‘The extent to which we take everyday objects for
granted is the precise extent to which they govern and
inform our lives’
Margaret Visser1
He is a familiar folk devil for our times: an overweight slob eating a TV dinner with a fork in one hand, remote control in the other, slouching in semi-darkness on the sofa. Perhaps he is watching The Simpsons, in which the family arranges itself on the sofa in front of the TV at the end of the title sequence; or The Royle Family, the opening credits of which show a blank screen coming to life, and different family members appearing one-by-one on the living-room couch. Unaware of the irony, this slob slumps on the sofa, facing his fictional counterparts on their tele-visual upholstery. But there is a contrasting set of images, familiar from the glossy inserts for sofa companies that fall out of the colour supplements, or from the TV commercials shown at bank holiday periods: female models contort themselves into various unlikely positions on their sofas, or couples laugh and joke, holding glasses of wine (or, for some reason, half-eaten melons) with their bare feet tucked under their thighs. The last thing these beautiful people would be seen doing is slobbing out in front of the telly.
Our modern interest in the sofa is somewhat strange. Historically it was a low-status item, a bastard child in the history of furniture design. In 1783, William Cowper’s friend Lady Austen tried to alleviate his chronic melancholy by challenging him to write a poem in blank verse about the most mundane thing she could think of: his sofa. The resulting long poem, The Task (1785), begins with a mock-Georgic history of this item of furniture before becoming a hymn to the joys of domesticity: ‘I sing the Sofa. I who lately sang / Truth, Hope and Charity … / Now seek repose upon an humbler theme.’2
In 1822 the critic Richard Brown declared that, while the design and manufacture of chairs had improved in the hands of more specialised tradesmen, ‘sofas are as ridiculous and unmeaning in their forms as ever’.3 The chair has traditionally been the ultimate expression of the designer’s skill and creativity, but the sofa is a shapeless, multifunctional object, an affront to our modern fixation with ‘clean lines’. The various efforts to introduce good design to Britain in the twentieth century – such as Scandinavian-influenced ‘soft’ modernism, Festival of Britain contemporary, or Habitat-inspired minimalism – have either ignored or looked down on the sofa. It has stood for a whole range of undesirable English values, from snobbery to prissiness, epitomised by those possibly mythical people who worry about whether they are sitting on a ‘couch’ or a ‘settee’, and keep it forever wrapped in the cellophane in which it was delivered.
The real appeal of the sofa is that it is simultaneously a very commonplace and a rather luxurious item. It still retains associations with bespoke luxury, partly because upholstery has resisted mechanisation longer than many other trades. The sofa is the one piece of furniture that cannot come in flat-pack form, and it sits rather uneasily within our instant-gratification, throwaway consumer economy. Making a sofa remains a labour-intensive and skilled job, despite the introduction in the last century of pneumatic staple guns, foam fillings and ready-made spring units. In 2006, the average spend on a three-seater sofa was £1,118 for a leather one and £900 for a fabric one, making it one of the most expensive items we can buy for the home.4 But almost every home has a sofa of some description.
In this sense, the sofa mirrors the entire history of seating, a narrative of the democratisation of comfort, as progressively more people have sat down on purpose-built objects rather than simply kneeling or squatting. In eastern and Arabic countries, the sopha or suffah was a part of the floor raised about two feet, covered with sumptuous cushions, and reserved for the wealthiest, most important people.5 In Britain, too, the sofa was initially an opulent item, but over the last two centuries it has filtered down the social scale. At the end of the 1950s, Richard Hoggart imagined the ritual of bonfire night in a working-class northern community: ‘It is a truly urban fire, with very little wood that has known a tree for the last few years, a fire composed of old mattresses and chairs – replaced now that someone’s club turn has come up – or a horsehair sofa displaced by a modern one on hire purchase.’6 What really transformed the sofa into a classless purchase in the post-war era, as Hoggart’s quote suggests, were the invention of the cheap filling of polyurethane foam and the rise of consumer credit. The easing and then abolition of government restrictions on hire-purchase arrangements meant that, by the end of the 1950s, four out of five British families had consumer debts, owing a total of £1,000 million.7 Hire purchase was used for all large items, from cars to washing machines, but it particularly transformed furniture retailing, which relied on HP for three-quarters of its trade.8 The set of soft furnishings bought on the ‘never-never’ was one of the symbols of growing affluence in this period.
The sofa truly arrived as a stand-alone item in the 1970s and 1980s, when it broke free from the increasingly outmoded three-piece suite. A British institution, the three piece suite had originated as a slimmed-down version of the seven or nine-piece sets in well-to-do homes in the nineteenth century.9 Symbolically, a matching set meant that you were wealthy enough to buy all your furniture in one go.10 Betrothed couples saved up for years to begin their married lives with a sofa and two armchairs, and the new members of the middle class who settled in suburban semi-detached houses in the inter-war years were particularly prone to what snobbish design critics called ‘suite-itis’. The three-piece suite eventually died for three reasons. First, the arrival of central heating in many homes meant that sofas and armchairs no longer needed to be placed around a fireplace in the conventional three-piece arrangement. Second, the larger number of smaller and single-person households needed fewer items of furniture. Third, the lone sofa – or, more commonly now, an identical pair – managed finally to escape the three piece’s associations with lower-middle-class suburban taste, which the success of stores like Habitat and Heal’s had rendered so unfashionable.
In part thanks to these stores, the sofa became plainer and simpler in its design. Sofas made for prosperous households before the twentieth century were highly decorative, with rolled arms, spooned backs, curved legs and ornamental carvings. The classic three-piece suite gestured towards the exotic eastern origins of the sofa in its floral chintz covering, velvet trimmings and fringed edges. In the 1960s and 1970s, artificiality was in vogue, with brightly coloured vinyl and PVC sofas, like the ‘leather look’ endorsed by Beverley in Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party (1977). But such flashiness then became rather passé. Compared to the American Lay-Z-Boy recliner – the chair that, at the push of a button or the pull of a lever, puts you in a horizontal position and has built-in gadgets like refrigerators, remote controls and snack trays – the British sofa of the last quarter-century has been remarkably low tech. There is an almost universal modern style, with a low back, tall cushions and very little pattern or ornament. Only three things are left to distinguish sofas from each other – colour, fabric and size – and they therefore assume an excessive symbolic importance.
Despite this lack of variety, our interest in the sofa continued to grow with the consumer revolution of the Thatcher years. By then people were spending much more time in their living rooms, not only watching telly but playing with their music systems and computer games, and the sofa was the living room’s centrepiece. Sofas were also the perfect product to sell in the retail parks that were springing up on the outskirts of towns – they are so big and tactile that people want to see them properly before buying them, and they need a lot of space to be displayed. The commercial breaks began to fill up with sofa ads, with celebrities like Michael Aspel and Bruce Forsyth walking around furniture warehouses promising us unbeatable bargains and interest-free credit, and reminding us about the sale that was always about to end. Since the life of upholstered furniture is potentially endless, advertising is vital because it has to persuade people with a serviceable sofa that they need to buy another one.
The firm that did most to popularise the modern, no-frills sofa towards the end of the century was IKEA, which, in the words of its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, aspired to ‘provide a better everyday life for the many’ and bring the benefits of good design to all.11 IKEA opened its first shop in Britain in Warrington in 1987, and its hold on the UK consumer was complete by the mid-1990s. In 1996 it launched a famous TV advert, with a song on the soundtrack called ‘Chuck out your chintz’. In this ad, an enormous, IKEA-blue skip falls down from the sky into a street of stock-brick Victorian terraces in what looks like an up-and-coming area of London’s East End. Women emerge from their houses, throwing their flowery furnishings – candlewick bedspreads, frilly lampshades and tasselled sofas – into the skip. At the end they are seen chatting together happily in their stripped-down homes with their new laminate flooring, tasteful prints and plain IKEA sofas. The menfolk are nowhere to be seen and the song lyrics evoke 1970s feminist struggles: ‘We’re battling hard and we’ve come a long way, in choices and status, in jobs and in pay.’As a final act of liberation, the song suggests, all women have to do is dispense with their petit-bourgeois taste: ‘That sofa’s so girly, so silly and twirly.’ One director of IKEA’s advertising agency, St Luke’s, was explicit about the political message, claiming that ‘“Chuck out your chintz” is the modern equivalent of “burn your bra”.’12
But the chintzy sofa had been an object of opprobrium long before IKEA put this sentiment to song. In Barchester Towers (1857), Anthony Trollope dismissed a new sofa as ‘a horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious’,13 and George Eliot wrote in an 1851 letter that ‘the effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming’,14 apparently using the word in its modern sense to mean vulgarly suburban. Since its heyday in the nineteenth century, chintz – which is not a pattern, as is commonly believed, but a material, a glazed Indian cotton on which it is easy to print designs – has had various returns to vogue, notably during the ‘country house’ revival of the 1980s, but it has long been a minority taste. IKEA’s stroke of genius was to latch on to a battle that was already won, presenting its own brand of mild minimalism as thrillingly revolutionary.
The following year, IKEA produced another commercial which featured a team of ‘researchers’ knocking on people’s doors to discover the link between furniture choices and personality traits. The ad purported to discover that ‘when people had flowery settees, they often had snooty tendencies’ and that ‘people with green sofas were adventurous in bed’. IKEA did not just want us to buy its furniture; it wanted us to buy into an attitude and a lifestyle. The IKEA sofa was disposable furniture for urban nomads and serial monogamists. It was light, unfussy and stylishly impermanent, with none of the baggage of the family heirloom or the bought-for-life wedding present.
But the sofa’s egalitarian, informal associations created their own anxieties, particularly if they extended beyond the home into the workplace. When Lord Butler, in his 2004 report into the intelligence used to justify the Iraq War, noted the ‘informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures’,15 it was widely interpreted as a criticism of Tony Blair’s eschewing of boring Cabinet meetings in favour of unofficial chats on the office sofa with his inner circle (although Butler never used the famous term ‘sofa-style’ to describe Blair’s government, and nor would any other mandarin; this was a journalist’s invention). But anyone who has attended a meeting conducted on sofas will know that they do not necessarily encourage easiness and informality. Sitting the full complement of people on a supposedly three-person sofa is tricky: the piggy in the middle has no armrest and is in danger of being squashed.
Even in the privacy of our own homes, there is the same, long-standing dilemma: how do you sit on a sofa? In Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Trollope describes Lady MacLeod thus: ‘She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back.’16 Chairs did not ‘give’ at all until springs were introduced in the 1820s. In many homes, the closest thing to a sofa was an ottoman – a long, stuffed, backless seat considered too plush for anyone except invalids and the elderly.17 The Victorians wanted more luxurious seating. The sofa began the movement backwards, displacing the less upholstered ‘settee’ because the sofa was more suited to reclining.18 When springs arrived, seats and backs became deeper and people began to sit back, which meant that crocheted antimacassars – small lace and cloth circles and squares – had to be placed on the headrests to protect them from the oil on men’s hair.19 But Victorians still firmly discouraged slouching, in keeping with traditional courtly etiquette and their own concern with gentility and self-control.
The historian Kenneth L. Ames argues that the rocking chair, which allowed the sitter to tilt back, was a form of American resistance to the European obsession with an upright posture20 – a resistance that arguably continues today in the Lay-Z-Boy. Up until at least the Second World War, perfect young ladies were taught at British finishing schools and deportment classes to perch on the ends of sofas rather than lean back, and to cross their legs at the ankles rather than the knees. The ‘keep fit’ craze of the 1930s added a medical dimension to this traditional injunction to sit up straight. Advising against slouching, the Daily Mirror’s posture expert wrote in 1944: ‘Muscles and joints get “set” and awkward stiff movements become habitual. Round shoulders and narrow chest are two figure faults which follow on from “sitting in a heap”.’21
The modern sofa finally grants permission to slouch; indeed, some of the squidgier kinds render it a necessity. While the office chair has been ergonomically refashioned, we are still allowed to ruin our backs in the privacy of our living rooms. What we expect from the modern sofa, apart from good looks, is comfort; but what exactly is comfort? Architects and designers have never been able to agree on a definition. Is comfort merely the absence of discomfort, or does it have a quality all of its own? People’s opinions about what constitutes a comfy chair vary considerably, and rarely tally with the ergonomically recommended posture.22 We never simply ‘sit’ on a sofa; we ‘lounge’, ‘curl up’, ‘slouch’ or ‘sprawl’. The words suggest both comfort and laziness, a confusing message in a society which is itself confused about the proper relationship between leisure time and good health. Our uneasiness about the kinds of habits encouraged by the sofa is encapsulated in the phrase ‘couch potato’, coined in California in the 1970s and used in Britain since the 1980s. In June 2005, representatives from the British Potato Council demonstrated outside the offices of Oxford University Press and in London’s Parliament Square, campaigning for the use of the word ‘couch slouch’ instead of ‘couch potato’, which they claimed was insulting to potatoes. To no avail: the ‘couch potato’ or ‘sofa spud’ lifestyle has become universal shorthand for our supposedly inactive lives, prey to obesity, back problems and mental vegetation.
This is part of a larger anxiety about the sofa’s relation to time, and the discomforting evidence it provides that we have spent so much of our lives simply sat down not doing very much. For the lived-in sofa has a memory all of its own. After its occupant gets up, its seat leaves a temporary trace of that person’s shape and warmth. As the springs loosen and the foam hardens, it remembers the contours of our backs and the indentations of our bottoms. Eventually these patterns become embedded and the sofa sags irreparably. Sofas also remind us of past times by accumulating the detritus and marginalia of our lives. Pet hairs, dirt and food stains settle on them; and pens, crumbs and remote controls fall underneath them, or down the gap between the cushions and the upholstery. (The financiers Jonathan Wren recently estimated that nearly £1 billion in small change lies forgotten in British homes, much of it presumably down the backs of sofas.23) Family homes now tend to have deep plum or chocolate-coloured sofas that cover stains, or leather ones that are wipeable and age well. But even the leather sofa lets itself go eventually, by sagging, fading and cracking in the sunlight.
When confronted with this embarrassing confirmation of physical decline, there is only one thing to do: make a trip to the retail park and buy another sofa. If you want an idea of the high emotion that this can produce, then cast your mind back to that terrifying night in February 2005, when north London erupted into the infamous ‘IKEA riots’. For its opening of a new store in Edmonton, IKEA advertised an offer of three-seater sofas, normally priced at £325, for £49. The subsequent rush to reach the store in time for the midnight opening caused traffic chaos on London’s North Circular Road. People drove across roundabouts, reversed up the dual carriageway, parked on pavements and, eventually, abandoned their cars on the road itself. When the doors opened, 6,000 people barged their way to Soft Furnishings. Shoppers ‘bagsied’ sofas by diving on them, only to have others pull them off by their feet. Two people tugged at opposite sides of the same sofa, both shouting, ‘It’s mine, it’s mine’. One woman grabbed a sofa only to be pinned against a wall by a man with a wooden mallet. Another woman waiting at the checkout queue was ‘mugged’ for her sofa. As security guards fled from the scene in panic, police and paramedics were called, and twenty people were hospitalised with crush injuries.24
What on earth is going on, when people are prepared to surrender their dignity and safety to scramble over domestic furniture? A leather sofa, however cheap, is not a De Beers diamond or a truffle from a Tuscan forest. Our attachment to this rather straightforward object – which is, after all, just a wooden frame, a few springs, assorted stuffing, a bit of fabric and some cushions – makes no obvious sense. Anthropologists have used the term ‘fetish’ to describe objects to which we attach this kind of irrational significance. The word was first used by early Portuguese traders in West Africa to describe the amulets which were thought to have magical properties in tribal societies. In the first volume of Capital (1867), Karl Marx drew on this concept to argue that capitalist societies suffer from ‘commodity fetishism’, the semi-mystical qualities we project on to the products that we buy. The commodity fetish dissociates itself from the mundane labour that goes into producing and purchasing it, and reinvents itself as a desirable object that will bring beauty and meaning to our lives. In nineteenth-century Britain, in particular, Marx identified ‘a mania for possessions’, a ‘fetishism’ which ‘clung to the products of work once they became wares’.25 In fact, you did not need to be a revolutionary to notice this Victorian passion for things. An 1854 magazine article noted that ‘it is a folly to suppose that when a man amasses a quantity of furniture it belongs to him. On the contrary, it is he who belongs to his furniture.’26 The modern sofa fulfils a similar role. It is not just something to sit on. It has acquired all the associations of a better life: good taste, easy opulence, social belonging. A heavy burden to bear for a humble item of upholstery.
Unlike the fetishes worshipped in tribal religions, however, the magical, incandescent properties of the commodity fetish do not last. The sofa will survive long after its lifespan as a commodity is over. Even the IKEA-crazy citizens of north London will have to calm down eventually. They will realise that items of furniture have a mundane purpose, and the way that a sofa looks in the showroom is not necessarily how it will sit in the lounge. The sofa adverts may shout at us to buy this thrilling, fashionable item (unbeatable offer! nought per cent APR!), but the alluring lifestyle they promise will soon subside into the comforting boredom or mild disappointment of daily habit. When a sofa arrives in the living room for the first time, it will look like a glamorous intruder, its brand-new smell will linger for a while, and when we first sit down it will seem rather strange and unyielding. After a while, though, we will stop feeling it or even noticing it. It will become like the ‘purloined letter’ in Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the same name: invisible by virtue of being so clearly on display. Whatever those excitable adverts say, we know that sitting on the sofa is really just the unnoticed adjunct to other habits, which merge together in general after-work weariness – eating dinner, dozing off, watching TV.