Snake Essay 006: Who made the best furniture this year? There's no way to know
No awards, no insight means furniture and design remain impenetrable
At the end of the year we get lists ranking what people have made. In most fields. Best records, fashion lines, outfits of the year, things like that. It’s great. I like reading these lists, I like reading old ones. After skimming through the bunch of them that got released over the past couple weeks I got to thinking about how they are outright missing in design. This field—furniture, homewares, architecture maybe, and so on—isn’t covered as minutely. Or tracked. Nothing for furniture. No lists—which aren’t the best, sure, but bear with me—of best chairs, lamps or sofas. Best rooms or houses you’ve seen this year, maybe, out or in a movie; best-designed restaurants, best old places… best huts, best melon ballers. Are they out there? Maybe on a few websites somewhere. But even then they’re hard to find.
Now, truth be told, I’ve done a few of these assignments myself, not as year-end things, but as work with a short time frame eye looking back. Rounding up new sofas, kitchen appliances, lamps, design items… many more things… that were designed well and produced over the preceding year. The research is hard. Not hard like ditch-digging or doing 25 chin-ups… but not frictionless. Tricky. Not that much is made, it seems, or is produced, annually that’s good enough to commemorate. Certainly not as much as fashion, it seems like… but that’s not what’s tough about it. It’s more that… it’s also tricky to actually figure out what came out what year. No one really covers it. There are no publicly-sourced and free and available sources of information. There is no WWD or Hypebeast or Vogue Business covering new items. There isn’t. And even the companies who are producing this stuff don’t push out their press releases with alacrity. You’re making crap. Why don’t you tell everybody?
Look. Let me ask you something. Can you name a handful of pieces of furniture—NEW—that came out this year? 2022. Let’s say… two desks, two lamps, two chairs. They can’t all be by the same designer or store. That you like. Bonus points if you don’t work in the design industry or if furniture and design are not your hobby. $7 says you can’t. I’m not sure I can… I can think of a few things from Lichen? And some retros? And I do this a few days a week. And so this is a problem. No granular knowledge, or expression of that knowledge. Taken further, the difficulty of finding this granular info on a historical timeline shows why design is such a mystery. What I mean is this. Can you name six things from for 1973? Easy. OK. What about 1974? And 1975? And 1989, 1934. Not in a name five songs type of way… I’m just saying it’s hard, for these instances, to find real, discrete information. As for how major an issue this is, that’s anyone’s guess. But to me it’s a big structural reason why so many folks are so in the dark about furniture.
Furniture has no structure
Leaving aside the value of the year in review glut, the buying guides, top 10 lists, the attempts at canonization, and their authority (or lack thereof)… this type of writing and celebration, to me, are signs of a successful industry, or, at the least, one that faces its public. One with celebratory aspects built into its structure. In a healthy industry—one with consumers, one where people who don’t make things care enough to weigh in, and where producers get enough cash to fund their next projects and have free time to live a life—there are plenty of parasitic or specialized industries… there’s the old line the real money is not investing in Coca Cola but in a bottling plant. This is another discussion, but, simply… when a cultural industry works competently then it creates regular intervals when its work, as a whole, gets judged… recommended, and presented to consumers.
Take fashion. Fashion as an industry and marketing mechanism relies a great deal on nostalgia, self-celebration, knowledge… scope. It’s not perfect—as if anyone thinks that it is—but as far as the scope of this article is concerned, it makes money for people and there are brass rings. And so as we can define here fashion as a market that’s much more successful, outwardly, than design.
Consider the way information about fashion gets into consumers’ heads. There is the crap itself: the clothes you see people wear. That’s prob number 1. There is the day-to-day hubbub around it—stories and news articles, IG posts, new adds to stores, the occasional profile, Ssense sales, stuff like that. And, more occasionally, but regularly, and on an institutional scale, there’s an industrial rewards system: a series of awards, top 10 lists, seasons and, maybe, archives of criticism that, when accessed apart from the day to day slog of what gets seen, explains with a birds-eye view what people are buying. What fashion is… and, more specifically, what it was, at a point in time. (Even last week.) These things, themselves, are mostly silly, sure. Lists… awards… come on. But it’s also real information, info that puts all the clothes and whatever was popping during a certain real span of time into an easy-to-understand context. And, most of all, it’s available. If you don’t know how clothes work, but want to, say, evolve your style, or figure out why people dress a certain way, then you could, with your free time, figure out these answers. Read, read, read and look, look, look. If you want to understand something from back then—how, say, fashion evolved 35 years ago, from, I don’t know, Claude Montana to Jil Sander, then you have even more, better resources to dig through. You might not get it totally right, and indeed, you might be fooled. But you’ll have archives of collections—on Instagram, on Vogue Runway, YouTube—that are easy to access, news stories published at the time that are available now and which can be found with minimal effort, books, discussions, works of historical criticism… documentaries, nostalgic columns, and, more than that, a skid of photography, all of which put the work and its production in a fairly clear context. The best-covered or thought about moments in time even get museum shows—the 1997 Big Bang, in Paris’ Palais Galliera this year, for example, much of which is available digitally… And tying it all together, the bridge between what happened this year and what happened decades ago are awards… prizes and events. Fashion is legion… the CFDA Awards, the British Designer of the Year Award, the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Awards, ANDAM winners (amazing list), off the top of my head, I’m sure more, delivered annually. Most important, and almost too obvious to mention, is the fact that the list of the winners for each of these are public and available. This info is not hard to find. Following these awards certainly doesn’t guarantee a nuanced understanding of the creative work of a profitable industry. But it allows anyone to see, very simply, what was perceived, at the time, as that industry’s best work. Which is a quick road to knowledge: look at enough dots and it becomes easy, or at least pretty possible, to trace lines.
So why is there no bullshit like this in design? For whatever reason, the very simple, very up-the-middle tentpole lists that sketch out the fences of creative, profitable industries are just not there when it comes to furniture. There is just no way to bone up. There’s no structure. There is not much out there for current design, and there isn’t that much historically. After digging around I found these:
And look, I’m sure I missed some. Maybe even, probably even, a couple major ones. But the point is none of these are as easy to find as the Oscars. And I don’t want to bag on these lists, which are helpful and upon which I lean a little bit. What I am saying is they’re lagging behind the rewards structure of other industries. Something is missing. Even with good lists.
Take the the Compasso D’Oro. It’s Italy’s annual design award, and its history is all hits. But even the CD’O (shouts out Lewis Ranieri) has a more invisible profiles than one would think. Want a list of everyone who won this crap? Which is, more or less, everyone in good standing, annually, within the Italian design community? Good luck. It’s barely out there. Which is wild since Italian design is not exactly small or underground (no design is; but this is too acidic a point to harp on). Compasso D’Oro information is just not online, and is not really Googleable. The winners are not in a book in the library. It’s not on their website. There aren’t archival accounts out there marking down this stuff. Some of it’s out there… but it’s not frictionless to find. Look. I found some Compasso D’Oro winners and runners up. Let’s look at a random year. In 1970, Ettore Sottsass was for his adding machine (news to me; no one has written about this); the same year that Afra Scarpa and Tobia Scarpa won for the Soriana. (A few winners it appears.) The lineup’s all hits. More winners:
Colombo’s air conditioner (unreal)
It goes back decades; each year’s list of winners and is a revelation. And to be sure, the information is not entirely hidden. But entire decades are missing. It’s still not enough. It’s not complete, and, more than that… many of the runners-up or winning items have no digital trail. No photos, no auction results, no nothing. This is a money issue… sure. But look. Think about this. Nationally-recognized works of design from the country with the greatest design tradition in the world… from only half a century ago… have absolutely no digital trail. And say you like French… Danish stuff. What was the best chair from Finland in 1985? It becomes even more exacting. And, moving further—there is no real, consistent award for young designers, there is no real historical source that lists, gee whiz, something as simple as furniture items released in, say, 1924. (There are ways to find this information; on the MoMA site, on auction sites; I use them… but this is real work, and, what’s more, it’s not complete complete.)
And I want to be specific: the issue is not that we need a list of awards to justify design’s existence, or to make us understand. It’s not a moral problem. It’s more of an explanation… these awards are primary documents, and, in design, there are none. And because there is such a scant amount of easily-accessible, regular, transparent awards, there are no snapshots of design at the time, and so the body of work—all furniture, all design—is mostly if not completely shrouded in mystery and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t have a formal education on this stuff or who doesn’t have an endless amount of time on their hands.
Why?
We can ask why. Why does such a profitable industry skirt the chance to get real, effective, transparent information out there? What’s more—why are they avoiding marketing and publicizing and legitimizing the work they create on a much bigger scale…
Well, from my vantage, a few reasons. One reason is because design, money-wise, is a much more enterprise-facing business than fashion, cinema or music… it just is. Furniture companies make much more money selling their products to wholesalers, or to offices, or to design professionals than they do to regular consumers. Way more. And it’s been like this for a while, but especially since the 1980s. And the result is that the publicity these awards and so on create might only be a drop in the bucket in terms of profitability. Is it worth it to put all this work in to grade items, to evaluate them, to regularly put out press releases… when the best situation, for a furniture business, is to outfit a series of offices?
Another reason might be logistical—furniture is heavier and more expensive than jeans, and people don’t go through as many permutations of sofas or lamps in their lives as they do clothing. And for vintage furniture, there’s a lot of it, but not an infinite amount. So it’s a bit smaller of a market.
Indeed, it does sometimes feel like furniture is super underground and unimportant. It’s impossible to find, and to find out about. There is no way as many different credenzas are produced every year as are feature films. Design is a hedge maze and a mystery and hard to find, and expensive… so maybe it’s not really out there. Maybe there is no furniture out there at all. Maybe they shut down the Compasso D’Oro because they just did not make that much cool stuff.
But ehh…. I don;t think so. Maybe there aren’t as many Boby Trolleys as 501s. But they’re out there. Furniture gets made every day. It’s not extinct. And in terms of ideas… design as an industry is not dying. It didn’t die decades ago either. It’s not like Architectural Digest takes the whole summer off, and only three people make good couches a year. There is seriously a lot of money here. Which is why I am a bit confused why it doesn’t celebrate itself a little bit and throw pomp and circumstance events. There should be a Pritzkers, or Oscars, or Grammies… for chairs. They should have already been one of these for the past century. Or if there was one, and I missed it… well, it should be as easy to access as any of those three.
What’s next
So what’s next? Well… the good thing is all markets mature. In a couple of years, or five, maybe 10, there will be lots more real info out there. About French furniture, Brazilian, Nordic, Italian… way past that. Different eras of Italian, warring factions from 1976… the tyranny of small differences… a codex. I say this from my gut. It’s almost beginning to be something. I’m sure there’ll be accounts out there archiving entire collections, and media bodies that actually, competently looking at who’s doing what. Maybe. Companies, some of whom subscribe to my newsletter, will get better at presenting their archives to their customers (hit me up if this is y’all; I do this the other three days a week). Vintage furniture’s wild-west, barren and pinched informational market will soon be a thing of the past. How do I know this? Well, I don’t. But… it was like this with vintage a decade ago. It was a much different market.
We forget now the austerity era of vintage clothing. But it was real. For a long time, until a few years ago, that market used to be barren. Hard to find out info about anything. Any old piece of clothing. Information was pinched. And then, eventually and then all of a sudden, it was not. IG accounts began to archive entire collections, civilian writers began writing stories, more people became experts, more people were buying and selling, stores opened up, money came in and people with lives became fairly literate. And while some vintage industry people groused at this progress, then and now, the fact is the market improved. The sellers who stuck around evolved and improved their stock. Sourcers began finding more items. You wouldn’t think this would have happened but it did. Stores and sellers began offering more items at better prices—not cheaper prices, but a wider range of prices. You can easily find $400 old jeans now, or a $9 pair… back then you only really could in Japan. That is better. There were more stores… more archives… more knowledge. Designer got added in. Lines blurred. And amidst this, as old clothes became socially acceptable and companies retroed old pieces… magically, more and more unreal vintage kept being found. Without awards, sure, and without lists… but informed by the healthy structure that celebrates designer fashion. And so it should happen with furniture. The crap is out there. It’s not underground. There’s not much information but it’s still a market. And as a market matures, it will grow. It’s just going to be spotty for a while. There are only a few places where the knowledge exists. And in these places it’s not really structured. But what can you do. At least now we understand why there’s no info.
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Snake
Epic read. I'm endlessly glad I found you (I am really unsure how though)... I've always been interested in art and design in general but through the last few months of reading your work you've opened a whole new world (furniture!) for me. Thank you so much.