A Curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on the Value of the Togo
Editor Dami Yoo | Photographer Sunghoon Park
Since its founding in the late nineteenth century, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has studied and shaped the lineage of French design and the decorative arts. From furniture and craft to fashion, graphics, and objects, the museum explores how the tools of daily life have carried the aesthetics and values of their times. Juliette Pollet, a heritage curator at the museum, devotes her research to contemporary design and craft from the 1960s onward. She regards Michel Ducaroy's Togo as an emblematic work—one that distills the transformations French society underwent at the close of the 1960s.
The full interview is available in Magazine C Issue No. 8, Togo.
Could you introduce the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, founded here in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century?
This is one of Paris's leading museums, devoted to the history of the decorative arts and design in France and across Europe. Our holdings comprise more than 1.5 million works and objects, spanning the Middle Ages to the present day. The collection covers a remarkably wide range of fields—furniture, tableware, fashion, textiles, jewelry, wallpaper, sculpture, glass, Asian art, toys, advertising, drawings, and photography.
The vast collection and the chronologically arranged permanent exhibition read like a map, charting how the forms and roles of furniture have evolved and how those changes have surfaced across cultural history.
The furniture collection is a central pillar of both the museum's holdings and the current permanent exhibition. By unfolding the history of design chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the present, the permanent exhibition offers a multidimensional view of how furniture's forms and roles have shifted over time. Within it, the space devoted to the contemporary collection addresses the major themes running through design today—eco-conscious design, multicultural trajectories, and the revival of contemporary craft.
In the exhibition Moderne et Contemporain, the space juxtaposing chairs from different eras—from Michael Thonet to Müller Van Severen—is especially striking. What perspective on the chair did you hope visitors would take away, and what kind of experience did you set out to offer?
We call this space the Chair Library. Since the floor area cannot accommodate the full sweep of the collection, we composed it from a selection of works. The idea was to place chairs from different eras and contexts side by side, so that comparisons and connections would arise naturally between them. This arrangement leads visitors to see each chair not as an isolated object but to discover the relationships that emerge where different eras and ways of thinking meet. Take, for example, a chair by Hector Guimard—the architect who designed Paris's first Art Nouveau apartment building and the Métro entrances that came to symbolize the Belle Époque. Next to it we placed Gavin & Alice Munro's Full Grown Chair, a work made by training and grafting living trees onto frames so that they grow into the form of a chair. I enjoy compositions that produce these leaps in time. Set side by side, the two works make it clear that the same design inspiration—the growth of plants—has driven the design of its era in entirely different ways. Likewise, placing Philippe Starck's garden gnome stool series, Gnome, next to Gio Ponti's Superleggera is a humorous, even slightly provocative gesture, and an important element that defines this exhibition.
Now, shall we turn to the Togo? What place do you think Michel Ducaroy's Togo occupies in the history of French design today?
The Togo is a sofa unlike the chair typologies we usually picture. You could call it a kind of "anti-chair," one that emerged in defiance of traditional chair and sofa forms. The seat and backrest merge into a single mass, and the seat sits very low. Rather than fixing the body in a particular posture, its form simply receives it. The modular structure is another important feature. With corner units—units with an armrest on one side—and ottomans, the sofa can be combined, expanded, and configured to suit the purpose of a space. At the time, this was a remarkably new approach. These qualities become even more interesting when set within the broader currents of furniture in the late 1960s. Among designers, manufacturers, and the advertising industry alike, a preference was emerging for casual, floor-level ways of living over formal settings. Life spent together was valued over time spent alone, and a relaxed atmosphere—bodies stretched out and gathered freely—was becoming more important than sitting up straight.
What lay behind the beginnings of this shift? I am also curious how the social climate of the time was reflected in culture and design.
The new design language developed by French and international designers from the late 1960s through the early 1970s vividly reflects the upheavals sweeping society at the time—moral liberalization, the rise of youth culture, and revolutionary political ideals. In France especially, May 1968 unleashed a popular longing for a freer, more egalitarian, more joyful world. That longing carried over into design history as well, steering it away from the inherited past of the decorative arts. Coupled with industrial progress—above all the development of plastics—it made possible formal experiments never seen before.
Is there a concrete episode that captures that period of dynamic change?
There is a striking anecdote about Marc Held, a designer who led the design trends of that era. Rising to prominence in the late 1960s with his innovative furniture, he ran a living shop called L'Échoppe—a name meaning a small corner store—a pioneering space that prefigured today's concept stores. Held once staged a deliberately unmade bed in the shop window, displayed as if someone had just gotten out of it. The police deemed the display improper and ordered him to make the bed neatly. This was April 1968, just weeks before the mass protests that would shake France. The episode is telling: it shows how firmly the norms of daily life and public morality still held at the time, and how even a small design gesture could collide with the standards society had set.
How, then, does the idea behind the Togo sofa connect to this climate in French society?
What makes the Togo so striking is its boldness and radicality. Consider the furniture that appeared around the same time: Olivier Mourgue's Bouloum lounge chair, which transposed the human silhouette directly onto a chair, as if one were lying upon a person; Pierre Paulin's Déclive, a mat woven from multiple columns that functions as a chair; and Roger Tallon's lamp Cryptogramme, whose launch advertising openly flaunted an erotic overtone. Like the Togo, these designs sought to cast off the glorious past of French furniture—the grandeur of seventeenth-century Versailles, the refinement of the eighteenth century, the decorative opulence of the nineteenth—and invent an entirely new language. What sets the Togo apart is that, while formally unconventional, it was positioned as a popular piece of furniture. Its launch advertising featured an elderly woman knitting on the sofa. Radical as the design was, the intent was not to shock with a rarefied, experimental image but to reach people as furniture anyone could use in everyday life.
Some read the Togo as design after functionalism—anti-functionalist or postmodern. I would also like to hear whether the avant-garde foam sofas that appeared beyond France, in Italy and elsewhere, can be seen as part of a single design current together with the Togo.
The Togo's emergence should of course be understood not only within the French context but alongside the experiments of Italy's radical design movement of the time. Take Sacco, designed in 1968 by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini, and Franco Teodoro for Zanotta. Known as the world's first beanbag sofa, it too is an "anti-chair" that breaks with traditional typologies and receives the body in any posture. One might also think of Superstudio's Sofo and the Living Sculpture prototype Verner Panton created for his own home. All are emblematic pieces produced between 1968 and 1970, born of the same impulse to break free of a rigid society and propose new ways of living. The Togo certainly reflects the aspirations of its time—for a society less rigid, less formal, less hierarchical. Personally, though, I do not think the labels anti-functionalist or postmodern apply to the Togo. This sofa is extremely functional. For anyone in the physical condition to rise from it without difficulty, the Togo is supremely comfortable—a chair that accommodates every posture. And in that it was mass-produced and aimed at a broad public, it carries the traits of the modern design movement, which sought to transform how ordinary people live.
It is also interesting that the Togo has recently been drawing renewed attention from younger generations. How do you interpret this phenomenon?
I sense that the Togo has become a remarkably versatile piece, used today in the most varied contexts—occupying everything from the most bourgeois interiors to the most bohemian ones. That versatility, I think, stirs a nostalgia for an era more optimistic and more devoted to pleasure than our own.
Ligne Roset, the maker of the Togo, has collaborated with Castelbajac, Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, the Bouroullec brothers, and others. As a French person, do you feel the brand's identity and narrative resonate with the general public as well as with specialists? I am also curious how Michel Ducaroy has been assessed in design history.
Ligne Roset has never positioned itself as an elite brand. During the postwar reconstruction, it produced furniture for public spaces ranging from hospitals to ski resorts, and it has a history of making sofa beds for the newly built affordable apartments of the era. Through Michel Ducaroy, who served as its design director for twenty-six years, the company achieved a strong aesthetic turn, and by building technology and a production system specialized in foam furniture, it set itself apart from its competitors. As a result, Ligne Roset established itself as one of France's most accessible and widely distributed furniture brands, and it has continued to produce emblematic works of design history to this day. Yet as far as I know, Ducaroy himself has received almost no scholarly attention in design history—no doubt because he spent most of his career as the brand's in-house head of design. As a result, the name Togo came to be remembered ahead of the designer's own renown, and the work has long been consumed as an icon of the brand.
It is also interesting that the Togo has recently been drawing renewed attention from younger generations. How do you interpret this phenomenon?
I sense that the Togo has become a remarkably versatile piece, used today in the most varied contexts—occupying everything from the most bourgeois interiors to the most bohemian ones. That versatility, I think, stirs a nostalgia for an era more optimistic and more devoted to pleasure than our own.
Ligne Roset, the maker of the Togo, has collaborated with Castelbajac, Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, the Bouroullec brothers, and others. As a French person, do you feel the brand's identity and narrative resonate with the general public as well as with specialists? I am also curious how Michel Ducaroy has been assessed in design history.
Ligne Roset has never positioned itself as an elite brand. During the postwar reconstruction, it produced furniture for public spaces ranging from hospitals to ski resorts, and it has a history of making sofa beds for the newly built affordable apartments of the era. Through Michel Ducaroy, who served as its design director for twenty-six years, the company achieved a strong aesthetic turn, and by building technology and a production system specialized in foam furniture, it set itself apart from its competitors. As a result, Ligne Roset established itself as one of France's most accessible and widely distributed furniture brands, and it has continued to produce emblematic works of design history to this day. Yet as far as I know, Ducaroy himself has received almost no scholarly attention in design history—no doubt because he spent most of his career as the brand's in-house head of design. As a result, the name Togo came to be remembered ahead of the designer's own renown, and the work has long been consumed as an icon of the brand.
A final question: What is your favorite chair, and why?
Among the chairs in our collection, I am especially fond of number 108 of Gaetano Pesce's Nobody's Chair. Every chair in the series takes on a unique appearance, because the composition of the resin changes each time and the gestures of the maker—which determine color, texture, and transparency—are never the same. Pesce's way of thinking, which redistributes the roles of designer and artisan, remains powerful and pioneering. What draws me to this method of production is that it can be contemplated in both political and semantic terms at once.
Want to dive deeper?
Issue.08 TOGO
Designed by Michel Ducaroy in 1973, the Togo departs from the conventions of the traditional sofa. Its signature wrinkled surface, low seat resting directly on the floor, and all-foam construction offered a comfort and innovation on a different level from the sofa design of its day. Born of the 1960s and '70s, an era yearning for social and cultural change, the Togo reflected the zeitgeist—and its appeal remains just as strong today. Rediscovered through social media during the pandemic and embraced with explosive popularity, the Togo has become more than furniture: a cultural icon of free spirit and creative energy.
