about collecting vintage design. peter lang / designandfun.com

about collecting vintage design. peter lang / designandfun.com ..........................................................................................................................................

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about collecting vintage design

13.000 years ago the first human beings followed herds of
large animals from russia to america to hunt to survive,
it was the ice age and I guess they had no choice.
also they had to find the right stones for weapons to be able to
hunt large animals. they say that the human brain has not changed
much since then. so there might be an instinct for hunting, for discovering
and finding things, at least in me because it woke up in me one day.
I am a vegetarian, I like animals and besides, if you have that instinct,
hunting them nowadays with modern weapons is no challenge.
(with all the good food from all over the world I hope respect
for animals will come into the consciousness of people.)

something of that old brain started to awaken in me.
as a young man I had made plans to discover the famous treasure
on the cocos island west of columbia. but it did not work out -
many had been there already and today people search with modern,
expensive equipment. so that was just a dream and is another story.

later, after some routine established itself in my job, I started to learn about
antique carpets in my free time. with my former girlfriend
we started to look for them - like for needles in a haystack-
at flea markets, garage sales, everywhere.
all that meant lots of time spent, more than one can rationally justify.
but one day we found a large, old carpet, meant to be thrown away.
the fact that sothebys took it for an auction was just one part of it.
the other was that it was not only a carpet, it was a piece of persian
culture, of history that we saved. a ‘kick’ like this is what starts
all collectors I guess.
we thought- ‘we are on the right track’, but how many pieces like
this can you find even if you look for weeks and months?

at one of the fleamarkets, since there were no carpets again,
we bought some floor ashtrays from an embassy that
was selling the contents of their old interior.
nobody wanted them, we thought they might be practical and looked
good. my girl friend worked as a sculptor at the time, she said those
ashtrays look different and she would know from her work.
I had no idea what she meant.
days later I looked at them again and turned one around.
it was stamped: ‘stilnovo’, ‘made in italy’ and ‘joe colombo’.
that was completely new to me, I became interested and tried to find
out something about that stilnovo and that joe colombo.
that must have been around 1998.
back then I found practically no information about the 60s,
70s or joe colombo or anyone.
we found out that sothebys planned their first design auction.
but information was very hard to access at that time.
on the internet I found the first dealers of vintage design,
joe in chicago, bill in belgium, sabrina and diego in italy,
christophe in france...
tribu-design, designaddict, designboom... started at that time.
we were searching like crazy for information and things and
spent all our time at it. we collected more and more and started to
sell to friends. but it was not like it is now, almost nobody was interested
in our first verner panton shell lamps, nobody knew about them -
not even verner panton was known, except to a handful of people.

in 1999 we started with designandfun.com with the help of a
computer student. first I sold mostly to japan and to the united states.
these countries were years ahead of the trend that came,
and 1-2 years later the interest in vintage design spread all over,
including to europe. all those great people who bought from me made
it such a pleasure to run the website, to sell and to start something new.
it was work, yes, but it did not taste like work.
it was an incredible time, the mood was amazing.
all of the customers were special individuals I can say,
having their own taste, far away from the mainstream.
many things I sold had their own little history.
for example a marcel breuer table, an original from the 30s,
that breuer had given as a present to gropius.
I bought itfrom an artistic family, distant relatives of the descendants
of the gropius family.

even more important to me is that I started to form a connection to
many of the things I bought and sold. it was sometimes hard to
ship something, but I like the idea that many of the things I liked
are spread all over the world. from alaska to new zealand,
from florida to bangkok, to a a famous star as well as to a glass museum.

now things are different. there are tons of informative
books, auctions and hundreds of sellers, designandfun.com is just
one of many, there are almost no things to find any more.
back then it was like- we all knew each
other and we all went and did something not knowing where it would go.
it turned out to become a new style to buy vintage things from
the 60s/70s, commercials used it, magazines, tv-stations and then
the masses came. even do-it-yourself supply shops use re-editions
of 60s things to illustrate their catalogues.

all this confirms how special the 60s were, a time when a young
generation questioned society and opened ways for rethinking
all aspects of our culture and creating space for more individuality,
diversity, spirituality, new music, new living.
the internet made it possible to buy and sell from person to person
without an organisation that would have done market research first to
check that there was a market or a demand for a new trend.
‘power to the people’ as john lennon sang, for some time it came true.

peter lang
http://www.designandfun.com

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