mid century modern furniture archive

 

2 Aspirational nostalgia on tap

Retailers and manufacturers love reissuing designs from their archives, tapping into to our seemingly insatiable appetite for mid-century-chic. Two reappearances last year were Joe Colombo's 1960s Tube Chair by Italian furniture brand Cappellini, and a mini desktop version of Danish designer Verner Panton's 1971 Panthella floor lamp.

 

But with digital database Adsausage, we can go straight to source, so to speak, and get an undiluted style fix through the adverts and brochures of yesteryear.

 

The site boasts 40,000 vintage ads from the 1950s, 60s and 70s across categories from appliances to travel. The top destination, though, is the design section, where magazine ads for Formica tables and Cassina sofas sit alongside Artemide wall lights and reclining LA-Z-Boys in red velour.

 

The colours are sumptuous, the patterns elaborate and the copywriting suitably aspirational. An Anglepoise lamp “puts light in its place - and in its place Anglepoise complements the most modern décor”, the text reads. In fact, most try to pack as much onto the page as possible, with busy visuals and reams of information-heavy text.

 

Adsausage describes itself as a global consortium of pop culture ventures, with offices in north London, Cairo and Los Angeles. “We represent the personal archives of the late international business magnate, Sir Roger Delfont. Spanning over fifty years, this once-private collection of jet-age ephemera is being presented for the first time.”

 

Still-famous brands Knoll and Herman Miller are well-represented in the office furniture category, and it’s difficult not to hanker after the former’s Albinson stacking chair, and latter’s modular s-shaped lounge seating.

 

But even back in those days, brands could be tempted into an opportunistic reissue. Alvar Aalto’s famous 1935 Lounge Chair appears here reissued in the Finn’s Zebra fabric, harkening back “to a glamorous age”.