Design history

It is more than 40 years since Tom Wolfe said to me, in a Chinese restaurant on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, that ‘Modern’ had become an historical style label. He meant it was not, as the high modernists believed, the inevitable conclusion to all artistic progress, but had a beginning and an end as nearly precise as, say, Baroque or Rococo. And I should write a book about it, he added. This was a brilliant suggestion which I flubbed. I wrote about design instead. But ‘modern’ and ‘design’ are inextricably linked. Franco Albini’s handrails for the Milan metro? Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti? Charles Eames’s chair, which he designed for Billy Wilder?

The tide of survival bias has retreated and left the Anglepoise a design classic. Its contemporaries from the mid-1930s, a BSA Scout and de Havilland Dragonfly, for example, have become quaint antiquities. Almost unmodified since 1934, it is that rarest of things: a design beyond fashion. And it has totemic qualities. For my generation, the possession of an Anglepoise as much as a set of David Mellor cutlery or even a chicken brick was a ticket to the modern world where perfect products made you happy. Or so the theory went. To understand that modern world, now deceased, you need to appreciate basic analogue systems such as the rivet and