Sitting in front of an Alexander Girard wall panel with boxes of fabric samples unfurled in front of him, Vince Bravo is quick to point out that he’s not an archivist—he’s a collector. Girard’s story is intricately woven, and Bravo knows more about it than even the most diehard midcentury modern fans. But his game is connecting the dots (and swirls and stripes and checks), not cataloging them; buying, selling, and in many cases living with the objects he loves.
For 20 years, Girard’s work was intertwined with Herman Miller’s, from his hiring in 1952 as the founding director of the newly formed textile division to his unofficial retirement in 1973. “It’s a massive story, and unfortunately it’s been distributed, with so many objects in so many different places,” he says. “There are so many questions.” Like: What was the painted angel figurine Girard gifted to his wife Susan on a shelf in a Domus magazine photo? Where are the daisy-shaped tables Girard designed for Manhattan’s L'Etoile restaurant in 1966? What is it about Girard that makes everyone connected to his work so happy to talk about it?
“There’s a nostalgia, a sentimentality to it,” Bravo says, by way of explaining his own love of this sunny slice of MCM. “My grandparents had a cool toaster, the Dome Sunbeam. It had an engraved art deco pattern and a red light. It blew my mind.” More questions emerge: Why did they still have it, even into the early nineties, when Bravo was a Bay Area teen? And why does Bravo now have the same one? “Hoarding is in the genes.”
Led by the Sunbeam’s glowing red light into a sea of Deco and “kitschy ’50s stuff,” Bravo started a reselling business when he was 16. Back in the mid-’90s, people wanted Zippos and jeans. He remembers a pair of Herman Miller chairs he priced at $99 collecting dust in his shared San Carlos, California storefront while Haywood-Wakefield nightstands flew out the door. “People need nightstands.” Eventually, tastes changed. Generally, Bravo credits Ikea, Danish imports, Dwell magazine, and Mad Men. For him, though, the shift happened when he saw an eBay listing for a dining room table. “I didn’t want it, but there were some chairs in the background of the ad and I said, ‘how about I come take a look? I’m local.’” Which is how Bravo found himself down the road, at a 1969 Don Knorr house in Woodside, California—one of Girard's most famous interiors, as it turned out, designed for a longtime patron named Dr. Robert Scoren."
Eventually, Bravo and his husband moved into his current home, a 1956 Mogens Mogensen quasi-ranch in the South Bay—“pretty much our dream house”—and his collection took shape to fill it. “It just made sense that all of that California pottery that I had liked before, all the little tchotchkes needed to go away.” In their place: a Girard coffee table, with another arriving any day now. Environmental Enrichment Panels from Girard’s experiments to enliven Action Office 2. And the tchotchkes? They’re not all gone—but many have been replaced with “Tunsi” figurines, made by Girard’s brother Giancarlo. Girard’s own assemblage of tchotchkes number more than 100,000—and all live at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe as the Girard Collection.
It’s a collector’s home, not an archivist’s, as he mentioned. Which is to say, things end up where they look best—sometimes, just where they end up. “Knots works really well with our chandelier in this room,” Bravo says about the particular panel behind him. The Environmental Enrichment Panels are screenprinted, but Bravo appreciates this particular design for "its woven feel."
“If I had a real Girard mind, I'd probably switch them out,” Bravo says. By this, he means that Girard loved variation. His designs for the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana were meant to be rotated with the seasons. He’d design dozens of versions of each patterned fabric for customers to choose from. “He did these multiple color schemes intentionally. It's not random. It is very purposeful.” Purposeful and so … personal. Each chair was made for one specific customer with their specific taste. “Every piece is unique.”
Some of Bravo’s favorite objects to collect are fabric swatches: “I just love them. You get to see all the variations. Like, this ring is just all different whites, so really it's about the texture. This one's called Pet; it's like a lamb.”
Part of the joy and frustration of any collector is the singularity of their pursuits: The desired object is specific and limited, which makes it even more satisfying to have, but all the harder to find. With Girard, that dialectic is in sharp relief.
For Bravo, this is an added pleasure, connecting him not just to Girard’s story, but to the stories of the object’s owners before him.
Girard’s Herman Miller “Cutout” tablecloth from 1961 (the same year his Textiles & Objects shop opened) came in over a dozen variations; Bravo found his on a Girard Facebook group. “This woman was an antiques dealer in Michigan and we just started a conversation. She sold one bolt of fabric to take her kids to Disney World. Over the years, she’d sell me fabric, and we just kept in contact, sending each other pictures of flowers in our yards.”
As for the coffee table he's expecting: A couple in Oklahoma got it at a state auction, thrown in with a lot of garden tools. They wanted the tools; Bravo ended up with the table. “By the end of our conversation about Girard, she sends me a Facebook friend request. Everyone’s nice when it comes to Girard.”
While Bravo laments that some of Girard’s output might be lost forever (those seemingly lost-to-time La Fonda del Sol tables, for one), there’s always more to discover—even in Bravo’s own collection. Bravo laughs about re-buying things he already has, and the joy that comes from rediscovering a piece of ephemera you forgot you had. “I often sit and look at these things at night after a long day.”
A collection of Marilyn Neuhart dolls, designed for Girard’s Textiles & Objects Shop in 1961.
On one of those nights, he came across a memo for those ties, a previously unknown piece of the multi-layered Girard-Herman-Miller fabric. And he did what he loves to do: made a connection. “I immediately took a picture of it and sent it to Katherine [White] at the Henry Ford Museum, like, ‘you won't believe what I read.’ Information like that, it's hidden somewhere. People are asking the questions and doing the research, but it's so easy to just be simply enamored by the product, right?”
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