Suspend: micro-decorating move #8

Last month, Harry Styles released his third studio album, Harry's House – and it's no surprise that the cover is a knockout. The singer looks quizzically downwards in a topsy-turvy room furnished with sleek modernist pieces:

The surreal image gets at the unacknowledged weirdness of most of the interiors we pass through: there's so much on the floor, so much less on the walls and almost nothing on the ceiling. By flipping the expected order, the photo lets us ponder – as Harry does – the strangely unpopulated surfaces that are always hovering above us.

This accounts for the unsettling power of suspending something: suddenly there's an eye-catching item pointing in the opposite direction of almost everything else. The effect can break through our adult world-weariness and trigger a secret, almost child-like glee.