frame bag by konstantin grcic
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INTRODUCTION Writing about design
DISEGNO SALONS Announcing our upcoming lecture series
Exposé 22
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LUSTRE GABRIEL Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s crystal chandelier at the Palace of Versailles
THE PAST IS PRESENT Felix Chabluk Smith’s graduation collection enters the Costume Archive at the Met in New York
OBSERVATION 1 Céline’s sphere heel
WALK-IN ARCHIVE The new Clothworkers’ Centre designed by Haworth Tompkins architects OBSERVATION 2 ProtoPaper
THE PRACTICE OF THE EVERYDAY As his exhibition opens at the Serpentine Gallery, Martino Gamper reflects on the quotidian DIRTY READING Nina Power challenges the rise of titillation and objectification within design media OBSERVATION 3 Look 14 by Vivienne Westwood
LUDIC EXPERIMENTS Julia Lohmann shares her plans for developing kelp as a flexible design material
OBSERVATION 4 Titanium and acetate sunglasses
THE NEW MEDICI Critic Sarah Frater looks at how luxury brands have become the leading patrons of the arts
Features 59
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THE CONSTRUCTION OF A COLLECTION AND A COLLECTION OF CONSTRUCTIONS Designer and artist Nathalie Du Pasquier assembles a series of collages for the Disegno Residency NO COSY CORNERS Designer Konstantin Grcic prepares for a retrospective at the Vitra Design Museum
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CONTENTS
Disegno. 15
Lustre Gabriel It’s a few hours until the unveiling of Lustre Gabriel, a chandelier designed by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec for the Palace of Versailles. The French designers are pacing their studio in Belleville, Paris. The chandelier has been installed for over a week and the brothers have just finished giving feedback on a film about the project. >
22 Disegno. LUSTRE GABRIEL
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec look on as their chandelier is installed in the 20m-high Gabriel staircase at the Palace of Versailles. PHOTOS Linus Ricard
LUSTRE GABRIEL
Disegno. 23
The chandelier was built on site by a team of Swarovski engineers over a period of 24 hours, after three years of development work by the Bouroullecs.
> There is impatience rather than celebration in the air. Ronan doesn’t understand why there isn’t a shot of the chandelier in its entirety in the film, and Erwan is busy on a different project, hanging over the computer of one of their design assistants. “I have to consider the probability that when I die, it will still be there,” says Ronan. “Versailles is such a symbolic thing in France and having done this project is something that might stick to me as a label, a very strong one.” Approaching the Palace of Versailles to the southwest of Paris feels as if you’re entering a historical Disneyland. We all vaguely know the stories that were played out here, snippets of information picked up in history classes and countless films and books. This is not just one of France’s most celebrated and famous buildings, but also an ostentatious symbol of the Ancien Régime, which came to a bloody end with the French Revolution in 1789. Despite Versailles’ dubious symbolism, it’s been preserved, celebrated and improved over the past 200 years. About 6 million tourists visit annually to marvel at its Hall of Mirrors and Battles Gallery, as well as the once-upon-a-time bedchamber of Marie-Antoinette. Nowadays, many visitors enter the palace through the Gabriel staircase, a space only completed in 1985, but built according to the 1772 drawings of French architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel. This classicist and rather cold two-storey staircase, executed in stone and marble, is the setting for the Bouroullecs’ Lustre 24 Disegno. LUSTRE GABRIEL
Gabriel, or Gabriel Chandelier. “When I came for the first meeting with [then president of Versailles] Jean-Jacques Aillagon to discuss if we wanted to be part of an invited competition, I went just to be polite,” says Ronan. “I thought this wasn’t for us, as we never do unique pieces.” Yet three years on, there it hangs. A 12m-tall chandelier made up of four seemingly delicate strands of crystal, looped to form an organic decoration that illuminates the Gabriel staircase through the latest LED technology. The signature is undeniably Bouroullec, its sinuous lines and organically-created shape recalling their Lianes light installation at Galerie Kreo in 2010, or the Algues room-partitioning system for Vitra from 2004. And yet, it’s so other. The ostentation of crystal feels far removed from their previous material choices, but then again this project is quite unlike any of their other engagements. Ever since the Gabriel staircase was completed there has been a sense of something missing in the space. When Aillagon became president in 2007, he decided to tackle the void. “It’s a very dry space,” says Aillagon, “so when I arrived at Versailles I decided it should be given personality through an artistic or architectural intervention.” The proposal was Aillagon’s, but he had to consult the curators and the national administration of historical monuments to seek expert opinion. The decision was made easier by the fact that Aillagon had previously invited contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Japan’s Takashi Murakami to exhibit at the palace. Both set the scene for the proposal of a permanent
intervention. Contemporary sculpture, it turned out, looked intriguing against 17th-century architecture. “So, now the question was: ‘Should we commission an artist to execute a piece of art, a painting for the ceiling, for example, or commission a designer to create a piece of furniture?’” says Aillagon. He asked for advice from Martin Bethenod, then director of the FIAC art fair, now director of Palazzo Grassi in Venice. A competition was launched, not for ideas, but rather to ascertain suitable participants, and, upon the advice of Bethenod, Aillagon resolved to work with a designer. “There was a real need for furniture in this space, and therefore we didn’t need to think of transformation through a purely artistic lens,” says Aillagon. “Also, having a designer rather than an artist carrying out the transformation would be less likely to be polemical.” But that doesn’t mean Lustre Gabriel has nothing to say. Consisting of 800 crystal lenses fitted around a core of LED lights,
“Having a designer rather than an artist carrying out the transformation would be less likely to be polemical.” the chandelier’s physicality is palpable; with a weight of around 500kg, it still manages to look effortless. It even moves gently, a quality Erwan likens to Foucault’s pendulum, an experiment demonstrating the rotation of the Earth, named after French physicist Léon Foucault. “One of the big questions was how to be delicate and yet create something strong,” says Ronan. “Something with a contemporary character that worked with the space and still reflected us. We knew we probably had to create something big, because the space is 20m-high, so at first we tried to find a chameleon approach. For some months we thought that stone could be the material for this chandelier.” The result of those early experiments can be seen in the much smaller Perles de Jaspe necklace that the Bouroullecs created for Galerie Kreo in 2012 (Disegno No.4). Although stone was eventually replaced by crystal >
leather by
The Practice of Everyday Life Martino Gamper is frying eggs. The yolks are coagulating in the frying pan and when they reach just the right consistency he serves them up on two plates with toasted Turkish bread. Tea has already been poured into fragile porcelain cups. It’s a relatively simple breakfast, but a picturesque one, especially when placed on the table in Gamper’s east London studio. The tabletop is teal, with >
38 Disegno. THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Andrea Branzi’s 1981 Gritti Bookcase installed in Martino Gamper’s Design is a State of Mind. PHOTO Hugo Glendinning
THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Disegno. 39
> white segments that radiate from its centre. It was made by Gamper using fragments of discarded Gio Ponti furniture. “I’m interested in the parts of design that are to do with our everyday-ness,” he says. It’s this everyday-ness that Gamper has a formidable talent for imbuing with wonder. His work gives meaning to even mundane tasks – like frying an egg. The Italian designer is busy preparing an exhibition on this very theme, to be staged at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Design is a State of Mind opens in March and is only the gallery’s second design show, after Konstantin Grcic’s Design Real in 2009-10. While Design Real’s premise was to look at a series of industrially-made objects that represented the importance of good design in everyday life, Gamper’s show is less pointed – it is about how we engage with the things around us. The exhibition presents a series of shelving systems selected by Gamper but all created by different designers, ranging from Swedish functionalist Bruno Mathsson, to Italian experimentalists such as Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti. Each shelf serves as a display case for the personal collections of Gamper’s colleagues in the design industry. “The exhibition is about how you look at things, how you live with things, how you integrate design as part of your life,” says Gamper. Maki Suzuki is showing his collection of terracotta bricks, while Enzo Mari will share a collection of paperweights and Marc Newson a group of knives. The collections are also documented with supporting interviews and stories published in the exhibition catalogue, designed by Alex Rich. “I went to see Enzo Mari yesterday,” says Gamper. “We had a long conversation and he told me he thinks that he’s failed as a designer and that’s a little heartbreaking.” Italian designer Mari is in his 80s, and throughout his career has attempted to change the design industry, condemning its consumerism and vanity. His Autoprogettazione collection was
40 Disegno. THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Above: Maki Suzuki’s collection of terracotta bricks. Below: Martino Gamper sits in his studio in Hackney, east London. PHOTO Ben Quinton
a series of blueprints for making furniture from readily available components, disseminated free of charge, 40 years before the rise of the open-source movement. Though his ideas still impact on designers
upheld as the ideal. In Gamper’s own work, this is expressed through reworking already existing materials and designs. In his 100 Chairs in 100 Days project in 2007, he built a century of new chairs from existing
“The exhibition is about how you look at things, how you live with things, how you integrate design as part of your life.” and the system in which they operate, Mari does not consider them to be successful, because they have not yet changed the politics of the wider industry. “And that’s what’s changed in design,” says Gamper. “I don’t think we consider that there’s only one solution to everything anymore; there isn’t this one design that can solve every problem. Instead, there is design for different situations or for your geographical need.” In many ways, Gamper operates in the field French scholar Michel de Certeau wrote about in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). The book investigates how we shape the world around us by consuming it, thereby emphasising the importance of consumption in contrast to the 20th century’s more dominant concern: production. De Certeau’s book looks at the “art of doing”, where daily activities such as walking, reading, dwelling and cooking are considered acts of creativity and a form of resistance to the strictures of modern society. The design industry has traditionally been concerned with the efficiency of production, with great emphasis placed on mass manufacture. But in recent years the design process has changed drastically; industrial production is no longer always
ones. His Gio Ponti table – and the series it’s part of, If Only Gio Knew – functions in the same way. But Gamper is not solely preoccupied with making objects. In his practice, he has also developed disparate events such as Total Trattoria, a pop-up restaurant concept. It is this philosophy, rather than Gamper’s own work, that is expressed by Design is a State of Mind. A model of the Sackler Gallery sits on Gamper’s desk, complete with miniatures of the iconic shelving systems exhibited in the show. The designers’ collections have also started arriving, the plastic crates they are stored in taking up the studio floor. It’s a curious juxtaposition that these shelves, which experimented with ways of manufacture and production in the mid-20th century, will serve as exhibition display cases for the objects collected by contemporary designers from the detritus of everyday life. Yet it is a concept that serves as a perfect example of De Certeau’s ideas in real life. Everyday life.
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Johanna Agerman Ross is the founder and editor-in-chief of Disegno. Design is a State of Mind is at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, until 21 April 2014.
Purism. Sensuality. Intelligence. To see what else bulthaup kitchens have to offer, contact your local retail partner www.en.bulthaup.com/dealers
Bath, Belfast, Cheshire, Clerkenwell, Dublin, Edinburgh, Exeter, Glasgow, Holland Park, Mayfair, Oxford, Putney, Swindon, Winchester
Konstantin Grcic at his apartment in Berlin’s Hansaviertel housing estate. Grcic’s studio is based in Munich, but the Berlin apartment serves as a space for quiet reflection.
64 Disegno. NO COSY CORNERS
No Cosy Corners Konstantin Grcic has forged his career through uncompromising devotion to the ideals of industrial design. Now, an exhibition at Vitra Design Museum will spell out his vision for the future and challenge the format of retrospectives. WORDS Jana Scholze and Johanna Agerman Ross PHOTOS Linus Ricard
NO COSY CORNERS
Disegno. 65
I
1 Antonello da Messina (c.1430-1479) was a Sicilian-born Renaissance painter strongly influenced by early Netherlandish paintings.
Interbau was a large-scale architecture project in West Berlin in 1957 that took the form of a exhibition. Only part of the development was completed in time; the remaining 35 buildings were added by 1960.
2
Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx Allee) was a monumental boulevard in East Berlin built by the GDR in the 1950s. Its socialist-style towers were designed by Egon Hartmann, Hanns Hopp, Kurt W. Leucht, Richard Paulick and Karl Souradny, bookended with towers by Hermann Henselmann (1905-1995) in the wedding-cake style of socialist classicism.
3
66 Disegno. NO COSY CORNERS
n room 62 of the National Gallery in London hangs a small painting by 15th-century Sicilian artist Antonello da Messina.1 Little bigger than an A3 sheet of paper, it portrays 4th-century Christian theologian Saint Jerome reading in his study – a peculiar piece of miniature architecture, or a very large piece of furniture, sitting within a vast ecclesiastical space. At its base, small steps lead up to a platform where Jerome sits in deep concentration. The shelves behind him contain various objects of symbolic and religious nature, while arched windows reveal a view of a field, a town and birds in flight. “That picture has been important to me for a long time,” says German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic. “It’s in my library of references.” A three-room apartment in an Alvar Aalto-designed building in Hansaviertel, Berlin, is Grcic’s equivalent of Jerome’s study – a quiet retreat from his Munich studio. He has a view of the other buildings in the Interbau2 estate, which was initiated on the occasion of 1957’s International Building Exhibition. It was West Berlin’s response to Hermann Henselmann et al.’s no-lessfamous East Berlin socialist building project Stalinallee,3 created during the Cold War when buildings functioned as propaganda for political systems on either side of the Wall. In the west, celebrated international architects such as Arne Jacobsen and Oscar Niemeyer were commissioned to rebuild Hansaviertel adjacent to Berlin’s central park, the Tiergarten. Today, the area is quiet and green, and many residents remain from its inauguration more than 50 years ago. The wellpreserved buildings make it a much-visited design destination, but compared to the bustling central neighbourhoods that have come to define Berlin in recent years, it’s something of an oddity. Grcic retreats to Berlin for about 10 days a month. The rest of the time, if he’s not travelling, he spends in Munich. “The Berlin space has an element of freedom to it,” says Grcic, wearing what seems to have become a uniform: dark-rimmed glasses, dark jeans, a navy sweater, a dark-blue blazer and his hair slicked-back. His high-top black leather loafers are pristine; he looks comfortable, but smart. “I am so used to working with assistants and having constant dialogue and distraction, so being on my own is a very strong experience,” he says. “I’m confronted with my own limitations, which is nice as it forces me to think twice and a little harder.”
Such reflection is typical of Grcic. Even 25 years into a successful career as an industrial designer, he remains restless and humble. He has weathered 1990s minimalism, the ostentation of the 2000s and the recent recession, and given into none. Instead, he has cultivated his own language, creating objects and furniture that push boundaries of both manufacture and use. Chairs by Grcic such as 360° and Chair One for Italian furniture manufacturer Magis became instantly recognisable expressions of the early 21st-century and its modes of production. His largest forthcoming project however – developed over three years – is not a product or piece of furniture. It is an exhibition, a format to which Grcic feels close. “Exhibition-making feels very familiar to me,” he says. “My mother had an art gallery and exhibitions were a part of the >
A tubular steel chair from from the Midtown project for Muji sits under the Pipe desk for Muji-Thonet in one room of the apartment. In the foreground is Grcic’s School side-table, manufactured by Böwer.
NO COSY CORNERS
Disegno. 67
Colour in Design It is an often overlooked subject for discussion, yet can fundamentally alter the experience of design. We look at the thinking behind colour. WORDS Anna Bates PHOTOS Michael Bodiam SET DESIGN Sarah Parker
82 Disegno. COLOUR IN DESIGN
Wogg 57 bookends by Loris & Livia for Wogg. A reflection of Constance Guisset’s Chantilly lamp for Moustache can be seen in the middle bookend.
COLOUR IN DESIGN
Disegno. 83
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British designer Sebastian Wrong (b. 1971) was a founding member of Established & Sons and is now the creative director of Wrong for Hay.
1
Based in London, Sebastian Bergne (b. 1966) is known for his work for German plastics company Authentics, French home electronics brand Moulinex and Italian manufacturer Driade.
2
Founded in 1950 by Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, Vitra is a family-owned Swiss furniture manufacturer that has since expanded into all facets of interior and furniture design.
3
Hella Jongerius (b. 1963) is founder of Jongeriuslab. She combines traditional craftsmanship with industrial manufacturing and new technologies.
4
5
See p. 22.
84 Disegno. COLOUR IN DESIGN
rocess, materials, form, production: interview a designer and the same topics come up. You may hear about the concept behind a work or how a personal memory shaped a design. But there is one subject that typically remains untouched by interviewer and interviewee: colour.
Colour is a decision that confronts every design, yet it remains largely unspoken. “It is completely underappreciated and underwritten,” says Sebastian Wrong,1 creative director of Wrong for Hay. But the industry’s ambivalence towards colour extends beyond journalism and into design itself. While colour has a proven ability to affect our emotions, it is often an afterthought; something “left to the end”, according to Industrial Facility’s Sam Hecht. For most designers, colour’s characteristics, behaviour and material properties remain a mystery.
In part, the reason for this silence is because colour bows to the market. The colour of a product is frequently driven by commercial sense, rather than design thinking. “I worked for Authentics,” says industrial designer Sebastian Bergne,2 “and colour was really important for them, but mainly – as it turned out – in communications. Although they presented their products in 12 colours, they sold 80 per cent in blue, black or white.” Very slowly, these statistics have started to shift. Ten years ago, Swiss brand Vitra3 sold 90 per cent of its products in black, white or grey, and it offered a choice of just 10 colours. Now, it offers 28. “Something has changed,” says Dutch designer Hella Jongerius,4 the brand’s new art director for colours and surfaces. “They’re convinced there’s a market.” Yet the move towards colour is not based entirely on instinct. Vitra has recorded a 20 per cent decrease in the number of products bought in greyscale. It is not a huge shift, but one the brand deems significant enough to act on. A desire for colour has also trickled into the mainstream. When Apple debuted its coloured iPhones last year, only 10 per cent of customers bought white. “I think it’s coming from fashion,” says Bergne. “People are talking about colour in a way they didn’t used to – they are even aware of Pantone.” But if the market for colour is growing more sophisticated, how is the industry reacting?
An immediate issue for designers is the sheer freedom afforded by the variety of available colours. “Actually, the subject of colour makes us feel a bit… unbalanced,” says French designer Erwan Bouroullec.5 “In product design a lot of factors need to be taken into consideration, like cost and weight. But for colour, there are no parameters.” This never-ending wheel of possibilities is a space most designers feel uncomfortable with; dealing with colour is not a feature of their training. “We did a brief project with a colour wheel,” says Bergne, reflecting on his design-school years. “And after that you don’t address it.” >
Clockwise from top left: W103 lamp by Inga Sempé for Wästberg, Serve table by Wrong For Hay, Profil shelf by Jörg Schellmann for e15 and Pal stool by Hallgeir Homstvedt for One Nordic.
COLOUR IN DESIGN
Disegno. 85
The Centenary of Lina Bo Bardi A mid-20th-century architect and designer, Lina Bo Bardi is only now gaining the recognition she deserves. New exhibitions and furniture editions join her building projects in Bo Bardi’s adopted home of Brazil, testifying to her architecture of freedom, flexibility and democracy. WORDS Edwin Heathcote PHOTOS Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi
98 Disegno. THE CENTENARY OF LINA BO BARDI
An interior view photomontage of Bo Bardi’s Museu à Beira do Oceano, 1951. The museum was an unrealised project for Sã Vicente. Bo Bardi adopted elements of the design for her 1968 MASP museum.
THE CENTENARY OF LINA BO BARDI
Disegno. 99
L 1 John Cage (1912-92) was an American composer, artist and music theorist.
Brutalism was coined by English architects Alison and Peter Smithson in 1953 as a derivation of the French béton brut: exposed concrete.
2
3 A belvedere is a structure built to take in a view. The one in Trianon Park, São Paulo was protected so MASP was built around it. 4
See p. 198.
Irish modernist architect and designer Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was known for the Bibendum Chair.
5
Storefront for Art and Architecture is a nonprofit organisation founded in 1982 by architect Kyong Park.
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7 The British Council was founded in 1934 as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries.
The Insides are on the Outside was a 2012 exhibition with work by artists and architects inspired by Bo Bardi.
8
Arper is an Italian furniture brand founded by Luigi Feltrin in 1989.
9
ina Bo Bardi once told a story about composer and musician John Cage.1 He was being driven down São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista when he suddenly asked the driver to stop outside the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), a brutalist2 building designed by Bo Bardi and completed in 1968. Cage walked the length of the belvedere3 that runs beneath and around the massive concrete structure, flung his arms out wide and shouted: “This is the architecture of freedom!”
What architect wouldn’t delight in telling that story? But in Bo Bardi’s case, it seems more justified and less self-aggrandising than it might from others. Hers really was an architecture of freedom, of democracy. It was an architecture that allowed its users to adapt, inhabit and feel it was theirs.
Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92) was one of the great architects of the 20th century. Along with Charlotte Perriand4 and Eileen Gray,5 she was one of the pioneering women of modernism and designed some of Brazil’s most popular, striking and enduring modernist masterpieces. Although her works have always been a bedrock reference of South American architecture, they have been largely unheralded elsewhere. Now, however, they are finding an international audience. The widespread acclaim that evaded Bo Bardi in her lifetime is beginning to accrue.
In December last year New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture6 held a 99th birthday party for Bo Bardi, while the exhibition Lina Bo Bardi: Together – which debuted incongruously outside London’s chilly British Council7 offices in 2012 – is now touring Europe. Elsewhere, Rowan Moore’s book Why We Build (2012) used Bo Bardi as the central figure to explain its theory of how a more humane modernism might illuminate our lives, and in 2013 Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist staged an art exhibition8 at Bo Bardi’s São Paulo house, Casa de Vidro.
Even Bo Bardi’s original work has begun to be reproduced. Last year the Italian manufacturer Arper9 launched an edition of her prototype Bowl Chair, while Izé10 has commercially developed the horn-like door handles she designed for Casa de Vidro. Such a reversal in Bo Bardi’s standing 22 years after her death is an extraordinary development. What is it that makes her so relevant to contemporary design and architecture practice? Bo Bardi (née Achillina Bo) was born in Rome, where she gained a degree in architecture. After graduation she moved to Milan and worked for architect Carlo Pagani11 and later with the great architectural polymath Gio Ponti.12 In Milan, Bo Bardi combined her architectural work with a writing career, assuming the role of deputy director of Domus magazine in 1943. But fascism and the wartime years were not conducive to the practice or everyday life of an architect, a situation exacerbated by Bo Bardi’s membership of the Italian Communist Party.13 So, despite becoming involved in the planning of Italy’s post-war reconstruction, in 1946 Bo Bardi moved to Brazil >
100 Disegno. THE CENTENARY OF LINA BO BARDI
Lina Bo Bardi in Kamakura, Japan, 1978.
THE CENTENARY OF LINA BO BARDI
Disegno. 101
Studio Job’s set, The Wall, for Viktor & Rolf’s spring/ summer 2014 show. PHOTO Bureau Betak
164 Disegno. CONSPICUOUS CONSTRUCTION
Conspicuous Construction Catwalk shows for major fashion houses are increasingly like Hollywood film sets, created by architecture and design studios with an eye on the all-important online afterlife, where brand identity is cemented. WORDS Caroline Evans
CONSPICUOUS CONSTRUCTION
Disegno. 165
F 1 British fashion designer John Galliano (b. 1960) headed Dior from 1996 to 2011. 2
See p. 152.
3
See p. 152.
Dior was founded in 1946 by Christian Dior. It is headed by Raf Simons (b. 1968).
4
5 Givenchy was founded in 1952 by Hubert de Givenchy. Riccardo Tisci (b. 1974) is the creative director.
Chanel was founded by Coco Chanel in 1909. Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1933) is at the helm.
6
7 Louis Vuitton was founded in 1854 by the eponymous luggage-maker. The creative director is Nicolas Ghesquière.
Prada was founded in 1913 by Mario and Martino Prada. Mario’s granddaughter Miuccia Prada is the head.
8
Studio Job is based in Antwerp. It was founded by Job Smeets (b. 1970) in 1998, who was joined by Nynke Tynagel (b. 1977) in 2000.
9
ashion shows of the 1990s were characterised by spectacle and performance. British designers such as John Galliano,1 Alexander McQueen2 and Hussein Chalayan3 overreached to produce shock effects that got them backers, buyers and press. It was these Londoners’ capacity to create spectacle that led French couture houses Dior4 and Givenchy5 to recruit Galliano and McQueen to their Paris catwalks as principal designers in the mid to late 90s. Nowadays, however, young independent designers rarely stage such bravura shows, instead leaving the field open to the big brands. It has increasingly been large, luxury fashion firms such as Chanel,6 Louis Vuitton7 and Prada8 whose shows have featured heavily constructed sets and consummate mises-en-scène.
In the spring/summer 2014 catwalk schedule they reached an apogee. What was once a fly-bynight format had morphed into monumental architecture. So vast and substantial were their sets that it was hard to believe these behemoths were created for a live performance lasting no more than 15 to 20 minutes. For all their brevity, however, these shows have a much longer, and more accessible, afterlife. Fashion shows are now filmed as well as photographed, then posted online. Designers and show producers alike are well aware of their potential longevity as moving image. “The view from the ‘photographers army’ is very important, but of course you have to take the public into consideration, as well as the stills and videos,” says Nynke Tynagel, who together with Job Smeets makes up Studio Job,9 responsible for the scenography for many of Viktor & Rolf’s10 catwalk shows since 2001. Watching the shows in their online format, one can’t help noticing that some of them look more like giant Hollywood film sets than architecture or interior design. For his swansong at Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs11 featured a mash-up of previous show decor, rearranged on an epic scale into something resembling a Baz Luhrmann12 film set – in funereal shades of black. Emphasising the film-fashion interface, the follow-up ad campaign, shot by Steven Meisel,13 featured a number of Jacobs’ muses from film and fashion, each clutching a different version of the Louis Vuitton Noé handbag. They included US director Sofia Coppola, veteran French model and actor Catherine Deneuve, and 2013 model of the year Edie Campbell, who had opened the show in a vast black peacock-feather headdress and Vuitton-logoed transparent body stocking. She led the way along a labyrinthine route that took models in and out of a functioning lift, up and down two moving escalators, along a mezzanine gallery punctuated by hotel-room doors, onto a fairground carousel and around an ornate fountain resembling a piece of 19th-century civic sculpture. The Luhrmann riff continued at Dior, where show >
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This page and next page: Dior spring/summer 2014 RTW show was produced by Bureau Betak with fake and real flowers by Eric Chauvin. It was set in a pop–up structure in the garden of Musée Rodin. PHOTO Adrien Dirand
CONSPICUOUS CONSTRUCTION
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