regularly.'' Peter Fiell, who researched the
company for his book ''Industrial Design A-Z,'' described the ethos
as a kind of moral humanism played out in chairs and shelving units.
''It goes back to Charles Eames -- how to get the most quality to the
greatest number of people for the least money,'' Fiell said. ''That's
the nucleus of modernism. It's inherently optimistic.''...
Among the many repercussions of the technology boom of the 1990's was
that it flipped the compass points of American class. Suddenly new
money was more dynamic, more mesmerizing than old
moneyAppropriate to the new economy, the furnishings were
expensive, but their value lay not in the materials but in an overlay
of information, a narrative of design. They told a story that
flattered both the owner and his audience. It was retro and futurist,
a comforting view of dizzying change. For Ikea, this was a recipe for
opportunity. Marble was expensive; color could be done cheap.
Josephine Rydberg-Dumont noticed a corollary change that had similar
advantages for Ikea's American experiment: an upmarketing of
downmarket goods. Calvin Klein's cK T-shirts, Starbucks coffee,
basketball shoes designed as if for the space program, sushi in the
Grand Union -- these were tokens of conspicuous quality for a broad
part of the population. ''Ten or 15 years ago, traveling in the
United States, you couldn't eat well,'' she said. ''You couldn't get
good coffee. Now you can get good bread in the supermarket, and
people think that's normal. I like that very much. That's more
important to the good life than the availability of expensive wines.
That's what Ikea is about.''
It was a particularly good thing to be about in the 1990's, a decade
in which the economic folk tales were of astronomical success (or, by
the end, vertiginous falls), but the broad reality was quite
different: for Americans in the middle of the wage scale, real
earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined or held flat for much of
the decade. Even when they were putting away a few dollars, members
of the middle class were losing ground to the people to whose status
they aspired, the heroes of those folk tales. The majority of
Americans were participants in a zeitgeist of obscene riches without
having a piece of the action.
What they could have, in just the same degree as the new economy's
new rich, was the immaterial titillations of design. Design was a
perfect class commodity for a class that was going nowhere. It added
value to a toilet brush or a garbage pail, to say nothing of personal
computers. The ubiquity of these fluid computer-generated designs
suggested an attractive world of class mobility. It promised that you
could be moving forward, even if your paycheck was slipping back:
why, just look at your toothbrush, designed by Philippe Starck for
Alessi. Glossy design magazines sat side by side with the tabloids in
supermarket checkout lines. Decor gurus built cable TV franchises
among the same daytime audiences that used to watch soap operas.
Target invited the six-pack public into the (blob-shaped) pool,
introducing conspicuously cool lines by the name-brand designers
Starck and Michael Graves. Here was a distinctly American perspective
on democratic design: if you couldn't afford to make your home look
like Buckingham Palace, you could get some of the snob appeal of an
Ian Schrager boutique hotel. Not only that, the newer take was better.
And what that new perspective looked like, more than anything, was
Ikea. Showcased in magazines, bruited among early adopters, Ikea
suited the benign technocracy and ironic wink of the new economy.
Where stores like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware offer the
comfort of prefab antiques, with a promise of permanence and
connection with the past, Ikea fabricates a connection with motion
itself. With little change in the product line, the company shifted
its profile from its blandly functional side to its design side -- if
not among the literal ''many,'' then among the taste makers the many
followed. ''They raised the popular consciousness of design,'' Fiell
said. ''It's based on a highly optimistic view of the future, with
equality of opportunity and an integrated look that is part of the
identity.'' Sold only in Ikea stores, surrounded by a universe of
other Ikea goods, the designs aim for an instant sugar rush. Like the
Swedish clothing chain H.&M., whose store opening clogged Manhattan
sidewalks in April 2000, it promises 360 degrees of immediate visual
candy, at impulsive, no-guilt prices -- what the critic George W.S.
Trow has called the context of no context. It's like being on TV, all
shimmery surface. As a set designer
