Juicy Salif ¹⁹⁹⁰

With this design for a lemon press, Philippe Starck caused quite a controversy in 1990. The object was a flagrant travesty of the famous modern design principle according to which ‘form follows function’. Starck apparently came up with this design when he pressed lemon juice over a dish of fried squid on the Italian island of Capraia. On his place mat he drew squids that later evolved into sketches of the fruit press. The long legs make the object rather unstable, however, and when you are applying pressure with one hand, juice runs over your other hand which you have to use to hold onto the object. And yet Juicy Salif became a bestseller, among other reasons, according to Starck, because his fruit press is a good conversation piece. Besides a squid, users also saw in it a Soviet space ship, an alien and a cancan dancer.

SOURCES

P. Lloyd en D. Snelders, What was Philippe Starck thinking of?, in: Design Studies, vol. 24 (2003), nr. 3, pp. 237-253.