The official IG profile of the famous designer is a true universe of soft forms exploding with color, encrusted with intimate but factual videos in which Karim talks about himself, life and design. He speaks as he designs: with skill and confidence. In person, his unpretentiousness is even more disarming.
-Please don’t kill me – he said as soon as he saw me – I have only 20 minutes. I am catching a flight and didn’t realize that getting to the airport will take an extra 30 minutes because Joe Biden is in town.
We are meeting in his building’s lobby. He was 15 minutes late.
Killing one of the most famous designers in the world would create an interesting angle for my article. If you have been writing for over a decade, you get lazy and perhaps even bored, therefore start inventing solutions to make the process exciting again. But there I was, hesitant. I missed my chance of looking for a deadly weapon, pressed the record button on my iphone instead. Old habits die hard. In my defense your honor: how often does someone who you just met say to you ‘don’t kill me’?
It is surreal to see him sitting at the most average lobby couch you can imagine, dressed in a pink sweater and tight black jeans. No nail polish. No glasses. The glasses are upstairs in his colorful penthouse. I watched a 10 minutes video tour of that space on YouTube.
Am I jealous of Karim’s glasses’ home? Perhaps. I know I would enjoy seeing up-close some of the pieces by Ettore Sotssass I saw on the video. The whole atmosphere of the designer’s interior reads: Stanley Kubrick meets Roy Lichtenstein. It’s sexy, it’s playful. It reminds me a little bit of the office of the photographer Helmut Newton: he too collected Sottsass and was known for being a volcano of humble creativity. That is one of the things no one tells you about superstars: people who get global recognition are usually pleasant to work with, infecting others with their passion. However, unlike Newton, Karim is a minimalist.
-Do you still have only 280 objects at your home? – I ask.
-Yes! – he answers pleasantly surprised – The number has not changed for 22 years. How did you remember that?
I smile and ask another question:
-I guess when you started out it might have been seen as an eccentricity and now it feels more like a necessity. How does it fit together with the job you have, which is to make new objects?
-Yes, I design commodities so what I do is try and learn and improve on each project. I tend to bring the latest objects or furnishings onto my house and remove the previous in order to not accumulate. Design is for people, for everyone to have a better, more experiential, more inspired life. So design for me is an impulse of change to progress and evolve us.
Karim’s prism
One of the things I wondered before my meeting with him is if he became a product of his own brand, a persona without obtainable personality. When someone’s spectrum of activities is as wide as Karim’s, it is getting harder and harder to write about them or discuss their achievements from a fresh perspective. I am pleasantly surprised by Karim’s authenticity. He speaks with confidence and lacks arrogance. He shares instead of selling.
– I’m a very objective person and what I mean by that is I’m not judgmental of anything. – says Karim in the honest way – We just hit the number of 8 billion people. The diversity of the world is so complex and each finds its own ways, paths, visions and beliefs, values, directions. I respect it all.
This does not sound like a well-rehearsed tape. Karim’s words hit me like a cultural time-lag of the XXth century values that he grew up with. He is 62 years old, he is from the generation that grow up believing in the idea that design can change the world. I myself feel attached to that idea too but likely for completely different reasons.
-Is it something that you grew up with or learned to have this attitude?
– Sometimes I envy people who engage in the traditions and rituals that arise from their roots. My father was a bit of a crazy artist, he took the first chance he had to leave Egypt. He went to England where he met my mother, later he studied in Greece, Rome and Paris. After that we returned to England and went to Canada from there. Canada was a mix of first generation immigrants from all over Europe. Toronto is very eclectic, in a sense it is a small New York. I was growing up thinking that this is how the rest of the world looks like, that we are all global citizens. In my class in Toronto I had a friend to my left from Yugoslavia, to my right sat a kid from Russia, and a girl sitting behind me was from India. By the way, she was driving me crazy, because I was obsessed with being the best and she sometimes beat me over one point at tests.
-And what does it mean to you to be the best today? Is that why you became famous?
I am best when I have an excellent sleep and I wake up and make a double-shot flat white and then I sit at my dining table and I look at the list of projects that I’m working on. I start to sketch. I think I worked on so many projects that my attention span has become very short although my best ideas come from conversations with clients. I’m also workout every day because it helps with sadness or depression, and it gives me a lot of energy to continue to be creative and to love the world around me.
No speed limit on the highway between white and red
While we talk, I notice the life of the lobby unfolding in the background. The packages arriving and being accepted by a doorman, building’s inhabitants going in and out with their dogs, a plumber expressively telling a story from his weekend over the phone, a big load of drycleaning delivered in rustling plastic bags. All this movement is performed in a white and gray scenography of high gloss surfaces and artificial light.
-People think that color is something superficial therefore they look down at this quality. Our emotions our well-being our thoughts our intellect all stem from our five senses and the greatest sense for me is the visual sense. Apparently, the average person can see up to 1,000,000 colors not only is that difficult to believe but it means that each tone is huge brilliant muted or whatever has an amazing impact on our emotional well-being.
The average person has three cones in their eyes to process RGB but I found out that I have 4 cones in my eyes which one in 10,000 people have and hence I can process up to 3 million colors. I have loved collars since I was a child and I don’t see the difference of why children can’t embrace color and as we get older we lose our sense of attraction towards colors yet every color prevails in nature and i get it but. I get criticized over and over again for being too colorful. Serious design must be monochromatic! Intellectuals don’t use color! This kind of judgment lies right next to the opinions on people’s skin colors.
The longer you live the more you try not to fall into a trap of being too sure of basically anything and everything. Colors are given identities and genders, they get assigned to symbolic culture values. Perhaps one of the reasons for them to evoke so many emotions and contradictions is because color is a form of life in itself: a visual representation of a radiation of materiality. Objects appear different colors because they absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect or transmit others.
– When we look at nature we see browns, beiges but if you go a little deeper you are able to see any color possible. Like the wings of butterflies or fluorescent bugs or birds with black feathers next to blue stripes and red necks. And what do we do as humans? When I walk in a new restaurant in Midtown I see beige from floor to ceiling.
Karim’s fascination for pink makes more sense to me now. On a highway from red to white, pink is a force in transition, a color on the move, hue of life affirmation.
I take a chance to change the subject and talk about places he likes to visit in New York. Which museums are his favorites?
-MoMA is far more extensive than either Guggenheim Museum or Whitney Museum. I find the second one to be sad. And only showing American art is limiting. And they rarely show new American artists. I know a huge roster of artists that should be showing there. I wish I could curate a show there called “The American New Wave”.
‘New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down’
Karim’s watch calls for the third time. It’s his Uber.
-Ok, one more question and I have to go.
I panicked a little. Do I have enough material? Where the 20 minutes went? I feel like we are just getting started. Is this one of these conversations that could go for 20 hours?
Does NYC have a color? – I ask in a desperate attempt to seek closure.
-Yes: brown. And gray.
-And how many years have you been in NYC?
-Oh, too many. 30 this year.
-That’s enough time in one place. So where are you moving?
-I do want to move but I have a 10 years old daughter and I want to be a part of her upbringing. Plus, when you face the freedom of moving anywhere in the world, you suddenly feel that you don’t have anywhere to go. I find myself going to for example Portugal, to a little town with beautiful sights but I feel like I couldn’t stand the serenity. Then I am in Copenhagen which is super clean and organized and I’m doubtful about the scale of it. Or I entertain myself about moving to Milan – I love Milan! – but it is so Italian, how could I live there?
New York spoiled me in a sense that I feel cosmopolitan here. You can be who you want, live how you want. But deep down I don’t really like this city: it’s intense, it’s dirty, everybody here acts like they are in a survival mode, it makes it harder to maintain social life outside of the professional interactions. But perhaps I need to work on that part of my life anyway.
-What about Tokyo?
-Love it, couldn’t live there. It’s too painfully Japanese.
-Ok then, how about you move to another part of NYC?
-Yes, that is so far the best that I could think of. I will move out from Hell’s Kitchen and reinvent myself.
