A Paris fashion week comp; insane Euro auction, the best valet/coat rack I've seen, Observer 87

Let's go Oilers

Nice out today finally again in New York, still processing 3 Days of design and everything I inhaled in Copenhagen… on a macro scale. With everyone else in the world in Paris for Men’s Week…

• Let’s go Oilers

• It got me thinking about the severe… perspective discrepancies between fashion and design. I mean as specific profit-generating industries. In many ways, on a market level, they’re pretty equivalent: 3 Days of Design, which is only 3 days (shocker) in CPH has about 200 brands displaying, or did in 2022, and has about 250 events; compare to Milan men’s week which has about 100 shows… and which, when counted up with Paris, is either equivalent to 3DOD or more than that… the comparison is not real but is only to say that these are equivalent on an industry scale: Everyone in each respective industry goes to these events, there’s a network effect… press, producers, sourcers, and so on, it functions as a big calendar date for debuts and news… it’s important. So too with Salone in Milan… among industry individuals these events are as crucial as, I don’t know, the NBA draft or All-Star Game… ways to count the years and delineate the seasons. The wild discrepancy is that 3DOD isn’t as… minute-by-minute covered or logged or noted as MFW goes… some of this is a perspective imbalance on my part… but there just isn’t as much… newsletter or mainstream press coverage of 3D compared to Paris. As for this reality, it’s expected, and it’s not something to complain about. There are plenty of logistical differences between design and fashion that I think makes for a much more… uphill consumer project… it is harder to buy a sofa than jeans. Instead I see this discrepancy asd a sign of health in the years to come...

• The seeds of positive influence here and the growth that design is … let’s say bound to have were best explained in Sam Hine’s great story about Milano’s Salone, which was published a couple months ago in GQ. In it the bridge between fashion week and design week is getting… not built but widened. It’s great. I see Salone and 3DOD as… not bigger, but crossing over more next year, and the one after that. And so maybe bigger. My hope is in a year or two the design readership will be as clued in and broad and educated as the fashion readership is now. How long until it’s ready for the kind of great, deep and immediate coverage Sam is offering. There is deep, probing coverage of design, to be sure… but it’s just not as everywhere yet. Couple years, maybe three, maybe five. Is it possible?

• Oilers baby

• Who’s to say. No one knows how things will shake out as far as details. Much to be positive about, though… mind-set is everything, and one can picture deep market coverage or a world where a suite of consumers that wants an Anfibio and can pay for it leading to… such items being available again. We’re in the very early-going and nothing has been set in stone. The reality is this: If you’re deep into design these days right now and you’re not employed in the industry, you’re a Mancunian at the June 4 1976 Free Trade Hall (insane name) seeing the Sex Pistols for the first time:

  Soon something big will happen. Perhaps you might be involved. But what? And how?

• Thank you for the great response to the soft launch/leak of my fitness newsletter. I will be launching it soon.

---

Last week’s values:

Kartell cabinet $275

Wettstein cabinet bench $475

Four yellow Thonet chairs $300 (crazy)

Full Heller set $400

Fleur de Steel table still 4 sale

Conan Ball dresser $1,600

Cardin dining table $550

Panton 270H stool $550

Pair vd Rohe and Reich stools $750

Wendell Castle dining table $4,500

Six Gerd Lange chairs for Thonet €280

Four Knoll BRNO chairs $280

Rietveld zig zag $1800

Wilkes soft seating chair $1200

Severe value, severe information. More insane deals follow below.

---

Obs. 87

Yanagi butterfly stool, Paris: ends Tues… One of the better and most immediate pieces out there ever… crazy it’s not full canon, or, rather, isn’t everywhere outside of the canon, in homes and in movies and so on… but that might be the false dichotomy this newsletter has in which design needs to be everywhere to be big. What I mean when I say this is for folks new to design to see that this, and about 400 other pieces, are beyond major, total skyscrapers that have existed as sort of epochal works for generations… without any instance of that crossing over into the mainstream. It’s destabilizing for people who know what’s up. But it’s a good lesson. My apologies for this explanation to the design graduates and advanced heads reading this. Yanagi also produced the best can opener ever made:

Too good. Early ‘50s versions (of the stool) run in the thous, more recent ones in the $700 range. House has lots of hits, including:

• Loewy bed—by some metrics his best piece, in that it smokes just about every other bed out there and is alone in its field. An entire DF2000 bedroom might be a little bit much. But I could see it happening down the line. I wanted to buy this one a decade ago when I was in the bed market—but at 94” it’s too deep for a New York apartment. Or mine at least. You never see these for sale in America; it’s one of his best. TBH these don’t sell for a lot; a headboard ran $1,000 just a bit ago.

• A few Mourgue pieces; a long Djinn lounge and the chair, neither mentioned in the auc title. One usually sees Mourgue’s Boulum on auction, which is shaped like a guy. The lounge is longer and more… exciting, and the chair is shaped like two heads. Actually—why pit favorite children against each other? One is as good as the next. It’s just that these are more rarely seen. For some people rarity will push it over the edge. But all furniture with point of view is pretty rare these days. €3,000 and €4,000, respectively, a bit over rate. I like the Boulums most out of anything in this auction, I think.

• This Pesce city sofa (properly called the Tramonto a New York, de Cassina) is up there… important archival piece. It’s one of the better Pesce pieces that have been listed in the past couple of months since his passing. Everyone is cashing in… so much Pesce is on the block now. But mostly minor ceramics. This thing is half art, and is €4,000… which is a deal; sometimes runs in the €10K range, sometimes more.

A bunch of FLW pieces in one auction out of South Bend—ending Tues. A.M.—I like all of these pieces, flirting even with more than liking them. It’s the quality of the wood and the stain here that jump out. The shapes feel almost… foundational? Existant? They feel existant. That’s a French word (but that’s cool I learned French before I learned English). Like they have existed for thousands of years. And they have… it makes sense Wright was egotistical—in this interview he talks about his “honest arrogance”—he was tapping into the eternal. The best stuff I’ve

Below the jump: the best FLW available this week (all on auction in the midwest), a couple of smaller apartment pieces that are well undervalued, a closer-to-home Mourgue, all similar deals to the market values above. Plus, Quick Hits (easy to buy pieces in LA or NYC).