Article:

Georg Jensen Damask, Denmark, is a good case both to study the transition of designer roles in production and marketing in current design culture and the status of home textile products in design history and life style media. Tablecloths of high quality are often part of family history and in some aspects the very stuff that memories are made of. But as part of design culture they mostly drown in the media focus on designer icons, names and aesthetic objects for daily life. This paper follows some of the challenges Guy Julier points out to the study of design culture in ‘mediations’ and ‘density’ (Julier 2014) and describes and discusses how the new owners of Georg Jensen Damask have to re-perform the old brand heritage with regard to new time dynamics of product categories, with a new focus on designer (or rather architect) names, with the use of product, rather than textile designers and with a new density of visual reference to other design categories, to icons and brands. The case shows substantial changes in ‘designer culture’ with the ‘Rize of Brands’ (Moor 2007) where ‘everything is media’, and the firm has engaged with industrial designers and graphic designers. But Georg Jensen Damask shows also to be a special case, because home textiles are often subordinated other interior design objects and are hard to brand in this discreteness. Neither does textile designers often reach headlines in design histories or in life style media. The materiality of the tablecloths and memory of the grand family celebrations are difficult to mediate in the re-performance of this brand heritage.