In 2019, Dixon was awarded the London Design Medal during LDF, so I was commissioned to write this piece about one of his early successes – the Mirror Ball pendant lamp – and reflect a little on his career
It’s risky mentioning Tom Dixon among designers, often eliciting a backhanded ‘I admire what he’s done, but it’s not quite my taste’. What he’s done is to become enormously, internationally successful, garnering critical acclaim for early DIY efforts and collaborations with Giulio Cappellini, many now to be found in the Museum of Modern Art, the V&A and the Pompidou. Then, via Habitat, Artek and an OBE, he launched his own eponymous brand in 2002 – an unattainable, enticing, lascivious fantasy for many designers, often those same ones condemning it as the move of a sell-out.
Tom Dixon Limited thrives to this day – its turnover is north of £40 million – and Dixon is one of the few British product designers around who is a household name. Alongside brand collaborations and interior consultancy, the firm boasts a 600-strong product range – now expanded from furniture into copper cocktail shakers and crocus-scented candles – reaching domestic and contract markets via a new HQ in King’s Cross, hubs in New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and, as of April, a restaurant-cum-showroom in Milan.
Dixon wanted to create an anti-design product, an invisible, elemental form that would disappear into its surroundings, but ended up with an attention-grabbing disco ball for the bling era
But the early fuel for the firm’s rise came from lighting, and the Mirror Ball Pendant of 2003 in particular. It was ‘the foundation of the business’, said Dixon in a 2016 Dezeen interview. ‘Without that as a hit object, I think we would be in a very different place now.’ It’s a strikingly simple blow-moulded plastic globe, coated internally with a fine layer of highly reflective aluminium. It comes with a little anecdote, worn thin by repetition and of somewhat dubious credibility: ‘Sometimes your biggest failures could be your biggest successes.’ Apparently Dixon, exhausted by the travails of Habitat, wanted to create an anti-design product, an invisible, elemental form that would disappear into its surroundings, but ended up with an attention-grabbing disco ball for the bling era.
The super-shiny surface is achieved by placing the polycarbonate globe in a vacuum chamber, sucking out the air, then vaporising pure aluminium with a massive electrical charge to generate a delicate mist. This settles on the plastic in a layer just a few micrometres thick, creating a perfect mirror. Dixon says he adopted this ‘vacuum-metallising’ technique from the sunglasses and space helmets of the optics industry, omitting to mention its more thought-provoking use for stiletto heels and lipstick cases. Manufactured in Germany, over 1,000 Mirror Balls are sold a month – generating a significant chunk of Tom Dixon’s turnover. Most of them now hover over velvet banquettes in darkened bars or in great clusters in the lobbies of boutique hotels.
Dixon admits that swank has been vital to the Mirror Ball’s success, but there’s a lot to commend it as a piece of design ...
To continue reading at Iconeye, click here. Image courtesy Dor Kedmi. Originally published in Icon 196, October 2019.