Philippe Starck
The star designer.
Philippe Starck has designed everything from hotels to toothbrushes. His Juicy Salif citrus squeezer is an icon of 1990s design culture.
Philippe Starck was born in Paris in 1949. His father was an aeronautical engineer, and Starck has said that as a child he spent a lot of time under his father's drawing board. He studied at the École Nissim de Camondo design school in Paris. As early as the beginning of the 1970s he was working for the couturier Pierre Cardin, designing inflatable objects.
His breakthrough came with the interiors of Paris nightclubs in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s he was commissioned to decorate parts of President François Mitterrand's private apartment in the Élysée Palace. In 1984 he designed the interior of Café Costes in Paris, with a three-legged chair that became famous. From the late 1980s he worked with the hotelier Ian Schrager on high-profile hotels in New York and Miami, where the lobby became a stage.
Starck has designed everything from furniture, lamps and kitchen utensils to bathrooms, boats, motorcycles and buildings. The Juicy Salif citrus squeezer of 1990, a spider-like object in aluminium for Alessi, became a symbol of 1990s design culture, even though it has been criticised for not working particularly well. The Louis Ghost chair of 2002, in transparent plastic for Kartell, is a modern take on an 18th-century French chair and has sold in very large numbers.
His style is sculptural, humorous and often surprising. He has spoken of democratic design, the idea that good design should be cheap and accessible, and has made products for mail-order and discount retailers. More recently he has emphasised sustainability and questioned his own profession.
Starck is one of the best-known designers in the world and has become a celebrity in his own right. His work has been criticised as more spectacular than functional, but he has made design visible to a broad public.