From glamour to man

Published: 2009 - February/March, ZOOM

“I am a producer of material things and I am ashamed”, Philippe Starck declared last March in the weekly German magazine Die Zeit. “Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will leave designing within the next two years. I want to do something else, find a new way of expressing myself. In the future I will no longer be a designer”. A year has passed since that declaration but it seems that Philippe Starck has no intention of retiring. Eccentric, glamorous, provocative, Starck is one of the most famous and highly paid designers in the world. The worlds most prestigious names in international furniture such as Cassina, Vitra, Driade and Kartell vie for the chance for him to launch their new products, because his touch is able to renew any object and reveal it in a different light, more elegant and ‘cool’. An architect, born 1949, in thirty years of his career he has created everything: from the most common used furnishings and electrical appliances, to furniture and de-coration for the home, to interior architecture for restaurants, shopping centers and luxury hotels. His is a lucky story of self taught talent that came to change the world of French and European design. The son of an airplane designer from whom he inherited his creativity and genius, Stark came to design when still at University he founded a company making inflatable furniture. But success arrived in the 1980’s, when he was asked by the French President Mitterand to redecorate the Elyse Palace and redesign the interiors of Café Costes and the Royalton Hotel in Paris. Since then Starck has relentlessly changed our everyday life through projects with a multitude of objects, to the point that museums all over the world, from Paris to London, to Barcelona, to New York and Kyoto, exhibit his work. But is it really true that design is dead as the maestro Starck suggests? To us it doesn’t seem so. Certainly times are changing and when there is little economic growth strong identities are weakened. Most probably glamour and luxury will make space for a more responsible and ecosustainable design, but that doesn’t mean that design is dying. A new wave of creativity is coming from a large majority of voices, multiplying thanks to the internet, blogs and Facebook: ideas are spread much more rapidly and even fashion. Philippe Starck wrote a chapter of the history of design. Now it’s time to turn the page, as he himself suggests, towards a less esthetic and symbolic design that has man at its center and not objects.