Compare a bank built in 1926 with one built in 2026, and odds are the former will evoke a sense of beauty, while the latter will be a glass-and-plastic box. Compare the pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 19th century with most modern works, and the contrast is equally violent. Today’s manners, dress, speech, literature, music, and cinema: We may love them or hate them, but sadly, the word beauty rarely comes to mind when we experience them.

“Why is everything so ugly now? Not just the arts, but our mundane day-to-day touchpoints with clothes, with going to the bank, going to the post office, everywhere. Our architecture, our music: Why is it all so ugly? And what effect is that having on people spiritually, on our culture, and on people in general?”

Julia James Davis recently raised these questions in an interview with The Epoch Times.

In her video series “The War on Beauty,” in her writing and reading, and in her work as a designer and manufacturer of dresses and jewelry, Davis spends every day asking these questions, but even more, investigating and guiding the rest of us onto the pathway leading to the restoration of beauty, beauty in how we live and behave, and in the art and literature, music, and architecture we produce.

Time to get acquainted with this Gen Z champion of beauty.

Training for the Battle for Beauty

Davis’s fascination with art began when she was little more than a toddler.

“Some of my first memories were in a museum,” she told The Epoch Times. “Beauty has always played such a strong role in my life. Growing up, my mom would take me to the museum every single weekend, and from there I became obsessed with art, and knew that I wanted to study art history and work in art. So I went to USC and got my degree in art history. I did the Sotheby’s program in London for art business, with all of this culminating in my graduation.”

During these years, Davis’s affluent relatives also stirred her interest in art. In 1932, her great-grandfather, Julius “Jack” Davis, founded Jay Day Dress Co., which eventually became an enormous success, selling more than 200,000 dresses a month to stores such as Sears and Woolworth’s. His son Marvin, Julia’s grandfather, used some of the profits to enter the oil business and became wildly successful, moving some of his capital into Hollywood, where he owned properties such as 20th Century Fox and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“I was blessed to have such an amazing grandfather,“ Davis said. ”I grew up going to stay with my grandparents almost every summer at their home in Beverly Hills, the Knoll, and they were incredible art collectors of painters like Degas and Sargent. To spend time in close proximity with art is such a unique experience.”

Until 2020, because of her training and education, Julia had favored post-World War II contemporary art. She laughed about the time her father drove her all the way to Marfa, Texas, to look at the museum of minimalist art, where there are “endless rooms of just boxes and weird sculptures.”

“He never complained or said anything like, ‘I’m bored’ or ‘I just don’t get this,’” Davis said. “He was just happy to be with me.”

Fashion and Faith

When COVID-19 hit, Davis found herself back home, preparing for graduation.

“I felt like I didn’t have a connection anymore to what I had been working towards my whole life,“ she said. ”And I think in this space, I was able to get some clarity around what I really wanted to do. I ended up reviving my great-grandfather’s Jay Day Dress Co., which is what I run now.”

That was a big decision, but it proved to be only the first step in Davis’s transformation.

“In reviving my love of fashion, I also started to become more faithful,“ she said. ”My father was Jewish, and my mother was born and baptized Catholic, but I was raised sort of culturally Jewish and didn’t believe in God. But around COVID-19, my mom took me to a Bible study. For the first time, learning about God and prayer, I started to see there was a huge erasure of beauty not just in art, but really in our everyday experiences. It struck me that this is that thing I originally connected to as a child in a museum. It was the beauty that hit me and that I loved.”

In 2023, this faith walk led Davis into the Catholic Church.

“I think coming to faith—it was almost like putting on a new pair of glasses and seeing the world in such a different way, that beauty is real, whether that be a bank building or human interaction that is polite and dignified,“ she said. ”Our clothes used to be beautiful, but now we wear sweatpants every day, so dress has also seen a precipitous decline in quality and beauty. It’s something that matters, and it’s something transcendent that can actually morally and spiritually uplift you and ultimately point you to God.”

Courage Under Fire

That new pair of glasses led Davis to reject contemporary art, fashion, architecture, and the rest and to revisit the older arts that had enthralled her as a child. With her mother wielding the camera and with the help of her two brothers, one a musician, the other a filmmaker and photographer, she began her video series, “The War on Beauty.” Here viewers will find an array of videos, most of them between eight and 20 minutes long, featuring Davis addressing topics such as “The War on Silence & the Extinction of Genius,” “Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Past and Present,’” “Brain Rot and the English Language,” and “The Death of Music and the Decline of the Soul.”

Davis also drops bombs on the uglification of society and culture and what it is doing to the human mind and spirit, in episodes such as “How the Stripping of Beauty Led Us Back to a Primitive State,” “No More Tattoos!” and “The Deeper Meaning of the Cracker Barrel Rebrand.” Some of these topics may trigger certain viewers while delighting others, such as “Men Are Better Artists Than Women” and “Why We Need the Patriarchy.”

When asked where she finds the courage to post some of her more hot-button videos, Davis said: “I think that beauty and art, our paintings, our sculpture, our architecture, our music—these are all things that shape people, for the better or for the worse. And so, it’s something that I really care a lot that they survive and thrive.”

She then said, “Even if some of my videos edge towards more controversial takes, and I would even say not just patriarchy or about men being better at art, but the basic topic of beauty being objective is actually where I get some of my most fiery comments of opposition—beauty itself is a very controversial topic—but I do consistently see people in the comments saying, ‘This is just putting words to what I knew’ or ‘I see this in all these different ways in my own life’ or ‘I’m an artist and I recognize this too.’”

It’s Our War Too

Davis makes clear that all of us can play a part in the defense and restoration of beauty, and she provides tips on what we can do.

“First of all, I would say pray. Connect to God in some way,“ she said. ”Keats famously said, ‘Beauty is truth,’ but God is the source of truth and the source of all beauty.”

She next advised appreciating nature, “whether that be in clouds, a flower, or a human interaction.”

“I would also say reading books,” she said. “I’m a huge promoter of that because so much of the beauty in the world is in books, and we don’t read very much anymore. So that’s a simple way, actually, to bring beauty into your lives. And listening to music, like my family and I, we love to listen to classical music.”

Davis puts this philosophy into practice through her design work at Jay Day Dress Co. A prime example of bringing transcendent beauty into everyday life is “the promise dress,” a garment she created that can be worn in more than 20 different ways because of its detachable sleeves and different shifting lengths.

“It’s basically a modular dress to cover the need of having a lot of different outfits without having a lot of different clothes,” she said.

Just as the promise dress offers a versatile canvas for everyday life, we too can adorn our routines with simple, intentional choices—through reading, listening to music, learning more about great art, gardening, hiking, and more—reclaiming the real and varied beauty so needed in today’s world.