Collectible design or – as noted curator, writer and historian Glenn Adamson has redefined it – vanguard design is often concerned with conveying and even embodying messages about production, materiality, identity, culture, and politics. Like fine art, it’s about much more than just function and form.
From the late 1960s through the 1980s, radically inclined talents in Italy and elsewhere used furniture and other applied mediums to challenge social conventions. Subverting the composition of a table with unexpected shapes and materials allowed them to make bold statements about how we live and consume. Later in the 1990s, a group of Dutch designers began to take on a similar humoristic and experimental approach. Burning a widely respected classic armoire or making a chair out of knotted rope was all the rage, as was pushing the limitations of standard production.
