The stuff we’re made of: What elevates certain designs to iconic status?
This week we’re telling the origin stories of three creative legacies. Here, by way of introduction, we try to figure out why certain ideas and objects have become so deeply entrenched in our cultural consciousness.
Share
Share
The term iconic is bandied about so much now, it’s changed its meaning. I have personally referred to Craig David’s
Born To Do It album cover and white Baby G watches as iconic, but I think I was confusing iconicity with nostalgia and impeccable taste.
To my mind, a design becomes iconic when it elevates above its peers to become symbolic of its own genre. For some designs, its name becomes a byword for its product type, synonymous with its own description. Hoover is the most famous example. Post-it another. Lego too. Others are visual icons of their genre, seen as the most successful, prominent, widely acknowledged epicentre of all those orbiting around it. The Walkman, th