No More Hangers

30 Aug 2005 Category: Products

An undeniably important aspect of industrial design is “improvement”. Of course you can always cover your product in brushed steel or titanium or compressed saffron or what have you to make it look more stylish, but if the user cannot pick it up from their coffee table without first doing rigourous stretching in case they rip a tendon due to the weight of your new, stylish product, you have failed as a designer and should probably put those metallurgy books down.

So “improvement” does not necessarily mean “make it look all futuristic and cool ooh this would look great in my new hover car”. However, the rash of designers setting out to improve the design of the humble clothes hanger are actually managing to combine some pleasing designs with a marked improvement in the actual functionality of the design, too. Well, most are.

I’m not sure what makes the clothes hanger such obvious fodder for improvement by industrial designers, though. What about all the other clothes-related peripherals that might benefit from a redesign? I’d like to see items like The Phillippe Starck Lint-Collecting Roll-Brush, The Jonathan Ive Shoehorn, The Michael Graves Novelty Elizabethan Neck Ruff but something tells me you just won’t see these items in shops.

Anyway, clothes hangers. Since industrial designers the world over have silently declared the current design of clothes hanger to be fundamentally crap, new-and-improved designs keep popping up all over the place. Here are 3 recent examples and my thoughts, as a person who is entirely unqualified to talk about industrial design.

Firstly, mentioned in PingMag a few months ago, this design popped up at the DesignLab01 German design fair in Japan in May this year. Created by Konstantin Grcic, this design incorporates a brush to clean your clothes of lint etc after you remove them from the hanger. The ergonomics are as such that you could probably use it as a handy back-scratcher too.

Next up is a very clean and simple design from gnr8. Actually no perhaps “simple” is an understatement. I suppose the general goal here was to get “back to basics” as much as possible but there is a fine line between creating something beautiful in it’s simplicity and creating something that looks like it was knocked up in about 5 seconds and this design certainly challenges that line. I call this the “back to basics no wait, now you’re taking the piss” threshold. I can imagine these triangular shapes at a hanger factory, waiting in line to be moulded into the conventional hanger shape, and all gnr8 have done is come along and say “I’ll have those” and selling them for $40 each on the internet, giving a net profit of, oh I don’t know, about 4000%.

Lastly, we have this folding effort from Osika Design, looking like something a ninja might carry, to kill everyone in a single room by throwing it and then controlling it’s flight path with the power of his mind. I’m all for folding hangers though and indeed, productdose have labeled this as “the perfect travel hanger” but I’m not totally convinced. You see, for it to be really practical as a travel hanger, it would first have to NOT look like a FLYING AXE OF DEATH, ensuring smooth transition through the x-ray machine without being accosted by airport security for being a potential ninja warrior. But that’s just my opinion.

So has the perfect hanger been made yet? Chances are, yes. And chances are, it’s hanging in your wardrobe right now.

Written by Jon.

by Konstantin Grcic
by Konstantin Grcic
by gnr8
by gnr8

by Osika Design
by Osika Design

7 Comments

  1. thanks for subject. it is very intersting post

    Posted by: nakliyat on February 28th, 2008 at 3:10 am

  2. thanks for subject. it is very intersting post

    Posted by: konteyner on December 24th, 2010 at 5:44 am

  3. Besides Mr. Ukai’s usual work he founded the Yokohama Film Festival. “I love independent films and

    Posted by: perdeci on December 24th, 2010 at 1:55 pm

  4. So “improvement” does not necessarily mean “make it look all futuristic and cool ooh this would look great in my new hover car”. However, the rash of designers setting out to improve the design of the humble clothes hanger are actually managing to combine some pleasing designs with a marked improvement in the actual functionality of the design, too. Well, most are.

    Posted by: amed on December 25th, 2010 at 10:57 am

  5. maurers

    Posted by: maurers on February 22nd, 2011 at 1:10 am

  6. goruntulu sohbet edin super bir yer ya girin amk ne duruyonuz

    Posted by: goruntulu sohbet on August 6th, 2011 at 2:09 am

  7. Good Aritcle

    Posted by: All Failure on October 22nd, 2011 at 12:55 am

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