Jack White on Upholstery

The following addresses excerpts from Your Furniture is Not Dead by The Believer with Jack White regarding re-upholstery, of all things. As a musician, Jack White might be considered the revivalist of Detroit garage rock; here his thoughts on the value of a dying trade run analogous to his approach to music. His interest as a young adult in a then-waning trade seems in line with many of the other varied themes prevalent in his work in music and film. All of this is made especially relevant coming from a native of Detroit, the ground zero of economic collapse.

What's changed over the last hundred years

It used to be that you got your parents’ furniture when you were married or whatever and you had their mattress re-upholstered and it would last for thirty, forty years. You spent a lot of money on it initially, but you never got rid of it. Now, the whole method of how people get furniture is just disposable. You go to Art Van or whatever and buy a $400 couch and throw it out a couple of years later. That whole method just killed the upholstery trade, and [reupholstery] became a rich person’s thing.

Why, though the loss of trades are tragic, Ikea may not be such a bad thing

So many places ignored [style] for the last 40 years or so. Then all of a sudden places like Target started making things. What else can you do when you don’t have any money? At least you can get something cool if you don’t have that much.

Finally, this last anecdote reveals an important commonality on how artists and master craftsmen work, delving into a subject of interest- or "getting serious about it" as the schoolmarm says.

At one point I thought, “Well, while I have my own shop I should really get into every mode of upholstery I can and learn what I can about everything,” so I remember calling up a bunch of places that were upholstering coffins, three or four in the Detroit area. I called them all up and they just would not hire me. I was like, “I’m an experienced upholsterer and I’ve been working in the trade for years,” and they were like “Why do you want to upholster coffins?” They thought I was some sicko or something, but I wanted to learn that part of the trade because there are certain techniques used in tufting and working with silk in coffins that you don’t get to do in regular upholstery, but they just wouldn’t hire me. They were like, “You know, a lot of this stuff is prefabricated and we just glue it together when it gets here and you don’t want to work here.”

While one happy ending to this story might have been reading about Jack White, master upholsterer, performing on a Nelson day bed by Herman Miller to a sold out crowd, there is still the reassuring thought that trade craft is still valued and not forgotten. Though pursuing efforts to assimilate dying trades in modern culture are met with skepticism and resistance ("You don't want to work here") they are not without worth, even to enrich the foundation of an impressive future body of work. 

via riha