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Fashion, Lifestyle… And Furniture?

The emotional aspect of design when grasped right can elicit a strong “buy me!” reaction in consumers but are manufacturers paying enough attention to their capricious, style conscious end-users? Nicole Liang finds out through exclusive interviews and trend reports from Pantone and IMM Cologne.

The thing about design trends is that it’s an odd bag of mixtures. There is really no one thread to follow. The season could be one for subdued styles and neutral colours or it could also work for things that wow and pop – depending on who you speak to and for whom these designs are made. But ultimately, one rule does apply: the piece has to relate to and evoke emotions in the user.

Housed in steel containers and measured by order books, the furniture trade often walks the talk of costs, raw materials, regulations and numbers, while walking further away from the talk of emotion. But Sternsteinas a
lifestyle product, consumers in fact have the ultimate influence on any furniture supplier’s bottom line, and they are an emotional (and capricious) lot. Consumer-buyers look for excitement in fashion and they demand the same in furniture. Retailers know this behaviour most intimately.

Macy's, Inc is one of the nation's premier retailers in the US, with fiscal 2008 sales of US$24.9 billion, operates more than 800 Macy's department stores and furniture galleries. In the Pantone Fashion Colour Report Spring 2010, its Fashion Director Nicole Fischelis said: “Consumers have an insatiable appetite for what’s new and fun in fashion, and that is true this season as well. While they may be more selective in their purchases right now, people still want to be excited and inspired by fashion. Colour is arguably one of the most essential elements each season as it triggers the emotional ‘buy me’ reaction!”

Vincent Chia, Design Director for Air Division Pte Ltd agrees that furniture is part of fashion today. “Furniture labels nowadays are like an accessory which you show off to friends. It is no longer that ‘thing’ your folks bought and handed down to you. It’s a status statement just like driving a BMW or carrying a Louis Vuitton bag.”

Fashion, Lifestyle… Furniture?

However, not everyone sees the inseparable connection between what we sit on and the fancy apparel we wear.
Dragan Mladenovik, who is Design Director for Rare Dragan Co Ltd, sets the direction for the company’s high-end occasional furniture. He too laments the same: “I see fashion and furniture very interconnected. Of course, we do not have four collections for each season like fashion does but launching new furniture collections once or twice per year is also something very important and exciting in our industry.”

Rare Dragan’s products are exported to Eastern Europe, Australia and the Middle East. The company also operates retail stores in Vietnam, Australia and India.

“There are many designers who share my opinion, however, it is sad that the majority of manufacturers are not on the same page as me. To some, furniture is lifestyle and part of fashion, but for many, it is not,” Mladenovik continued.
“People should see home interiors to be as style-worthy as their cars and outfits,” he added.

To Chia, the parallel between furniture and lifestyle in fact extends to include even music trends. Chia's Singapore-based company is a producer of designer furniture and furnishings. The well-known name is a multi-award winner and has been featured in the media locally and overseas. It also offers industrial design consultancy. To date, it has worked with globally renowned designers like Toshiyuki Kita from Japan (designer for Sharp’s Aquos TV) as well as Voon Wong & Benson Saw from the UK.

“The furniture trend tends to follows the fashion world, which is led by the music scene. Currently, it’s a mixed bag of 80’s inspired music, that’s why there’s a lot of angular furniture coming up, reminiscent of the angular cars of the 80’s. So the next trend is definitely going to be 90’s inspired, judging from the trend of music,” he shared.

Main Elements Of Creativity

Just as Toshiyuki Kita’s sleek and minimalist Aquos TV is a stunningly attractive piece of lifestyle product to own, boast of and admire, fashionable furniture can command the same emotional pull among consumers too (without being over the top).

In an unassumingly pragmatic tone, Mladenovik summed: “Innovation is something that improves the look, functionality, cost and efficiency of a product that had been designed and developed in the past. But at the end of the day, a chair is still a chair”.

Air Division’s Chia emphasised that the “fresh idea” need not be “crazy” and should not be “overly executed”.

“It’s all in the details. The difference between a double-stitch and single-stitch piece of leather can give you a totally different look. Sometimes, minute details like the thickness of the tread can make a whole lot of difference,” he explained.

The Postmodernist pessimism mourns the dearth of originality – anything truly new had been invented already. Today, everything is a pastiche, or blend, made up of things that are already in existence. But every little component of this pastiche matters and makes a difference. All it takes is a fresh perspective, and to keep the combination of elements simple.

“And if you look at the design icons by today’s masters – the works of Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic, Ron Arad’s chairs or the little things Stefano Giovannoni has been doing for Alessi – there’s nothing whimsical about them: they’re serious design, not jokes. When design is taken seriously, it contains cultural aspects, artisanal qualities or even, in my case, architectural solutions. Then design can be an expression of something that goes far beyond itself,” said architect/designerJohanna Grawunder in an interview with Claudia Wanninger for the IMM Cologne Trendbook 2010.

The jury member for IMM Cologne design events added: “Take the Kolumba Museum here in Cologne: even though you sense the hand of the architect, Peter Zumthor, very strongly, it all looks as if he hadn’t done much at all. And yet it’s precisely the wonderful design of a neutral palette of floors, walls and paths which, despite the minimalist aesthetics, are nevertheless incredibly rich in terms of the spatial arrangement, materials, light and so on”.

Dollars And Sense

To business owners with more acute sense for real dollars, the elements and emotions of design might be an abstract concept. But the long-term commercial benefit of fashionable design, to those who realise it, is sustainability.

This is why the Singapore Furniture Industries Council (SFIC) set up the Singapore Mozaic brand in 2009. Ambassadors of this B2B brand are collectively promoted as “Singapore’s Finest” at trade exhibitions worldwide and through international media. SFIC saw the need for this branding initiative because it “aims to bring across the importance of design in every business practice”.

Said SFIC’s president Andrew Ng: “We strongly encourage Singapore furniture companies to adopt design as a core competency in building a more sustainable future for their business, especially in the global frontier”.

And as Mladenovik puts it, a chair is still a chair. And for a piece of furniture to serve its function, Singapore Mozaic and SFIC recognise that strong foundations in other aspects in the company are needed to support design R&D. To become a Singapore Mozaic ambassador, Ng said that good ethical business practices count as one major criterion as well, so that they can provide unique and cost-effective methods to produce attractive and innovative furniture designs and products.

4 MAJOR TRENDS FOR 2010

Johanna Grawunder is an architect who also designs interiors and industrial products for clients like Boffi, Flos, B&B and WMF. She is also a two-time jury member of the IMM Cologne’s Interior Innovation Awards and D3 Contest. She and her team forecasted four major trends for the year 2010.

“Especially for the public, for certain sections of the design world and for lots of manufacturers who want to get an overview and understand what’s happening beyond their factory walls. With its sketch-like texts, the Trend Book creates a narrative ‘catalogisation’ that’s both important and useful, especially as its conclusions point the way to the future,” she said.

The four trends forecasted are:
1. Trickery: False-Bottomed Design
2. Comfort Zone: Consoling and Cuddly
3. Rehab: Purism as Self-therapy
4. Discipline: A Return to Reason