Classic Novelty...

It's Paris Design Week.

It's one of those things that I tend to go to as a bag carrier, rather than a fan. My taste in architecture, art, culture and cutlery looks mostly backwards rather than ahead, towards a futuristic, cutting edge... I don't like reinvention for its own sake. For me, there is a huge difference between design and innovation. In fact the very word design should be legally obliged to be accompanied at all times, by a qualifying adjective.

Interior design, graphic design, fashion design, industrial design... it's a long list already.

But Design Week itself needs no adjective. It simply happens to you, the way the 'flu happens to you, because for ten days in September the whole thing spills out of its polished-concrete trade halls and into the streets - soaking over the Marais, Saint-Germain, Bastille - until you cannot walk to buy a croissant without first passing through somebody's ephemeral showroom and being handed a small card made from recycled lettuce, by a beautiful Asian person in recycled spectacles.

And so I carried the bags, a little grumpily, through a great deal of it. And I will be honest, because pretending otherwise would be a waste of both our time: a lot of it made my heart sink.

It was the furniture, mostly. Deliberate and challenging in its conceptual orphanage. Wonky and garish, with legs of unequal length making some non-sensical point about the power of asymmetry, moulded from yellow plastic and shouting out its upcycled lineage.

There were tables you couldn't stand a cup on and lamps, lit so feebly, they wouldn't attract a depressed moth. Entire pop-ups featuring objects whose entire function, as far as I could imagine, was to be photographed, admired for the duration of a sneeze, and then consigned to a far-away land fill.

Everything yelled in yellow. Everything was an un-necessary statement. I mainly stood around, over-dressed and hot, thinking nobody will own any of this in 10 days, let alone 10 years. Nobody will want to.

Here is where a lesser man - a man matching my mood, on that afternoon - writes the easy essay. The one that goes: Design is dumb, the young have no taste, everything is over-considered now - "Bring back the honest chair"... I could write that essay in my sleep. It would be somewhat satisfying but completely worthless, because it's the same tired tune every generation whistles about the one that follows - that things were better made and more beautiful "...when I were a lad", and it's all gone down the loo, ever since.

It is the Interior Design version of shaking your fist at the weather forecast. And I am way too grateful for rare trips to Paris, to spend any of them being annoyed, smug or superior.

So let me try to say the truer, more uncomfortable thing instead.

What I love - what much of my writing lately keeps circling back to - is the object that lasts. The heavy-bottomed, copper jam boiler that Vanessa found at a flea market, that someone used after someone else did. The bistro chairs in Parisian cafés - all bentwood and cane, that have held a thousand Parisian backsides and will comfortably hold a thousand more.

The well-made, quiet, useful thing, designed so beautifully that you stop noticing it's been designed at all, and simply use it, daily, for a lifetime, and then hand it on. That is the genius of the classic Paris design shop, and it is a moral position as much as an aesthetic one. The most sustainable object in the world is not the one whose recycled journey was the longest, most surprising or ecologically admirable. It is the one you never, ever throw away.

And that is my real quarrel with the yellow chair. Not that I find it ugly - ugliness is subjective and I am neither willing, nor qualified to judge. Unattractiveness is often just earliness. I think the root of my objections are that it has the sustainability arithmetic a little bit backwards.

It waves the (recycled) flag of recycled while being, in every way that matters, wholly disposable: made to be seen once, never used, discussed briefly, and binned. A thing built to last a century is worth more to the planet than a hundred things built to last a minute and a half, and labelled as virtuous. Those of you who know, will know.

Anyway, much of what I saw last week had mistaken novelty for innovation, and recycled for durable. Oh... and yes, my scathing and largely ignorant commentary for peer review.. but.... much of it really was - if you'll forgive me borrowing from my own week - well-dressed waste.

I had more or less finished being totally right about all this, when the awkward thought arrived - as awkward thoughts often do - totally uninvited, just as I was giving a juicy carrot to my high horse, where we were both standing, up there on the high ground.

Which was this: every single classic piece of art, or furniture, or building styles that I've just been praising was once, itself, a wonky yellow table...

The bentwood bistro chair - that timeless, perfect, hundred-year object - was on its first day of school, a shocking industrial novelty. Mass-produced, steamed and bent by machine, sneered at by people who preferred proper wood, carved by a bloke in a brown apron. People like dismissive, smug me, would have thought Herr Thonet's cheap café furniture was just a vulgar gimmick.

The gorgeously imagined Eames chair, now the very definition of well-designed and tasteful for ever, was once an alarming experiment in moulded plywood and fibreglass that made traditionalists mutter and mumble about over-design.

The Tolix stool, the enamelled jug, the angle-poise lamp - each and every one of them arrived as somebody's design-based provocation, and were tutted at by the me of the day, clutching at literal straw, going on to became classics by surviving long enough for the tutting to be silenced for good.

Which rearranges everything, somewhat annoyingly.

Because it means the recycled yellow chair of design week, and my vintage copper jam boiler, are not enemies at all. They are the same object at different ages. The classic is simply the novelty that lived to tell its tale. And there is no way to know - standing in the showroom on the afternoon it's unveiled - which of these shouting, wonky, over-designed horror stories, will be quietly beloved in a hundred years, and which ones will be, quite rightly, forgotten by Christmas Eve.

The people who dismissed Thonet's bentwood café chair were partly right - but only in that most bistro furniture of the 1860's needed a bit of an upgrade, if only to match the massive demands of the emerging café society. They were just catastrophically wrong to write off the one piece that mattered.

So Design Week, which I will fully admit, I walked into with only partially unjustified resentment, turns out to be doing something I can't sneer at after all. It's a bit of a sorting office. Mostly colourful noise, mostly landfill-in-waiting, and a great deal of yellow plastic that will not, thank the Gods of quality design, last very long.

But somewhere in all that racket, on some stand I probably walked straight past to bemoan the next piece in the parade, there may well be sitting the one chair my great-kids will think of as timeless, and will not believe was ever considered remotely unpleasant.

However... I still don't have to like it. That's the small mercy of being the witness rather than the judge of history - I'm allowed my preferences, and mine are firmly, unrepentantly for the enduring and the useful over the loud and the new. I would still, given the choice, take the copper jam boiler, every single time.

But I've ceased from being certain that I can tell a gimmick from a future heirloom just by looking at it. No self-proclaimed expert can. It reminded me of the not-quoted-often-enough Theodore Roosevelt speech - itself made in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910. "It's not the critic that counts"... it's the people in the arena. The ones that are doing it. Trying out new techniques and new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding. And that is certainly not I.

At the Château, there's a chair nobody remembers buying. It's not valuable and it's not fashionable and it has simply always been there, outlasting three or four complete turns of what everyone agreed was tasteful. I used to think it survived because it was a classic.

Now I suspect it survived because somebody, long ago, was kind enough not to throw it in the skip before it had the chance to grow old.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.