The news that the rapper A$AP Rocky is launching a “decor studio” will be startling to believers in the high-minded principles of modern design, and its antecedents in the arts and crafts movement, especially when they see that his main idea is to add some primary-coloured mushrooms to a cactus-shaped hatstand created 50 years ago by the Italian designers Guido Drocco and Franco Mello. “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” said the Victorian socialist and designer William Morris, words that don’t have much traction in this case. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” said the author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Nope, also not much use here. Rocky’s explanation is that he has long advocated for psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, so “it was only right that we made a cactus with them”. This might sound like a flimsy argument to justify what looks like a marketing gimmick. But maybe legacy objections don’t apply when, as Rocky says of himself, you’re trying to “push the boundaries of the home decor space”.
