(Rate this week's H&H at the bottom.)
"It isn't as good as last year."
"It didn't have any furniture... mainly chochtkes."
"I miss the Italians and the Annex."
These are things we heard people say about ICFF this past week. Leave it to William Hamilton to rub it in. In his lead article, Are Designers Sheathing the Cutting Edge, he makes it clear ICFF has jumped the shark and adds, "The proliferation of makeover shows on television..makes it clear just how shallow the pool of thought is in contemporary design."
We couldn't disagree more.
While we know it is a critics job to find fault, and the mass interest in home improvement has led to some pretty heinous excuses for "design," Hamilton's thesis is a pathetic cop out.
American designers are not "sheathing the cutting edge," they are simply in the midst of a major transition as the Ralph Lauren/Martha Stewart Era rattles FINALLY to close and new voices struggle to be heard.
Design creativity is taking off in Europe, and designers in the US, from California to Brooklyn, are absorbing this new inventiveness while trying to integrate it with our DIY frugality and a consumer market mentality that marginalizes anyone who isn't designing for Target.
American design will be cutting edge soon enough. Watch out.
If ICFF was anything this year, it was a fractured tower of Babel. Designers were calling out in many different languages and no one was dominant. Even the panoply of off-site shows bears this out.
This is not bad. This is good.
These are the fertile signs of a transition. Guaranteed, we will see a dominant style emerge in the next three to four years, along with some new heroes to lead the way. Right now, the field is wide open.
This glass is half full.
MGR
Top Stories
- Waiting Till Sunset to Seek a New Dawn: A tiny report on what went on at the off-site design shows.
- Chuck Leavell: Roots of a Rolling Stone: The Rolling Stones tour pianist shares his home down south.
- 'Theydunit' in the Park: Anne Raver turns sleuth and gets the dirt on this messy little spat concerning tree felling in Gramercy Park
- At the Chelsea Hotel, Married, With Kids: Sally Singer and her husband, Joseph O'Neill are raising three sons in an eighth-floor suite
- Linoleum for the Commitment-Phobic: Sources for DIY linoleum and the pros of latex paint.
- Personal Shopper: Marianne Rohrlich uncovers some cool resources in Hoboken and Dumbo:
- Eric Chapeau of Chapeau Antiques
- Thomas Newman Custom Furniture
- Jonah Zuckerman of City Joinery
- Jeffery Goodman glass fixtures
- Jeanne Heifetz of Loomful of Hues
- Freecell
- Emmanuel Delalain
- Christophe Pourny
- StanleyCo
- Ernest Newman Studios
- From a Movie Genre: Digs to Kill For: Rick Marin coins a new term for tough guys who like high design, "the machosexual."
Currents
- Nice pics of Ian Schrager's Gramercy Park Hotel
- Martha Stewart's New Kmart Collection: Cheap, self assembled furniture
- Adrian Benepe, the Parks Commissioner: Will buy lunch for anyone who can tell him where this chandelier came from.
- A new four-door Samsung refrigerator
- Glidden has a new line of paint samples that peel and stick on the wall!
- Eric Chapeau of Chapeau Antiques
If anything has jumped the shark it's H&H. It's almost always the-lives-of-the-rich-and-famous-and-the-designers-they-hire-to-create-a-facsimiel-of-a-life. Actually, that's snarkier than it should be. But since visiting this site and others like it, H&H has come to feel like veja du. It ain't called the gray lady for nothing.
note to self-when sending snark remember to spell check.
facsimile
Um, was ICFF ever a home for the Ralph Lauren/Martha Stewart aesthetic? Not sure how the success or failure of this or any year's ICFF signals the rise or decline of any other non-contemporary furnishing trend, which I'm guessing will still survive. But anyway...
I don't quite get the point of Hamilton's piece. Is he bemoaning the fact that contemporary furniture is no longer a party for a member's only guestlist, simply because past fair's content have made their way into the mainstream? Don't these fairs, and their participants, all strive to be, find or buy "the next big thing"? Yet we seem to bitch when these same pieces then successfully find their way out of these environments and into actual living rooms (then it becomes some evil homogenization plot...)
I don't share the belief that "good" contemporary design has to be so "cutting edge" that it needs to be explained or can't be perched upon or drunk out of (or adapted to real life). It may make a good newpaper front page shot, but I'm guessing that the exhibitors at ICFF hope their wares travel well past that point, and past the cash register...
And, um, the pencil chair guy weighed about 90 lbs, btw, and admitted he had no intent of mass-producing the chair.
ps-- "machosexual" is now my new favorite word.
Mr. Hamilton lost his credibility with me with his praise of the the pencil chair. Hey Billy, you can sit in a regency chair! (no offense Jeremy) I'm no design hero but I have always found that to be a nice aspect to chair design. Anyways, what's so forward thinking about pencils? aren't they practically obsolete? How about a big sony monitor for a seat and a sleek flat screen backsplat? I'll call it Jpeg. Oooh, I gotta get ready for Milan! See ya.
just wanted to say thank you!
for posting the H + G articles here,
(great for those times of looking forward to Thursday, but failure to purchase the Times)
Just a correction............Chuck Leavell is the Rolling Stones tour pianist.........Charlie Watts is the Stones drummer.
Of course Charlie Watts is the drummer! What a silly typo on my part. fixed now though. thanks, ae.
Sorry, seems like the word was coined before anyone at the NYTimes borrowed it. It used as the antithesis of Metrosexual - From World Wide Worlds -
MACHOSEXUAL This should have been mentioned last week, as I found
it in the Observer for 27 March, but at the time the word hardly
seemed to have any currency. In the week since, this has changed
somewhat, with a number of Web sites picking up the term. As you
may have guessed, "machosexuals" are the opposite of metrosexuals
and are men who are "resistant to fashion and hearken to the call
of adventure with the same passion that metrosexuals adore grooming
products", as Robert Young Pelton put it in the original article.