Philippe Starck

Philippe Starck is one of the most famous designers nowadays. There is hardly a place where you won’t find his objects. Besides his uncountable products, also the person Philippe Starck does often wake the interest of the public. Provocative, society and self critical like his statements and messages are also the democratic designs of the meanwhile 60 years old star designer.

Philippe Starck was born in the year 1949 in Paris and reached great popularity already shortly after his studies at the end of the 60es with his series of inflatable objects. A two-year occupation as Art Director for the fashion designer Pierre Cadin followed, as well as his first own interior design projects for bars, clubs and discos.

At the end of the 70es the first pieces of furniture emerged from Philippe Starck’s feather, like the Mac Gee shelf (1979), that is still produced by the Italian company Cerruti Italia today. The elevation into the design Olympus Philippe Starck achieved in the beginning of the 80es, when he created the interior furnishing of the Elysée-Palace in Paris according to an order of the French president Mitterand. In the year 1984 the prize awarded design of the prestige rich Paris Café Costes followed, from where also the popular three legged coffee-house chair Costes originated. This one is produced by the manufacturer Driade today.

Further namely producers and manufacturers enlarged their assortment afterwards with one original-design from Philippe Starck: toothbrushes, pasta or motorcycles – Starck designed numerous products for the most differing life areas. At the end of the 80es and the beginning of the 90es he created real design icons, with the citrus press “Juicy Salif” and the ashtray “Joe Cactus” (both 1990) amongst them for Alessi, as well as the table lamp Ará for Flos (1988) or the chair “Lord Yo” for Driade (1994).

The eccentric Starck advanced with this to the “Pop-star amongst the designers”. Not at least because of the methods with which he puts himself into the limelight besides his products again and again. But who accuses this marvellous designer of lack of reflection regarding his works, does this unjustifiably. Like hardly a designer does, Philippe Starck deals with the social and moralistic meaning of design on his own humorous and theatrical way.

His numerous created objects can be examined regarding ideal and emotional qualities as well as economical aspects. The “Good Good’s” catalogues that were raised to life by Starck or his programme of the “democratic design” follow the aims to enrich the quality of products, to reduce the product prize and to shape the distribution so that design becomes accessible for everyone. A goal that was already followed by the Bauhaus and that is regarded as almost achieved by Starck.

Immaterial parameters like sex, sensuality and symbolism play an equally great role in Starck’s designs like their prize and the production-conditions – his plastic chair Louis Ghost, that he designed in the year 2002 for the Kartell company is therefore lovingly called “a sort of post-Freudian Bauhaus chair” by the designer.

Philippe Starck is deemed to be „simply terrible“ in the designers scene, but his numerous prizes and awards, the presence of his objects in the collections of world wide important museums and last but not least, his enormous product-selling quotes make Starck one of the most important contemporaneous designers.

Despite multiple times coquetting with the end of his career, Starck has not left his work behind. It is just the opposite: right now he is planning the interior shaping of the soaceship Virgin Galactic, whith which tourists are going to be transported to the universe in a near future.