Between Furniture and Fashion: A Subtle Correlation
Editor Sunjin Kim | Photographer Miyeon Jeon
Pascal Monfort — owner of the agency REC Trends Marketing and a consultant who has led trend marketing for global fashion brands — believes that just as fashion has carried the zeitgeist into everyday life through clothing, furniture has shaped our spaces and attitudes toward living within the same current. To him, the Togo sofa is an icon that speaks for its era while remaining fashionable to this day — a cultural marker where timelessness and trend intersect, and a symbol of the design landscape of the 1960s and '70s, when individuality and creativity burst forth in every direction.
This interview appears in Magazine C Issue 8, Togo.
To begin, tell us about your work as a fashion marketing consultant. How have you collaborated with global brands?
I've worked with fashion brands like Lacoste and A.P.C., as well as beauty care within the Estée Lauder Group and global sports brands such as Adidas. I conduct qualitative research centered on consumer insights and connect conversations between experts to help brands make better-informed decisions. It's less about quantitative data and more about proposing solutions grounded in sensibility and interpretation.
Alongside running your consulting agency, you also curate a fashion book collection housed in a vintage shop here in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. It has drawn considerable attention on social media — could you briefly introduce the project?
Ephemera is a project that encompasses a wide range of archival materials related to fashion. It began as a pop-up bookshop in the 9th arrondissement, and today it operates as a dedicated shelf inside the concept store Appendix. About 90 percent of the collection is vintage — books, magazines, and catalogs, most of them from my personal archive. With the fashion brand Casablanca, we hosted a book club during fashion week, and I'm preparing an installation project using large-format books and magazines. In 2025, we also held the first International Fashion Book Awards, which I plan to continue in the years ahead.
When did you start collecting fashion books? Was there a particular moment that sparked the collection?
I've kept every fashion magazine since I was a teenager. Growing up in a small town, fashion magazines were practically my only connection to a world I couldn't otherwise reach. I started with skateboarding magazines like Thrasher, and my interest naturally shifted to fashion titles like i-D, Vogue, and Dazed. Once I began working in the fashion industry, I started collecting any document related to fashion — party invitations, lookbooks — and I've been at it for more than twenty-five years now. Today it has become a truly meaningful collection tracing the history of fashion. What makes an archive like this even more fascinating is that it extends the story beyond fashion into design, art, and architecture. Take Paul Poiret, one of the earliest designers in the history of haute couture: he was the first to declare that a fashion designer wasn't someone who only made clothes but someone who could create everything. He staged performances under his own name and expanded into stage sets, interiors, and furniture design — he even founded a decorative arts atelier devoted to furniture. Figures like him led me to an interest in design in all its forms, well beyond fashion.
How do you see the relationship between fashion and furniture design?
I discovered the world of furniture design through the eyes of fashion designers. Pierre Cardin, Rei Kawakubo, Rick Owens, and Raf Simons made furniture themselves, while others like Jean Paul Gaultier and Jil Sander collaborated with furniture designers or brands. Reading their interviews, you come to realize that making furniture demands a sensibility and knowledge beyond producing an object for everyday use. A chair is never just a chair — it's a piece of research, an attitude, a medium that reveals a brand's direction. Rei Kawakubo, for instance, first designed chairs and furniture for her stores and showrooms, because — as with most fashion designers — the furniture placed in a store must embody the message the brand wants to convey. Those chairs were never comfortable, but that was deliberate: she believed creative people should always keep moving, so she chose forms that let you pause briefly and then move on. She herself never liked sitting for long, either. As such examples show, these designers share a genuine seriousness toward design of any kind.
So when people call a piece of furniture "fashionable," they don't simply mean it's pretty.
It carries countless messages, histories, and the context of a particular era. Both furniture and fashion hold function, historical background, and even a poetic dimension. I believe that's a more essential level of meaning — one that comes before price, social status, or symbolism.
We often define an era by its fashion — perhaps because fashion is the field that leads trends. How do you compare timeless design with trendy design?
I think there's a subtle emotional relationship between the two fields. A furniture designer can create something that stays relevant far longer than a fashion designer can. Fashion, by contrast, lives in constant tension with time. Sometimes I even sense that fashion designers quietly envy furniture designers. (laughs) Some furniture — like the Togo — arrives as an intensely fashionable object at a particular moment and then stays that way for a long time. Fashion designers, meanwhile, are asked to produce newness without end. That's why, when a furniture designer creates work that transcends time, you see just how much fashion designers respect them.
What do you think makes the Togo so iconic?
The Togo is a fascinating object. It's considered a classic today, yet it's also a deeply strange, eccentric piece of furniture. It's no exaggeration to say it follows none of the traditional rules of design. Its form is irregular, and it's unconventional even in that it's clearly a sofa yet sits so low that getting up isn't easy. That eccentric streak, I think, is the essence of the Togo. To be at once classic and unconventional is exceedingly rare. You can only subvert the existing grammar and rules once you fully understand them — free creativity is possible only on a rigorous, precise foundation — and the Togo embodies that tension and balance perfectly.
In the 1960s and '70s, when the Togo was created, new materials like polyurethane foam were commercialized, giving rise to voluminous, avant-garde furniture design. What was happening in fashion design during this period?
If the furniture industry began using polyurethane foam to make enormous, plush sofas, the decisive change in fashion was that materials like nylon became available by the millions of tons. It was, quite literally, the age of synthetics. As nontraditional materials like plastic and metal came into full use, the need for prêt-à-porter — ready-to-wear — emerged, led by Yves Saint Laurent. It was a time when even haute couture designers were declaring that haute couture was finished. That's when a new generation of couturiers appeared — André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne. They believed that if haute couture was dead, then it had to exist to predict the fashion of the future. That's why we call them avant-gardists and futurists. Above all, this was the first era in which youth culture took center stage. A clear rupture opened between the fashion of the older generation and that of the new. Styles emerged that pushed the limits of eccentricity and exaggeration — miniskirts, wide flared pants, platform boots. And for the first time, the relationships between fashion and music, art, and social revolution became more important than anything else. What mattered was no longer traditional haute couture or established norms but a connection to culture as a whole. Trends stopped trickling down from above; they began with the young and spread across the world. The same was true of furniture. New materials and modes of production freed furniture from being the preserve of a particular class, opening the way for freer, more experimental forms.
So there's a reason the 1960s and '70s are called fashion's belle époque.
It was an era of exploding creativity, where currents like American hippie culture and Britain's Swinging London converged. The most important change was that design was no longer reserved for the elite — it began opening up to everyone. Just as the rise of prêt-à-porter symbolized this, furniture design also entered mass distribution. You could find genuinely fun, well-made, beautifully designed furniture even in places like supermarkets. I believe the Togo sits squarely within that current. It's a piece that speaks precisely for that era and that moment.
If you were to compare the Togo to a fashion item, what comes to mind?
The K-Way windbreaker. It's light and functional, comes in a range of colors, and is a cult object in its own right. Familiar to our parents' generation, it's now embraced as cool again by a new one — much like the Togo. And just as it was the jacket you wore on holiday or at school, the Togo carries a playfulness that ties it to memories of freedom and lightness. You can surrender your body to it and sit however you like — and it's the kind of furniture children leap onto the moment they see it. (laughs) In that sense, the Togo resembles an everyday item open to everyone, never confined to a particular class or occasion.
What do you make of the Togo's comeback? It has been in continuous production since the 1970s and stands as one of the defining sofas of twentieth-century design, yet with the rise of TikTok it caught the attention of a new generation in an entirely different context. How do you think this will affect the Togo's value?
I see it as part of a recurring cycle in design history, in which certain iconic works are rediscovered and consumed anew. Because the Togo is so widely known, a kind of snobbism around design seems to have emerged lately as well — a phenomenon you see naturally in the fashion world. That said, I don't think the TikTok generation understands these things as belonging to a single era. The fashion and design of the 1970s are being broadly revisited, but this generation tends to receive them as fragmented, individual objects — the Togo here, Memphis there. Memphis style, too, is often consumed without much awareness of its background or the movement behind it. What's interesting is that the furniture going viral on TikTok today is, in the end, all timeless work. These were accomplished designs from the start; something simply brought them back into the spotlight. They may look trendy for a moment, but I'm certain they'll remain good furniture long after this micro-trend passes. Personally, I'm rather waiting for the fever to die down.
Getting noticed on TikTok or Instagram seems to have become an important criterion — even a condition — for creating new design. Amid today's flood of trends, what challenges do fashion and furniture design need to confront?
I don't think that should ever be the starting point or the reason for design. Look at restaurants and sandwich bars these days: some prioritize how they'll look on Instagram over how the food tastes. They look the part, but the substance is often missing. In furniture design, that's especially dangerous. A T-shirt can afford to be part of a micro-trend — "we sold two thousand last week and then it disappeared" can sound perfectly natural. But furniture, and chairs above all, are not T-shirts. They have to withstand time and use, and that demands a standard beyond trend.
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.
