Marcel Wanders is contagious. Addressing a packed auditorium at the Boston Design Center on a recent evening, the Dutch designer has pathogens flickering across his face thanks to a projector.Pollinosis. Influenza. Sinusitis. The germs groove to the beat of bad techno and, realizing he's in their way, Wanders, six foot four, steps aside and explains the video: "We took this guy who was sneezing all the time," he says in a menacing European accent, sounding like a Die Hard villain sent to charm school. "We had him sneeze through this machine scanner, and we found great objects flying." Gross, sure, but with 3-D digital prototyping technology, Wanders reproduced the shape of the contorted particles in the celebrated Airborne Snotty Vase.
Beauty in the banal with a double shot of mischief: Welkom to Wanders's world. At just 43, he has wreaked whimsy on the landscape of design—mannequins that breathe, vases shaped from egg-filled condoms (seriously), chairs made of knotted epoxy-coated rope—and launched his own companies, most notably Moooi (the Dutch word for beauty, with an extra o to denote extra beauty). Felicitous but not gratuitous, his creations please the eye and soul, as if they're the physical realization of an inside joke. "I want to make sure we live in a world which is super-fantastic," Wanders says, and then reveals his secret. "I like the material to decide for itself what it wants to be. The material knows better how it can look beautiful."
Wanders also has an eye for the female form, and as he reclines in a borrowed office the next day—clad in a velvet Baldessarini blazer that makes him look part pimp, part prince—he reluctantly recalls the pickup line he used on his girlfriend, Nanine Linning. "Three years ago I did a little lecture. At some point afterward I was speaking to two ladies"—with his mammoth hands he motions here and here—"and I saw in the corner her legs and green boots, and I turned and said, 'Fuck!You have beautiful legs.'?" Professional legs, it turned out: Linning is a renowned choreographer, who spiked heartbeats at a Milan design fair when she hung upside down from a chandelier in a satin bra and underwear and poured Champagne for guests.
The scene is a little tamer at Wanders's studio in Amsterdam, where he works around the clock with his staff of 25. "I've done the whole enchilada," he says. "All the mushrooms, the weed, the pills, the smoking, the drinking. I've had enough." Instead, recreation consists of running on his treadmill (an Italian movie in the DVD player); showing his newest marvel to his eight-year-old daughter (full name: Joy Faith Love Wanders); and racking up speeding tickets in his Porsche (he had 24 last year, but hopes for fewer in his new car, "Granny," an obstinate 1973 white Mercedes 250).
Wanders has come a long way from the small southern village of Boxtel, Netherlands. "My father used to say"—he switches to a stentorian tone—"Breathe more deep, walk more straight, own the city." Wanders's brashness got him tossed from the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven in the eighties and, eventually, noticed by the designers Richard Hutten, Jurgen Bey, and Hella Jongerius, with whom he formed the Dutch collective Droog, a final nail in the sleek coffin of early-nineties minimalism. Having won nearly every design award this decade, Wanders seems unfazed by his rapid ascent to Philippe Starck-altitude celebrity, shyly recounting how a woman recently approached him on the street with a pen and asked if he'd endorse her breasts. He'd rather just autograph his own work. "If you put your name on a product, you are a rock star," he says. "You cannot go back."
Indeed. In the coming months, Wanders will design a series of buildings, including an art museum, in Kuwait. He recently unveiled a line of suitcases, tents, and bags with Puma and made further inroads into the U.S. when B&B Italia, which owns half of Moooi, opened its first New York store in SoHo. All this while pursuing such idle hobbies as, oh, reinventing the violin. "Design has gotten too technological," Wanders laments. "We have to forget what we have been taught over the last 100 years." Take, for example, new hi-fi equipment. "Why, for God's sake, are speaker boxes square? Why? Speakers themselves are always round. It's probably because the machines cut straight lines. That is the automatic pilot of the designer, to make things in an easy way. I think that's terrible. You deserve far better. You deserve the best. Life is really boring enough."
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