Furniture has been comfortable for thousands of years. Among the artisans who carried us out from the Dark Ages, among the blacksmiths, the tailors, and the cobblers, there were the upholsterers. The Believer sat down with a former practioner of the trade to learn more. Of particular interest was the upholstery business as it stood in the Midwest in the Eighties. Though upholstery as a trade was on the wane, several active practitioners could still be found, driving their multicolored vans around suburban Detroit, connecting deeply with the textures of the time. Jack White’s experience with upholstery—from his apprenticeship with Brian Muldoon to his enthusiastic and ultimately abortive entrance into the field as an autonomous player—offers a fascinating and instructive glimpse into a young person’s simultaneous encounters with the worlds of business, art, and furniture.

—Dave Eggers

THE BELIEVER: The best thing we can do is talk about upholstery.

JACK WHITE: I was an upholsterer. I worked at a bunch of upholstery shops the whole time I was a teenager. I ended up having my own upholstery shop, called “Third Man Upholstery.”

BLVR: How did you learn that trade? You apprenticed?

JW: Yeah, I apprenticed for this guy named Brian Muldoon in Detroit for three years or so. Then I went out to the suburbs, and I worked in a big shop called “Beaupre Studios.” Then I worked in a couple of other little places, for a few days at a time. I finally got a little studio and opened up my own place. I was working on sculptures, too, in the same space. I wasn’t really business-minded, though. I didn’t really have a love for money, which kind of hurts the drive to keep working. I would get a check for something and I would just say “Oh,” you know, “Big deal, I’m just going to use this to pay bills or something.” I never really loved the money part. I guess it started to hurt my business attitude.

BLVR: What kind of materials did you work with? Metal, wood?

JW: I wanted to work on more mid-century modern things like Noel and Herman Miller furniture when I first started apprenticing, but it’s the most difficult upholstery you can do—I wasn’t experienced enough to get into that yet. Also, the person I apprenticed for in Detroit had the market locked down and I didn’t want to compete with him, so I was mostly doing antique furniture, you know, people’s settees and chaise lounges and stuff like that. The clientele is mostly older people who could actually afford it, because it’s pretty expensive.

BLVR: It’s incredibly expensive, isn’t it?

JW: Yeah. I initially thought I could hook...