Before reading this wide-ranging cultural history of the popular mid-twentieth-century furniture known as Danish Modern, I had assumed my point of entry would be as a design historian interested in technology and business. Midway through the book, however, Per H. Hansen's account of Danish Modern being marketed to U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany triggered a vivid memory from 1963. My brother and I, then ages eleven and fourteen, endured an excruciating afternoon at Den Permanente, a large retail showroom in Copenhagen, as our parents examined tastefully simple, organically shaped furniture and tableware. More adventurous than many military couples, they were reflecting cultural capital newly won through European travel. However, they were obviously unaware that a few months earlier, a rift between craft-oriented cabinetmakers and owners of furniture factories, over whether manufactured goods could be displayed at Den Permanente, had accelerated Danish Modern's collapse as a viable retail category. This anecdote, bridging concerns of producers and consumers, suggests this book's considerable range.

Danish Modern Furniture is an exhaustive, many-faceted study by a business historian at Copenhagen Business School who employs such theoretical heuristics as organizational frame analysis, narratology, actor-network theory, Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital, and design historian Regina Blaszczyk's concept of fashion intermediaries. Hansen does not, as would a traditional design historian, address the aesthetics of Danish Modern or provide biographies of innovative designers or craftspeople responsible for iconic pieces. Instead, he reconstructs narratives employed by various stakeholders to represent their motives for producing and marketing furniture for domestic and export markets, as well as narratives they constructed for consumers, explaining how this furniture reflected a society caught between nostalgia for a stable traditional past and progressive faith in the positive nature of disruptive change.

Although Hansen's subtitle indicates a three-part sequence, Danish Modern Furniture mostly concerns the rise of a modern style of furniture expressive of Danish identity and marketed as such to the outside world, and its subsequent decline as popularity required factory production (which violated a handicraft ethic) and as new furniture types (with plastic materials, artificial surfaces, and bright pop-art colors) dominated international markets for high-end furniture. In Hansen's telling, Danish Modern emerged in the 1930s as a warm, humane, craft-oriented, wood-centered furniture promoted by Kaare Klint at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Furniture School as an alternative to the cold, austere, mechanistic, factory-oriented furniture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Although Klint regarded a scientifically derived functionalism as key, his reliance on craftsmanship and wood's organic simplicity anchored modernism in stable Danish traditions. At the same time, the furniture seemed a perfect expression of and stimulus to democratic institutions and the progressive ideology of Denmark's emerging welfare state.

Hansen describes a system whereby architects (such as Finn Juhl, Hans Wegner, and Børge Mogensen) created designs for furniture produced by hand in small craft shops whose owners belonged to the Cabinetmakers’ Guild, in existence since the sixteenth century. Gradually, during the 1940s and 1950s, such architects also began designing furniture lines to be produced not by hand but in furniture factories. As Danish Modern became more popular—at first in Denmark and later, owing to advertising campaigns and traveling exhibitions, in the United States, Germany, and other European countries—factory production became economically obligatory even though organic craftsmanship remained the hallmark of the style. Den Permanente (rendered in English as The Permanent Exhibition), which had served as an educational institution to the public, as an industry-wide retail outlet, and as a de facto brand for Denmark's individual furniture craftsmen, became a major point of conflict when the movement's purpose shifted from creation and maintenance of a stable progressive Danish lifestyle to promotion of domestic and international sales in a capitalist system dependent on perpetual novelty of new styles. Moral uplift and social reform yielded to status consciousness and a drive for profits. This point appears starkly in chapters devoted to the marketing of Danish Modern in the United States, which began with a high-minded traveling exhibition entitled “Design in Scandinavia” (coordinated in part by Edgar Kaufmann Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art) but eventually led to cheap American-made knockoffs being passed off as “Danish Modern.”

The last two chapters address the contemporary reemergence of a style so stagnant that in 1969 its major American distributor dismissed it as “period reproductions” and stopped importing it (p. 315). Hansen traces three separate recovery modes: the rise in value of original handcrafted Danish Modern pieces as collectible artworks, the contemporary manufacture of “retro” furniture according to original designs, and the popularity of new furniture extrapolated from the organic functional ideals of Danish Modern by young Danish designers, with a “New Nordic” label indicating a twenty-first-century orientation with neither the nostalgia nor the progressivism of original Danish Modern. In conclusion, Hansen suggests these new furniture designs have moved beyond not only the original furniture's ideological meanings but also any strictly national identification with Denmark.

Hansen is skillful at identifying, glossing, and analyzing the vocabularies, both verbal and visual, by which creators and marketers of Danish Modern furniture represented ideological meanings of material objects. Apt quotations from organizational records, business memos, trade journals, product catalogs, the design press, and popular journalism appear throughout the work—most previously unavailable to nonreaders of Danish, as the work is translated from a 2016 expanded edition of a book first published in 2006. Hansen also includes more than 140 illustrations, most taken from trade catalogs and advertisements, revealing how Danish Modern was presented to retail dealers and consumers. Discursive captions provide additional information not given in the main text, or isolate and expand on points merely touched on by the main text. As an object, Danish Modern Furniture is exquisitely designed and produced, printed on heavy paper stock with signatures sewn to endure for decades, if not centuries. However, despite otherwise admirably complete documentation and bibliography, the book's usefulness is marred by an index that includes only personal names—making it next to impossible to look up anything.