I am asking myself: WHO is buying anything like that? When I am frequently complaining about my fellow Germans' bad taste I do not mean THAT sort of bad taste, but quality bad taste. Boring, reliable, lower-middle class stuff, that's what they buy, and...
... if it's not boring, reliable and lower-middleclass...
... it's boring, reliable and pretentious upper-middleclass. And always new and "matched", of course. Bad taste comes in suites.I am not putting up any links here or naming names, because I find it unfair to be negative about some probably very hard-working people's businesses just because I dislike their stuff.
The first one of the two pictures above is by the Swiss advertising agency Jung von Matt from a study about the archetypical German, Swiss and Austrian living rooms. HERE is a Flash-presentation they put together. Have a look! It's self-explaining and fun.
But back to those chairs. While they are not cheap, they are certainly not prohibitively expensive either. They have been at Ebay for years, too, so there must be people who buy them. But again: who? Maybe the one with the faux leopard cover has a redeeming quality and may serve under certain circumstances as a statement or conversation piece, but the other ones? Can they be described by anything else but ugly, ugly and ugly? They are not even particularly well-made, either, and won't fit into either type of archetypical German sitting room above. What is their purpose? I have asked a similar question at my entry Robert Mugabe Yard Sale.
A partial answer to the question may lie in the fact that it are mainly chairs that come as such execrabilities, and I wonder whether there may be a certain craving for "elevated" sitting. Designer Socialism. A throne for everybody!
