It started with the briefest of comments made yesterday by world-renowned French designer Philippe Starck, in an interview with France Info radio. “Indeed, we have a big project together that will be out in eight months,” he told them.
The other half of the “we” to which Starck was referring was Apple, and he refused to divulge any further details on the project, citing Apple’s “religious cult of secrecy” – but he did drop one tantalising tease, when he added that the project is “quite revolutionary”.
For those of you who are too uncivilised too unstylish too ill-educated who don’t know him, Philippe Starck is one of the world’s leading contemporary designers, with countless extraordinarily styled items of furniture, interiors and other products to his name - often featuring the sort of styling that you’ll either love, or hate, or hate so much that you’ll feel compelled to mock others who love it.
While the chances are you probably don’t recall the premium iPod sound system that he designed for Parrot in 2008, you may remember his forays into designing more mainstream consumer electronics products: the ‘Microsoft Optical Mouse by Starck’ (from all the way back in 2004), and the more recent "LaCie by Starck" hard drives.
The news that he was collaborating with Apple over this ‘revolutionary’ new product was greeted with a mixture of excitement, fear and outrage (depending on who you spoke to), but there was no real sense of incredulity, that this news was in any way unbelievable.
So it came as quite a shock when AllThingsD revealed that they’d spoken to Apple, who told them that Monsieur Starck’s claims simply weren’t true:
Reached for comment, an Apple spokeswoman said the company is not working on a new product with Starck […and] declined to speculate about what the designer might have been referring to when he told France Info Radio that he and Apple “have a big project together that will be out in eight months”.
But AllThingsD offers up one suggestion for the confusion. They claim that Starck was working on a new yacht with Steve Jobs before he died. Indeed, he spoke fondly of Jobs in the interview, and revealed how he visited the Apple legend at least once a month in California for seven years. “We used to love talking about interesting things”, he said.
The yacht was a personal project for Jobs, and he began designing it in 2009. It was even mentioned in the best-selling authorised biography of his life that was released shortly after his death in October last year. Could this really be what Starck had meant when he spoke of the “big project” that he was working on with Apple?
Perhaps – although curiously neither of the sources that AllThingsD cites in reference to their claim that Starck was working on the yacht even mentions Starck by name. In fact, there don’t seem to be any relevant references to the Jobs-Starck yacht collaboration before AllThingsD made that claim yesterday.
But if their assessment is incorrect, either Starck or Apple is lying. Apple has proven in the past that it’s not above deception or obfuscation to protect its interests (from Antennagate to widely reported misrepresentations of Steve Jobs’ health). Starck may conceivably have been lying – but what would he have to gain from telling a lie that would be so quickly refuted? And if he was telling the truth, at least as he saw it, where would he have got the impression that his collaboration on the yacht was with Apple directly?
For now, all we have is something of a he-said-she-said situation, and the joining of dots with the yacht seems to fit nicely, but the citations and attributions confirm what we already knew - that Steve Jobs was working on a yacht - but not the crucial detail of Starck"s involvement on that project.
We have sent a request for further information to Monsieur Starck’s representatives, and will update this article with any details that we receive.