ODL affiliate Tim Parsons, designer, writer and lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was interviewed by obsessionistas.co.uk about his collection of 50 coat hangers:

In the late 1990s while studying at the Royal College of Art in the Design Products department, I came across a box of hangers discarded on the street in South London. Some were familiar but others were quite unusual, with strange crooked shapes, extraordinarily long hooks or company names embossed into their wooden surfaces. Struck by the variety of characters expressed by this one type of product I appealed to friends to bring more into college, however strange or ordinary, so that I could make a record of them. It was a kind of ad-hoc, research about the personality that can be imbued into everyday objects. I didn’t intend it to become “my collection”, but many of the friends who brought in hangers for me to photograph said I could keep them, and as word got out, I began receiving them as presents. I made a small flip book called “50 Hangers”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to all of the 50 Products / 50 Lights / 50 Tables books that populated the design sections of bookshops at the time, and eventually I had to concede that I did actually collect coat-hangers!

Read more here, and see more of the collection in the Obsessionista gallery.