Object Lessons
Tom Dixon’s design career started in a London garage, but his Anglophile aesthetic has taken the world by storm..
February 1, 2008, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
“I think I could lend a bit to the international space station. Maybe it would be better in pink.” So muses Tom Dixon, the man who has personally winched British industrial design up a good many style notches over the past few decades. And his flippancy comes as a relief. He may sport an OBE from the queen and be sat at the head of a multi-brand design firm, but Dixon is not always comfortable with the media machine; he seems more at home among Zambian craftsmen or Indian brass workers than fans with champagne. Yet one could say that it is this lack of polish, plus a healthy dose of humour, that has put him where he is now: talking interplanetary design in Asia.
Dixon’s industrial design career famously came to be in the eighties, in a friend’s garage in London. He had dropped out of art school and picked up bass guitar in a band called ‘Funkapolitan’, dabbled in freelance graphic design and party organizing, then turned to welding; something he could do while convalescing from a motorbike accident. His first scrap metal furniture pieces were powerful and punk-inspired. Within two years Giulio Cappellini had spotted his work, taken him onboard and put his S Chair and Bird Lounger into production – a prize most formally-trained design students would kill for.
Still, despite time with the Italians and seven years of due diligence with Habitat – a vast British design company – Dixon was careful not to smooth out all his rough edges. Nor did he consider further formal education. His own website lists him as a ‘self-educated maverick, whose only qualification is a one-day course in plastic bumper repair’.
“I’d gone from an independent radical working with scrap metal to a studio of 15 to 18 people, to working for one of the largest furniture firms in the world,” he recalls. “Six thousand items with a turnover of 40% a year! But it taught me a hell of a lot about how design can be a regenerator of industry, [about] creating desire for objects.”
Dixon has three brands under the umbrella heading of The Design Research Group, and each offers room for different kinds of exploration. One, relatively new, deals in interiors, one is Artek, a sustainably-minded Finnish furniture mainstay co founded by architect Alvar Aalto, and his main label, Tom Dixon, started out with something different in mind. “It’s more a fashion brand than a service industry,” he explained to a roomful of fans at Hong Kong’s Business of Design Week. “I wanted to control the manufacture, the design, and the way it was presented to the public. That was a new idea at the time.”
Dixon’s products are raw, a little rough and they employ a winning mix of British solidity and panache, whether seen in the large slabs of crowned oak that make up his Slab and Tall chair and table series, or in the blunt Polyethylene curves of lights Jack and Melon. His globe-shaped Swarovski chandelier back in 2003 managed to be both beautifully ethereal and rather disco-dazzle at the same time
The aesthetic does well in Asia despite its low-tech aura. A small collection of his products, including Slab and Tall, can be found in Hong Kong’s Lane Crawford, but it is in Shanghai that he opened his biggest store yet, last year. The glitzy Mirror Ball lamp has been an especially large hit here; a product ironically conceived during one of what Dixon calls his ‘anti-design kicks’.
“I was like, okay, can I actually not make it any shape, or make it the simple form of everything,” he remembers. “The form of the world or an atom, not any gloopy weird shape… Then make it a non-colour – silver – so it reflects everything around it to make a non-design statement. As you can see it completely failed”. Even this man’s mistakes make money.
Still, Dixon identifies other challenges ahead. “The hardest thing is to keep that naiveté going,” he explains, describing his fear of getting too institutionalized, of seeing so much design he’ll go ‘snow blind’. As a result he has bouts of enviable, impulsive creativity, fueling constant speculation among fans about what he will do next.
At the London’s Design Festival two years ago he organized the ‘Great Chair Grab’ in Trafalgar Square. Photos show 500 of his plastic seats floating their way home through the city with happy, yet completely unprepared new owners; on bicycles, being wedged into cabs. Earlier in his career Dixon was probably the first one-man show with a mobile extrusion machine as a side kick – the kind that spews out molten plastic spaghetti. Standing on a platform at expos he would create a chair for customers on the spot, and the follow-on range, Fresh Fat Plastic, achieved cult status.
This break with conventionality comes part and parcel with the Dixon brand. In 2001 he was goaded into action by a pair of women from Myla, an adult label, when they placed a box of scandalously cheap sex toys on his desk. Along came Bone, one of the first seriously chic vibrators on the market. A trip to India to meet brass workers in Jaipur gave rise to his Beat series; hand beaten, contemporary brass lamp shades and pots, and a heavy duty, humanistic approach Dixon seems to love. The project helped craftsmen learn to compete against cheap imports and the products went down a treat at that years’ Milan Furniture Fair, contrasting nicely with the computer-generated, high tech rabble.
Dixon’s OBE underscores the boost he’s given his home industry, but he is well aware of the work still to be done. “Since the war the Italians have created a whole perception of quality and style. From a British standpoint I am trying to create something that has those connotations, some kind of national identity, because it doesn’t particularly exist at the moment,” he explains. He talks with enjoyment of aristocrats in old tweed, of sturdy Rolls Royces and of substance-over-style, but bemoans the lack of top local manufacturers. British designers are prime export material right now, with graduates fleeing by the plane load to German car companies, Italian furniture or American computer firms.
A move into interiors currently fills the Dixon agenda; another way of taking the Brit-fever worldwide. His Design Research Studios has started to build up a smooth portfolio of members clubs, from the recent Shoreditch House in a 1920s London warehouse to the Tokyo Hipsters Club, a fashion retail and exhibition space in Japan, each a unique blend of distinguished and off the wall. The chance to design a setting for your own products, he says, is just another excellent way to grow your business, since you’re constantly finding out that you need a bar stool, a soap dish or a sink. Yet with this list of ‘never –dones’ dwindling it’s no wonder that his goals have started to hover higher. One hopes the world’s astronauts look good in pink.