Mad Men: What Makes a Classic?

The Mad Men offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce drip with modern cool. The glass walls, sleek sofas, and leather chairs are exactly what you would expect of a successful New York ad agency in the 1960s.

For fans of the show with an eye for design, classic furniture abounds; but for Don Draper, the digs of his new Time & Life office were anything but classic. Draper and his partners were simply surrounding themselves with items that reflected—or might spur—the creativity of their work. Years later, the consensus is that some of these designs are classics, and not simply because they’ve endured over the decades.

So what makes a classic? A blend of beauty, utility, and a certain sense of inevitability, as though the object is somehow exactly as it is to be? And if Mad Men were set today, what classics might we see in the offices of a modern-day Don Draper?