“He fought the prejudice of a population he termed “visual illiterates,” people who confused design with style, who hadn’t developed any critical visual faculty, who didn’t understand that the immediately apparent “look” of something was not design at all; that design was, to the contrary, an internal, necessary, and ineradicable logic inherent in the fabricated, synthetic world. Design, for Nelson, made the mind’s eye visible, tangible, comprehensible in the language of materials of the physical world.” http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm?contentalias=georgenelson

Great design seems to reveal itself gradually. You notice over time that carefully thought out objects outperform the merely visually pleasing. The right choice is hard to make at the time of buying, tho. Maybe that is reason enough to opt for time-tested classics.