Furnitureheads
The Fauteuil Kangourou in cobalt-blue bouclé (image courtesy of Florian Böhm).
Can you imagine hankering for a table more than you would an Hermès Birkin handbag? Or coveting a couch over a pair of Dior Jordan 1s? Swiss furniture brand Vitra seemed to be banking on as much when, earlier this year, it began circulating teasers for a lounge chair via email marketing, its website and on Instagram. In a video, the camera pans down over horizontal oak wood back slats. Register now. A house plant casts a moody shadow across a close-up of cobalt-blue bouclé upholstery. 12 days, 5 minutes and 36 seconds to go. A hero shot shows the chair seemingly staring out to a view of the sea, the main protagonist in the living room of a modernist house. Only 150 pieces. Then on 15 June comes: the drop. In a matter of minutes, the chair sells out.
The object at the centre of this preamble is 20th-century French “constructeur” Jean Prouvé’s Fauteuil Kangourou. Today, Prouvé is considered the designer’s designer. Having trained as a metal craftsman during World War One, subsequently becoming a manufacturer and entrepreneur, Prouvé is admired for his life-long commitment to unearthing the poetics of then-new industrial processes – an ingenuity evident in the tapers of his blade-like chair and table legs. Prouvé applied his talents to everything from a letter opener to prefabricated housing and modular building systems, lighting to furniture. His signature was his structural approach. With an engineer’s understanding, he laid bare the modernist credos of “form follows function” and “truth to materials”. His designs went beyond simply exposing the logic of a chair’s construction, but also made legible where forces played out across its structure.
The Fauteuil Kangourou (Kangaroo Armchair), one of his lesserknown furniture pieces, is no exception. Designed in 1948, the armchair gets its marsupial-inspired name from its sculptural wooden “haunches”. These slope back towards the floor to support the chair where the sitter exerts the greatest stress, allowing for light front legs made of thin steel tubes. But the Fauteuil Kangourou is not your usual attention grabber. Its no-fuss attitude is the source of its appeal. Except for the nuanced curves of the wood, the statement blue of the upholstery and the woolly caress of the bouclé, you’d almost be forgiven for tripping over the Fauteuil Kangourou at a house party. You wouldn’t be scared of sitting on it either. The chair is at once elegant and elemental, so much so that it makes its 20th-century peers look like they’re trying too hard. Robin Day’s Recliner (1952), too rectilinear; Hans Wegner’s Papa Bear (1951), too exuberant; Arne Jacobson’s Egg (1958), too round. What is significant about Vitra’s 2022 re-edition is not the Fauteuil Kangourou’s enduring appeal, however, but rather the fact that the chair was produced in a run of only 150 pieces. A second run of the chair, this time in ecru bouclé with brown trim and dark wood, followed in September. Still, one imagines the sale of 300 chairs will represent barely a dint in Vitra’s bottom line.
Limited editions are not new to the design industry. In the noughties, many contemporary designers favoured limited editions as a way of exploring the potential of objects and materials outside of the constraints of industrial production and the market. Blue-sky designing aside, however, designers and architects have long created high-end bespoke commissions, of which the Fauteuil Kangourou is just one example. While most of Prouvé’s furniture designs were intended as contract furniture for the likes of schools, hospitals and public administration buildings, the armchair was a commission for a private house. Prouvé created the Fauteuil Kangourou for the beachfront Villa Dollander in Le Lavandou, Cote D’Azur, that he designed with his brother Henri for the Dollander family. According to Christian Grosen, Vitra’s chief design officer, only around 10 to 15 of the original chairs were ever made,[1] a fact that finds some symmetry with the small numbers being produced in 2022.
Jean Prouvé’s furniture within one of his Demountable homes.
Due to postwar material constraints, Prouvé looked to wood when designing Fauteuil Kangourou instead of his signature steel. The result, Grosen explains, is that fabrication of the chair requires “a great deal of woodworking and craftsmanship”. But none of this is enough to justify such frugal production numbers. What is most interesting about the 2022 Fauteuil Kangourou is that the powers that be at Vitra have purposefully made it play hard-to-get. Today, the webpage for the chair on Vitra’s website is emblazoned with the words “sold out”. With its online campaign, Vitra has harnessed the internet’s capacity for fuelling our sense of FOMO, or what Byron Hawes, author of the 2018 book Drop, calls “social media’s push to make having something other people don’t, our primary reason for getting up in the morning”.
In economic terms, this approach means cultivating demand to deliberately exceed supply. In practical terms, this means a “product drop” and the manufacture of all the associated hype that product drops entail. By most accounts, these drops have their origins in the 1990s, when early players in street- and skate-wear, GOODENOUGH (GDEH) in Tokyo and Supreme in New York, realised that they could generate an air of exclusivity about – and higher prices for – hoodies, t-shirts and skateboards by making them available in limited numbers. Sneaker fever grew among hiphop and basketball fans at roughly the same time, having catapulted into mainstream consciousness with the success of Michael Jordan’s eponymous Air Jordans for Nike. In 2002, however, Nike’s dominance had diminished its cultural currency in the eyes of the growing skater community. To help recapture underground cool, the brand launched a limited-edition drop in collaboration with Supreme. Only 1,250 pairs of the resultant sneakers, the Supreme x Nike SB Dunk Low Pro, were ever made. By 2010, many other sneaker brands were following suit, as was luxury fashion. When Louis Vuitton collaborated with Supreme five years ago, for instance, The New York Times ordained 2017 to be “the year of the drop”. This kind of cross-pollination, whether between streetwear and high-fashion, or highend designers and high-street brands, allows labels to leverage credibility while expanding their reach. Today, the limited-edition collaboration is a mainstay of fast-fashion. Think Gucci x Adidas or Uniqlo x Jil Sander.
While Vitra has stopped short of marking their Prouvé collaboration with the now customary “x” between two names, the campaign bears many of the hallmarks of the above legacy. The promotional materials for the Fauteuil Kangourou channel design history into hype. A booklet advertising the chair features the neutral-coloured version artfully photographed by Florian Böhm in idyllic timber and leafy surrounds. The double-page spread interrupts archival black-and-white photographs of Prouvé and the Villa Dollander, accompanied by sketches and technical drawings with authenticating stamps. These show the chair’s evolution from a four-legged object into its final kangaroo-like stance.
At their zenith, product drops resulted in riots. In 2005, on New York’s Lower East Side, the release of influencer Jeff Staples’s Nike SD Pigeon trainers was met with knives, machetes, baseball bats and, finally, SWAT teams. And in March 2022, crowd unrest over the release of the MoonSwatch, a collaboration between watch brands Swatch and Omega, forced Swatch’s London Carnaby Street store to close at 10am. At their best, however, product drops spawned a culture and a community – legions of dedicated fans who congregated around their consumerism, either online or in the street, and who used their sartorial choices to signal to anyone else who also happened to be “in the know”. Hawes is nostalgic for the days when, “[if] you waited outside Supreme, all the kids knew each other. They would put on their fuckboy finest[...] and check each other’s outfits out.” Product drops also gave rise to their own lingo and to the figureheads of the “sneakerhead”, someone who collects sneakers, and the “hypebeast”, someone who closely follows trends and dedicates themselves to acquiring hyped products.
The Fauteuil Kangourou.
But can riots over sneakers translate into frenzies about furniture or even into online forums full of furnitureheads fervently discussing the merits of a Prouvé over a Le Corbusier? Full disclosure: I have never queued for anything (even a nightclub), although I can envisage getting involved in a Prouvé/Corbusier debate. Vitra did cause a frenzy though, when, for one night only in 2019 at its headquarters in Weil am Rhein, the usually straightfaced design elite were subsumed by a hoard of autograph-seeking twentysomethings walking around in their socks, waving their sneakers in the hope that they might be signed by the evening’s guest of honour. The object of this rock-star reaction was Virgil Abloh (1980-2021), a designer widely recognised as a horse-whisperer for the millennial market. The founder of Off-White and artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, Abloh was described by Michael Burke, chief executive of Louis Vuitton, as being “incredibly good at creating bridges between the classic and the zeitgeist of the moment,” and he did just that with the three limited-edition products he designed for Vitra. These comprised hacks of Prouvé’s 1950s Antony chair and Petite Potence wall lamp in Abloh’s signature orange, as well as an individually numbered decorative ceramic breeze blocks.[2] “One of the intentions of the collaboration was to address a much younger group of people,” Vitra’s CEO Nora Fehlbaum explained, which is something that Los Angeles-based fibreglass furniture manufacturer Modernica also achieved when, in 2018, it engaged graffiti artist Futura (then known as Futura 2000) to decorate some of its classic shell chairs. The Modernica x Futura collaboration is now in its fourth iteration and includes an armchair, coffee table, daybed and storage cabinet for paint cans. These are released in lots of 25 to 50 pieces that regularly sell out in a matter of seconds.
Grosen acknowledges that “making 20th-century design relevant to a younger generation” is central to Vitra’s current objectives. Prouvé, however, hardly carries the same pop cultural cachet as a New York graffiti artist or even Abloh, who routinely bandied around the names of Marcel Duchamp, Pharrell Williams and Mies van der Rohe in the same sentence – the kind of synthesis between art, pop culture and design that brands seem, increasingly, to be chasing. While the Prouvé re-edition’s marketing campaign may be an indication that Vitra is trying to coax millennials into buying high-design furniture, it is more likely a sign that the product drop has simply become the modus operandi of retail. Certainly, Vitra’s intention for the Fauteuil Kangourou to be a primarily online purchase seems underscored by the fact that, at the brand’s new London flagship store, the sales team were not keen for me to sit on the display chair when I visited. Whether this was because the chair is a rare specimen or because it was precariously perched on a mirrored tile, was hard to know. Either way, their reluctance seemed to nullify the showroom’s conventional purpose of offering customers a chance to road-test designs. In the era of Instagram, perhaps appearance and backstory trumps comfort or ergonomics.
This does not mean, however, that Vitra is necessarily trying to convince people to change their chairs as often as they do their shoes. Vitra, according to Grosen, vehemently “avoids all short-lived trends”. At circa £3,500, the Fauteuil Kangourou will set you back a little bit more than a £140 orange Virgil Abloh brick. The price tag on the chair is something Hawes perceives as a potential obstacle to Vitra’s success. “The drop strategy will probably work better in the industrial design sector with lower cost items,” he says. “It’s easier to get people to impulse buy a $350 1970s Italian hyper-maximalist plastic planter than a serious sofa.”
By virtue of the air of scarcity fabricated around them, these objects also accrue value with the help of the secondary market. This was the case with Abloh’s now-notorious brick. Individually numbered in an edition of 999, the brick today regularly appears on resale sites such as eBay and 1stdibs for thousands of pounds. A quick search on 1stdibs reveals the same dynamic now at work with the 2022 Fauteuil Kangourou. A blue iteration of the chair has already fetched nearly £10,000. This, according to Hawes, is where the opportunity lies for Vitra. “You end up getting secondary branding and marketing where the perceived value of your product rises,” he says. “Lots of people will pay thousands of dollars for a specific colourway even if at the end of the day it’s the same $50 shoe.” In this respect, the chair embodies what 19th-century economist Thorstein Veblen called, as part of his theory of conspicuous consumption, a “Veblen good”: a luxury item for which demand increases as the price increases, thereby making it a status symbol. Colourways produced in limited numbers are just one way of making a factory-produced item appear special.
Only time will tell whether the demand for the Fauteuil Kangourou will continue to escalate due to the fog of desire that Vitra has created around it. In some ways, this fog seems at odds with such a straight-talking design. For its part, Vitra is tight-lipped about discussing anything as mercenary – and transitory – as its sales and marketing strategy. The company is, after all, in the business of selling – and anointing – design classics. When I speak to him, Grosen continually returns to the values of “simplicity, honesty, logic and longevity”, both in his discussion of Vitra’s philosophy and in the story of the Kangourou. But this is precisely the point. In 1957, Vitra signed a licence with Herman Miller to produce Eames furniture in Europe and the Middle East; I can’t help but wonder about how those designs, now classics, initially fared on the market. “It takes time for designs to mature in people’s minds,” confirms Grosen, “It’s like good music. You have to listen to it a few times until you really get to love it. But then you will enjoy listening to it for many years.” In other words, icons are not just born, but made. In the case of the re-edition of Jean Prouvé’s lesser-known Fauteuil Kangourou, Vitra is making an icon, one click at a time.
1 The Dollander family ordered four, while others were produced for select clients.
2 See Felix Chabluk Smith’s ‘Ceramic Block by Virgil Abloh’ in Disegno #24.
Words Elizabeth Glickfeld
Photography Florian Böhm
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.