"Have you seen Don't Look Up? That movie's awesome! The metaphor for global warming is brilliant." Moments after he's left his motorcycle cab and is already on the arm of his wife, Jasmine, Philippe Starck struck up conversation about the successful green comedy produced by Netflix. He then told us about his incredible arrival the day before, by private jet, from Portugal where he now lives, without seeming to care about the obvious contradiction. Due to fog, his plane could not land in Paris and had to divert to Reims. "We experienced the same situation a few days ago. Instead of Lisbon, we landed in Faro." Minor setbacks, he acknowledged.
Should things on the planet go really wrong, the designer reassures us that he already has his fallback destination planned. He's currently designing the spaceflight preparation training complex for the Orbit space tourism company. It will take the form of a city planted in the desert in a secret location. There, Starck has developed a reversible wooden construction system capable, he said, of being assembled and then disassembled without leaving a trace.
The same cannot be said of the French designer who, at 73, continues to hold the top spot among the world's celebrities in the field. No one else signifies "design" as much as he does. He embodies this creative field as much as Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier remain the media-friendly faces of fashion.
He is the man the general public sees in newspapers, on television, speaking on the most diverse subjects, the man around whom stories have always circulated, from his short stay at the Parisian private design school Camondo, where he was already recognised as a genius, to the recent legal dispute that pitted him against Steve Jobs' heirs for whom he had created a 78-meter long mega-yacht that was not paid for. He is the designer who, as soon as he is handed the microphone, launches into endless tales about the Big Bang, dematerialization, dreams of houses perched on a tower, the evolution of man or love as an endangered species.
A star losing influence
Mr. Starck embodies the height of 1980s aesthetic more than any of his fellow designers, in France at least. The Café Costes, in the Les Halles district of Paris, has remained one of its most emblematic expressions. Mr. Starck, who hates having his work presented in museums, will be honored at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris next fall, in an exhibition devoted to the 1980s.
While he has always observed the art market with suspicion and refused to create limited editions, the works from his early years are resurfacing, driven by young gallerists convinced that his market value will soar within a few years, just like Charlotte Perriand or Jean Prouvé, whose pieces have become unattainable. "In six years, we have already gone from €300 to €3,000 euros for a Miss Dorn chair on Leboncoin and Easy Lights, his Star Wars style neon lights, are now taking off at nearly €10,000 euros in the auction house," said the dealer Paul Bourdet, who has become one of the ambassadors of Mr. Starck's "strange, over the top and surprisingly charismatic" furniture.
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