Does vintage furniture have an 'offseason'? Plus, how to keep an evolving trend novel, and Observer 093
Mucho Italian lamps, dining sets, Sottsass and a breathtaking anon Belgian stool
Happy Monday evening, back on schedule. Some housekeeping and a bulleted essay:
Celebrated a decade of this newsletter with an event at Entrance Gallery, show was up for a couple of days. Thank you to everyone who came out, it was… a trip, can’t immediately describe it.
I have some extras of the shirts I made for the anniversary and the event:
Which are available here:
https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/10-year-anniversary-shirt
Shipping before Wednesday, since…
I’ll be in France through October. Let me know if you are there. Snake Paris flea market report? Will Sami Reiss finally live out his dream of reviewing jeans in real time? Also in London and Milan a little as well… swagaroni…
Big post on
this week. Big. Sign up at that link, or check out the mission statement:
Furniture and Offseasons
Wanted to talk about this idea touched on in a fine
letter the other day…
Which was about shopping against season… a smart piece of advice on buying summer items right now as it’s wrapping up, shoring up next year, as opposed to being anxious about your fall wardrobe as everybody else purchases theirs. In the post, worth reading, the author writes:
I always get a much clearer idea of what I actually need at the end of a season, not at the beginning. After all, hindsight is 20/20. How did I actually spend my days? What did I really wear? Looking back gives me the clarity to see what’s worth keeping and where the real gaps are.
Which is fairly correct… and the advanced way to buy crap… which vintage sick-os have been doing for years, and which I am sure the author has seen great results from. In another post, TR rightly points out how bad newly-produced non-luxury clothes are… they don’t last like they used to, and that there no longer seem to be any good, new, mid-priced pieces of gear:
One way to respond to these two ideas—seasons and anxiety, quality of construction and honesty—is to champion vintage outright and to push readers into just buying that. But TR doesn’t do this, rightly… it’s more about clothes, and it’s also a bit narrow to just do vintage—there is good new stuff out there. Sometimes! And sometimes it is nice when something is new.
What jumps out to me more about these two posts is they signal a new point in the vintage discussion, and its evolution… one in which rebellious, market-exit anti-calendar advanced vintage ideals are now interacting, smoothly, with the traditional seasonal ways many consumers think about clothes.
This rich duality TBH might just be a characteristic of the discussion of women’s clothing—which has the most educated readership outside the Daily Racing Form—but it feels like a general evolution nonetheless. Helpful advice like this—parkas are cheaper on eBay in June and July—isn’t about being cheap, as it might have been years ago, but about being smart. The change, to me, is that as vintage has moved out of charity shops and into many different ones with good curation is… that it has ceased to be… diametrically opposed to… shopping. Or whatever the word for shopping is. What I mean is that vintage used to be always cheap and often un-materialistic. You’d buy good stuff people forgot about, and move would on, or would become obsessed and still have time for other interests… Now that kind of vintage is certainly around, still, but it is perhaps undiscussed… instead, old pieces and collections and items frame newer collections and trends. They’re not diametrically opposed to each other; in a year or two vintage should outright take over.
As far as how this relates to design: well, it is seasonless, which is nice. Only college students buy lamps in September. And because of this there are deals every day. And I think buying the right crap on the cheap still counts as a sort of market exit. Beyond that, if I can mention my anniversary again… I think the connection is even simpler. Over the past 10 years of this newsletter, covering, then, vintage clothing and now covering furniture… one of the arguments has been that we all have to wear and sit on something. There is more out there than any writer knows what to do with… and seasons have nothing to do with what’s good. Have they ever? Well, for clothing, probably definitely. But for furniture, I’m not so sure.
Values
Aulenti Martinelli Luce lamp $1,400 (black base) ⦿ Nakashima mirror $7,500 (fair) ⦿ YSL Swiss Guard vtg scarf $75 (crazy) ⦿ Kravet upholstered Baughman style bench $225 (massive steal; pictured) ⦿ 70s Louis Vuitton suit bag $125, weekend bag w compartments, several roller suitcases $700 each, monogrammed Saks bag $125 (apeshit) ⦿ evil Gucci Michael Graves-looking clock $75 (with a tail) ⦿ Kjaerholm glass side table $1,700 (so fair) ⦿ two mint Eames exec chairs $1,800 (old, mint) ⦿ 10 Brno chairs (Mies) under $4,000 ⦿ Massoni modular wood stackers didn’t sell ⦿ Aarnio brat chair $100 ⦿ pair Kjaerholm P22 chairs, mint, $2,000
Obs. 093
Sottsass Mandarin chairs for Knoll, Ct.: Ends Tues… ideal piece here, aesthetically since it’s in the greatest genre of design which is tamped down, subtle items from once-wild designers. Very muted and nice. These chairs were part of a fascinating series Ettore Sottsass made for Knoll in the 1980s, along with the East- and Westside collections (worth just Google image searching and enriching your life)… and the Bridge chair, which is very similar. The chairs showed up heavily in libraries and restaurants (chinese chicken salad, very LA 1988, s/o
’s latest letter)… they are a very library chair.What is nice about the Mandarins on auction is… how incredibly gated to their era they are… they are so 1980s. (I don’t think any era of furniture had as much burgundy in it except perhaps late Victorian.) At first the details are invisible—the shape and material and color are not… as revolutionary as old Sottsass. Almost looks bargain basement. Up close, however, the fabric and angles jump out:
So great. Perfect piece. Not one of the best Sottsass pieces—that would be crazy—but one of the best chairs. (Cementing his genius…) Mandarins run for absolutely nothing; sets of five sometimes sell for $200 all-in, this one isn’t priced exorbitantly but is more of an appetite whetter… if it doesn’t sell DM the house and ask for a deal. House, Jasper, has its usual fair haul—a corner-sized Togo, a Johansson-Pape stool—of which everything is priced much too hopefully. $2,400
Sottsass for Flavia Milano plates, Denmark: Copenhagen is in Denmark and Amsterdam is in Holland… auction dates this to the late 1900s, which is technically true… these are also by Sottsass, a set of plates which were produced by Flavia for Memphis Milano:
The plating arm of the design movement? A nice thing to think about is that for all the revolution the Memphis Milano design movement brought with it, a decade later they were doing good business designing and selling plates… lines of them. It puts so-called design revolutions into relief—if a revolution just becomes plates… is it really a revolution? But it’s also not that deep. What are you gonna do? This lot has been listed so many times. On eBay and other marketplaces you can get the same plate (maybe a couple) for $200-300 or so. Don’t spend too much; $200
Studio BBPR Urania armchair for Arflex, Chicago: Ends Thurs… Wild piece that is new to me, and which was made for a big ‘editor’ (Arflex)… and which is made by an even more accomplished set of designers. And so here we are, in the early days of the design discussion (still), another no-context treat with insane provenance for the working person with an interest in design… another piece of history to add to the pile. Definitely not invisible, BBPR was an old Milanese architecture firm, standing for Gianluigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers (good Pynchon name)… founded in the 1930s… they drew up the postwar Milan city plan in 1945… Massive body of work in that sphere and hits in furniture, including this desk:
which is in the permanent collection at MoMA… lots of chairs. The two that jump out are the Neptunia chair—one, on auction, is an office chair in vomit green on casters, in velour… four worlds, maybe three, together at once… rewarding. The one on auction is an Urania (rough name), which is not mentioned in the description (sad), and is from 1953… the auction item is in dialog with the white stuff that came out of France at the time and has the same arms as Wegner’s Papa Bear. Exactly the sort of sloughed-off, immediate, distilled design decisions that come from architects punching down. Steel is nice. I believe I like this more than French furniture (from 1953) or the Papa Bear. Part of a strong Wright auction that I highlight in depth below the fold, but will include these sterling silver Botta pitchers for the people. So so great. Only one BBPR Urania (yuck) on LA and it went for €1,300. $350
Keep the energy moving below the paywall with a dozen other deals and canon items including two designer dining sets (big tables, many chairs) each at the moment running less than $200 (and not many watchers either, and one is near NYC and one is in LA), a pair of obscure lounge chairs by a sleeper/high-tier design team, exacting and fun Italian lamps and a Haller unit I have never seen before in any capacity, vintage, bespoke or otherwise…
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