The pleasing tactile feedback of the material chosen for these salt-and-pepper shakers cannot rescue this item from the design trash-heap of kitsch façadism.
A number of objections could be made to the details of this design. The curled edges of the item are liable to damage. The hemisphere that joins the two pieces will lose its grip as repeated use erodes the ‘cup’ into which it fits. But it is better to strike at the root of this poor application of conceptual design to a noble material. There is simply no need to fix the unbroken format of the salt-and-pepper shaker.
Even if we assume the conventional design needs fixing and that the correct fix is a salt-and-pepper shaker in the stylised form of a waxed moustache, the reference to a moustache is senseless unless there is some convergence in the choice of material. But if a prototype salt-and-pepper shaker was made from, say horse-hair or nylon fibre, the choice of façade might lead the designer to think ‘how perverse and fatuous this object is’, rather than ‘how clever and playful a designer I am’.
Not all façades are meaningless. But the kitsch façade belongs in the realm of conceptual art, not product design where real objects exert real effects on their users. It also may have some aesthetic value in literature, perhaps in order to dramatise the kind of human character we would rather avoid at parties or in the workplace.
Above: Object, Meret Oppenheim, 1936. The functionally useless application of fur to a teacup has no merit at all from a design point of view, but may be meaningful as a symbolic reference to the physical and psychological experience of cunnilingus.
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