Looking Out To Sea

We’ve been discussing what we would do for a dining table for a while now. The kitchen is a very important place for both of us and so the table has to be something inviting and comfortable to sit at. You might think “it’s a table, what can be wrong?” but there are uninviting tables. I think of these as Formal Tables. You know the kind — smooth and sleek, with expensive dark wood and a gleaming polish. You can’t put a coffee cup on a Formal Table. You certainly can’t put your hands on a Formal Table. Formal Tables have ten types of cutlery laid out on them. Formal Tables are cold even when they’re warm. Formal Tables are not for me.

But the big point in my mind, so big that I didn’t even notice it was there, was the fact that I wanted a normal table. I didn’t want fancy in any way — rectangular in shape, wooden in material, having four stout legs and being flat on top. You know: a table. And yet nothing we did could satisfy such a simple request. It was either legs in the wrong place so someone could be assured of an uncomfortable seat, or artificial aging and distressing, or some other needless change. In the end we found what we needed at IKEA.

This seems to be a theme, and I wonder if there’s something deeper to it. My idea is that people have an archetype in their mind when they go shopping — we were looking for the Platonic table but everybody was selling something that differed from this ideal. It seemed that every time there was something that conflicted with our ideal table it was because the designer had ignored the obvious route (flat table, legs in the corner, etc) and done something “clever”. And wrong.

The same happens when clothes shopping, for me at least. A casual shirt can be perfectly plain and yet have three arbitrarily-placed rivets down the left sleeve. There is no explanation for this, just the strange whim of the designer. Neither is there any way in which this riveted shirt can be considered “better” than a plain shirt. I can only suggest that designers don’t feel they are doing a job unless they can make a mess of something that was fine to start with.

Several years ago I read an article on design called The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes (and other notes on the distinction between style and design) which brought instant clarity to something I had been gently working my way around and towards but ultimately failing to pin down — the difference between design and style. If you have not read this article I strongly urge you to do so.

It occasionally pops into my head when I’m shopping for clothes and all I can find are things which have been styled past the point they were “finished”. This, I think, is why shops like IKEA or Gap¹ do so well — because if there is design it is purposeful and the styling isn’t tacked on. I don’t know if I’m correct in my observation or what the reasoning would be. Crap designers? Boredom? I’ve heard it said that once an object becomes a commodity then companies do their best to create a brand, a lifestyle that people can be persuaded to buy with the object. Hence Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King and so on. I wonder whether these low-level design fripperies are an expression of that — few big companies feel bold enough to sell something unadorned, because you might go elsewhere. And in the end, we did.

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