The Subtle Ties Between Furniture and Fashion
Editor Sunjin Kim | Photographer Miyeon Jeon
Pascal Monfort is the owner of and a consultant at REC Trends, a marketing agency that has handled trend marketing for a range of global fashion brands. He believes that just as fashion has carried the spirit of the times into everyday life through clothing, furniture has shaped spaces and attitudes toward life as part of the same current. To him, the Togo sofa is an icon that represents an era while remaining fashionable today. It is a cultural marker where timelessness and trend intersect, and a symbol of the design landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, when diverse personalities and creativity flourished.
This interview is featured in Issue 8 ‘Togo’.
First, tell us about your work as a fashion marketing consultant. How have you worked with various global brands?
I’ve worked with fashion brands like Lacoste and A.P.C., the beauty care side of 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 decisions. The work is less about quantitative data and more about proposing solutions based on intuitive direction and interpretation.
Alongside running your consulting agency, you also curate a fashion book shelf inside a vintage shop here in Paris’s fourth arrondissement. The shelf has drawn a lot of attention on social media. Could you briefly introduce the project?
Ephemera is a project that brings together a wide range of fashion-related archival material. It began as a pop-up bookshop in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, and now I run a shelf inside the concept store Appendix. About 90% of the collection is vintage material, including books, magazines, and catalogs, and most of it comes from my personal collection. We held a book club with the fashion brand Casablanca during fashion week, and we’re also preparing an installation project using oversized books and magazines. In 2025, we launched the first International Fashion Book Awards, and we plan to keep holding them.
When did you start collecting fashion books? Was there a particular reason?
I’ve kept every fashion magazine since I was a teenager. I grew up in a small town, and fashion magazines were almost my only link to a world that felt out of reach. At first I read skateboarding magazines like Thrasher, and then my interest naturally shifted to fashion magazines such as i-D, Vogue, and Dazed. Once I started working in the fashion industry, I began collecting any fashion-related document, from party invitations to lookbooks. I’ve been collecting for more than 25 years now. Today it has become a truly meaningful collection that holds the history of fashion. What makes these archives even more interesting is that they extend the story beyond fashion into design, art, and architecture. Paul Poiret, for example, was one of the earliest designers in the history of haute couture. He was the first to say that a fashion designer doesn’t just make clothes but can create every element. He staged performances under his own name and expanded into set design, interiors, and furniture design. He even founded a decorative arts atelier specializing in furniture design. Figures like him are what drew me to design in all its forms, including 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, I came to see that making furniture requires a sensibility and knowledge that go beyond producing an everyday object. I also realized that a chair isn’t just a chair. It’s a piece of research, an attitude, and a medium that reveals a brand’s direction. Rei Kawakubo, for instance, first designed chairs and furniture for her stores and showrooms. That’s because, as with most fashion designers, the furniture in a store also had to embody the message the brand wanted to convey. Those chairs were never comfortable. She chose forms that would make people pause briefly and then move on, based on the idea that creative people should always be in motion. She herself didn’t like sitting for long, either. As these examples show, these designers share a sincere commitment to any kind of design.
So when people call a piece of furniture “fashionable,” they don’t simply mean it’s pretty.
Rather, it means the piece carries many messages, a history, and a specific historical context. Furniture and fashion both hold function, historical background, and even poetic elements. I think that’s a more fundamental dimension, one that comes before price, social status, or symbolism.
We sometimes define an era by its fashion styles, probably 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. Furniture designers can create something that stays relevant far longer than fashion designers can. Fashion, on the other hand, is always in tension with time. Maybe that’s why I sometimes sense that fashion designers quietly envy furniture designers. (Laughs) Some furniture, like the Togo, appears as something very fashionable at a particular moment and stays that way for a long time. Fashion designers, by contrast, are constantly expected to deliver something new. So when a furniture designer creates a timeless piece, you can see how much fashion designers respect them.
What do you think makes the Togo so iconic?
The Togo is a truly fascinating piece. Today it’s considered a classic, but it’s also a very strange and whimsical piece of furniture. It’s no exaggeration to say it ignores the traditional rules of design entirely. Its form is irregular, and it’s unconventional in that it’s clearly a sofa, yet so low that it isn’t easy to get up from. I think this eccentric character is the essence of the Togo. It’s very rare for something to be both classic and unconventional. You can only twist the existing grammar and rules once you fully understand them, and free creativity is only possible on a rigorous, precise foundation. I see the Togo as a perfect embodiment of that tension and balance.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when the Togo was created, new materials such as polyurethane foam became commercially available, giving rise to voluminous, avant-garde furniture designs. What was happening in fashion design at that time?
While the furniture industry began using polyurethane foam to make huge, plush sofas, the decisive change in fashion was that materials like nylon became available by the millions of tons. It was literally the age of synthetics. As unconventional materials such as plastic and metal came into widespread use, the need for prêt-à-porter, or ready-to-wear, emerged, led by Yves Saint Laurent. It was a time when even haute couture designers were saying, “Haute couture is over.” That’s how a new generation of couturiers emerged, including André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Paco Rabanne. They believed that “if haute couture is dead, it should exist to anticipate the fashion of the future.” That’s why they’re called avant-gardists and futurists. Above all, this was the first era in which youth culture took center stage. A clear break emerged between the fashion of the older generation and that of the new. Styles that pushed the limits of eccentricity and exaggeration appeared, such as miniskirts, wide flared pants, and platform boots. And for the first time, the relationship between fashion, music, art, and social revolution became more important than anything else. The key was no longer traditional haute couture or established norms, but a connection to culture as a whole. Trends also stopped flowing from the top down. Instead, they started with young people and spread around the world. The same was true of furniture. New materials and production methods freed furniture from being the preserve of a particular class and made freer, more experimental forms possible.
So there’s a reason the 1960s and 1970s are called fashion’s “belle époque.”
It was an era of genuine creative explosion, when many currents came together, from American hippie culture to Swinging London in the UK. The most important change was that design was no longer just for the elite. It began to open up to everyone. Just as the arrival of prêt-à-porter symbolized this shift, furniture design also entered mass distribution. Even in places like supermarkets, you could find furniture that was a lot of fun, well made, and excellently designed. I think the Togo clearly belongs to that movement. It’s a piece that precisely represents that era and moment.
If you compared the Togo to a fashion item, what would come to mind?
A K-Way windbreaker comes to mind. It’s light and functional, comes in many colors, and has a cult status of its own. It’s also like the Togo in that it was familiar to our parents’ generation but is now being embraced as “cool” again by a new generation. Like a jacket worn on vacation or at school, the Togo is a playful piece of furniture, so it’s tied to carefree, lighthearted memories. You can sink into it comfortably, and any way you sit feels natural. It’s also the kind of furniture kids jump onto the moment they see it. (Laughs) In that sense, I feel the Togo is like an everyday item that isn’t limited to a particular class or situation but is open to everyone.
What do you make of the Togo’s comeback? Since its debut in the 1970s, the Togo has been in continuous production and has established itself as a defining sofa of 20th-century design. At the same time, it has caught the attention of a new generation in an entirely different context through TikTok trends. How do you think this phenomenon will affect the Togo’s value?
I see it as part of a cycle in which certain iconic pieces from design history are rediscovered and consumed again. Because it’s so widely known, a kind of snobbism around the design seems to have emerged recently, too. That’s something you see all the time in the fashion industry. That said, I don’t think the TikTok generation understands it as part of an “era.” The fashion and design of the 1970s are being reexamined as a whole, but this generation tends to take them in as fragmented, individual objects, like the Togo or Memphis. Memphis style, too, is probably often consumed without much awareness of its background or the context of the movement. What’s interesting is that the furniture going viral on TikTok today is, in the end, all timeless. These are designs that were well executed from the start and simply came back into the spotlight for one reason or another. They may look trendy for a while, but I’m confident they’ll remain good furniture after this microtrend passes. Personally, I’m actually waiting for the hype to die down.
Getting attention on TikTok and Instagram seems to have become an important criterion, even a prerequisite, when creating new designs. Amid today’s flood of trends, what challenges do fashion and furniture design need to address?
I don’t think that should be the starting point or the reason for a design. Look at restaurants or sandwich bars these days. Some prioritize how they look on Instagram over how the food tastes. They seem convincing on the surface, but often there’s little substance. I think it’s especially dangerous in furniture design. A T-shirt can be part of a microtrend. It might be perfectly natural to say, “We sold 2,000 last week, but they disappeared just as quickly.” But furniture, especially a chair, isn’t a T-shirt. It has to withstand time and use, so it needs standards that go beyond trends.
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.
