Archival Consumed: Museum Quality

[Muji]

Someday, Andy Warhol once mused in one of his many deadpan ruminations on the future, ”all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” If this has not happened literally, it has practically. In the former art-world stronghold SoHo, gallery-like retail outlets abound; the Prada store is at least as effective at inspiring reverence for its contents as the building’s former occupant, the Guggenheim. Meanwhile, as James B. Twitchell showed in his 2004 book ”Branded Nation” (the source of that Warhol quote), the chiefs of what he calls Museumworld regularly exhibit consumer products and have become increasingly sophisticated about marketing themselves.

So set aside the hoopla around the newly reopened and expanded MoMA, and look instead at the recent debut of a shop-within-a-shop at the SoHo branch of the MoMA Design Store: the first North American Muji outlet. A consumer-goods chain with 280 stores in Japan, Muji has managed to stake out space in something so presumably highfalutin as a museum design boutique partly because the 270 or so Muji objects for sale in the SoHo store are (according to store publicity) ”appealing, useful and essential” items for the ”design-savvy consumer.” These include office supplies and storage pieces, but also items like a very clever set of $42 cardboard speakers. The Muji style is sleek, clean, unfussy and, at least by SoHo standards, affordable. As of December the top-selling Muji piece in the MoMA store was a $7.50 aluminum business-card case.

The name Muji is a shortening of Mujirushi Ryohin, which translates to ”no-brand goods.” After starting out as the in-house brand of Seiyu department stores in the early 1980’s, with low cost as a major selling point, Muji spun off in 1989, emphasizing quality design, sensible use of materials and utilitarian practicality, under the slogan ”Lower Priced for a Reason.” While the stereotype of the logo-obsessed Japanese consumer lingers, unadorned Muji has thrived. It has gradually been challenged by a variety of even lower-priced chains in Japan but has held its own (and in effect become an identifiable brand). In fact, from the original line of 40 Muji products, the company now offers more than 5,000 — everything from clothing to bicycles to furniture to packaged food.

Muji has also expanded into the European market. Most Americans who have encountered Muji first discovered it abroad and, like Kathy Thornton-Bias, the retail general manager at MoMA, many of them fell in love with it. In her case, it was six years ago, while working as a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue, that she visited a Muji store in Paris, was pleasantly shocked by the low prices and bought a huge pile of travel accessories and organizers. She became a Muji addict. ”The product isn’t loud,” she says. ”The function is what’s loud about it.”

The link between retailing and museums goes back more than 100 years, to the store at the Victoria and Albert Museum, notes Twitchell, who teaches English and advertising at the University of Florida and has written several books on consumption; the logo-adorned shopping bag was actually a museum-store innovation. All along, part of the allure for the museumgoer was to leave with ”a piece of the experience,” Twitchell explained when we spoke. ”This is the nature of the souvenir — which has very little to do with what it is and everything to do with where you purchased it.”

Museum stores have lately become more savvy about selling consumer furniture made by the same famous designers exhibited in actual museum shows, meaning those pieces have been ”baptized in the glory of art,” as Twitchell puts it. The MoMA-Muji collaboration takes this idea to the next logical step. The brand’s fine-design aura and exotic rarity are good for the shop — but the shop has an aura of its own, one that gives Muji goods a bit more sparkle than they might have if they had appeared in, say, Kohl’s, or even Target. So if the speakers and card holder cost about 10 percent more here than they do in Great Britain, despite the weak dollar, that’s probably because here they are in a museum shop, not a mass retail chain. True, the shop happens to be located a lot closer to the Prada store than to MoMA itself, but maybe the whole link to art has become an afterthought; some products can simply be baptized in the glory of museum retail.

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[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the January 9, 2005, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]