Coat Hooks Gone Wild: A Compilation of the World's Craziest Coat Hooks (Vol. 2)

After the popularity of my first post on crazy coat hooks, I realized that my quest to feature the world's most bizarre and least practical coat hooks simply couldn't end with puppy butt coat hooks. Despite the elegant simplicity and functional beauty of the traditional coat hook, people just can't resist trying to innovate. Who knows? Maybe the world really craves an update -- perhaps there's an industrial designer somewhere in the world right now who's wire-framed the ultimate new coat hook... Or a handful of college engineering students huddled around a 3d printer, silent with awe, as a revolutionary earth-shattering coat hook appears, layer by layer, before their eyes...

I doubt it. Nevertheless, people do keep trying.

Without further ado, here are real coat hook designs I've found for sale online.

Artistic coat hooks - (you know, for artists)

I've known a few artists and a lot of "artists." Let me describe the difference: artists are always at least 20 minutes late for every appointment. When you speak to them, they often visibly zone out and stare at something over your shoulder. They don't sleep well because they sit up late, haunted by mortality. Their stubby fingernails are chewed off. Knotted, stained hands are restless as if they just don't know what to do when they aren't creating. Yet we put up with them -- why? When they speak, they say incredibly insightful things that leave us pondering weeks later.

"Artists" adopt all the most annoying habits of legitimate creatives. They're chronically tardy, inattentive, and high-maintenance. Their hands and clothing are carefully stained with their media of choice because they want you to know they've been working. Their studios feature carefully-arranged but rarely-used tools of the trade: crusty paintbrushes, filthy throwing wheels, stubby pencils... and things like this.


These coat hooks are intended to tell the world, "Yeah, I'm an artist -- a HARDCORE artist. I'm SO hardcore I think about painting all the time. Even when I hang up my filthy smock on my paintbrush coat hook I spent hours searching for online and nailed to my wall in the hope it would make people take me more seriously, you know, as an artist."

My most successful artist acquaintance hung her coat on a crooked masonry nail a previous tenant used as a picture hook. When she bothered to hang it up at all. Usually it lay in a sad little threadbare heap on the studio floor. Her hands looked like this.

In essence, the true difference between an artist and an "artist" is this: the latter love, LOVE, to talk about art. And talk about artists. And talk about their big plans and big projects and important artsy friends and how life-changing, how moving, this gallery show they just saw was.

Real artists make art. They create. They may or may not love it, they may or may not be great at it, but they can't help it. My artist friends really aren't very good at anything else.

Interior design pro tip: any time you choose an accessory or accent based on whether or not it will make people take you seriously, don't. Just don't.

Stone coat hooks (not just for Neanderthals any more!)

When I think about the coat hook's ancient pedigree, I have a vision of the first coat hook on earth. I see a heavy-jawed caveman trudging into a cave, worn out by a long but fruitless day stalking woolly mammoths or giant ground sloths. He props his flint-tipped spear against the wall of the cave. He reaches over his shoulder and removes the heavy bearskin cloak from his shoulders. There's a convenient protrusion just here -- a knob of stone at the perfect height to keep the bearskin off the dirty floor where filth-crusted dogs might snuggle up on it for a nap. He drapes the bearskin over the knob. The coathook is born.

From the time humans had clothing, they've been removing those clothes and then casting around for a convenient place to store them. The above vignette may never have happened, but something like it almost certainly has, tens of thousands of times, throughout human history.

Maybe you're yearning for a simpler time. Maybe the rest of your home is decorated in earth tones and you decided, "What the heck, let's turn it up to 11." Maybe you're a geologist.

If any of these apply to you, well, someone somewhere has developed a coat hook just for you!