Which is why an excellent company such as Samsonite should have signed up Starck to produce a range of luggage. Autographed luggage, naturally. The Starck Samsonite stuff, with its extraneous bits and bobs, sits very uneasily alongside the sleek high-tech look of the standard, and much cheaper, range. But the company wants added value, which means increased profits. It is no longer enough to make good ordinary products. Otherwise, you’d find people buying an ordinary glass lemon squeezer for £1, and then where would you be?

So what is the Starck style? He has a phrase for it, of course. “Emotional design” he calls it. “Over the top” we might call it. The opposite of minimalism, anyway. Starck is a maximalist. Also a postmodernist, particularly in the way his designs so often cartoon the designs of history. He is particularly fond of making rigid plastic shapes that mimic the soft padded upholstered forms of late 19th and early 20th century furniture. The “Lord Yo” wing chair, for instance, or for the “Bubble Club” garden furniture, moulded in the form of a comfy old chair and sofa. These are skeuomorphs - objects that adopt the forms of an earlier age when there is no reason, other than nostalgia, to do so.

Some Starck objects are beautiful but useless, such as the “Dr. Sonderbar” chair that made his name in 1983 (though doing an apartment at the Elysee Palace for Madame Mitterrand the same year helped no end). This semicircular three-legged affair of chromed tubing is, he admits in his jolly way, impossible to sit in. At least it looks a bit like a chair - unlike the tall barbed 1990 object known as the “WW stool” (dedicated to film director Wim Wenders) which is, if such a thing is possible, a beautiful instrument of torture.

Other objects are ugly but more or less practical, like the “Tooth” stool of 2002. So he has imagined a piece of furniture that’s a bit like a human molar. So what? I don’t want to sit on teeth. And then there was his jocular attempt to provide a complete prefabricated house through a mail-order catalogue. What you got, in a wooden box, was a set of instructions, a hammer, a blank notebook, and a French flag. Everything else, you had to find for yourself. Even Starck can sound a bit defensive about that one. These things are just vaguely Dadaist exercises to keep himself amused. But, Starck being famous, they get out into the world and people pay for them. He is, in short, a machine for producing things that - if they did not exist - nobody would miss.