Subconscious design

As artistic and cultural movements go, surrealism has to be one of the more intriguing around. Those haunting works by Magritte (the man with the hat and the apple in front of his face), by Marcel Duchamp (the urinal) and by Salvador Dalí (his strange, dismembered paintings) to name but three, always leave us longing to know more about them. They fascinate, attract and disturb. But while most of us understand subliminally what surrealism is about — all those mysterious images that clearly arise from somewhere deep in the unconscious and from the phantasmagoric world of dreams — we have probably never stopped to think about its wider influence on the field of design.

An exhibition starting soon at the V&A takes as its theme surrealism's impact on the worlds of theatre, interiors, fashion, film, architecture and advertising. It charts how a politically avant-garde movement turned into a commercial style that still influences designers today. One has only to look at the work of Philippe Starck, with his magical plays on proportion (his giant glass chair in the Baccarat shop in Paris for one), his new and consciously exploitative take on Oscar Dominguez's satin-lined Wheelbarrow armchair, his wit and humour, to see the debt he owes to surrealism.

Then there is Viktor & Rolf, the Dutch avant-garde designers who have a very surreal take on fashion — their store in Milan, for instance, features everything upside-down, with oak parquet on the ceiling and a chandelier sprouting from the floor. There's Marcel Wanders, the Dutch wunderkind, with his giant mushroom lights and chairs that morph into a wall, who enjoys playing with the slippage between one object and another; and Maarten Bass, burning pieces of antique furniture. Earlier, of course, we had Salvador Dalí's Mae West's Lips sofa and Fornasetti's dismembered parts of the body (eye, hand, foot) embellishing chests of drawers, ceramics, chairs.

Anybody interested in the subject should hotfoot it to the V&A where the Surreal Things exhibition is clearly going to be fascinating. One highlight will be a section devoted to the Galerie Drouin exhibition of 1939, which brought together paintings and objects by artists including Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and Eugène Berman. Ghislaine Wood, the curator of the exhibition, has tracked down several of the pieces in it, including some — Leonor Fini's anthropomorphic wardrobe and corset chair, and Meret Oppenheim's original table with bird legs — which haven't been seen before.

The exhibition will be of interest on several levels. With something like 300 exhibits, Surreal Things will look at how many artists engaged with design and how later designers were inspired by surrealism. It will fascinate those intellectually intrigued by the movement itself as well as those interested simply on aesthetic grounds.

Several of the pieces on show are still being made today and can be bought from the V&A shop. Among the most significant are Meret Oppenheim's "Traccia" Bird Table (£1,295), Man Ray's wonderful mirror Les Grands Transparents (£750), and the Wolfhound pawprint rug (£250), a witty reproduction of the wolfhound pawprint carpet commissioned by Edward James, a patron of surrealism. Starck's witty take on the Dominguez Wheelbarrow chair (which is in the exhibition) will be on sale (£3,295). There'll be jewellery available, too.

Meanwhile, Selfridges in London will be joining in the surrealism fest with amazing windows (some designed by Rolf Sachs) and various shops-within-the-shop selling both the V&A products and others specially commissioned by Selfridges.

Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design runs March 29-July 22. V&A (020-7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk); Selfridges (08708 377377; www.selfridges.com)

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