Why Togo Matters, According to a Musée des Arts Décoratifs Curator
Editor Dami Yoo | Photographer Sunghoon Park
Since its founding in the late 19th century, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs has studied the lineage of French design and decorative arts and helped shape their history. It explores how the aesthetics and values of each era have been reflected in everyday objects, from furniture and crafts to fashion, graphics, and objets. Juliette Pollet, a heritage curator at the museum, focuses her research on contemporary design and crafts from the 1960s onward. She sees Michel Ducaroy’s Togo as an iconic work that captures the changes in French society in the late 1960s.
The full interview is featured in Magazine C Issue 8 ‘Togo’.
Please tell us about the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which was founded in the late 19th century.
It’s one of Paris’s leading museums, covering the history of decorative arts and design in France and across Europe. We hold more than 1.5 million works and objects dating from the Middle Ages to the present. The collection spans a very wide range of fields, including 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. They show how the form and role of furniture have changed and how those changes have played out in cultural history.
The furniture collection is a core pillar of both the museum’s holdings and the current permanent exhibition. By tracing the history of design chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present, the permanent exhibition offers a multidimensional view of how the form and role of furniture have evolved over time. The space devoted to the contemporary collection addresses the major themes running through design today, such as eco-design, multicultural trajectories, and the revival of contemporary craft.
In the ‘Moderne et Contemporain’ exhibition in particular, the space that juxtaposes chairs from different eras, from Michael Thonet to Muller Van Severen, is striking. What perspective on chairs did you hope visitors would gain from this exhibition, and what kind of experience did you want to offer?
This is what we call the ‘Chair Library.’ Space is limited, so we couldn’t show the full scope of the collection and selected only certain pieces. By placing chairs from different eras and contexts side by side, we wanted comparisons and connections to emerge naturally between them. This arrangement encourages visitors not to see each chair as an isolated object, but to discover the relationships that form when different eras and ways of thinking meet. For example, there’s a chair by Hector Guimard, the architect who designed the first Art Nouveau apartment building in Paris and the Paris 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 fixing living trees to a frame and grafting them so they grow into the shape of a chair. I enjoy arrangements that create these leaps in time. Placed side by side, the two works clearly show how the same design inspiration, plant growth, has shaped the design of different eras in different ways. Pairing Philippe Starck’s Gnome series of garden gnome stools with Gio Ponti’s Superleggera is another key feature of the exhibition. It’s a humorous and somewhat provocative gesture.
Now let’s talk about Togo. Where do you think Michel Ducaroy’s Togo stands in the history of French design today?
Togo is a sofa that’s different from the type of seating we usually picture. You could call it a kind of ‘anti-chair’ that emerged in opposition to traditional chair and sofa forms. The seat and backrest flow into a single mass, and the seat is very low. Rather than holding the body in a fixed position, its form naturally accommodates it. Its modular structure is another important feature. With corner units, which have an armrest on one side, and ottomans, you can combine pieces to set the sofa’s size and shape as needed, expanding and arranging it to suit the purpose of a space. That was quite a new approach at the time. These features become even more interesting when you view them within the broader furniture trends of the late 1960s. During this period, designers, manufacturers, and the advertising industry were all moving toward a casual, low-to-the-floor way of living over formal seating. Living together took precedence over time alone, and a relaxed atmosphere where people lounged freely in a circle became more important than sitting upright.
What sparked this shift? I’m also curious how the social mood of the time was reflected in culture and design.
The new design language developed by French and international designers from the late 1960s to the early 1970s fully reflects the upheavals of society at the time, such as moral liberalization, the rise of youth, and revolutionary political ideas. In France especially, May 1968 marked an outpouring of citizens’ desire to create a freer, more equal, and more joyful world. That desire carried over into design history, leading designers to break away from the past traditions of the decorative arts. Combined with technological innovation and industrial progress, especially the development of plastics, it made possible formal experiments never seen before.
Is there a specific example that captures that period of dynamic change?
I can share a memorable story about Marc Held, a designer who led design trends at the time. In the late 1960s, he rose to prominence designing furniture with innovative forms, and he ran a home goods shop called ‘L’Échoppe,’ which means a small shop, like a corner store. It was a pioneering space that recalls today’s concept stores. Held once staged a deliberately unmade bed in the shop window, as if someone had just gotten out of it. But the police deemed the display inappropriate and reportedly ordered him to make the bed neatly. This happened in April 1968, just weeks before the mass protests that would shake France. The story says a lot. It was an era when everyday norms and standards of public morality were firmly upheld, and it shows how even a minor design gesture could clash with the public standards society had set.
How, then, does the idea behind the Togo sofa connect to the mood of French society at the time?
What makes Togo striking is its boldness and radicalism. Think of the furniture that appeared at the time. Notable examples include Olivier Mourgue’s Bouloum lounge chair, which translates the shape of the human body directly into a chair, as if it were lying on top of a person. There’s also Pierre Paulin’s Déclive, which binds a series of poles into a mat that functions as seating, and Roger Tallon’s Cryptogamme lamp, whose launch advertising openly played on erotic undertones. Like Togo, these designs abandoned the glorious past of French furniture, the grandeur of 17th-century Versailles, the refinement of the 18th century, and the decorative richness of the 19th century, and set out to invent an entirely new language. At the same time, the key point about Togo is that, despite its unconventional form, it was positioned as furniture for everyone. Its launch advertising showed an elderly woman knitting on the sofa. Even though it was a radical design, the intention wasn’t to shock with special, experimental visuals but to present it as furniture anyone could use in daily life.
Some interpret Togo as post-functionalist design, in other words as anti-functionalism or postmodernism. I’d also like to hear whether you see its relationship with the avant-garde foam sofas that emerged beyond France, in Italy and elsewhere, as part of a single design movement.
Of course, Togo’s emergence should be understood not only in the context of French design but also alongside the experiments of the Italian radical design movement at the time. One example is the 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 types and accommodates the body in any position. You could also think of Superstudio’s Sofo and the Living Sculpture prototype Verner Panton made for his own home. These are all iconic pieces made between 1968 and 1970, and they all grew out of the same impulse to escape a rigid society and propose new ways of living. Togo clearly reflects the aspirations of that era for a less rigid, less formal, and less hierarchical society. Personally, though, I don’t think the labels of anti-functionalism or postmodernism apply to Togo. The sofa is highly functional. As long as you have no trouble getting up, Togo is extremely comfortable. It’s a seat that accommodates every posture. And because it was mass-produced and aimed at a broad range of consumers, it shares the qualities of the modern design movement, which sought to change how ordinary people live.
It’s also interesting that Togo has recently caught the attention of a younger generation. How do you interpret this?
I feel that Togo has become a versatile piece of furniture used in a wide variety of contexts today. It has found a place everywhere from the most bourgeois interiors to the most bohemian spaces. I think this versatility evokes nostalgia for an era that was more optimistic and pleasure-seeking than our own.
Ligne Roset, which makes Togo, has collaborated with Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, the Bouroullec brothers, and others. As a French person, do you think the brand’s identity and story resonate not only with experts but also with the general public? I’m also curious how Michel Ducaroy is regarded in design history.
Ligne Roset has never positioned itself as an elite brand. During the postwar reconstruction period, it made furniture for public spaces ranging from hospitals to ski resorts, and it also produced sofa beds for newly built affordable housing. Then, through Michel Ducaroy, who served as Ligne Roset’s design director for 26 years, the brand underwent a strong aesthetic shift. In particular, it set itself apart from competitors by building technology and production systems specialized in foam furniture. As a result, Ligne Roset became one of the most accessible and widely distributed French furniture brands, and it has produced iconic works in design history to this day. As far as I know, however, there has been almost no design history research on Ducaroy. That’s probably 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 himself, and the piece has long been seen as an icon of the brand.
It’s also interesting that Togo has recently caught the attention of a younger generation. How do you interpret this?
I feel that Togo has become a versatile piece of furniture used in a wide variety of contexts today. It has found a place everywhere from the most bourgeois interiors to the most bohemian spaces. I think this versatility evokes nostalgia for an era that was more optimistic and pleasure-seeking than our own.
Ligne Roset, which makes Togo, has collaborated with Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, the Bouroullec brothers, and others. As a French person, do you think the brand’s identity and story resonate not only with experts but also with the general public? I’m also curious how Michel Ducaroy is regarded in design history.
Ligne Roset has never positioned itself as an elite brand. During the postwar reconstruction period, it made furniture for public spaces ranging from hospitals to ski resorts, and it also produced sofa beds for newly built affordable housing. Then, through Michel Ducaroy, who served as Ligne Roset’s design director for 26 years, the brand underwent a strong aesthetic shift. In particular, it set itself apart from competitors by building technology and production systems specialized in foam furniture. As a result, Ligne Roset became one of the most accessible and widely distributed French furniture brands, and it has produced iconic works in design history to this day. As far as I know, however, there has been almost no design history research on Ducaroy. That’s probably 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 himself, and the piece has long been seen as an icon of the brand.
One final question. What is your favorite chair, and why?
Among the chairs in our collection, I’m especially fond of Gaetano Pesce’s Nobody’s Perfect Chair No. 108. Every chair in this series looks unique, because the resin mixture varies each time and the gestures of the makers, which determine the color, texture, and transparency, are never the same. Pesce’s way of thinking, which redistributes the roles of designer and craftsperson, remains very powerful and pioneering. What appeals to me is that this method of making can be considered on both a political and a semantic level.
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.
