We’re not talking about a brand name for a particular type of leather armchair from a specific manufacturer here. We’re referring to a leather armchair that was once in the possession of a famous person.
This is clearly something rather different to the usual kind of leather armchairs you can buy in the shops. If something has been owned by someone famous, it almost doesn’t matter what condition it is in, or even how old it is. In fact, you would almost think that it didn’t matter if you never even sat on said armchair for the rest of your life. What matters is that celebrity connection.
But even then, how far would you go to acquire such an armchair? And more to the point, how much would you pay for it?
How about 21.9 million Euros? If you typed that into a currency converter at today’s exchange rates (and this sale only happened a short while ago in February 2009), it would equate to Ј18,743,268 – oh, and about thirty pence. And all this for a single armchair.
So who had owned this leather armchair?
The answer is Yves St Laurent, who of course passed away in 2008. Now it is possible that his death raised the prices somewhat, but one feels that even his ownership of this item shot the price through the roof.
The leather armchair itself was the creation of a designer, Eileen Grey. So it was always going to command rather steep prices; it was estimated that it would have cost you around 150,000 Euros at the steepest end of the grade. That equates to Ј128,373 in British pounds.
You can see then that this was always an expensive armchair. But the huge step up in the sale price at the auction was amazing, given the fact that the only difference was its previous owner. If you haven’t already brought out your calculator to work it out, the Yves St Laurent connection shot the price up by one hundred and forty six times what it would otherwise have gone for under the hammer. Isn’t that amazing?
So would you buy a leather armchair that had previously been owned by someone famous? Perhaps you wouldn’t have paid that sum of money for it, to be sure. But there is no denying the fact that this kind of celebrity connection adds a certain something to the armchair. That ‘certain something’ isn’t tangible in any sense. It is more than that – it adds imagination to it.
You can sit in that same armchair and imagine what its previous owner would have done with it. Where was it situated in their home? How often did they use it? Did they relax with a good book in it? It certainly sparks the mind, and perhaps that is why we have such an insatiable appetite for anything along these lines.
The most amazing thing is that this sale occurred during a full blown recession. Now that’s money well spent!