A new program of mass production had to be introduced. Eventually, American manufacturers moved in to fill the production gap. The furniture manufacturer Baker hired Finn Juhl to design its Baker Modern line, and he made changes to his earlier classic designs (such as the Chieftain) to make them easier to manufacture on a large scale and to distinguish from their Danish counterparts. Instead of teak—widely used in Denmark because of that country’s colonial relationship with Thailand, where it grows natively—Baker chose American walnut. The Chieftain’s horned vertical back supports—originally produced by the cabinetmaker Niels Vodder with a step joint, a sophisticated move that allows two pieces of wood to meet at an acute angle—were elongated to maintain the overall shape while simplifying the joinery process. It was at this point that Danish Modern started to become all-American, leading to the eventual conflation of the terms “Danish Modern” and “mid-century modern.”

By the late 1950s, almost every American furniture company had a Danish line. “Advertised as ‘Copenhagen Danish Modern’ (Lane), ‘Danish-inspired’ and ‘Royal Dane’ (Bassett), and ‘truly Danish-Modern’ (Stakmore), these American furniture sets borrowed certain features common among Danish imports—for example, all were made of wood—and codified them, helping to create a popular sense of Danish design and what it looked like,” Taft writes. In this way, Danish Modern became a hallmark of the American century and American power.

At the first televised US presidential debate in 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sat in Round Chairs. Danish Modern was presented as a symbol of the luxury, freedom, and stylishness afforded by the capitalist development with which America had become politically synonymous; it was now as American as democracy itself. This association, however questionable, became an important element of the furniture’s appeal—and of the marketing campaigns to sell it. Danish Modern was, in ad copy and in the words of the era’s tastemakers, furniture for all Americans. “It is a significant part of the Wegner story,” wrote House Beautiful editor Marion Gough (as quoted by Taft), “that people were ‘discovering’ this beauty even before the experts stamped it with their approval.” Wegner’s Chair belonged, at least in theory, to anyone and everyone.

Danish cabinetmakers, American manufacturers, and tastemakers like Doris Scherbak—an American whose husband was stationed in Paris to work on the Marshall Plan—popularized not just the specific pieces of Danish Modern furniture but the very idea of it. Curved lines, splayed legs, rich wood: These became emblematic of the idealized, placid mid-century American lifestyle made possible by the outrageous growth of capitalism. Since the high cost of producing those emblems kept them out of reach of a number of Americans, capitalist ingenuity saw an opportunity to satisfy its profit motive: Copies and knock-offs proliferated in the United States, where copyright rules were lax to the point of nonexistence. Even Scherbak, who had outfitted her apartment in Paris entirely with furniture and fabrics from the Danish store Den Permanente, bought a pair of knock-off chairs in Mexico and proudly wrote to Fischer that she was “happy to have” them, because they were “really good copies and were so very cheap.”

As these copies and knock-offs filled the market, design integrity and quality suffered. Take, for example, a collapsible chair designed by Wegner, with two notches on its underside for hanging when folded. Numerous manufacturers reproduced it as a fixed chair but retained the notches, turning them into a purely decorative element. Or consider the proliferation of curved chairbacks that emulated the Chair’s back and armrests. Designed to enable the joining of two rectangular blocks of wood, the Chair’s unique curve was a crucial part of its engineering, not an aesthetic decision but a structural one. The makers of the Chair’s many knock-offs kept the curve not because they were reproducing the Chair itself as a crafted, engineered object, but because they were reproducing the Chair as an idea, embodied by an image. If we subscribe to the adage that form follows function, then the reason that copycat designs looked the way they did is because the look made them salable.

I am tempted here to return not to Mad Men but to another piece of prestige television from an earlier era: Sex and the City. In the middle of the show’s run, when Carrie’s column is being optioned for a film in which Matthew McConaughey is apparently set to play Mr. Big, Carrie and the girls end up on a trip to Los Angeles. Once there, Samantha takes Carrie to a backyard in the Valley, where a man opens a trunk to reveal a mass of fake Fendis encased in thin, off-gassing, transparent plastic. Carrie purses her lips into a “no”—they’re very nice, but she doesn’t want them because they are fake. The originals conferred the appearance of something: status, good taste, and, above all, wealth. The fakes would communicate the same thing to everyone but their owners, who’d know they were a sham. That wasn’t good enough for Carrie.

Things have certainly changed. In the world of purses and bags, the market is saturated with fakes to such an extent that there are now prestige fakes more highly sought after than other run-of-the-mill fakes, and perhaps even more than the originals themselves. “Authenticity” is increasingly elusive at a time when replicas of the Chair far outnumber the originals. In the furniture world, the mainstream public is so removed from the fact that pieces are designed by specific people that, outside of specialist circles, there might as well be no such thing as an original.

Taft’s story culminates in a hall of mirrors: Once American manufacturers started producing their own Danish-style designs, Danish furniture makers started copying them. Danish originals gave way to American copies, which gave way to American originals, which gave way to Danish copies of the American originals, and so on and so forth. The furniture objects became a representation of the marketing and advertising slogans that the originals had inspired. And so we’re back to where we started. The 21st-century popularity of MCM-style furniture surely has to do with Mad Men’s aesthetic appeal and a recession-fueled nostalgia for the years of the postwar boom, but it might have even more to do with the very thorough and very successful decades-long marketing campaign for Danish Modern design. During a time of scarcity and strife—and yet another war—rich wood tones, hairpin legs, and wool upholstery could serve as a respite without veering into ostentation. The narrative had been long established, and the evidence for it could be found not just on TV but also in catalogs, photographs, and advertisements: MCM furniture was luxurious yet restrained, beautiful yet sober, unique yet egalitarian. It promised, through the simple act of buying, the image of a better life. In this way, it has never been a symbol of freedom or democracy, but rather of the way capitalism pushes people to treat consumption as the only way to achieve a different reality.