Little by little, and over a career that has now spanned almost 40 years, the
French designer Philippe Starck has been refashioning almost every object in
the world. Or that’s how it seems.
He has made sexy taps and “Juicy Salif”, a long-legged lemon squeezer that
looks very like one of Louise Bourgeois’ giant mother-spiders and is said to
spill lemon juice all over the fingers. He has transformed the toothbrush
into an almost beddable object, with sensually yielding curves.
He has turned the humdrum lavatory brush and holder into something that
resembles the quick zip of sword and scabbard. He has designed shoes with
Puma, clothing that clings like a second skin, mineral-water bottles,
noodles and curvaceous door knobs. He has made a whole range of objects for
mother and baby. He has feminised the macho world of the motorcycle.
He has recreated the interiors of the entire Schrager hotel chain. In the
current issue of Wallpaper you will find a full page ad for
“Visionary Condos” in the East Village in New York. Beside a picture of the
man himself, looking every inch the chic and cerebral Frenchman with
enormous sexual possibilities, runs the caption: “The World of Philippe
Starck . . . Discover Yourself.”
Now, in The Temptation of Space, an exhibition at the Espace Louis
Vuitton on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he has made an installation for a
show that celebrates the idea of space as Man’s latest frontier for luxury
travel.
The installation is in a smallish circular space – a little like a
mini-planetarium. You sit in a circle, heads tilted up to a grey dome that
simulates the night sky. A sudden deafening rush brings the craft itself
hurtling back to Earth, towards you. But as it approaches, you see that it
is not a craft at all. It is the ever-expanding iris of a human eye. This is
the logo that Starck designed to promote Virgin Galactic, the company
established by Sir Richard Branson to initiate brief flights into the
stratosphere.
After the iris has landed with an almighty juddering, bodies – light, airy,
slenderly muscular, beautiful and all dressed in clingy, iridescent grey,
skin-like clothing and red Starck-Puma-range shoes – float and wheel across
the night sky. Is this good art? It would be more honest to call it sleekly
persuasive advertising for Virgin Galactic.
Starck himself will have quite a say in the success or failure of Branson’s
project. What exactly will he do? A bit of everything, it seems. The
Spaceport, to be sited in the deserts of New Mexico, is on the drawing board
at the moment. He will also be bending his mind to issues of spacesuit
design, the interior décor of the craft, and much else. Who knows, your
complimentary baguette may come sheathed as only Starck knows how. For a
deposit of $20,000, you can secure a seat for lift-off in 2009.
Starck, 58, is burly and tall, with a stomach like a Toby Jug. He looks eager,
boyishly energetic, distracted. He is wearing a white T-shirt and Levi’s.
His short-cropped hair is freshly ruffled. His chin is stubbly, his cheeks
pockmarked with acne scars.
He talks wildly and impulsively, often staring up at the sky above the Avenue
George V, in a kind of fractured English that at its best has an
extraordinary, albeit bizarre, eloquence, and which at its worst seems to
plunge into overblown nonsense. He is difficult to interrupt, and difficult
to pin down. He is given to lofty, cloudy flights of philosophical fancy. In
short, he sounds every inch the British caricature of the typical French
intellectual.
We begin with his childhood and his education – in Paris, at the hands of the
Jesuits. He hated it. He would escape to the Parc de Saint-Cloud to dream
and to draw. He would sit in the sun – and in the rain – just thinking. Or,
back home, he would sit beneath his father’s table making, unmaking,
remaking. “You see, I was somewhere else. I was invisible, out of any
society. I had an absolute problem about industrial society. For the most
part, I was depressed . . .”
By the age of 19, he had established his first business – making inflatable
objects. Then, in the 1970s, he designed nightclub interiors. A big break
came in 1982 when President Mitterrand invited him to redesign the private
apartments of the Elysée Palace. As every year has passed, his capacity for
work, and the nature and the range of his activities, seem to have increased
and diversified. When I suggest that at any time he is at work on 200
projects simultaneously, he says “more”.
And yet to hear him talk you would think that he was not so much the global
brand that he has become, not so much the frenziedly energetic and
successful man who at the last count owned at least 19 homes and a private
plane, as a kind of anchorite, wholly set apart from the world, some
spiritual master of slow time. And, what is more, a blundering, childlike
innocent – something a little like Caspar Hauser, as immortalised by Werner
Herzog.
“You know, the only beautiful job is creativity, and that is what I surrounded
myself with when I was young, dream, invention, creativity. I am absolutely
not ambitious, either to be somebody, or to make a lot of things. I am
perhaps a little oversensitive . . .you see, we do not have the life we
deserve. Life today is a little dirty, a little obsolete.”
When I ask what it’s like to be a global brand, Starck becomes impassioned.
“You see, I don’t care. I am so out of everything. I have no mirror to see
myself. To my neighbour, when I am at my oyster farm in Bordeaux, I am
blowing in the wind. I am strictly nothing. I am less smart than my
neighbours. I am a brand because I have worked well in 25 years. Like it or
not, it is a success.”
Starck can’t really express where all his ideas come from. “Even for me, it is
a mystery. In daily life, I am completely dumb. I am not fun or interesting.
I would even go so far as to say that my consciousness is vulgar. But I am
driven by a powerful, sophisticated subconscious. And in my subconscious I
am everything. It is my magma. I am a magma-former.”
As for collaborating with others, there is no acknowledgement of other
colleagues during our conversation, no reference to other designers who may
have influenced him. In fact, Starck speaks with contempt about the idea of
design.
“I work strictly alone. I live far from everything. There are no cocktails, no
dinners. No luxurious houses. I am a modern autist . . .” A modern artist?
“No, a modern autist. I have no computer. My real job is dreaming. I have
the same drawing paper, the same drawing pad I have used for 25 years. I do
everything entirely alone. I have worked with the same small team for 25
years. I send ideas from anywhere in the world. They check them. They return
them to me.”
For Starck, designing a toothbrush and a hotel room is “the same thing. I
don’t care about them. I care about an object or a place only if it gives a
bit of life for my friends or my tribe. I am not interested in design for
its own sake. That is a materialistic project.”
Why did he get involved with Virgin Galactic, I ask. “The only thing that
interests me is the story of our animal species, our mutation,” Starck says.
“It is the most beautiful poetry. It is, I think, to do with the myth of the
angel. We have some intuition in our DNA that we must escape before the
world explodes. It is about the freedom and the democratisation of space. My
son, who is 11, will go.” (Starck has four children and reveals he is about
to divorce his third wife. He introduces me to Jasmine, his fiancée.)
I end by trying to pin him down on what he is actually doing at Virgin
Galactic. Starck takes a deep breath. “My job is to drive the philosophy, to
keep the direction, to be the guard of the temple. These travellers will see
the world is small, fragile, alone.”
— The Temptation of Space is at Espace Louis Vuitton, 101 Avenue
des Champs-Elysées, Paris (00 33 1 53575203; www.louisvuitton.
com), until August 26
A passion for making gadgets
The Lemon Juicer
Its producer (Alessi) described the Juicy Salif as “the 20th century’s most
controversial citrus-fruit squeezer”.
The Plastic Chair
No longer confined to school halls and community centres, the ubiquitous chair
was given a baroque twist and the Louis Ghost Chair was born.
The Mixer Tap
The Starck Mixer Tap combined the distinctive shape of the letter Y with the
functionality of a combination faucet.
SALMA CONWAY
