What can furniture brands learn from fashion?
The boundaries between fashion and design are blurring. It’s time that object designers show a sense of adventure.
The blurring of boundaries between fashion and design is picking up pace: famed Finnish design house Iitala (whose catalogue includes designs by Aino and Alvar Aalto, and Tapio Wirkkala) has just celebrated the second anniversary of its creative director, Janni Vepsäläinen, who took up the role after working as the head of knitwear at JW Anderson. Meanwhile, French outdoor furniture firm Tolix is now being run by former Balmain executives Antoine Bejui and Emmanuel Diemoz. At Milan Design Week, which this year runs from 7 to 13 April, the biggest showcases are almost always the fashion brands, with Hermes’ homewares prompting queues around the block. A host of labels have even launched furniture and homeware lines – Fendi Casa, Versace Home and Dolce & Gabbana Casa spring to mind.
This movement is, so far, one way: fashion to furniture. Perhaps it’s understandable, as clothing textiles know-how is simpler to apply to upholstery than joinery and welding to cutting a suit. Nonetheless, I’ve begun pondering what the furniture industry could embrace. Certainly, I don’t want to see fashion’s rapid seasonality transfer over: in an ideal world, you’re sitting on the same sofa in 30 years’ time – and preferably not in the same pair of trousers.
I would like to see furniture brands that show the fashion designer’s sense of adventure. Furniture design studios tend to share creative directors, an approach that means the same person is churning out similar-looking chairs and sofas for multiple brands. Fashion’s current merry-go-round of creative directors, by contrast, is producing a giddy host of new styles. And emerging fashion designers are given serious platforms: editors flocked to Jawara Alleyne’s London Fashion Week show in February to size the young designer up. By tapping into fashion’s taste for innovation, furniture brands might be able to compete, finding themselves some breathing room in a crowded creative market. They could step back into the limelight at events such as Milan Design Week too. And maybe it will even make for a better product.
