Marc Newson Is Just Getting Started

Marc Newson: I have my company and I’m doing a bunch of stuff with LoveFrom together with Jony Ive and the team there. Most notably, there’s a project for Ferrari that's taking up a lot of time because it's an ambitious project. It's been very challenging on some levels but extremely rewarding. 

On top of that, we're working on a large yacht for a Japanese client, Maezawa-san, who’s a fun and fantastic client. He's a huge art collector with a great understanding of contemporary culture and also technology. He’s the one that, in 2021, went to the International Space Station for 10 days. I got a call from Houston at 10 AM one day, and the voice on the phone asked, "Are you willing to accept a call from the ISS?” So we chatted for 10 ten minutes, and he told me, among other things, that he was quite bored. He was there for a week, and he said he felt bored and often a bit sick.

Then, we’re continuing to do projects with some luxury companies like Louis Vuitton. I've had an ongoing collaboration with them for about a decade now. That's still going well. And we’re doing some timepiece-related things with Jaeger-LeCoultre. What else, what else, what else? I always forget.

MN: Oh, yeah. The Swarovski Optik binoculars. That was the second pair that we've done, and by far the more ambitious. That's a crazy project that's been going on for around seven years. It’s “AI-supported” and has the ability to recognize various species of wildlife, specifically birds, and tell what they are.

It's a wonderful way to embrace technology. What do you do with the pair of binoculars, right? They are so quintessentially analog, but these new ones are an interesting example of combining analog and digital.

MN: They’re funny: a bit cyclops-looking—or triclops. Swarovski Optik is well acknowledged, at least amongst birdwatchers and people like that, to be the very best with optics. 

MN: I’ve had a fascination with timepieces since I was a child. I'd always imagined them as little universes, these mechanisms that contained such a huge number of very complex parts that all worked perfectly in unison. When I started doing jewelry in art school, I was immediately trying to identify functional objects that I could use those skills to create. Well, the two things that I did was make watches and make furniture. I loved the idea that they had very different scales, and I’ve remained fascinated with this idea that you could work on something very small and on something big, like a yacht or an airplane, and essentially apply the same rules, the same logics, and the same sense of precision to both.

But the watch thing stayed with me. I went on to create my own watch company, for better or worse, in the mid ’90s. I was never interested in managing the business—I was only ever interested in designing. The name of the company that I co-created still exists, but, sadly, the product is not the same. 

MN: I feel very strongly about the work that I did and everything that we worked on. We had fun, and I came up with some incredibly iconic designs. It was a moment in time. I'm sad that the company no longer exists in the way that it did. Certain elements of the DNA that I was responsible for are, frankly, being expressed quite poorly compared to the originals, in my opinion.

I had a feeling watches and timepieces would always be something that I’d be involved with. I'm not quite sure why, but they seem to follow me around. I went on to design the Atmos Clocks for Jaeger-LeCoultre—three different ones—and now I’m working on another fantastic thing for them. Then, of course, I was invited by Jony to come and work on the Apple Watch. That was a pretty amazing project to be involved in.

With the Apple Watch, you have the age-old typology of the timepiece, which sits on a wrist: it’s wearable; it's a worn object; it sits in a place where watches have always been placed. There's this familiarity that you have even without using it. It was a wonderfully successful combination of old and new.

MN: I'm really looking forward to seeing it. I wanted to approach it in a very different way than you would if you were looking at it from a local perspective or perhaps if you were Japanese. I love many aspects of Japanese culture, particularly the craft and the way that things are produced, the materials that are used, the finesse with which even mundane materials, like concrete, are treated. But I wanted this thing to be oddly familiar for locals, like a small temple that just landed under the Shuto Expressway.

It's in a wonderfully central location but a very odd site—-and that typifies the contradiction that I love about Japan: you can find the most neglected derelict spaces in prime locations. I first went to Japan in 1983, when I was just out of school and my family were still living in Tokyo, and the site reminded me of an area of Tokyo from that period or from when I lived there in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I didn't want it to be an architectural statement because I'm not an architect. It was more about housing the interior. I wanted to create an environment that looked familiar but almost spiritual.

MN: As I was saying before, I got bogged down doing a whole bunch of those sorts of projects for myself, and they ended up taking a lot of time. Doing it for someone else always felt like quite a chore. Doing those kinds of projects, you realize the problem is that every one of them is essentially a prototype. One of the great things about industrial design is that you aspire to perfect things. You make prototypes and improve to a point where either they can't be improved anymore or you don't want to improve them anymore, but you're happy with them. I've never been completely happy with an architectural project, with the exception of a couple.

The Lever House and the Azzedine Alaïa boutique, I was pretty happy with. The Tokyo Toilet, I’m pretty happy with. There are many compromises, simply by virtue of the fact that you are working with different skill sets in different countries. But, of course, working in Japan makes things a hell of a lot easier and better.

One of the reasons I ended up designing products was to have something to populate these interiors with, because these were the objects that could be controlled. You could ship them in and you knew that they were going to be fine. So, if your plasterer was a complete drop-kick idiot, at least you could rely on the furniture. Eventually, it got to a point where I couldn't bear it anymore.

In a weird way, that's why I've ended up doing major yachts, because, for all intents and purposes, the interiors are pure architecture–the difference is that they're engineered to the millimeter. Everything's absolutely perfect, despite the fact that these huge boats are like buildings. So, a lot of those skills I had in designing materials and environments, I was able to exploit working in yachts, because they're one of the few large-scale environmental situations where you really can control everything. You couldn't apply those metrics to a conventional terrestrial environment.

MN: I've always liked the idea of consistency, of having or developing a recognizable style that appears throughout my repertoire, trying to create a language of my own. The other reason, I think, is that design is really a case of problem solving. By having this repertoire of features or qualities, it feels like one less problem to be solved. It enables me to move on to the next thing, rather than reinvent the wheel every time. It’s always been important to me to be able to do different things across a broad range of  Us. There's no reason why a shape or a solution can't be appropriate for a variety of different problems that you are trying to solve.

MN: I've always liked the idea of embracing different mediums, whether it be fashion, film or music. I love the idea that all of these things are interconnected. I'm not claiming that I've been able to do it successfully, but if you want to attempt to successfully design a relevant contemporary product, then I believe you need to have a good understanding and a fervent appreciation of all aspects of contemporary culture.

When I was just starting out, I'd often look at architects and then I'd look at the way they dressed, or I'd meet musicians and look at the houses that they lived in, and there seemed to be so many mismatches: so-called “creatives” can be so mono-dimensional in their interests. Again, take architecture as an example: it often lives by itself regardless of what is happening in the world of contemporary culture.

At the other end of the visually creative spectrum, fashion's always fascinated me. Fashion, for the longest time, was almost a dirty word for those of us in the world of industrial design or architecture, who would look down their nose at it because of its very fast and ephemeral nature, as if that implied it lacked integrity. But I love the way fashion is fast and dynamic in the same way that architecture is slow.

There are so many ways to express yourself. I can't see how not to embrace many of those things or at least look to those areas of exploration or industry and how they can benefit us.

MN: I love the idea of working with techniques or technologies that are in decline, which is sadly most of them, and the idea of working with materials in completely unexpected or impossible ways, so, for example, manufacturing things in marble from solid blocks to end up with a silhouette of a shape. It feels extravagant, but it's also unexpected and difficult, and I enjoy doing difficult things that people think are not possible, challenging people's technical perceptions.

The cloisonné pieces that I did in China are a great example. I think they're among the biggest three-dimensional cloisonné objects that have ever been made. We had to build a small factory outside of Beijing with a purpose-built kiln big enough to fit them, and, of course, it was an absolute nightmare, but I refused to be told it wasn't possible. So, after some years, we figured out a way and we did it.

Simultaneously, one of the benefits is that you are supporting industries that are slowly dying. I truly enjoy going to work with people who probably felt like they were the last of their generation and who end up truly appreciating your involvement. It becomes a valuable and heartwarming collaboration.

MN: I suppose it's safe to say that we started in a relatively similar space. I'm talking when we were really young. We both shared an innate interest in detail and ways of creating detail. Jony's father is a renowned silversmith, and I studied silversmithing, so there are some weird synchronicities. I’ve more or less always been a gun for hire, working for a variety of different clients, which has not been the same for Jony, but I think the methodology in both our cases was very similar. We share very similar views. We have similar tastes.

It's not often you meet people where there's so much that can remain unsaid, because the common basis is already relatively elevated, and there's not much explaining that needs to be done. He gets what I'm talking about, and I get what he's talking about. We’re able to have very sophisticated and meaningful discussions about everything that each other is doing. In our case, we talked about work so much and what we do that actually working together felt like a very natural evolution of that process.

MN: It's a great and complex question. It's very difficult to look into a crystal ball and see where things are going. Having kids gives you a window into one potential outcome, which is not particularly pleasant, when you see what kids are exposed to and the way they expect the future to be. I feel like I'm from one of the generations that straddles both of these worlds and, many times, I feel like I'm being torn by it. I know what I prefer but I know what I need to do and what I need to embrace.

I hope that we can meaningfully reconcile these two worlds. There are some wonderful examples of VR, AR giving you a unique ability to understand how mechanical things work. And, of course, there are a myriad of ways that these tools can help us to embrace—I want to say “the past,” but it's not the past, because the analog way of doing things really needs to be part of the future as well.

You can easily sound old-fashioned or out of touch when you talk about these two worlds. There's clearly a space for everything. The danger is simply that you focus too much on one or the other. Now, what the answer is and how it evolves? I'm not quite sure. I suspect it will evolve in a way that will be irritating, but, at least in my lifetime, I would continue to advocate for doing things and making things. It’s as simple as that.