrid, if you will, of Western fairy tale and Bollywood surrealism – I realized that it already has.

 It has been long established that hybrid plants grow bigger and faster than their parents. Darwin first identified the scientific principle known as heterosis in 1876; now virtually all corn grown here is a hybrid of different strains. What is fascinating to observe is how we too are increasingly becoming hybrids, along with the things that surround us.

In the more than 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia State law barring whites from marrying non-whites (the 1967 decision was serendipitously named Loving vs. Virginia), we have been mixing it up like never before. According to U.S. census figures, more than 7 per cent of America’s married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to only 2 per cent in 1970.

 Here in Canada, the number of mixed-race marriages rose by 35 per cent between 1996 and 2001 – the outcome being that more and more of us are identifying themselves as coming from more than one racial background than ever before.
In my own humble opinion, we are becoming more beautiful and developing a more complex and layered world view as a result (have you seen Obama’s family tree? That guy’s even got ties to Canada, through his brother-in-law, a Vietnamese Canadian from Burlington). Interestingly enough, the latest research is with me.

 A June 2008 study of hybrid vigour in people between the University of Michigan and Singapore Management University called upon groups of various backgrounds to come up with things like a dinner menu and a mobile communication device. According to the report, in all cases, the subjects who were better able to draw on their mixed roots were more creative – the holy grail right now for all enterprises and organizations.

 And speaking of creativity, we are also increasingly fascinated by a material world whose aesthetic is as cross-pollinated as we are.

Of course the cars we want, if we want any, are all hybrids. Some of them for the way in which they use energy, and others simply by design. The Mini is a both a cute retro car and a roaring BMW, while the 2010 Mercedes GLK 350 is an ungainly collage of what appears to be a Subaru Forester, weighed down by an enormous Benz grille. The Cadillac Escalade Hybrid is all of those three things simultaneously, and the 2010 Ford Fusion is designed to work like a hybrid but look like a mean muscle car.

 My son, meanwhile, casts adoring eyes every time we are in a men’s fashion boutique, at the new fusion jackets, which marry a wool sport jacket with a hoodie, or a zip-front cardigan with t-shirt sleeves. Indeed, fashion appears to have latched on to this hybrid phenomenon and turned it into an entire aesthetic, breeding satins for day and flannel for night, mixing the ordinary and everyday with high glamour, and the natural and organic with synthetic materials. This spring, Ralph Lauren has come up with dressy cargo pants in metallic gold lame. And as I write this, I am wearing a pair of crazy-looking, but intensely comfortable shearling Uggs flip-flops.

 In design and décor, it’s all about mixing outside the gene pool. From decorative objects like needlepoint graffiti pillows and urban street toile to functional objects such as lit cubes that fuse seating and lighting, designers are working like professional breeders, sampling from different test tubes. Increasingly popular design joint ventures between the West and the developing world, as in the fetching and affordable XO computer designed for the One Laptop Per Child program or the mass produced craft collaborations Canadian designer Patty Johnson has initiated in Botswana, are, in Johnson’s words, little “collisions of culture that give us a new balance and remind us that everything relates to everything else.” What is heartening, at least from a design perspective, is that the future looks more and more like the snap-together hybrid mythology that stuck a bird’s head on the tail of a lion—an initially awkward sort of comic-book vision to be sure, but also, happily, one of global interdependence and tolerance.

 Like the Kanye West rap, we might actually be getting “harder, better, faster, stronger.” Thanks to hybrid vigour, so might all the new, stylish, mash-ups out there on offer. Now if we could only harness that to fix the economy so that we can buy them.