Last month, during the five-day furniture fantasia that is Milan’s Salone del Mobile, anyone navigating the narrow Via Monte Napoleone was confronted by a scene akin to Alice in Wonderland. Here, jutting out in architectural style, the 73-year-old Philippe Starck had fixed some 160 chairs to the façade of the Dior store.
Resembling an elegant, extraterrestrial army, the installation celebrated what is, surprisingly, the first collaboration between the veteran French creative and the fashion house to reinvent Dior Maison’s archetypal Louis XVI Medallion chair. For a closer look, a few streets away at the opulent Palazzo Citterio, guests were guided down a darkened flight of stairs into a pitch black cavern, where all 24 iterations of the Miss Dior design were unveiled. Positioned on pedestals like stage stars as the balletic sounds of French composer Erik Satie (he, who first coined the term ‘furniture music’) remixed by the experimental Soundwalk Collective played out, Starck’s majestic Medallions were illuminated one-by-one.
The Medallion chair has a history that is deeply intertwined with Dior’s. When Christian Dior charged interior designers Victor Grandpierre and Georges Geffroy with decorating the first atelier at 30 Avenue Montaigne, it was scattered with the designer’s beloved Louis XVI chairs, upholstered in toile de Jouy and cane motif fabrics. Opened in 1947, the grand 19th-century couture house was, in his own words, ‘the salon of my dreams’, cementing the sleek but sober, neoclassical ‘Dior-Louis’ interiors look and instilling the antique chair with a distinct sense of cool. Originally known as the goût grec, the French neoclassical style born during the 18th-century reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, it is a piece that has been prized for its sense of beauty and restraint ever since.
Wide-eyed, wearing his uniform grey hoodie, black blazer and track pants, and accompanied by his wife, Jasmine, Starck has descended from the Portuguese mountain that they currently call home — ‘though we live almost everywhere’ — to talk about the Miss Dior design. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by this icon,’ says Starck, whose own lucite Louis Ghost chair remains one of his most recognisable designs. Working with complete carte blanche, Starck compares his role to that of an archaeologist, digging in to the collective subconscious, to reduce the Medallion to simplest form, what he calls ‘the minimum of the minimum’. ‘You have to find the spine, the soul, the spirit [of the piece],’ he says. ‘Then you can guarantee that people will buy it, they will use it and have it forever. Because it’s the flesh that becomes old, never the bone.’ Starck’s elegantly stripped-back creation is a remarkable feat of engineering, formed in Italy from a single mould in ‘very technical’ injected aluminium, black chromium, pale rose copper and gold. Incredibly light, each of the fabrications holds a particular meaning: aluminium represents ‘intelligence’, copper ‘softness’, gold ‘the sacred’ and black ‘mystery’.
Perhaps his most avant-garde move is the mono-armed Miss Dior chair (there’s also a two-armed and armless version), Starck’s nod to the fantasy of haute couture, and what is known in France as empra la pose, he says, which loosely translates as ‘strike a pose’. As a child flicking through the pages of his mother’s fashion magazines, he was struck by a photograph of Marlene Dietrich with Dior, resplendently arranged around a chair. ‘Even then I was super impressed by it,’ he says of the image. ‘It was so elegant.’
In the intervening decades, Starck’s career, which began with ultra-chic Parisian nightclubs in the 1970s, has been defined by its diversity. Spanning space stations, telephones, toothbrushes, super yachts, mansions and hotels, he found fame in the mid-1980s when the former French president, François Mitterrand, asked him to redecorate his Élysée Palace apartments. Yet the chair remains one of his most ardent design obsessions. Why? ‘If your design is even a few millimetres out, then it doesn’t work,’ he says. ‘That’s why there are so many bad chairs and so few historical ones.’
Starck’s seating fascination has its foundations in a childhood spent in the bourgeois salon of his grandparents’ apartment, which was filled with Louis XVI thrones. They were kept covered up, only exposed when guests came to visit. As a boy, Starck would seek solace among the chairs, hiding out beneath their covers. ‘It was my house, my shelter,’ he recalls. The fond memory conjures an idea: ‘I know,’ he says excitedly. ‘We should make slip covers for the Miss Dior!’
It’s not the first time Dior has given the Medallion a makeover. At last year’s Milan Design Fair, the French fashion house commissioned 17 global designers including India Mahdavi, Martino Gamper and Pierre Yovanovitch to reinterpret the chair. Despite the fanfare of the presentation, this year’s more streamlined offering feels more appropriate for our times. ‘Don’t buy something that’s just for you, buy something for your children and grandchildren,’ he says. In high design terms, this timelessness doesn’t come cheap, of course: the Miss Dior is already on sale for €1,700-€5,000 (£1,460-£4,300).
What is perhaps most telling is that Starck prefers to be described as a creator rather than a designer. ‘I make so many different things,’ he says. His subject, however, is singular. ‘I try to understand who we are, where we were and where we are going. And that,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘can occupy an entire lifetime.’ His belief in humankind remains unfailing. ‘Can you imagine? We were bacteria 1 billion years ago. In 1.2 billion years the sun will implode but we are so, so smart we will already be somewhere else. That’s genius.’ One can only hope there will be room on the Starck mothership, and enough Miss Dior chairs for everyone.
