A report from our Berlin correspondent on design in culture.
The Japanese call them (that is, they call us) “Mujirers” — people so addicted to Muji’s “no brand quality goods” that its store openings and new product announcements set our pulses racing. In Japan, the store can cater to all your needs, from cradle to grave. Since the 1980s it’s offered not just household goods, but food, clothes, bicycles, campsites, phones, yoga, furniture, floral shops, cafes, even off-the-peg concept homes. And, some would add, a state of mind.
Here in the West we’re finally getting the chance to discover why a brand built on the apparent absence of branding inspires such loyalty. New York Mujirers experienced a bout of tachycardia last week when the city’s second Muji store (the first is in SoHo) opened on the ground floor of The New York Times building (40th Street side). Up to forty Mujis are set to follow, in cities across the US. Here in Berlin, the opening of the city’s first Muji store two weeks ago in the former British Council building threw many of us — thrifty, discriminating people inexplicably thrilled by self-assembly pens, wooden toys and endless rows of subtly-nested semi-transparent plastic boxes — into a state of tastefully-understated hysteria.
What unites all these products is a certain lack of splash, an avoidance of unnecessary color, pattern and detail. Designed by the likes of Naoto Fukasawa — whose recent book with Jasper Morrison calls the aesthetic “Supernormal” — Mujiware approaches the Japanese ideal of shibui: an unobtrusive beauty. The company is also committed to fair trade, sustainability and recycling.
I always think of Muji as the kind of store likely to appeal to readers of early Nicholson Baker, a man who could wax lyrical for pages on the origami-like beauty of a milk carton spout. But in fact it’s cyberpunk sci-fi writer William Gibson who really nailed its appeal: “It calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist,” Gibson wrote, “a Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard.”
Muji the company is, characteristically, more restrained. Its Web site says it’s all about “the confident awareness that modesty and discretion are, together, the better part of style.” Be still, my beating, ecologically-packaged heart!
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