Snake America Fifty
Snake is a bi-weekly email newsletter covering salable items. This week, my friend Royce asked if I could cover rugs so I am. A Danish hook and a Nike rug. Subscribe.
eBay: Danish shag hook rug from the 1970s: This here is the last frontier of carpeting. There aren't a lot of purchasable items out there both loud and comforting. This is. It's so thick it needs to be hung. Rug scholarship is hardy and it's rare to find a mysterious chain of rugs, but there's not a lot on latch-hooks. What are these rugs and are they Danish? There's no section on latch-hook rugs at The Strand. The Times story from awhile back is mostly a run of quotes. The latch-hook tick-tock on messybeast.com is all there is. None of the completed auctions or image searches show Danish tags. This active auction is for a rug made in England. ... I don't know a lot about them except that:
Latch-hooking rugs is more craft than art.
It reached its height in the 1970s. The colors in the above fall into Pantone's decade breakdown nicely.
The technique is similar to traditional Persian rug-making, since both involved stitching across a vertical thing, that's the technical explanation, but the similarities end there.
The big bulky shapes show that ... amateurs can't properly depict a dolphin's curves in wool.
They recall 1970s Italian furniture? Or cartoons?
I am not sure if in 10 years these maybe-Danish rugs will get the respect handed to, say, a Qajar-dynastic handmade Tabriz. Couple of them look OK, though. No real provenance on these things, though, so you can find regular deals. Good luck.
Hypebeast.com Forum, Nike rug: These were a hot item 10 years ago but you don't hear a lot about them now. If you Google "Nike carpet display" the first page of results link to spam pages hosted on Columbia University's Graduate School of Business domain:
Spam? It makes sense a young business student would be hustling. But the links are five years old. He or she could have just moved on to better things. I'd say there is a cottage industry in getting Nike store displays to the right customers, but I can't see anyone, no matter to what extent they corner this market, making a living off this. The auction linked above is four years old and can't be active. The most recent post in that thread came a few months after the listing and makes a good point. It's an inventory issue. There are maybe 20 displays still standing from every store that sold sneakers in history (1980-2002) and most are trash. Who is going to put a dusty plastic sign from the 1992 Olympics up in their room ... or in their foyer? Or one of those shoe-shelves that slides into a ridged wall? Interest in tertiary activity is good on principle but this is too far gone. A big moment for Nike ephemera was when Momofuku Jr. on 2nd (the first location) put up the John McEnroe poster on the wall and nothing else(1) for ambiance. You could still get posters of Rick Carlisle(2) with his shirt off covered in sweat or George Gervin sitting on a throne of ice palming basketballs. But store merchandise is more elusive. Mostly because it is straight up garbage. But also because there is less of it. There are a ton of Michael Jordan life-size cutouts on eBay. An enterprising interior decorator could plot an evolutionary or BMI or hairline progression continuum with the right five cardboard statues. My friend Mike in high school once stole a cutout of the Reebok triathlete guy with the mohawk, and his name is a detail I can't find. It might be Glen Plake, the freestyle skier who dyes his long mohawk several colors, like pink, and who was born in 1964. He may be the person in question, and he lives in France now. But I remember the cutout having a tri-hawk. It was just sitting on a curb.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Summer sneakers (the plimsolls sold; rest didn't)
Snake Before That: Silver Nike BWs, Western biker vest (relisted; for sale)
(1) I think. Whatever
(2) Young