PARIS — A spat over some flowers has roiled Europe’s design community into an escalating debate on the age-old question of style versus substance.
It started in October when British inventor James Dyson, known for his high-tech vacuum cleaners and high-toned delivery on American TV commercials, resigned as chairman of London’s Design Museum in protest over an exhibit devoted to a mid-20th-century British flower arranger, Constance Spry.
“It just wasn’t a serious subject for an exhibit,” said Dyson of Spry, a sort of British Martha Stewart who had urged women to beautify their homes with plants.
He said the museum’s director, Alice Rawsthorn, a former Financial Times journalist, had focused too much on “tinsel” and “styling,” drawing into peril the public’s perception of “serious design.”
“A museum is meant to deal with difficult-to-understand subjects,” Dyson said.
Rawsthorn, who arrived three years ago at the institution that was founded by Sir Terrance Conran in 1981, also has put on shows featuring Manolo Blahnik shoes, Philip Treacy hats and Nike sneakers.
Those exhibits have been public hits, making the Design Museum more popular than ever with the media and the gallery-going public. Attendance has increased 20 percent during Rawsthorn’s tenure. Rawsthorn declined to be interviewed for this article, although her supporters, and she has many, said Rawsthorn had succeeded in “sexing up” a subject that runs the risk of being perceived as dry.
“The Constance Spry show was absolutely brilliant,” said Peter Saville, a British graphic designer whose work Rawsthorn featured in a show last year. “It was more interesting than another furniture designer.”
In a recent column in The Financial Times, Wallpaper magazine founder Tyler Brûlé said Rawsthorn has helped “redefine the notion of design within our consumer culture.”
Marc Newson, the Australian industrial designer who has a show running now at the museum, said, “I liked the Constance Spry exhibit. Personally, I like flowers.”
But Dyson is on the warpath. He said his resignation was meant to “bring a serious matter to a head” because meretricious design was threatening the profession’s existence.
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“To survive against [Asia], we can’t just rely on shallow styling,” he said earlier this month in a high-profile lecture broadcast on BBC television. “We need technology and design that they don’t have. As long as we continue to innovate and produce products that have better features and work better, we can compete. We have no choice but to shake off our obsession with styling, and to focus on creating new, more advanced products.”
“There’s a lot of style without substance around right now,” Conran said. “It’s the mood of the moment, and it needs addressing.”
Conran remains on the museum’s board, but has threatened to quit if the shows don’t get meatier.
Just as so-called “design” hotels have been reduced to watered-down, tracing-paper recipes being rolled out by the big chains, industrial design’s legitimacy seems to be threatened by its own success.
After all, Philippe Starck products have been in Target stores, and a majority of designers concur that, as France’s Andrée Putman put it, “Design, as a notion at least, has lost its meaning. There’s too much of it. There’s so much of what people call design out there that isn’t design.”
“Mass marketers have realized that slapping a ‘design’ label on something is highly lucrative and generates sales,” Conran added. “It cheapens design.”
The question of where to go next is far from settled.
“The idea that design comes from function isn’t founded,” Putman said. “It’s also a game between decoration and in-utility. It can also be putting eight vases next to each other and arranging flowers in them. That’s design: It’s a representation of form and ornamentation.”
“In the Sixties and Seventies, design was a bastion of taste,” Saville said. “But we’re out of that. That’s boring. How boring is it to see a house with a Barcelona chair and an Arne Jacobson table? Design is now about issues of taste. Taste is a dictate. Issues of taste are meant to discuss the dictate.”
He called the last 50 years of modern culture a “learning curve, a sort of grand tour, in the 18th-century sense, for the masses.”
Saville continued, “Once you know French food, it’s boring to go to a French restaurant. You want French Pacific. Once you know classic wines, you want something new. You move on to wines from New Zealand.”
He said design is experiencing a similar moment and that it has “fractured into a multilayered experience.”
Putman agreed. “Design can’t impose any dictates today. There’s something for everybody. It’s a glass that you fill with a color, but there is not only one color.”
Nonetheless, she admitted that the profession is having a hard time finding a new raison d’être.
But for David Kester, chief executive of Britain’s Design Council, the body that promotes design in business in the U.K., the debate highlights two interconnected parts of design.
“On the one hand, there’s the fashion-conscious idea with notions of style in the fore, and on the other, design based on more conceptual ideas, building brands, innovation and at the heart of a business’ economic strategy,” Kester said. “I don’t think you need to make a distinction.”
Kester urged more concentrated thought on how to apply design to industry.
“The Design Council has just completed a study of 1,500 British companies,” he said. “We found only 8 percent of companies have a strategy to manage the use of design, and just 3 percent have a strategy to calculate returns on design. This is in Britain, which is one of the most design [conscious] communities in the world. I’d say there’s room for improvement.”