Sitting comfortably, Seventies-style
Designers are rediscovering the decade’s zany look
By Jill Krasny
Design companies are obsessed with the past. Each year a selection of chairs, tables, lamps and stools is dragged out of the archives, dusted off and relaunched for a new generation of customers. For the past 25 years, this has given us a flood of modern furniture from the 1940s and 1950s, with the sort of clean, upright forms that provided the backdrop to every scene in “Mad Men”. Now that trend is changing. Familiarity has bred contempt: as Alexis Barr, who teaches at the New York School of Interior Design, puts it, “It’s really hard at this point to get excited about anything by Charles and Ray Eames or Hans Wegner.”
The past is still providing inspiration, but the decade has changed. Few people will have heard of Luigi Caccia Dominioni, but his Toro armchair, designed in 1973 and now released again by B&B Italia, represents the looser, chunkier aesthetic that has come back into vogue. It was conceived at a time of social uncertainty, shortly after the Paris riots of 1968, as were the cushy designs of Pierre Paulin, a Frenchman whose Bonnie chairs and sofas from 1975 have been relaunched by Ligne Roset. According to Sarah Lichtman, a historian at Parsons School of Design in New York, in the 1970s furniture-makers were keen to acknowledge our increasingly casual lifestyles with zany ideas and wildly disparate styles and colours. “American catchphrases in the 1970s included ‘If it feels good, do it’ and the ‘Me Decade’,” says Barr. These chairs embody that spirit of self-expression and experimentation.
The work of contemporary designers like Paolo Ferrari and Pierre Yovanovitch does too. Ferrari’s Ultra Low Roll Back armchair, with its rounded velvet forms, has a louche, 1970s glamour. Yovanovitch, whose work has often drawn on the unadorned designs of mid-20th-century modern furniture, has recently taken another direction. Like his bear armchairs from 2017, which were inspired by the Goldilocks fairy tale and featured soft, ear-like forms on the headrest and bulbous wooden feet, his Assymetries armchair is big and enveloping. Consider it the 2019 take on the Toro armchair.■
More from 1843 magazine
1843 magazine | The Italian bear on trial for murder
Last year a jogger was mauled to death in the Dolomites. Did the EU’s rewilding project go dangerously wrong?
1843 magazine | “We have to make Biden lose”: Arab-Americans are switching to Trump
Anger over Gaza in the swing state of Michigan might cost the president the election
1843 magazine | Inside the Kenyan cult that starved itself to death
During covid-19 a preacher lured thousands of people into a remote forest. Then he told them to stop eating