Have We Finally Moved On From the Pandemic’s "It" Sofa?

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it.

Did any other design item have as good a pandemic as the Togo? Probably not. Consider the timeline: one single Ligne Roset sofa, designed by Michel Ducaroy in 1973, unveiled to skepticism in its debut, outdoes expectations, remains in production, and then, 50 years later, as people are stuck in their homes, goes viral in a way that few, if any, pieces of furniture have. Prices explode, people lust after it, and containers of old Togos are shipped stateside from overseas. Furniture usually doesn’t get this exciting.

In the past couple of years, though, the aura around the sofa has drifted a bit back to earth. Sellers aren’t promoting it as much, it’s in fewer photo shoots, and old Togos have been fetching lower prices at auctions than they did at the height. But during its descent, no other sofa has taken it from its perch. And so we might ask, where is the new viral sofa? And can it exist?

Before 2020, the Togo was a connoisseur’s sofa, one interchangeable with the Chiclet and the Anfibio: a canonical piece, if obscure or ugly to people outside the design industry. Then things changed, because of two factors: social media and availability. It shook out like this: if you were at home and bored during the pandemic and had an inkling of interest in design, you probably had your eye on a Togo. The sofa—the chair, the corner piece, the settee—was hard to escape. Featured on TikTok, in shelter publication home tours from Dwell to Architectural Digest, by influencers, on Reddit discussions, as dupes on Facebook Marketplace, and as a meme (slide 5), it eclipsed its pre-pandemic origins as a regular, run-of-the-mill elite vintage item to become an era-defining piece of furniture.

Interest in the Togo, says Coco Robazza, a vintage furniture dealer and sourcer for In Corso, in Toronto, came out of an unprecedented interest in design itself during the pandemic. "A ton of people got into vintage furniture then," she explains, and through "influencers and celebrities," it was pushed into "the mainstream." Through that massive new popularity—pushed through social media, specifically through TikTok, and through home tours—different old, bulbous, or curby sofas, including the Togo, cut through the noise.

But it also helped that for an "it" couch, the Togo was very flexible, and came in lots of options. During the pandemic, the sofa "fell into the comfy/cute thing," explains Dan Rosen, a comedian who critiques design and furniture with his podcast, Middlebrow. What’s more, Rosen says, the Togo was "relatively affordable compared to other iconic couches, and looked comfortable," and the serious backlog of vintage Togos—in all sorts of colors and options—allowed for more than just one aesthetic to prevail. "Its leather and orange and other colorways," Rosen explains, helped "it fit into the hypebeast/Fellow kettle/record collector/sneakerhead world." The Togo is both comfy and "unisex," he adds.