bricolage

noun

bri·co·lage ˌbrē-kō-ˈläzh

ˌbri-

: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand

also : something constructed in this way

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Bricolage Has French Roots

According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." Lévi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning "to putter about") and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Bricolage made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers ("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts ("technical bricolage").

Examples of bricolage in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

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The campy bricolage of the Deetz’s home may be less universally appealing than the sweet florals favored by the Maitlands, but Otho and Delia weren’t designing for everyone. —

Rachel Wallace, Architectural Digest, 11 Oct. 2024 Simultaneously there was a gathering of fragments in bricolage designs that conveyed a power-in-numbers or parts-making-a-whole kind of symbolism. —

Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 29 Jan. 2024 Madonna’s shows are known for being meticulous and highly conceptual, but this bricolage of past styles and aesthetics made Celebration feel unusually scrappy. —

Shaad D’souza, Pitchfork, 18 Oct. 2023 And nowhere does that maxim ring truer than in the world of fashion where designers relentlessly loop back to styles from decades past for inspiration, breathing new life into old trends to create a kind of bricolage between past and present that results in something totally novel. —

Emily Kirkpatrick, Peoplemag, 21 Sep. 2023 See all Example Sentences for bricolage