Postmodern

Postmodernism entered IKEA by a detour. Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis manifesto, a 1981 Milan declaration against austere modernism that claimed furniture could be a quotation, a joke, a collage, was never something a mass-market company could buy directly. But its echo arrived in the range as coloured laminates, asymmetric legs, fifties-style clips stuck onto otherwise wholly functionalist pieces. Knut and Marianne Hagberg did this most often.

A second, more disciplined postmodern wave arrived in 1995 with IKEA PS, a range launched at the Milan Furniture Fair under the banner Democratic Design. PS was postmodern in a more considered form: Thomas Eriksson’s keyhole-shaped clock, chairs and side tables that quoted the 60s and 70s with irony, and above all the awareness that a piece of furniture is also a statement. The line ran in several waves until roughly 2005 and has since returned as Nytillverkad.

This is the least visually coherent style in the archive (postmodernism by definition refuses one language) but the most coherent in intent. Each piece in this category asks the same question: does furniture have to be serious. IKEA, a company normally associated with a mildly dull Swedishness, allowed itself a moment of irony in these objects. Most were printed in relatively small runs and today, two decades on, still look fresh, precisely because they never tried to be timeless.