December 3, 2018 | Furniture
HE / SHE SAID by Nitzan Cohen
HE / SHE SAID is a collection of wooden chair designs that have a wide range of sizes, functions, and approaches. Designed by Nitzan Cohen, a Germany-based designer. The chairs have classic forms and smooth curves. It is made from ash wood and comes with different color options.
The designer mentioned that the masculine-feminine variation between HE / SHE SAID reminds him of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Aside from their clothing, the differences between them are subtle – Mickey’s nose is slightly bigger and Minnie has eyelashes, He Said has protruding, aggressive armrests, while She Said was curved down gently. It’s strange that chairs haven’t always had masculine and feminine variations, when so many other products do.
In Freudian analysis, knives are male and spoons are female. The best sets of cutlery have great tension between the knife and spoon and I can see a similar tension between HE SAID and SHE SAID. Distinguishing chairs in this way re-imagines their role, introduces a new dynamic between chairs, and a new form of product development for them.
These pieces are ambitious, push their production technology, update nomenclature, and restructure the concept of how a family of chairs is composed. And using the different symbolism of gender as an approch to make variations in furniture design is really an interesting inspiration.
