The V&A

The V&A celebrated success at this year’s awards, winning Best Licensed Brand, Museum, Art & Design in the 2022 Licensing International Excellence Awards. This is in recognition of the ongoing amazing creativity, expertise, and commitment of everybody involved in the V&A licensing programme. In addition, the V&A won Best Brand Licensed Homewares, Kitchen & Tabletop Range at this year’s B&LLA’s, for its collaboration with Richard Brendon on the V&A Reflect Series. The collection perfectly reframes original masterpieces in an imaginative way and is an homage to British craftsmanship both past and present. A stunning range that truly brings the archive inspiration, quite literally ‘to life’. The V&A’s activity in the fashion and accessories arena continues to expand. Lauren Sizeland, Head of Licensing, “We have a growing roster of apparel licensees including LeDiN, M.Latin and Cocoon in China; Pearly Gates and Ping in Korea; People Tree, Japan; and a debut collaboration with Love & Roses in the UK. The richness of our archives enables us to celebrate the breadth of the V&A’s collections, either capturing the beauty of nature or depicting more whimsical and narrative designs, satisfying a real diversity of markets.” The shared love of pattern and print has been encapsulated in a beautifully rich limited-edition collection with Love and Roses. The variety of the V&A’s collections has provided the fashion label’s in-house design and creative team with an invaluable creative print resource alongside unique and historic stories. The

V&A’s outstanding collections of floral textiles and natural history prints, spans many eras, from chinoiserie style furnishings to classic 1930s dress fabrics. This inspired range incorporates newly created patterns and offers modern silhouettes and colourful, bouquet-filled staples, designed to brighten every wardrobe and endless occasions. People Tree, the ethical fashion retailer, a pioneer in sustainable fair-trade fashion launched its ninth season with the V&A. It includes beautiful standout pieces, featuring ornate patterns reimagined in contemporary colour palettes, printed on to carefully sourced sustainable fabrics and crafted into classic People Tree styles. The collaboration was born out of a mutual appreciation of high-quality materials and a love of print, pattern and colour. The spring summer 2022 range features delicate floral motifs which are a reproduction of a cotton chintz and inspired by a fragment of block-printed fabric. In celebration of the museum’s exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, many licensees globally used archival inspiration to launch products, including M.Latin. Inspired by the enchanting tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, M.Latin has followed Alice down the rabbit hole and created a whimsical range of clothing featuring characters based on the humorous illustrations of John Tenniel. It offers a fantastic world of nonsense inhabited by white rabbits and playing card gardeners on tops, dresses and cute little outfits and keys and quotes from the original books.

East Asia is a key area of global expansion for the museum, with the launch with HealerB of V&A Beauty in Korea and Japan. V&A Beauty’s product and packaging embraces different eras and styles, featuring intricate patterns and photography. The collaboration recently won the Red Dot Design Award 2022 for packaging design. This year the V&A saw the successful introduction of V&A Beauty stores, with the opening of two permanent concessions in Seoul, Korea and Osaka, Japan within luxury department stores. Alongside this, there have been pop-up store openings in popular departments stores Lotte and Hyundai in Seoul with more to come by the end of 2022.

2022 also saw the ground-breaking launch of the first V&A and Chow Sang Sang Jewellery stores in K11 Musea, Hong Kong and The Londoner, Macau, with a truly one-ofa-kind jewellery shopping experience. It is a whole new world of modern jewellery presented alongside some examples of European art and design throughout the store interior, conjuring up the romance, sentiment and craftmanship that inspired it. This is a real cementation of the long-term collaboration over 15 years between the V&A and the retailer.