Obs 136: The brand and the designer
57 auctions for S-tier furniture linked in this newsletter today
Lots of furniture this week. Let’s get to it.
Snake’s Retail Solution 001
A rebrand. I’ll be straight up that nobody’s been clicking on the furniture links I’ve been using in this retail column, except when they’re from Ssense, and even then—the tariffs changed tha. Numbers now are very down.
The experimentation got so bad that I linked to some chick’s teapot last week, which my girlfriend described as “sorority girl TJ Max gather sign aesthetic”—about which, the less said the better.
And so I’m veering this section to a broader remit of retail items; not just furniture. Clothing? Workout stuff? Some sort of seed oil-free chili crisp? Maybe some sort of pressure cooker? Ferrari merchandise? A return to this newsletter’s pre-furniture specialization. (Just here. Rest of the letter will be hard F furniture.)
Today I’ll highlight these PIG utility gloves. They’re good. Better than Mechanixxx or most sec-ops options. Or maybe just slept on. Great worker gloves that work well for calisthenics athletes, or as a light winter glove. It can’t all be credenzas.
Obs 136:
The brand and the designer
Sottsass Stoja for Ikea lamps, Fl., Tuesday AM: IKEA is truly the peskiest most stick-around name in design, still: even as taste for mid-modern and Nordic wanes for organic shapes, metal, leather, rosewood… the brand’s top of the heap for younger vintage furniture hunters: look at the views on these videos about vintage IKEA by these little freaks.
It makes sense, though. The name’s a throwback, still around, still mainstream. Reminds me of Uggs: glory days in the rear view but still plugging away, for students, young families, couples… whoever. As a brand, it’s reassuring.
It’s also a surprising brand, with a bigger footprint than it looks. IKEA isn’t just Nordic, plasticky, mid-modern. There’s a gulf there: lots of stuff. Which is where the vintage lust comes from. IKEA is really the best big furniture brand to dog around in, if you’re someone with good internet facility and a renter. You can get a lot out of google image searches: so many hidden gems… more hidden, anyways, than the archives of higher level American makers like Knoll and Herman Miller.
Did you know that IKEA had a massive body of work in the 1980s and 90s, with avant/S-tier designers? (If you’re reading this, probably. But bear with me.) Verner Panton, Niels Gammelgaard, and, at the highest level, Ettore Sottsass. (Sottsass is a massive Italian designer whose high-level work spanned decades… long essay of mine on him here). These lamps, from the tail end of his career. They’re one of three IKEA items in the auction, the best by far.. one of a dozen or so slapper deals in the lot. Auction’s close to New York, if you’re shipping.
It’s wild to see this set of lamps (from 1987; doesn’t say so in the auction), because of rarity and condition. This rarely lists; only one—a wall sconce; quite different—has come up on the block. It’s also rare to see such a… poppy IKEA item in such good condition. This is an odd piece, but it’s in showroom condition. So the question might be why is the work he did for smaller producers—and every producer is smaller than Ikea, in a way—more available than this?
I think precisely because the maker was so big. Ikea furn. was widely produced, and was framed, to consumers, as democratic, accessible furniture that looked better than other big box furniture. It wasn’t designer furniture, or an investment, or a collectible… and so it wasn’t maintained. Or hoarded. Or collected. Kind of like an old baseball card. People just bought this stuff and used it.
And while I like Sottsass’ body of work much more than Ikea’s, if design is going to blow up, like fashion did, over the next couple of years, it has to take the Ikea path. Mass produced, well-designed furniture at scale from companies not afraid to take chances… actual good design in normal people’s homes. Will this happen? I don’t know. It’s not being fixed on a structural scale. Every furniture sicko out there builds a design education by themselves, finding and selecting good vintage items as opposed to, I don’t know, waiting for Crate & Barrel to make furniture that has a point of view.
The lamps are one of Sottsass’ most playful and cartoony pieces—him playing up to the platform; maybe him turning in easy work—and offer a wild reminder of what mainstream design can be, what it can offer young consumers, normal individuals. Imagine there was good shit like this in a damn store instead of just on auctions. Oh well. What can you do.
A hint of the furniture listed below:
