When the Wallpaper* Beauty & Grooming channel launched in February 2020, we had no sense of the seismic shifts the beauty industry was about to undergo. Beauty is always an intriguing lens through which to view culture at large, and over the course of nearly two years we have tried to offer coverage that examines various definitions of beauty, the technology developed to achieve those definitions, and the creatives who challenge it. 

Below is Wallpaper’s Mary Cleary’s pick of 10 stories from 2021 (in no particular order) that showcase some of the innovations in beauty and grooming over the past year, from make-up that looks different in physical and digital realities, to a new tattoo ink that lasts exactly one year, and skincare inspired by the reproductive biology of black widow spiders. 

Top 10 beauty & grooming innovation stories of the year

01. What is the future of beauty post-Covid?

Wallpaper* imagined what beauty would look like in a post-pandemic world. In this theoretical cosmetic landscape, the ubiquity of mask-wearing, increased time indoors, and an obsession with health created an interest in both clinically minimal features and expressionistic applications of colour. 

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02. What will beauty look like in 2030? A new report investigates

We expanded our look towards the future of beauty in this article, using the insight report ‘Absent Beauty’ from Lucy Hardcastle Studio as the basis of our investigation. 

What, we asked, does beauty mean in our post-2020 world? How has this period of illness and isolation shifted our understanding of what is desirable in ourselves and others? How will individuals manifest beauty in the years to come? Hardcastle posits that as we become more obsessed with our biology and more reliant on technology, we will continue to transform ourselves into data points. As our physical health and mental wellbeing become things we quantify and measure, we will, in effect, make ourselves into machines. 

At the same time, we will also crave an escape from technology that will trigger the rise of ‘physiological nostalgia’ technology. These future devices will use tech to trigger peaceful, bodily sensations with new forms of  audio escapism and aromatherapy becoming particularly popular.   

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03. New beauty brand challenges our perceptions of reality

For years, The Unseen has quietly been working on ingenious innovations in material science. A few years ago it created an environmentally responsive hair dye, which morphs from black to red depending on the surrounding temperature. It has also crafted a chameleon-like headpiece made in collaboration with Swarovski and a team of neuroscientists, which uses gemstones coated in temperature-sensitive, colour-changing ink that responds to the wearer’s brain activity.

In 2021, The Unseen launched the first product in what will soon become a full-blown beauty line. Called 

Spectra, it is a reflective cream eye that transforms under a phone camera’s flash so that what looks like a subtle grey in real life appears as a glittery black in photographs. Like all creation’s from The Unseen, Spectra’s dazzling appearance belies its examination of a larger philosophical question. In this case – how can we create a beauty product that caters to both our physical and digital existence? 

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04. Groom mates: innovative men’s beauty brands

While the past few years have seen a flourishing of genderless fragrances and make-up for men, innovative, inclusive approaches to male skincare and wellness have remained few and far between. 

In this piece we examined some of the most intriguing men’s grooming brands from the past year, including Tracaris, a New York brand catering to ‘a new wave of masculinity’, and Asystem, a subscription-based line of skincare and supplements designed to work in tune with men’s natural hormone cycles.

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05. Vanishing tattoos? This is ink with commitment issues

Ephemeral Tattoo is a Brooklyn-based tattoo shop that has just changed the relationship status with your ink from a life-long commitment to a year-long fling. Opened in 2021, Ephemeral has revolutionised the industry with its unique fade-able ink that looks just like the real deal but only lasts for nine to 15 months. 

In this piece, we examine the science behind Ephemeral’s ink and explore the lasting impact this innovation will have on an industry that was once defined by permeance. 

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06. Are biomaterials the future of beauty packaging?

Sustainable packaging is one of the biggest challenges facing the beauty industry today. A report by the foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory notes that the cosmetics industry creates 120 billion units of packaging a year and predicts that by 2050 the beauty industry will have contributed up to 12 billion tonnes of plastic to landfill.

In this article addressing one of the most pressing innovations in beauty, we looked at some of the innovative plastic alternatives that beauty brands have developed in recent years – from boxes made out of mushrooms, to packaging that completely dissolves in water. 

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07. Discover nail art inspired by our September 2021 Style Issue

Our September Style issue is always a party in print, with pages bursting with the brightest talent that fashion has to offer. This year’s edition, however, was a particularly riotous affair. Shoots focused on the possibility of roaring back into life post-lockdowns with a party-ready uniform that suits the occasion. To keep the celebration going, we rekindled our nail art collaboration with Paintbox NYC with a new set of designs inspired by the looks in Wallpaper’s September 2021 issue. 

Glitter, feathers, punchy colour palettes, and bold geometries are all on show within the issue’s pages, and Paintbox’s nail designs demonstrate a complementary exuberance while still being straight-forward enough to recreate at home.

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08. Renowned architects design sculptural beauty packaging

Kengo Kuma, Oskar Leo Kaufmann, and Tokujin Yoshioka are three architects who have taken beauty packaging to new heights, applying their knowledge of structure and form to everything from skincare containers to facial rollers. 

In this article we look at what happens when minds accustomed to create monumental structures try making objects for your bathroom shelf. 

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09. Chemical romance: this is lab-made beauty at its finest

Beauty and science have long been intertwined. Most beauty products are created in laboratories by researchers well-versed in the combination of chemicals used in skincare or the molecules that make up perfumes. However, in this article we examined a few scientists who are applying their technical insight to create uniquely groundbreaking products. 

These include Wendy Ouriel, whose investigations into the reproductive biology of black widow spiders inspired the anti-aging formulations within her skincare line; and Christine Nagel, the in-house perfumer at Hermès who used her background in organic chemistry to develop a new molecule for the H24 men’s cologne. 

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10. Hairstylist Issac Poleon on finding wigs and easy up-dos

‘A perfectionist view of imperfection’ is how Issac Poleon describes the style of his work, and it’s true that this London-based hairstylist has a particular knack for creating flawlessly executed designs with an expressionist, sculptural flair.

In this article we asked Poleon – who has worked with Gucci, Burberry, Louis Vuitton and Browns – to talk us through all kinds of hair how-tos, from wearing wigs to managing extensions. 

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Menswear designers walked on the bright side for A/W 2021, going for bold with silhouettes in vibrant, eye-catching hues. Our advice on how to sport these punchy, prismatic tones? Pick a shade from the colour spectrum, the more standout the better, and make it your signature for the season – with one of these men’s coats for winter, for example. 

An outerwear piece is an effective way to work colourful exuberance into your wardrobe, and a host of brands are advocating tailored, utilitarian or sportswear-centric jackets, coats and outerwear in zesty, high-alert hues. These men’s winter coats advocate a cheerful style approach, in a season often marred by dark nights, nippy temperatures and a tendency towards hibernation. 

In a bid to inject ‘optimism’, Milanese brand Prada proposed hot pink, in a collection that featured snuggly knitted bodysuits in retro patterned intarsia, bright leather gloves and pillow-like oversized clutch bags. Louis Vuitton men’s artistic director Virgil Abloh injected pillar box-red into his collection for the Parisian maison, serving up a spectrum of silhouettes spanning tailoring, kilts, traditional Ghanian dress and sportswear. Florentine brand Salvatore Ferragamo and British label Dunhill experimented with oceanic tones such as creamy shades of sea foam and cerulean. The former, Italian brand was inspired by interstellar dressing for A/W 2021, referencing otherworldly movie wardrobes and films and television series including The Matrix and Doctor Who.

Men’s coats for winter: colour it in with Dunhill, Prada,

For maximum dressing impact, we suggest experimenting with men’s coats for winter in tactile fabrications, like leather or high gloss. These will withstand the chill of winter, but will also ensure you shine style-wise all season. These head-turning materials will emphasise the multifarious shades of A/W 2021’s pencil box of prismatic tones – shades that will transcend trends and seasons and stand out long after 2021 – whether you err towards fuchsia, pillar box-red or sea foam. 

INFORMATION

A version of this article appears in the December 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*272), on newsstands and available to subscribers.

Technically minded face mask brand Xupermask – the venture of Will.i.am and technology company Honeywell – has unveiled a new limited-edition collection. The new Xuperfab Mask builds on the high-concept codes of the brand’s original masks, launched earlier in 2021, with nods to audio engineering and enhanced wearability.

In this new limited edition, the olfactory experience of the wearer is considered, with scented applications providing a delightful aromatherapy experience. Each fabric mask, designed in LA, comes with a personalised patch system – allowing the wearer to switch up their look as the mood takes them – scented applications, earbud holders and Honeywell filter inserts. The fabric is moisture-resistant, making this a hygienic addition to your face masks wardrobe. 

Xupermask’s first series of designs debuted in April 2021, when Will.i.am partnered with Honeywell to create masks that go one – or five – steps further than your average scrap of fabric. The original Xupermasks, in silicon with mesh fabric sides, boast an advanced ventilation system, as well as an audio control panel, LED lights, noise reduction microphone, and noise-cancelling earbuds. Safety, obviously, is the priority, and the filter inserts have been rigorously tested to keep out the vast majority of particles, with a fresh one used every day.

As an alternative, the limited-edition Xuperfab Mask, which comes in a case with 18 patches, 12 Honeywell filter inserts and 54 scented stickers, offers the wearer the chance to choose which aesthetic they fancy on a daily basis.

‘As Xupermask continues to innovate new concepts and collaborate with Honeywell, I knew there would be more ways to keep safety as a priority. The Xuperfab Mask is the everyday answer to wearing a mask, and personalising,’ says Will.i.am. Adds John Waldron, president and chief executive officer of Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions: ‘Masks and face coverings have become a staple in our day-to-day lives, and consumers are looking for masks that are comfortable and stylish. By combining Honeywell’s protective filter inserts with the Xuperfab Mask, we’re making sure the next generation of masks work harder for those who wear them.’

INFORMATION

xupermask.com

Over the last 60 years, Michael Craig-Martin has documented the evolution of objects that have defined our lives. The Irish-born artist, who has just turned 80, will soon unveil his first solo exhibition The Netherlands at Reflex Amsterdam, turning his attention to the most recent additions to our visual vocabulary. 

The Dublin-born artist spent his formative years in the US. He moved to London in the 1960s and began taking the conceptual art world by storm with his majestic take on the mundane. As a tutor at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, he had a searing influence on the then-fledgling Young British Artists, including Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, and Damien Hirst. 

In the 1990s, the artist pivoted to painting, but his powder-coated steel sculptures – bold-coloured, linear structures that appear like drawings in mid-air – remain an instantly recognisable facet of his work. Fountain Pen (2019), recently installed outside the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, imbues an object synonymous with function with a sense of regal grandeur.

‘All Things Considered’ at Reflex Amsterdam features paintings from the last six years alongside new works. Mostly in 2020, these works emphasise our new over-familiarity with our domestic spaces and the intimacy of household consumer objects. Among his subjects are a bunch of blue bananas, an Apple Watch, and a coffee cup, all reduced to bold, minimal, exacting lines and reimagined in all-consuming planes of colour. 

‘I am always looking for new things to draw and several objects quickly took on a new importance: masks, bottles of sanitising gel, and our laptops’, says Craig-Martin, who created the majority of these new works in 2020. ‘Those objects, but especially the mask, will, in future, immediately recall these times for all who lived through them.’

The paintings are not rendered on canvas, as one might readily assume, but aluminium. ‘There are many attractions about canvas, but for my work, aluminium makes obvious sense. My paintings are made using tape and small rollers, both of which require a surface that resists (which canvas does not do)', he explains. ‘Painting on aluminium allows me to see exactly what I am doing and work directly.’

‘The paintings always start with drawings. I make drawings of individual objects directly on the computer with the mouse. I never make one of these drawings with a particular work in mind. I simply add it to my now vast compendium of such images for possible future use,’ he says. ‘Because of the precise nature of my work, changes when painting are difficult and sometimes impossible. The spontaneity in their creation takes place in the planning which again is all done on the computer. It is a wonderfully flexible tool.’

This bold replication of the ‘things’ that accompany our newly-altered world feels profound; yet the exhibition title, ‘All Things Considered’ feels optimistic. Craig-Martin has turned objects of necessity, banality and consumer culture into luscious, candy-coloured objects of desire.

INFORMATION

Michael Craig-Martin, ’All Things Considered’, 2 October - 15 December 2021, Reflex Amsterdam. reflexamsterdam.com

ADDRESS

Weteringschans 79A
1017 RX Amsterdam

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When I first saw Yosuke Ushigome, now director at Takram's London office, he was part of an exhibition at Tokyo's 21_21 Design Sight in 2015. In a video titled Professional Sharing, Ushigome wears a homemade jacket with solar panels and pockets for various digital devices. He walks around Shibuya, as per requests from real-time clients, and gets paid for taking specific pictures at specific locations. Sometime during the video, he takes an online break while lending his devices’ processing powers to someone mining a digital currency. Later he queues up at a popular restaurant on someone else’s behalf, and likewise gets paid for his time. It was the sharing economy taken to the extreme, and a peek into the not-too-distant future, as he saw it at the time. 

Yosuke Ushigome, creative technologist

Ushigome calls himself a creative technologist. He studied system design engineering and later mechano-informatics in Tokyo before doing a master’s in design interactions at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. ‘I wanted to be better at communicating technological and engineering ideas from a more humanistic perspective,’ he explains. He studied under Critical Design pioneers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and has been working in design and technology ever since. ‘I believe in the power of design to make ideas tangible – not to make you buy more, but to make you think.’

After graduating from the RCA, he freelanced and worked briefly at design studio Superflux in London before Takram approached him (and fellow RCA alumni Miles Pennington and Lukas Franciszkiewicz) in 2014 to help start its London office. 

Today, Ushigome continues to spend much of his time visualising and speculating on what the future might look like. ‘Takram started out as a company trying to bridge design and engineering, but today we do more work helping our clients define their vision,’ Ushigome explains over Zoom.

With about 40 people in Tokyo, four in London and two in New York, Takram is the first Japanese design innovation studio to go fully global. Its services include branding, product and service design, and what it calls ‘future vision design proposals’. It’s not always easy to put one’s finger on exactly what the company does. Scrolling through its website doesn’t necessarily make it all that much clearer: there is a project featuring a cute-looking agricultural robot; a couple of branding projects for a small fruit farm in Hokkaido and Japan’s largest online flea-market platform Mercari; and also, what on the homepage is described as a ‘speculative design proposal for an automatic toileting system’, adequately named Heavy Load. 

Design is what ties all of these seemingly very different projects together. ‘We really believe in the power of design, and design as part of research,’ explains Ushigome, who works on most of Takram’s more speculative and futuristic projects. Professional Sharing is a good example of how the company uses design to try and suggest what the future might look like. By realising and showcasing their visions, the designers encourage stakeholders and the public at large to think about what can lie ahead.

Humanising big data

Another example of using design to try and engage people to think more about the future is the RISAR prototype app, presented at the 2020 Design Indaba conference in Cape Town. On the app, people are asked simple questions that have a direct effect on the rising sea levels, like how they commute to work. Depending on their choices and their physical location, the app predicts and demonstrates how they might experience the rise of sea levels. 

Using a phone camera and augmented reality technology, users can see the virtual sea rise right in their living room or in the park if they make environmentally irresponsible decisions. ‘Of course, this is all a bit oversimplified, but I think it’s a great way of humanising big data,’ Ushigome says. It’s a simple but powerful way of explaining something as complex as climate change; the amount of publicly available data on such phenomena can be overwhelming and difficult to relate to everyday life, but seeing your kitchen slowly fill up with water because you consistently take the car rather than ride a bicycle to work drives the issue home.

Such self-initiated projects often generate quite a bit of interest, which in turn helps Takram expand its service portfolio. Sometimes these projects are fully self-funded, other times Takram might approach another company with an idea, in the hope of collaboration and funding opportunities. Companies and government agencies also contact Takram for specific projects, such as the prototype Regional Economy Society Analysing System (RESAS) developed for the Japanese government in 2015. RESAS is a web-based system that gives clear and visually pleasing representations of nationwide data on topics such as population, economics, tourism and consumption, sourced from Japan’s central Teikoku Databank. It is used today by policymakers throughout the country to make sense of phenomena such as the movement of people or goods within and across different prefectures, or the change in economic growth in one area compared to another. It is another example of what Ushigome likes to refer to as the humanisation of data. ‘Data is only useful and relevant if understood, and design can be an excellent tool in making it so,’ he says.

Over the last 18 months, Takram has been working together with Hitachi’s Research & Development Group to create a website, sustainability-transitions.com, to share ideas for building a more sustainable world in small increments, or ‘transitions’. It features key findings from interviews with 12 leaders in sustainability, from Jonelle Simunich, a senior foresight strategist at Arup, to Yuji Yoshimura, a professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. ‘Thinking in transitions can give us a much fuller picture of how we build a sustainable future,’ it reads. ‘And it gives us practical, concrete steps we can take to help get us there.’

The website proposes ten transitions, including Centralised to Distributed, Degenerative to Regenerative, and Fossil to Renewable, and explains why they are necessary to build a sustainable future. It outlines opposing sets of qualities that define the current world (which sees energy as a resource, gradually running out while polluting the environment) and a preferable world (energy as a flow, renewably supplied and non-destructive). Importantly, it also offers very concrete proposals as to what each individual can do to help these transitional changes. 

‘I think that with Covid, being able to highlight and facilitate these kinds of discussions about the future is perhaps more important than ever,’ Ushigome says. He goes on to explain that, if anything, Takram has received more enquiries because of the pandemic. Perhaps clients are more willing to entertain speculative design proposals in uncertain times such as these? Takram and Ushigome might not have all the answers, but their innovative and forward-looking approach is sure to make you stop and think.

INFORMATION

takram.comyosukeushigo.me

The V&A unveils its new contemporary design gallery. ‘Design: 1900 – Now’ presents over 250 objects including furniture design, fashion, media and technology, with a focus on design and society charting the evolution of man-made objects from craftsmanship to the digital age.

The gallery’s display, explains Johanna Agerman Ross, ‘aims to position design as a means for understanding the way we live together, and to explore how designed things prompt us to ask questions of our past, present and future’. Agerman Ross joined the V&A in 2016 as curator of twentieth century and contemporary furniture, and has worked closely with senior curator of design and digital, Corinna Gardner, on the displays. 

After nearly two years of closure – the gallery has been in the making since autumn 2019 and was delayed by the pandemic – the space reopens to the public with more than 50 new acquisitions and a new focus on the Museum’s Rapid Response collecting project, showcasing design objects that respond to current social themes including, most recently, pandemic design and responses to episodes of racism.   

‘Design: 1900 – Now’ at the V&A

‘We thought about the pressing issues of today, and how they might be informed or reflected by the recent past,’ says Gardner. ‘We asked ourselves, “Where is design at its most current”? Society impacts on design, but design also impacts on society: how do we reflect that across the past 120-plus years?’

The curators’ approach features six major themes, roughly arranged in chronological order, including: Automation and Labour, covering the earlier part of the 20th century up to the 1930s; Housing and Living, looking at domestic innovations between 1920 and 1940; Crisis and Conflict, focusing on the period between 1935 and 1955. Across the hall, inside one of the V&A’s library spaces, is the Consumption and Identity display, exploring the period between 1955 and 1975, and Sustainability and Subversion, looking at the 1960s up to the year 2000. A further section on Data and Consumption explores the past two decades and the more technological side of design. The curators stress that these sections aren’t offering a strict chronological perspective; in fact, items from different periods are shown together within each thematic area, demonstrating the long-lasting influence of different design movements and moments in history. 

Design and contemporary history: in pictures

Each thematic display at the V&A's design galleries explores a seminal moment in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, analysing design’s role in shaping and responding to the biggest issues of our times through objects and their wider contextual meaning.

The rise of industrial design: Automation and Labour

‘Today we might be concerned about robots taking our jobs, and that [same] worry about mechanisation and automation, but also the promise and possibility, was keenly felt at the beginning of the 20th century,’ says Gardner. Earlier objects on display show the idea of what mechanisation can offer in terms of new design aesthetics and new possibilities for making. The display spans from the Bauhaus, with examples such as Marcel Breuer’s tubular metal chair, to more recent objects such as Ikea’s ‘Lampan’ lamp, a response to the challenge to design ‘the world’s cheapest lamp’.

Designing the urban space: House and Living 

The second section on display explores, as Gardner explains, ‘the infrastructure of the city, and the lived experience of the urban environment’, from the home to the city. Highlights include the newly acquired British Road Signage system by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir, as well as domestic product innovations ranging from the compact ‘Barbican Basin’, to Naoto Fukasawa’s CD player for Muji, and Konstantin Grcic’s multifunctional ‘Mayday’ lamp for Flos.

Design’s role in addressing global issues: Crisis and Conflict

From the Second World War to the modern day, this section looks at activism initiatives and design’s ongoing role in reacting and addressing global issues. ‘We look at the world as a place made up of the mass movement of people: we're currently experiencing the biggest movement of people since the Second World War, with over 270 million people, being called migrants by the UN and 70 million of them being refugees,’ explains Agerman Ross. Pieces such as the ‘Tala’ curry measure by Jasleen Kaur (a Scottish artist who grew up in a Sikh household in Glasgow), notes the curator, ‘speaks of the experience of creating your own unique culture in the place that we call home’. Sub-themes, the curators say, include facing issues of racism and designing with ingenuity when resources are scarce – an example being social enterprise Granby Workshop, created in Liverpool by Assemble. 

Design’s added value: Consumption and Identity

One of the questions that led the two curators throughout the process of creating the new gallery displays was: ‘When did design become design?’ The traditionally sexier side of design is explored in this section, with examples of Italian midcentury design, and pieces chronicling the added value a designer can bring to an object: case in point, Philippe Starck’s sculptural ‘Juicy Salif’ lemon squeezer for Alessi, and Virgil Abloh’s intervention on Ikea products. 

Design as a tool for innovation: Sustainability and Subversion

‘Here you have that desire for different worlds, socially, economically, but also environmentally,’ says Gardner. ‘The objects that we bring together here are those of repurposing, of recycling, but also where designers are railing against prevailing norms.’ Displays include Christien Meindertsma’s ‘Flax’ chair, the result of innovative design and manufacturing processes led by the designer using a new material for furniture production. But, perhaps most interestingly, there are also examples of design thinking that didn't quite work in practice, such as the ‘WOBO (World Bottle)', designed by N John Habraken in 1963 and intended to double as a brick after use. ‘This was an idea that wasn't fully realised, but that metrical measure of success is always an interesting point to think through, when looking at products and objects of this nature,’ explains Gardner, also citing Yves Behar's ‘One Laptop Per Child’ – ‘brilliantly influential in the design world, much more limited in its impact in the real world’.

21st century design: Data and Communication

More recent technological advancements in the world of design in this section include Front’s ‘Sketch’ chair, developed by the designers as a three dimensional hand sketch. The chair is shown next to Future Systems’ desk for Conde Nast’s Jonathan Newhouse, created in 1999; while it is an early example of computer design from the practice, the desk was hand-built by a boat building workshop in the UK.

Addressing the most pressing issues of today: Rapid Response Collecting

Showcased throughout the galleries are the V&A’s Rapid Response collection: launched in 2010, this series of 50 objects examines design’s role in shaping and responding to the biggest issues of our times and aims to spark a wider conversation about design. The most recent aquisition in this collection is a pair of posters by Asian-American artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, created to respond to the recent wave of crimes against AAPI communities in the USA during the Covid-19 crisis. Another recent object in the collection is a snorkeling mask, adapted by an Italian doctor at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, to be used as an emergency breathing mask and made available through a freely downloadable file.

INFORMATION

‘Design: 1900-Now’ is at the V&A, rooms 74, 74A & 76
vam.ac.uk

ADDRESS

Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Rd
London SW7 2RL

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In October 2020, Ying Suen and Jules Volleberg launched APOC Store, an independent online retailer which supports, showcases and sells the designs of burgeoning creatives, across the fashion and art spheres. ‘The world was kind of crumbling around us,’ Suen told Wallpaper* back in April. ‘We wanted to make a difference...We respect that every designer is an individual, with different capacities and resources.’

Continuing on a philanthropic path, APOC Store has announced a fundraiser, launched to raise funds to tackle racism and discrimination, in partnership with Creatives 4 Systemic Change. The latter is an online collective of designers and artists from around the world, who come together to raffle off pieces of their work in order to raise money for organisations that amplify and empower the Black Trans community. Last June 2020, its first fundraiser raised nearly $50,000.

The C4SC x APOC Store fundraiser, which runs until 27 June 2021, allows the public to enter an online raffle for £10, with a chance to win a donated piece they may not otherwise be able to afford, from a host of different designers and artists, including Conner Ives, Chopova Lowena, Sun Woo, Tim Teven, Venczel and Wed Studio. 

The funds will be directed to charities benefiting the Asian community in response to the rising anti-Asian hate in the West and to Asian garment workers suffering from the result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The raffle will also continue to distribute funds to two beneficiaries from 2020, carrying on supporting the work they do with the Trans community and black female-identifying artists. These beneficiaries include the Awaj Foundation, Hackney Chinese Community Services, Red Canary Song, For the Gworls and Home by Ronan McKenzie's Grant Programme.

INFORMATION

C4SC X APOC Store fundraiser runs until 27 June 2021. apoc-store.com; creatives4systemicchange.com

‘Routes’ by Pearson Lloyd for office furrniture specialist Teknion is a new collection of office furniture for the post-pandemic workspace, the result of an in-depth exploration of the changing ways we work.

Founded in East London in 1997 by Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd, design studio Pearson Lloyd works to ‘respond to the challenges of the day and enhance our experience of the world.’

‘Routes’: a collection of office furniture for the post-pandemic office

The ‘Routes’ collection of office furniture was conceived for what Pearson Lloyd call an ‘intelligent space’, and it includes desks, tables, task chairs, lounge seating, screens, storage and accessories – covering all office essentials. Each piece is designed to allow teams full flexibility, at the same time, the designers explain, ‘breaking with convention and introducing a sense of play into the world of work.’

The office furniture becomes ‘a toolbox to make working environments that encourage movement, creativity and collaboration, and to rapidly and easily reshape the space as needs change.’ Hence the name, referencing the possibility of a team to create its own ‘route’ by designing a workspace using functional objects and furniture. 

It’s a flexible furniture system which can be applied to small studios and larger spaces, with flexibility and the needs of an ever-changing environment a focus of the collection. ‘Routes’, the designers explain, give teams ‘the ability to swiftly make, unmake and adapt workspaces in response to the changing requirements: an essential capability in the new, post-Covid working world.’

Office essentials by Teknion and Pearson Lloyd to encourage ‘workplay’

Key pieces in the collection are a mobile screen that features a writing board and can be used to divide a space, or a stool inspired by colourful builders’ buckets that are often transformed into impromptu seats (and can be stacked when not in use) – pieces that exemplify the double nature of the collection, somewhere between work and play.

The collection is also made for kinetic work, a trend of the past decade and, the designers note, which has been accelerated due to the working-from-home pandemic revolution. The office furniture designs ‘empower users to determine their optimum mode of work: standing, sitting, or lounging,’ the designers explain: there is definitely space for spontaneity. 

At the core of the collection is the concept of ‘workplay’. ‘At their best, both work and play fire the imagination and are truly creative forms of activity,’ observes Tom Lloyd. ‘‘Workplay’ acknowledges the meeting point between both, to create a new form of inspirational space and place.’

INFORMATION

pearsonlloyd.com
teknion.com

Design firm Pentatonic and entrepreneur and philanthropist Natalia Vodianova have launched Masuku, a new brand offering an innovative and sustainable face mask concept. Named after the Japanese word for ‘mask’, Masuku nods to the importance of the face mask in Asian cultures, where it is commonly worn as a sign of respect for the community’s health. Its initial goal to create an anti-pollution mask has acquired new urgency in this pandemic; and its inaugural product, Masuku One, combines cutting-edge technological innovation and a sleek design. 

Natalia Vodianova and Masuku: the search for a sustainable face mask

Vodianova began to search for a sustainable alternative to everyday masks in 2016, which led her to connect with Pentatonic, a design and technology innovator whose projects have material research at their core. The studio has created objects from recycled smartphone glass, cigarette filters and e-waste, also working on objects and furniture designs with the likes of Snarkitecture and Pharrell Williams (most recently creating a recycled dining kit in collaboration with both).

‘Natalia and I first met in 2018; at that point she and her team had already scoped the mask market for sustainable suppliers,’ recalls Johann Boedecker, CEO and co-founder of Pentatonic. ‘But there was simply nothing out there that lived up to Natalia’s vision of a truly well-designed and absolutely environmental mask.’ The pair joined forces with the aim of reinventing the category ‘from the ground up’, and after two years of development, Masuku was born. 

‘As living beings, we need air even more than water or shelter but, due to a rise of allergies, air pollution and increased risk of pandemics, it is quickly becoming a risk factor too,’ continues Boedecker. The team’s focus was to create masks that become an effortless essential in our lives, much like sunscreen and filtered water. 

Masuku One: design and manufacturing

The Masuku One features a ‘spacer mesh’ fabric cover, made from 100 per cent recycled performance polymer and optimised for airflow. The material is heat-pressed into a shell-like shape and equipped with soft guard fabric on the side in contact with the skin. The ear-loops are also made from recycled materials, and feature four 360-degree joints for a personalised fit. 

Every material is either bio-based or recyclable at the end of its life, and every manufacturing aspect was calibrated to achieve maximum comfort and carefully considered with sustainability in mind. ‘When I started the project, I knew that developing a highly sophisticated air filtration system was pointless if not fully sustainable at the core,’ explains Vodianova. ‘Today our masks offer a truly safe and comfortable breathing experience, with no impact on the planet.’ Boedecker notes that readily available recyclable filters did not offer an adequate performance, but ‘with our high-end compostable polymer filtration membrane we finally struck gold. We built the daily range and the Masuku One filter around that innovation: compostable filtration using over 100 times less filtration material by weight than common mask filters.’ To produce the masks’ nano-fibre filtration material, the company set up a state-of-the-art AirLab in Yorkshire, with further nearby locations dedicated to assembly and production of Masuku products. 

‘Between the fit and comfort, filtration and breathability, we created a mask that you can wear for many hours a day without undue inconvenience,’ he continues. ‘We also invested a lot of time in creating very complex tooling to have three-dimensionally curved surfaces without creases or folds. So the outer fabric is beautifully contoured and sharp.’

Concludes Vodianova: ‘The air we breathe affects every organ and cell in our bodies. I sincerely hope, in the future, masks will not be needed. Until then, we want Masuku to be the most technological, sustainable option to breathe clean air, while respecting it.’

INFORMATION

Masuku One, £49 (£22 for monthly subscription)

masuku.com

NEWS 

One year ago, art galleries had shuttered their doors, revenue streams for artists were evaporating, and the art world began a sustained physical hiatus. Amid this tsunami of uncertainty, a hashtag began taking Instagram by storm. 

The Artist Support Pledge (#artistsupportpledge) presented an opportunity for artists to sell their work directly via the social media platform. Though simple, this artist-to-patron, artist-to-artist formula, proved revolutionary. To recap, each time an artist makes £1,000 in sales, they commit 20 per cent of their earnings to purchasing another artist’s work. The rules are not enforced; this is a principle built on trust and generosity, and one year on, the initiative has cast a positive light on the human condition. ‘ASP has proven that the vast majority are only too willing to give generosity a go,’ says Matthew Burrows, Sussex-based artist and founder of Artist Support Pledge. ‘It has fundamentally changed my view on what is possible.’

Artist Support Pledge, now a non-profit company, was conceived as an open, democratic marketplace based on a sustainable ‘micro-culture and economy’, as opposed to one of aggressive growth. Initially, it was to tide artists over until a three month isolation period lapsed, but as we now know things escalated. ‘Artist Support Pledge was set up as an emergency response to a desperate situation and has evolved into a new cultural economy formed out of a simple idea, who could have imagined that?’ Burrows explains. 

‘Sharing economies are at the forefront of economic thinking so it’s prescient that ASP’s impact has caught on. Fundamentally ASP is a movement which operates through cultural values, for the good of the many and not merely the few.’ This is not exactly a new concept; human beings thrived in societies based on similar principles for hundreds of thousands of years pre-industrialisation. As Burrows adds, ‘using digital media to create community-focused economies is the only new part.’ 

In another major recent development, the initiative has welcomed a-n (The Artists Information Company), the UK’s largest artists’ membership organisation, on board as a supporting partner. ‘It’s a natural match, we are both committed to nurturing and supporting the lives of artists,’ Burrows explains. ‘a-n have been doing it for years and are well set up to support ASP’s ambitions.’

It’s also been a year Burrows is unlikely to forget personally; he was made an MBE in The Queen’s birthday honours list, was named Apollo's Personality of the Year, and was listed among the ArtReview Power 100. ‘I get messages, letters and gifts almost every day from artists, from all over the world, expressing their gratitude. It can be overwhelming’ he says. ‘Some are just happy they have sold a few pieces, others are making a very good living paying rent and feeding their families. Then there are the buyers, who for the first time, feel like they have the opportunity to purchase art, without having to be super-rich.’ 

One year on, galleries and art spaces around the world are gradually showing signs of emerging from hibernation, but ASP is proving to be far from redundant. ‘There are just too many people living off ASP right now for it to stop.’ says Burrows, who will continue supporting artists in an ever-shifting landscape. He aims to ‘build bridges’ with commercial and public galleries, as well as educational institutions, but for that, he’ll require staff, and ergo funding. 

So where will Artist's Support Pledge be one year from now? Burrows’ goals are characteristically ambitious, but if the initiative’s track record is anything to go by, not unattainable. ‘I hope that ASP will have a team maintaining and developing a vibrant cultural initiative and economy, borne out of crisis into a new order of cooperation and interdependence.’

INFORMATION

https://artistsupportpledge.com

@artistsupportpledge

What does beauty mean in our post-2020 world? How has this period of illness and isolation shifted our understanding of what is desirable in ourselves and others? How will individuals manifest beauty in the years to come? 

These are the questions Lucy Hardcastle Studios is trying to answer in its new insight report ‘Absent Beauty,’ originally published on foresight and trends intelligence platform, LS:N Global. A multidisciplinary design practice focused on ‘sensual storytelling for a digital age,’ Lucy Hardcastle Studios uses its own past projects in interactive technology, 3D visuals, and moving image to examine how our understanding of beauty has changed in the past year and the impact that will have on our future. 

Lockdown beauty: the current state of things

According to the report, beauty is something that an individual can manifest through various ‘rituals’ or everyday acts (i.e. makeup application or the use of an Instagram filter). 

‘Absent Beauty’ posits that there are three main areas where we perform these rituals of beauty – the body, the domestic space and the virtual space- and that the past year has dramatically reoriented our relation to/ understanding of these areas.

As we live in a ‘suspended state,’ with the typical activities of lives put on hold, our tactical interactions have been largely limited to ourselves and our domestic space. We have not been out engaging with others as we once did and the result is that there is now a greater focus on our immediate personal space.

With our points of physical interaction limited to ourselves and our homes, wellness is now a highly personal act that must be cultivated by the individual. 

Our new tech-saturated reality

When we do present ourselves to the outside world, we do so through technology. In this technological universe, we can carefully curate the version of ourselves that the world sees. As Hardcastle puts it, ‘although we are in this suspended state, we still have a need to represent ourselves, producing a reality that is highly performative yet domestic.’

If it all sounds a little too abstract, think of it this way – in 2020 ‘beautifying’ acts that once relied on the skill of others, be that a haircut or skincare treatment, were largely done by individuals at home.

In 2020, when we presented ourselves to the world it was often through social media with a picture we took ourselves, or on Zoom where we could choose to be seen or not and if we did decide to show ourselves, it was only a Brady Bunch-style frame of our head that was visible. Our self-presentation became highly limited and highly controlled. 

Screen-free escapism: what's coming 

So what does this mean for our future? According to Hardcastle, our reanimated reality will be very different than what came before. ‘In what feels like an unpredictable world, the advancement to have control over one’s own body, environment and routine, which was already becoming apparent with the support of tech, has now become invaluable.’

‘We will have become at the centre of our own universe… [and] this focus on the self, and therefore our own biology will provide a new way to understand oneself.’

As we become more aware of our own biology and more reliant on technology, we will start perceiving our bodies as machines. Our biological functions will be transformed into data points, our physical health and mental wellbeing will now be things that we can quantify and measure. 

We’ve already seen the beginning of this trend with the popularity of the Oura ring for improved sleep or watches designed to optimise your exercise routine.

Hardcastle predicts that by 2030 people will average about 10 hours of screen time a day (four hours more than we do now). In this new, tech-saturated reality, a trend for ‘physiological nostalgia’ will emerge. 

‘Physiological nostalgia’ will use technology to trigger peaceful, nostalgic memories that induce a sense of relaxation, creating a screen-free means of transforming your domestic space into a meditative zone. Audio escapism and aromatherapy will be essential to this, as well as soft robotics that recreate various textures on demand. 

Those interested in theoretical case studies around this topic will enjoy exploring the Lucy Hardcastle Studios' past projects. These include, ‘Wetlands’ which uses Lucy’s own brainwaves to create a digital landscape, or ‘Intangible Matter’, which uses 3D software to visually recreate the experience of smelling a particular perfume.  

We’ll have to wait and see how many of ‘Absent Beauty’s' predictions will come to pass, but there’s no doubt that these next few years will usher in a brave (and perhaps beautiful) new world.

INFORMATION

lucyhardcastle.com
lsnglobal.com

The year 2020 altered the landscape of many industries, but its effect on beauty and grooming has been particularly revolutionary, including the demand for new skincare technology. ‘The past year has led to a steep rise in sleep loss and poor eating habits, not to mention a lack of Vitamin D thanks to stay-at-home orders – all of which has had a huge impact on our skin,’ says Jo Barnard, founder of London-based design agency Morrama.

‘At the same time, with salons being forced to close, consumers have had to take their beauty regimes entirely into their own hands, leading to a rise in DIY pampering at home.’ In response to this new reality, Morrama has created Future Skincare, a collection of three conceptual product designs that imagine the kind of skincare technology our new post-2020 world will call for. 

The most inventive of Morrama’s creations is The Patch, a facial sticker designed to combat breakouts with a unique temperature-changing mechanism. The product’s heat function releases a vitamin-rich serum into the skin and simultaneously increases blood flow to promote optimum surface rejuvenation. The alternative cool-down function can be used before or after the heat treatment to reduce redness and soothe irritation, both common effects of mask-wearing. 

Morrama’s The Masque is also designed to fight breakouts, but this time specifically around the mouth and nose. An adjustable mask designed to fit any head size, The Masque transmits heat and bacteria-killing blue light to combat the new and pervasive problem of ‘maskne’. 

The last of the three products is The Masseur, a kind of electronic gua-sha or face massager. The product’s antimicrobial copper alloy ball releases soothing vibrations that reduce muscle tension and support lymphatic drainage. 

Together, Morrama's designs address the irritation, sallowness, and acne that can be caused by persistent stress, sleep-deprivation, lack of sunlight, and mask-wearing. Although these specific designs are still in the prototype stage, products like these may soon become a mainstay of skincare regimes.

INFORMATION

morrama.com

Benjamin Hubert unveils a series of protective products as well as the brand identity for newly launched wellness start-up Never Go Alone. The British designer’s industrial design studio Layer worked closely with Vietnam-born, London-based entrepreneur Nga Nguyen, whose early exposure to Covid-19 in 2020 inspired a collection focused on essential pandemic protection, ‘to empower users to visibly take ownership over their health and safety’.

Never Go Alone: a debut range of protective pandemic products

The debut edition comprises a reusable face mask, refillable hand sanitiser, and a refillable sanitising wipes case: modern-day essentials that Hubert designed following research into human behaviour and environmental concerns. ‘We collaborated with Benjamin Hubert and Layer over the past year to develop an innovative and future-focused brand, with a family of sustainable protective and wellbeing products,’ says Nguyen. ‘The team applied their multidisciplinary approach and unique design thinking to all aspects of Never Go Alone, from the branding and website to product and packaging design.’

Starting from the visual identity, developed as a simple and intuitive visual language that suggests a ‘sense of calmness and balance’, Hubert and his team wanted to create a memorable user experience, focusing on elements such as tactility, intuitive functionality and bespoke scents that elevate mundane routines. The design process was informed by observing human behaviours and research into the hygiene experience, as well as an understanding of daily rituals and on-the-go protection. 

Benjamin Hubert’s face mask design

At the core of the collection is the face mask, the ultimate everyday essential, which Hubert updated with an innovative, engineered approach. Taking cues from athleisure apparel, the mask features a seamlessly bonded construction with interchangeable ear loops, and can be adjusted for maximum comfort. The mask is made of breathable, lightweight material, with a mid-layer in ultrasuede to create a structural shape, and a fine knitted inner layer featuring antibacterial fibres for extra protection. A replaceable bespoke PM2.5 filter slips into the mask’s internal pocket, offering protection from airborne particles. The sleek protective design was created to be neatly folded and stored in a specially designed case, to minimize contamination risk. 

Hand sanitiser gets a design refresh

The collection’s most tactile objects include a discreet hand sanitiser bottle and a compact case for wipes. These objects were designed as sculptural containers to be proudly displayed instead of being tucked away, with a warm palette of oranges and earthy neutrals to set the collection apart from more clinical offerings. For an enhanced user experience, the objects’ ergonomic forms were achieved using soft-touch materials (including recycled plastic).

Hubert is no stranger to taking a holistic approach to human-centric design, and his studio’s recent projects have included an electric scooter for Chinese electric-car maker Nio, designs for Bang & Olufsen and Muuto, and the overall design for tech start-up Nolii.

‘As a studio, we are focused on using the power of design to shift perceptions and solve the challenges of today and tomorrow,’ comments Hubert. ‘In today’s world, we believe it is essential to transform medical and hygiene products into sustainable lifestyle accessories that people want to use every day. Nga was inspired to create Never Go Alone by her own powerful personal journey – that story combined with the current, ongoing challenges we face across the world created an exciting opportunity.’

INFORMATION

nevergoalone.com

Today, Buly 1803 is best know as a purveyor of unusual beauty goods, offering everything from Mimi Senketsu oil, a natural ear cleaner, to Kyo Beni Hana lipstick, made from precious flower petal pigments and one of the most expensive lipsticks in the world.

Innovation is key to survival. So it’s no surprise that Officine Universelle Buly 1803 has existed in some form or another for over two centuries. Its founder Jean-Vincent Bully made a name for himself throughout Napoleonic era Europe with his Vinaigre de Bully, ‘a patented aromatic lotion to perform ablutions’ or, more simply, a face wash.

With that in mind, Buly 1803's scented patches are a welcomed new product at a time when we can all use a little light relief. The delicate scents provide a bit of comfort to what can sometimes be the stifling experience of wearing a mask. While the fun sticker format is a clever, lighthearted touch to our new reality.

Continuing on its reputation as an innovator, the brand has just launched a range of scented stickers for perfuming face masks. Available in three scents – eucalyptus, peppermint, and lemon – the patches can be stuck onto any type of mask for up to six hours of use.

The idea that fragrance can act as a conduit for wellbeing is nothing new, as evidenced by aromatherapy’s long history or, more recently, the emergence of ‘functional fragrances’ like The Nue Co.’s anti-stress perfume.

INFORMATION

buly1803.com

In light of the pandemic, many fashion designers have been forced to pivot and rethink their businesses. And yet, some are emerging more robust and relevant than ever. Two New York brands have shown resilience in eschewing 2021 trends and instead focusing on what they always set out to do: create beautifully made, considered clothes that inspire and uplift, whilst placing wearability front and centre. Having founded their businesses on principles that have helped them weather a challenging year – timeless, adaptable, high-quality pieces, made to last – they are not only enduring, but inspiring us to look ahead.

Here, Peter Do and Marina Moscone tell us in their own words what is driving their businesses today and tomorrow. 

Peter Do

Peter Do moved to New York from his native Vietnam ten years ago, establishing his eponymous collective label in partnership with four co-founders in 2018, with modern tailoring and slouchy sophistication at its core. Do’s intention was to build a brand that values the often overlooked behind-the-scenes work of the talented tailors and seamstresses at the heart of New York’s fashion industry. In response to a recent swell of anti-Asian racism, the brand has been actively backing the Asian American business-owner-led campaign #EnoughIsEnough to support underserved communities. 

‘We create clothes from living in them. Peter Do is founded on tailoring, so certain traditional values of structure, fit and the integrity of each garment remain important to us. But we also recognise the importance of adaptability. How can the garment be worn in different ways to adapt to a woman’s everyday life? When I was growing up in Vietnam, I only had a handful of clothes, which were made and worn for specific occasions. I never even owned a jacket, because the weather was hot year-round. Everything you wore had to be light and open in order to do what you needed to do. We take that blueprint and fine-tune it with our own codes. 

‘The woman we dress hasn’t changed. She still has the same values when it comes to her wardrobe – she dresses for her own pleasure, buying things that are considered, and last forever. Our tailoring is selling really well because I think people still want to have a sense of normalcy when working from home. Just as the pandemic started, we introduced knitwear and shoes into our e-commerce offering. Our customers want to be comfortable, but at the same time they want pieces that they can play with, that look beautiful. 

‘From the beginning, we've always done what feels right to us. Which means taking care of the team first and foremost. The brand received industry support, but we also saw the importance of putting in place our own channels by developing an e-commerce site and social media platform early on. We wanted to have our own voice, which is now paying off. We also spent a lot of time finding the right workshops and suppliers here in New York – it's much more efficient to work with them in person.

‘New York is chaotic, but it produces the most resilient types of people. We live in a global economy, but I think there’s advantage to investing in the communities around you. When New York shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, we found creative ways to engage with and support our communities, from our workshops in midtown to various small businesses and charities. New York is my home. It’s allowed me to be myself and it’s a city that embraces change. It defines it.’ – Peter Do

Marina Moscone

Marina Moscone launched her eponymous label in 2016, along with her sister and business partner, Francesca. Formulating an understated elegance that touches both day and eveningwear has earned the label widespread recognition and admiration amongst women who value elevated and easy luxurious pieces. Born in Vancouver to a South African mother and an Italian father, the sisters spent summers in Abruzzo – an influence that would emerge in the fabrics and artistry of the brand years later. Today, their business follows a pre-collection model combined with creating special custom items, negating the demanding churn of the fashion calendar.

‘I think women now are looking for fewer but better pieces. They are not just shopping but collecting, looking for thoughtful designs that have purpose, with no filler. When I’m designing, I ask myself, “Do each of these looks have intention?” During the pandemic, I was not travelling every other day, and Francesca and I really looked at what we wanted to do going forwards. I felt run down and uninspired by a constant desire for excess. Consumerism is about more and more all the time.

‘For the first time in years, I had time to think clearly and I realised I want to work on artfully thought out, beautifully designed pieces that take time to evolve. I don’t want to design for the sake of design. We have a big custom client base, and it seems to me that women are adding more quality bespoke and curated pieces to their wardrobes. I think there is a sense of hope and optimism attached to shopping for a post-Covid 19 world. 

‘I’ve spent the whole pandemic in New York. Watching women navigating how to keep going with life in a pandemic has motivated me to keep making clothes, whether it’s a bias-cut slip or an oversized T-shirt. The pieces are still made to the highest standard of luxury. I want women to look at what I make and say, “This will work in my life.” More importantly, I always want my pieces to remain open to interpretation, open to whatever a woman is doing – whether it’s working at home, painting, dining, travelling, dancing. 

‘I personally like to wear evening pieces in more of an undone way – a tuxedo jacket with my Nike Air Force 1s, or shirting over slouchy trousers. We have our own online boutique so we have the data, and we have seen people continue to buy smartly tailored pieces – because the clothes are seasonless and because they are intended to be collected and made to last. 

‘Ours is a New York brand, but I grew up multi-cultural. I’ve always considered myself Italian-South African and I think that’s why I feel I have a global perspective, even though I’m rooted here in New York. Being “stuck” in New York this past year was an amazing way to fall in love with the city all over again. 

‘I think there are many advantages to being agile and somewhat nimble – pandemic or no pandemic. We are family-run and we’ve built this incredible, committed team. We want to be progressive and know that evolution comes from uncomfortable change sometimes. We are open minded to that.’ – Marina Moscone

marinamoscone.com

Chanel’s new Lipscanner app transforms the world into a cosmetic colour palette. Developed in-house by Chanel, the app allows users to snap a picture of any red, pink, plum, or orange colour they might find throughout their day and instantly provides a range of Chanel products in the same shade. A painting, floral arrangement, ketchup bottle, any item – from the most glamorous to the most mundane – can be transfigured into a Chanel lip product with Lipscanner. 

The accuracy of the app's colour-matching technology is startlingly, as is the vast range of Chanel products to choose from (the brand has over 400 lip products alone). When it comes to identifying the image of another shade, Lipscanner can even provide options in the same texture – matte, glossy, etc. – as well as the same colour. The selected product can then be digitally tried on thanks to a highly precise face-scanner technology that applies the shade to your face in real-time. 

Ultimately, the result is that Lipscanner is like the beauty equivalent of the popular music-identification app Shazam. Carry it around in your pocket and it will instantly provide an answer to what you couldn’t figure out with only the click of a button.

Beauty brands have been experimenting with the possibilities of AI technologies for years, but the Coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the creation of innovative new devices and apps. With people unable to try products in-store or receive treatments in salons and spas, brands have created innovative, technology-based solutions that provide people with similar, if not better, shopping or self-care experiences from home. 

Everything from personalised skincare gadgets to algorithm-generated fragrances have been created in the past year with the hopes of becoming the next big beauty-tech trend. Chanel’s contribution to this field is notable, especially since it’s no doubt the first of many personalised, user-driven digital launches from the heritage brand. As one of the most established names in beauty, it will be interesting to see how Chanel continues to respond to the needs of a post-2020 world with new technologies and digital solutions.

INFORMATION

chanel.com

In the throes of lockdown, the photographer Ronan Mckenzie put down her camera and started to make clothes without really knowing how. What started as ‘something fun to do’ has evolved into a small line of made-to-order pieces presented under the name ‘Selasi’, meaning ‘God hears me’ in Ewe, a language spoken in Ghana. ‘The only reason I decided to give it a name was to make space for it in my mind,’ says Mckenzie. ‘I struggle to have downtime and relax, so I thought that turning it into an ongoing project would make me dedicate more time to actually doing it.’  

Mckenzie is a consummate multi-hyphenate: a photographer-director-curator-designer-artist. Towards the end of 2019, looking for a new outlet beyond commercial photography, she opened Home – a multifunctional creative hub encompassing a gallery, an events programme, a library and communal workspace in north London. ‘I needed something wholesome and community focused. I want to open myself up to creative pursuits in a way that doesn’t take away from any one of them,’ she says.

Selasi is defined by its softly sculptured heft. Mckenzie begins by drawing on A4 paper, guessing shapes and then cutting them in fabric before amending designs on her own body, tweaking in the mirror. The front of a trouser might be different to the back. One leg might be longer than the other. Cloth is slashed and hems always left unfinished. The clothes look homespun because they are. 

There are no plans for the label to be wholesaled, but a private launch of a full collection is due later this year. This will include a small run of knitwear made in collaboration with Khanh Brice Nguyen and shoes with Ugo Paulon. ‘It’s still me working things out – most of the time I’m so excited, I don’t want to spend time hemming!’ She says: ‘I’ve become more attentive about what clothes mean to me in this last year. I’ve been thinking so much more about what we put on our skin, what wraps us and holds us. How fabrics feel against our bodies. What we wear is directly related to what we feel. Clothes literally touch us, hug us.’

INFORMATION

instagram.com/__selasi__/

Last March, London-based Thailand-born fashion consultant Katie Ruensumran travelled back from Paris Fashion Week, as the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic began to unfold. ‘I thought, “this is going to be serious"', she says. ‘“We're going to have to rethink everything"'. Within a fortnight of her return, the UK entered its first lockdown. Shops, restaurants and offices shuttered, and the impact a global pandemic would have on the fashion industry in terms of employment, production and revenue became a reality. 

When Ruensumran returned to her small studio in east London to pack up her things in the wake of lockdown restrictions, she encountered people in the creative industries, from pattern cutters to graphic designers who’d already lost their jobs. ‘I wanted to do something about it,’ she says. The result is The Meaning Well, a small fashion label specialising in relaxed, voluminous silhouettes made using deadstock fabrics, developed with a tiny team of a pattern cutter and a graduate fashion design student.

With her label, Ruensumran is keen to subvert the notion of a one-wear-only purchase. Her ruffled taffeta dresses, insouciant slips and slouchy shirts and blazers are designed for trend-subverting investment. ‘At home or in the office, I want to wear beautiful things again and again,’ she says. ‘The concept of seasons just isn’t working anymore.’

Utilising her industry network, Ruensumran contacted fabric manufacturers for waste fabrics she could use to create her designs. Her floral print day dresses are formed from deadstock upholstery fabrics, several of which were originally produced for hotel soft furnishings. Emphasising The Meaning Well's focus on seasonless pieces, the brand won't release a plethora of new silhouettes, instead reissuing designs in different rescued fabrics. Ruensumran has already connected to a Thai factory left with thousands of metres of fabric, after an enormous clothing order was cancelled. ‘We can create new things with old things,' she says. 

INFORMATION

themeaningwell.com

Digital artist Ines Alpha is a pioneering force in AR beauty, a rapidly accelerating field that is set to be ever more prevalent as our universe continues to morph into a metaverse. Through computerised makeup application or otherworldly facial filters, Alpha explores how our self-presentation can be radically transformed within digital realities. 

‘I consider make-up to be something that transforms your face, be it Instagram filters or what I do,’ says digital artist and 3D make-up creator Ines Alpha. ‘It’s how make-up has been used since the Egyptians: enabling humans to transform into a character.’

Whether working with brands like Dior and Selfridges, or collaborating with artists and musicians, Alpha’s digital creations repeatedly push the boundaries of what make-up can be.

The lockdowns and mask-wearing of 2020 might have lead to a decrease in the use of traditional make-up, but it also resulted in a flourishing of new, technology-based alternatives. For those looking to satisfy their cosmetic creativity digitally rather than physically, Alpha has shared a list of Instagram filters that can transform your face with the click of a button. 

Reflection

This 3D makeup face filter was designed in collaboration with artist Anais Borie. She contacted me a year ago to create something together and we came up with a sumptuous cyber augmented mirror. 

In the opulent mirror 'Automated Divine Reflection,' the viewer is not confronted with his or her own image, but with a computer-generated face. The encounter in the mirror is intended to make the contact between human existence and technical progress tangible. 

instagram.com

Holoctopus

This is my brand new filter! It's an adaptation of a video I made during the very first quarantine of 2020. I was inspired to create 3D face masks to protect yourself from viruses in the digital realm. I'm super proud of it because it's technically more advanced than my previous ones. I've learnt new techniques thanks to other developers that helped me on it (@alwayscodingsomething @aaronjablonski @hongwei_tang). 

instagram.com

This is human

This collaboration with Bimba y Lola was my first with a brand. I was so excited to give life to one of my 3D characters. I can't wait to be able to develop Tamagotchi-like AR experiences so we can all play with cute otherworldly digital pets. 

instagram.com

Time warp scan

Every time you use it you randomly get a different funny face. I have so much fun playing with it. It's super interesting to record yourself every time and see how instinctively your body reacts to what it sees, because you cannot predict what you will look like, and that first second when you see your new digital self is magic. 

instagram.com

Alpha skin

Sarah Mayer is a great digital designer. What I like about this Instagram filter is that she's not trying to make you more beautiful according to society’s beauty standards. Still, this filter is truly beautifying but in an unconventional way, looking maybe weirder and unique and also very otherworldly. I'm always super happy to see other creatives working on diversity in beauty and showing you can be beautiful in so many other ways than just following Instagram’s typical model of perfection – cat eyes, perfectly contoured face, thin nose, flawless skin. 

instagram.com

Dream machine

I love crazy surrealistic filters and when AR can bring you into worlds reality cannot offer. I think Mitsuko has a great style and sense of humour, it's always cute and very playful. Her filters truly bring joy and I think also self-confidence because while using them it's so funny that you completely forget to look ‘good’. Of course, I'm a huge fan of the colours of this one. 

instagram.com

Otherworldly

The Otherworldly filter is a collaboration between me and @madroni_redclock, facilitated by @planet.huh. Though on different parts of the globe, Madrona and I connected around our shared ethos of unconventional beauty and the shared mood ‘otherworldly’. We conceptualised an oceanic design vision, which guided the cool tones and a geometric make-up design from Madrona, and the water-like 3D iridescent moving shapes from me, to create a 3D make-up face filter that transports users to another world. 

instagram.com

Creativity and crisis make for strange bedfellows. Yet, innovation proves itself best borne out of necessity as London Design Biennale and think-tank Chatham House address some of the most critical issues facing contemporary society with their new collaboration, Design in An Age of Crisis.

Launched this January, the digital platform effectively comprises a great meeting of the minds, poised to play an integral part in spotlighting the local iterations of far-reaching issues, encouraging radical design thinking and fostering dialogues between designers, policymakers and the public. The initiative is decidedly global and inclusive with 500 submissions spanning over 50 countries and 6 continents, each a response to an open call with four categories: health, environment, society and work. ‘The range of ideas illustrates how anyone, anywhere can contribute to design thinking’, says Victoria Broackes, Director of London Design Biennale, who views the exercise as a celebration of the survival of creativity with individuals continuing to form ideas even whilst at home during the pandemic.

London Design Biennale’s most ambitious presentation yet offers an unequivocal opportunity to practically reimagine our world. As Covid-19 continues to rage, the strain on the global community has highlighted issues outside of the pandemic that also demand address. Design in An Age of Crisis speaks to a world that will still be in need, even after coronavirus, ultimately presenting an opportunity for us to propose a world we want, in the face of one dealing with many crises.

After pandemic-related postponements in 2020, London Design Biennale will return to Somerset House this June to showcase a selection of highlights from Design in An Age of Crisis. Here, we look at some of the projects from the initiative's four categories. 

Environment

As confinement and social restrictions take their toll on the mental health of many across the globe, Pop-up Ecosystems by MuDD Architects and AirLab in Spain proposes a design that will safeguard our mental wellbeing as well as protect our environment. Effectively changing the shape of our urban landscapes, it offers innovative techniques for attaching green spaces to existing buildings to promote positive health.

PriestmanGoode’s Guy Genney designs a greener world with a strong sense of community with TURF, an app that facilitates for people to grow their own food and share surplus with neighbours and local businesses. The project includes a selection of items (in a zero-waste, biodegradable pack) needed to get started growing edible plants from home.

Work

Work cultures have undoubtedly changed as a result of the pandemic, so it is no surprise that some submissions have attempted to address our new realities, with some suggesting ways to reclaim unused spaces such as Out of (Paper) Office, a playful set of printable office prop templates by Brown Office and Jon Abbott Studio. The Work from Home Clock by Wareesa Lakanthampichit offers a practical way to organise time around work, leisure, rest, family and friends while working remotely. The digital project helps visualize a 24-hour period to better coordinate colleague interaction as well as personal time.

Health

London Orchestra From Waste Materials, a project by Andrew Scott from the Royal College of Art in collaboration with composer Hangrui Zhang from the Royal College of Music, aims to promote wellbeing through music and uses repurposed waste materials to do so.

Eindhoven student Anna-Sophie Dienemann addresses coronavirus restrictions and the direct impact on people's everyday lives with Bounding Spaces, a playful wearable aid to social distancing.

Society

Responding to issues around social identity, community and survival, Aqueous Communes by Mad(e) in Mumbai is a design that not only offers low-cost flood resilient housing for the Sonbarsa village in India, but also recycles the flood water to the benefit of the community.

Radical Gravity by Angelina Kozhevnikova, Kyungha Kwon and Konuralp Senol looks at some of the failures of the pandemic, which highlighted inadequacies in our emergency response systems. The project proposes an innovative, self-sustaining global system that provides airdrop shelters in the wake of natural disasters, using freefall as a self-building stage.

INFORMATION

londondesignbiennale.com

Benedicte Holmboe began knitting at a mere five years old, but it was when her own designs began attracting attention that she considered launching a DIY label, encouraging others to take up the contemplative craft. ‘In one week, two complete strangers came up to me and asked where my jumper was from!’ explains the Copenhagen-based designer.

Holmboe, who specialised in men's knitwear design at the RCA in London, graduating in 2012, worked for labels including Ralph Lauren, Stella McCartney and Celine, before launching her luxury at-home knitting label in November 2019, after eleven months of planning. Para Moda debuted online with three try-it-yourself knitting kits – containing a pattern, needles and tactile balls of bright orange, bordeaux and beige wool – for a beanie, a bib and a sweater. ‘Many of the people that try out my products come back again,' she says, of burgeoning knitting enthusiasts who first purchase her hat kits, before moving onto larger designs. ‘I've had people reach out to me as far as New York and San Francisco.'

‘Knittting encourages a real connection between the brain and the hands’ – Benedicte Holmboe

Copenhagen-based luxury knitting label Para Moda encourages you to pick up your knitting needles and knock out a standout sweater. Explore more of our favourite DIY knitting kits here.

Education is integral to Holmboe’s brand DNA. ‘I’ve been to numerous knitwear factories,’ she explains, ‘and tried out different yarns by making my own jumpers. I think sharing knowledge is key...I’m not precious about holding onto my ideas.’ It’s a democratic viewpoint that has been shared by a host of designers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last summer, Jonathan Anderson released the pattern for a JW Anderson rainbow crochet cardigan sported by Harry Styles, which led to a viral outpouring of recreations posted on TikTok. Last December, SHOWStudio also shared an unseen pattern for a Maison Margiela jersey stitch ribbon Reclica knit sweater designed by John Galliano, as part of its Design Download series.

Holmboe also finds merit in the power knitting has to pull us away from our screens. ‘It encourages a real connection between the brain and the hands,’ she says. ‘I find it extremely meditative.' Sick of kneading your sourdough bread? We suggest you knit away the hours instead.

INFORMATION

para.moda

WINNER

‘For the community by the community' portable handwashing station, by NMBello Studio

When the first wave of the pandemic compelled countries around the world to shut their borders, Nifemi Marcus-Bello was in Kigali, Rwanda, designing furniture for the Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture as a consultant with MASS Design Group. As Marcus-Bello caught one of the last flights back to Lagos to be with his family, he pondered how Nigeria and his community would cope with this public health emergency.

‘I knew design could play a crucial role, so when I got to Lagos, I spoke to a few friends who worked in the medical sector, and asked how we as designers could help,’ he recalls.

One such friend was Dr Mambidzeni Madzivire, founder of a local startup that was advising a number of  hospitals in Lagos on infection control. ‘We spoke to Nigerian doctors and nurses, both local and in the diaspora, and found out that those in Lagos face a very different reality in terms of architecture, infrastructure, budget and resources,’ Marcus-Bello continues.

Medical professionals told them it was difficult to wash their hands properly at overburdened healthcare facilities. Moving from one patient to the next very quickly left little time to dash back to the nearest available sink. Marcus-Bello’s solution was to create a portable and modular handwashing station, made from easily accessible materials, in collaboration with local artisans, and making use of a grant received from Samuel Ross of A-Cold-Wall* and artist Daniel Arsham.

The station is built around a frame of tubular steel, the same material used to make local hospital beds, so it can be easily replicated by any local welder. A sink, bin, and the casing for the pump and touch-free sensor have been created by local ceramicists (recent graduates from the Yaba School of Technology in Lagos), though Marcus-Bello hopes to partner with a local recyclable plastic company on future iterations. Further elements – caster wheels and 25-litre water kegs (to hold clean water and used water respectively) – are readily available, even amid a pandemic. 

The use of kegs, in particular, was inspired by rural water carriers of Nigeria (‘meruwas’) who wheel carts full of clean water kegs to communities without a stable water supply. ‘There is nostalgia and familiarity around the design that allows the user to decipher it without needing much explanation,’ says Marcus-Bello.

Relying on a battery-powered micro submersible pump that can run for 48 hours on a two-hour charge, Marcus-Bello’s handwashing station can be pushed from ward to ward, a simple yet effective solution that allows medical practitioners to clean their hands – in spite of busy schedules and haphazard hospital layouts. His team has already produced two prototypes which are currently in use, with another six to come at the beginning of 2021.

Their goal is to upscale their operations, to popularise a product that draws on local materials and artisanship to facilitate public health – as the title of the project states, ‘for the community by the community’.

Marcus-Bello’s clever and conscientious design won over the judges of the 2021 Wallpaper* Design Awards, who unanimously named it our Life-Enhancer of the Year. Our reigning Designer of the Year, Sabine Marcelis, commented that it’s ‘a necessity taken for granted by so many of us, brought to a community in need. Design at its best is about solving problems like these to save lives and support communities.’

Adds Ivy Ross, vice president of hardware at Google: ‘We should be creating more designs that manifest this way in the world.’

Lead Designer: Nifemi Marcus-Bello
Assistant Designer: Jaiye Oduyoye
Design Research: Dr. Mambi Madzivire (PhD)
Welder: Fatai Adisa
Weaver: Kofi Narh
Electrical Engineer: Samson Ojetade
Ceramicist: Segun Adetulo
Artist: Dennis Osadebe

nmbello.com, @nmbello1

SHORTLIST

These are the innovations that demonstrate design's pivotal role in overcoming the challenges of our time and helping us live more happily, healthily and sustainably, from from sanitising light sources to a 3D printer of beverages to a home office that expands and disappears at the click of a button

Integralis, by Artemide

The new Integralis technology, developed by Italian lighting manufacturer Artemide, offers an aesthetically pleasing alternative to the often unsightly sanitation lamps that are now a staple of offices and other public spaces. It combines a white light (with specific frequencies that inhibit the growth of bacteria, fungi and mold) with UV rays that can eliminate microorganisms, including viruses. The latter is emitted at intervals which are determined by a sensor – while a space is unoccupied, the UV rays become more intense, and vice versa to mitigate the risks of personal UV exposure.

Built as an open platform, the technology can be applied to existing lighting products, and activated via a dedicated app. While it can be integrated into all of Artemide’s designs, it is particularly effective when paired with the Ernesto Gismondi-designed Discovery Space (pictured). A semi-transparent panel that can be installed vertically or horizontally, Discovery Space helps define the environment while offering a safe distancing solution.

artemide.com

Ösa Lite electric bike, by Cake

From Swedish electric motorcycle manufacturer Cake comes a versatile commuter moped with off-road capabilities. Ösa Lite is built around a utilitarian aluminium frame, with fairings conspicuously absent. Supporting its seat is a large grey bar – which the company refers to as a ‘workbench’ – where baskets, racks, toddler seats, side-racks and an additional passenger seat can be clamped on to create over 1,000 different configurations. Functional, lightweight and with a range of up to 92km, it is equally suited to urban commuting, last-mile deliveries and cross-country sojourns.

A tubular frame underneath the grey bar cradles the battery, which is likewise modular: the user can swap it out and replace with a fresh one for longer journeys, or use its integrated outlets to power all sorts of devices from a computer, to speakers and a projector for an outdoor movie screening, to power tools to build a cabin in the woods. Explains Cake founder Stefan Ytterborn, ‘Whatever comes to mind and whenever, the access to power can bring traditional pursuits to new, virgin places and create entirely new experiences.’

ridecake.com; @ridecake

Pocket Office, by Ori

For city dwellers whose apartments cannot accommodate a fully-fledged home office, the Pocket Office by robotic furniture systems company Ori offers an elegant space-saving solution. The setup comprises two shelving modules, laid out in parallel along a discreet track system. During the day, the space between the modules can be expanded with the touch of a button (or a tap in the Ori smartphone app) to reveal a workspace with desk and chair, power outlets, a nook for computer screens, and generous shelving. Further features include in-built, dimmable LED lighting and sound-dampening cork and fabric panels, to create the optimal conditions for video calls.

By night, the Pocket Office can be easily closed up, leaving more room for the user to enjoy the entertainment centre (accommodating a TV and further display shelves) on the exterior of one of the modules. Beyond making clever use of limited square footage, the Pocket Office also facilitates mental separation between work and play, ensuring that the user can properly relax at the end of the day.

oriliving.com; @ori_living

Microbrewery and water filtration system, by Wayout

The flagship product for Swedish startup Wayout, this microfactory is marketed as ‘a beverage 3D printer’. Each standalone unit, measuring 5.8 x 2.3 x 2.4m, is equipped with a full suite of water treatment facilities, powered by solar panels so it can be used in locations with unreliable electrical supply. It can take any source water (whether from a tap, borehole, river or ocean), purify it via reverse osmosis, UV filtering and desalination, to generate pure H2O. The water is then remineralised and chilled for serving. Each month, it produces 70,000L of drinking water, eliminating the need for 250,000 disposable plastic bottles and preventing eight tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.

Beyond still and sparkling water, the microfactory can also accommodate personalised ingredients to create craft beers, ciders and soft drinks (soft drinks are instant, beers and ciders take about a week per 500L batch before they are ready). A smartphone app allows the user to order ingredients, operate the brewery, monitor performance, and even launch auto cleaning. With the first unit already installed at an eco-retreat in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, this microfactory promises to launch a revolution in localised beverage production. 

wayoutintl.com, @wayoutintl

2020 will go down as one of the most challenging, turbulent, and pivotal years in modern history, a year where we retreated into our bubbles as Covid-19 swept across the world. There were protests that compelled the world to address longstanding racial injustice, new warning signs that spurred us to fight the climate emergency, a realisation that the shifting plates of geo-politics will potentially transform how we live and work together for many years to come.

January started full of optimism with a packed calendar of design fairs, fashion weeks, exhibition openings, but with murmurs growing of the impending crisis. In February we were still all jetting off to Milan Fashion week as we were used to doing every year, unmasked, and looking forward to Salone del Mobile, however by the end of February our colleagues and friends in Italy were moving into quarantine and full lockdown by the beginning of March.

It took a while to comprehend what was happening, like everyone we coordinated our teams, but what initially felt like a precaution was suddenly a full-blown reality. It was a challenge making a magazine and website remotely – without the face-to-face discourse – but somehow we managed, partly out of endurance, but also by an overwhelming sense of responsibility to you – the reader, the designer, the creator, the maker, the brand, the educator and the next generation. I have never experienced such a united community force in the face of such adversity. There were of course harsh realities, but inspiring conversations and new ways of thinking quickly emerged, as the design community regrouped, re-imagined, and responded.

Here are the editorial highlights of our year:

Wallpaper* Poster Campaign

More than 1,000 readers from across the global creative community responded to our call for graphic innovation to reflect on the Covid-19 crisis and spread messages of hope. In our Summer 2020 Issue, available to download for free here, we presented a small edit of our favourite posters, including more from Piero Lissoni on the issue’s limited-edition subscriber cover. Tacked to this virtual poster wall, which we first published in June, discover an extended edit of 50 outstanding posters. The full, 1,000 strong digital response can be found at #WallpaperPosterCampaign on Instagram. Thank you to everyone who got involved!

Wallpaper* World View

We launched the World View series here on wallpaper.com just as the first wave of lockdowns wrought havoc in the design industry and confined us all to our homes. Our idea was simple: to investigate new ways of working in the era of physical isolation, when we all need a sense of camaraderie. So we tapped into our global contributor network to showcase how designers in each of their territories are meeting challenges – social distancing, supply chain disruptions, show cancellations and the like – with creativity, resilience and generosity. We told stories of a Mexican fashion designer who fabricated 50,000 masks for essential workers, a Californian manufacturer of fine art pieces who turned to making front panels for ventilators, and a Danish furniture manufacturer who pledged 30% of every sale to support the country’s independent restaurants. World View shared a message of hope in difficult times, and made us prouder than ever of being part of this industry.

Wallpaper* Re-Made launches 

An evolution of a decade of Wallpaper* Handmade, Wallpaper* Re-Made is a new platform that champions design for a better world. We’re bringing together the best and brightest creative and scientific minds, makers and manufacturers, to imagine ways of making and doing that are kinder, smarter, cleaner, and less exploitative of people and resources. Though the pandemic threw a spanner in our initial plans to put on a physical exhibition, our intrepid band of collaborators soldiered on, creating 23 design projects-in-progress ranging from planet-friendlier takeaway food packaging, to an e-trike and trailer made from low-carbon-footprint aluminium, to a colour therapy lamp made from shellfish waste. Re-Made strengthened our belief in design as a driving force for beter principles and healthier behaviours, and we look forward to following our design projects to fruition – perhaps even pursuing new ones – as we head into 2021.

Design Emergency Guest Edits the October issue

Design Emergency – an Instagram Live series from Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn that explores design’s role during and after Covid-19 – was a ray of light and optimism in a dreadful pandemic, and so it was a no-brainer that we invited them to guest edit our October issue. Their 39-page section included profiles of one of the medical illustrators behind the spiky blob recognised worldwide as Covid-19, an Afghan tech entrepreneur who empowered teenage girls to design emergency ventilators, the co-founder of the social justice-minded MASS Design Group, and a pair of Pakistani telemedicine pioneers, among others. Alongside, we asked the consistently brilliant Studio Frith to guest art direct, and commissioned legendary photographer Brigitte Lacombe for a portfolio of portraits, shot over Zoom. The result is an incredibly inspiring document of the visionaries who have steered us through a time of crisis, and are rebuilding our lives for the better.

Wallpaper* celebrates Earth Day with Doug Aitken

We invited artist Doug Aitken to take over our Instagram feed on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, on 22 April. ‘Maybe for a minute we can think about how we move forward, how we use creativity to move into the future,’ he said, introducing a series of his works that explore our connection to our planet. A video installation envisioning the Earth’s interior, originally created for the National Museum of Qatar, was followed by his mirrored house in the snowscapes of Gstaad, his underwater pavilions off the Californian coast, and a forest of 365 chimes swaying and sounding in Sonoma’s Donum Estate. ‘We have the possibility to really retool how we create – the materials we use, our processes, the places and locations that we seek out, and how we structure information,’ he urged.

Virgil Abloh cuts the Wallpaper* cover in half

Virgil Abloh took up our invitation to design the limited-edition cover of our September issue with characteristic daring, placing a simple dotted black line and scissor graphic on a matt white cover space – an invitation for the reader to cut the magazine in half. ‘Cutting the physical object makes the magazine come alive and reinforces the concept that the magazine’s media may be physical, but it also occupies a space figuratively and literally,’ he explained in his cover proposal. As an added element of this cover takeover, he personally cut and autographed 184 copies of his cover to raise money for his scholarship fund, which supports fashion education for Black students of promise. Radical, fun and for a good cause, this is one of my favourite Wallpaper* covers to date.

Wallpaper* introduces a new nexus of creative architectural talent series, starting in London

Architecture is adapting to a changing world, and a new wave of young practices in London emerges. They are armed with bold ideas, digital tools, new studio set ups and innovative designs and approaches. In our Next Generation series, our brilliant architecture editor Ellie Stathaki shines a light on the emerging creative scene in London, through an ongoing series of profiles.

Wallpaper* offers its print magazine free to download, as a show of support

In March, the world was dealing with its new separation-filled reality, as lockdowns of varying degrees swept the globe. In a showcase of support – both to the design industry we love, and our valued readers – we decided to offer our printed magazine for free, as a digital download. We have continued this throughout the year, as each new issue goes on sale, and plan to do so until life eases tentatively back into normality. Tens of thousands of you, from all corners of the world, have made use of this offer and we are so pleased that our magazine has continued to inspire, and offer some form of escapism, in both its print and digital forms.

Wallpaper* launches Discovered to support the next generation of designers

Alongside our longstanding partners American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), we announced Wallpaper* Discovered, a project that brings together 20 emerging designers from 16 countries. Each of them is creating a new object or piece of furniture, responding to themes of touch, reflection and strength. Their work will be produced by one of AHEC’s manufacturing partners and then shown at London’s Design Museum next June. Discovered is our initiative to ensure that the budding talents of 2020 – full of ambition, purpose and promise but currently deprived of opportunity – would not become a lost generation. By giving these young people a platform, and bringing on board a network of established designers, makers and design entrepreneurs to offer insight and advice, ensuring we protect and nurture tomorrow’s creative leaders.

INFORMATION

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Masks have become a ubiquitous health necessity. Formerly only commonplace in most Asian cultures and used as a symbol of courtesy, if one should be experiencing a malady, the face mask is now globally recognised as a form of protection, while also signifying civic responsibility.

This multicultural dialogue forms the basis of a conceptual design collaboration between the architect and designer Tosin Oshinowo, textile and furniture designer Chrissa Amuah and Lexus, who have come together to create a collection of masks designed as headpieces, unveiled at Design Miami. Exploring the ideas of protection, ornamentation, functionality and celebration, the headpieces present an artistic alternative to the utilitarian face coverings in a move that celebrates the world’s collective desire to move through the pandemic together. Named ‘Freedom to Move’, the collaboration also draws from a mix of cultural influences, identifying unexpected similarities and dialogues in materials, textures, colours and craftsmanship.

With human movement greatly redefined this year, Oshinowo and Amuah took the opportunity to reconsider the functionality of masks today, against the traditions of protection and adornment across global cultures. ‘As nomadic beings, it is unnatural to stand still, and we wanted to reconfigure how we move in a positive way, in spite of the restrictions of motion the world now finds itself in,’ says Amuah.
 
With Oshinowo based in Lagos, Nigeria and the collaboration taking place for the most part there, the designers put the African context at the fore. Lexus’ key design philosophies, such as the Japanese notions of omotenashi (exceptional hospitality) and takumi (expert craftsmanship), were also integral to the creative process.
 
The collection’s three mark designs, named ‘Egaro’, ‘Pioneer Futures’ and ‘Ògún’, each employ a wide variety of materials, such as bronze, brass, leather and acrylic, with further details such as intricate hand beading, laser etching and embroidery using the traditionally West African tinko method. Featuring aspects crafted by traditional artisans, fused with 3D printed elements, each headpiece is a poetic fusion of past and present. Each mask also features transparent panels, which facilitate communication – a common frustration experienced with most masks today.

‘In the midst of a global pandemic, we all are acutely aware of the head as both hostage to and host of an invisible adversary,’ reads a design statement by the pair. ‘Thinking about the masks that we all now wear for daily protection, we wanted to take a step further and consider how we can not only protect ourselves, but use this opportunity to celebrate our joint humanity. If we must wear masks, then let them be glorious! Let them celebrate our humanity and shared joys, rather than conceal them.’

INFORMATION

shop.designmiami.com

Repeated lockdowns around the world have caused havoc within the retail world, from tourist-attracting luxury flagships to neighbourhood outposts, multi-brand department stores on commuter belts to high street hotspots. Traffic through retail corridors has slowed to a trickle, shop doors have shuttered and boutique windows have been boarded up, some including stalwarts like Neiman Marcus, Century 21 and Brooks Brothers, to never reopen, or Debenhams and Topshop to enter administration.

In order to survive, brands have had to adapt to the new dimensions of the digital world, where innovations in e-commerce are key, across not just websites, but social media channels – from Instagram to WeChat – too. According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2020 report, 13 percent of European consumers were, as a result of the pandemic, set to browse e-tailers for the first time this year, while, in April, a quarter of US and European shoppers were set to spend online using social media channels. In November 2020, LVMH announced the creation of a conglomerate-wide position of ‘chief omnichannel officer', to respond to the surge on luxury shopping online. 

From 3D store experiences to AR changing rooms, Savile Row robots to shoppable Instagram filters, there's a host of innovative and immersive solutions which brands are bringing to spending online today. Here we round up the brands and boutiques who are leading the way.

Khaite

For those keen to shop New York label Khaite's cool-inflected sophisticated styles, from its drop-shouldered hand-knitted bouclé Sile Hoodie to its body-skimming sweetheart neckline Allegra Dress, digital help is at hand. In celebration of the launch of its A/W 2021 collection, the brand has launched an exclusive partnership with try-on technology pioneers Bods, culminating in an immersive digital experience which allows shoppers to view pieces on a replica of their own body, and note how they drape, cling and sculpt.

To create their digital alias, customers are required to submit two photographs, one profile and one-side on, alongside input measurements including height. Once their avatar begins rendering, they can then adjust personal physique according to skin tone, bust and bodily curves. It's not only expert computer graphics which ensure you can simulate clothing to a intricate version of your own body, Khaite's tactile, sculptural and sensual creations are also presented in expert likeness. Each digital clothing design has been constructed using original patterns to ensure it is accurately represented in 3D real-time.

Can't decide on Khaite's fluid sleeved cardigans or snuggly fitting leather jacket? Now you can try on both with online ease and customer confidence.

P.E Nation

For the launch of P.E Nation’s sustainable ski collection – an offering of retro-toned and colour-blocked alpine essentials crafted in recycled fabrics – the Sydney-based label launched a fitting room-inspired Instagram filter, allowing shoppers to try on three ski jackets online. ‘We decided to work with the Institute of Digital Fashion (IoDF) who are globally renowned for the production of digital clothing, for having a strong ethos of sustainability, inclusivity and always innovating within the fashion sphere,’ says co-founder Pip Edwards, of the filter, which features impeccably lifelike garments that were delivered in 3D stitch by stitch, right down to the final flicker of faux fur. ‘This file, an extraordinarily large size was then painstakingly manipulated, to fit into the tiny frame of Instagram's space by decreasing poly counts,’ Edwards adds.

In a snow-sprinkled spin, shoppers sport P.E Nation's ski jackets against a series of enchanting alpine backgrounds, allowing them to escape to icy online altitudes. ‘The background scenes are a manipulation of multiple different places, created by IoDF’s digital environmentalists, inspired by our moodboards,’ Edwards says. They resemble pine tree-circled perfection.

Gucci

In June 2019, Gucci became the first fashion label to incorporate augmented reality into its App, allowing fans of the label’s GG logo and star motif-swathed Ace sneakers to virtually try on their favourite styles. For the innovative launch, the Florentine house collaborated with Belarus-based startup Wannaby, which seeks to solve the disconnect between online merchandise and the at-home shopper. It launched the try-on AR sneakers app Wanna Kicks in January 2019, which garnered 500k organic users in the first days of its launch. For Gucci’s Ace Sneaker Try On technology, sneakerheads can select their Ace styles of choice, point their mobile device’s camera at their own feet to virtually try on their chosen pair. They can also snap their favourite styles and share them via social media.

Gucci's dedication to immersive shopping technology runs parallel to its renewned dedication to customer service. In April 2019, it opened the Global Client Service Center, a 2,300 sq m space in Florence, with over 150 multi-lingual client advisors, assisting customers across 26 countries via email, phone and live chat. The brand also plans to expand with six more global centres, from New York to Seoul, which will be designed to resemble the brand's physical boutiques, and provide more localised customer service experiences. 

Huntsman

A sense of touch is integral to the bespoke suiting industry of Savile Row, so when social distancing prevented Huntsman’s cutters and tailors from fitting clients in their Mayfair outpost or from travelling to visit them across the globe, they knew they had to provide a cutting-edge digital alternative. Enter, Mr Hammick, Huntsman’s first telepresence robot, named after its famed Head Cutter of the Seventies, who, with the aid of a local assistant, travels to meet clients, and executes fitting tasks directed from Huntsman’s Cutter in London or New York.

Mr Hammick – who boasts a touch screen and robotic arm – can be manouvered remotely – allowing Huntsman's cutters, who appear via a live video link, to manoeuvre around the body and zoom in, record and photographic specific garment details, and be with their client virtually from baste to final fit. Cutting out physical travel, the service actually speeds up the tailoring process and allows for more appointment flexibility.

There are other elements of Huntsman's home-focused efforts. This includes Hero, a live video chat for shopping, and Toshi, a white glove delivery service, allowing customers to receive pieces to their door, and with the help of an assistant, pin and measure garments to their chosen specifity.

Salvatore Ferragamo

Some lament the difficulty of shoe shopping online – finding it difficult to settle on size, and scope out the quality of a fabrication or the depth of a shade of leather. But fans of Ferragamo’s classic Tramezza shoe need not fret, as the Italian label has developed an immersive shopping experience, in collaboration with Microsoft, that allows them to personalise their preferred style, and see the result in 3D.

Harnessing Microsoft’s Hevolus Augmented Store at Home platform, Ferragamo allows customer to custom order its Tramezza shoe using a selection tool online, which offers up a 3D reproduction in a host of materials, from lizard to suede, colours, including rouge, stone and black and hardware details. Should they require more made-to-order help, shoppers can connect to a shop assistant through an online appointment, who wearing a Microsoft's HoloLens 2 holographic computer, can virtually enter their digital fitting room, and visualise and advise on their selections. At the end of the appointment, customers can also see a digital twin of their Tramezza shoe in augmented reality. 

Christian Dior

There’s something enchanting about entering a boutique’s beauty department and catching the aroma of a scent that suits you perfectly. There’s little that's sensorily stimulating about making an olfactory purchase online, but Dior’s virtual fragrance consultation provides a well-scented antidote. The service, hosted by the French maison’s UK Fragrance Ambassador Carl Groenewald, live from the Dior Salon De Parfum in Harrods, London, allows customers to book a fragrance consultation online, before being sent a fragrance tester set, featuring mini samples of hero scents to their home. Groenewald then talks clients through each perfume, including the spicy, woody notes of Purple Oud and the smoky incense aroma of Bois d'Argent, before they make their final decision.

In April, Dior also launched its first virtual beauty boutique, bringing the walls of its Avenue des Champs-Élysées boutique in Paris, to customers at home. Here, beauty fans can take a tour of the brand's space using clickable arrow tools, and watch short films relating to Dior's products, before making a purchase.

Browns

Sneaker heads and watch obsessives, rejoice! Browns’ latest Virtual Try – powered through its Browns Fashion mobile App, allows customers to try on their favourite trainer or timepiece using AR technology, from their comfort of their own homes. ‘As augmented reality technology has evolved over the past few years, we saw huge potential in bringing physical store experiences into the palm of your hands – specifically, “virtual try on”’ says Mohammed Said, Director of Technology and Product at Browns, of the launch. This was developed in collaboration with Farfetch. By simply pointing their phone's camera at a heel or wrist, Browns fans can virtually sport a selection of styles including for sneakers, a Converse high top, Alexander McQueen oversized sneakers and Axel Arigato's White Clean 90 low tops.

Browns' Virtual Try On technology responds to the growth in footwear and watch categories, experienced by the London retailer, connecting the dots between its e-commerce arm and at-home customers. ‘With the global pandemic restricting many of our customers from travelling to stores, we accelerated our investment in this space,' says Said. Start working your AR angles now.

INFORMATION

brownsfashion.com
dior.com
ferragamo.com
gucci.com
huntsmansavilerow.com
khaite.com/
pe-nation.com

Bosnian craft brand Zanat has called upon its international roster of designers to create a collection inspired by the isolation resulting from pandemic-related lockdowns implemented across the world in the past few months. ‘The recent lockdown has been a good opportunity to stay closer to our household members, to relax a bit and ponder about the future, the human condition and what truly matters to us,’ says founder Orhan Niksic.

The origins of Zanat date back more than a century, when Niksic’s great grandfather stumbled on a primitive hand-carving technique that originated near his hometown of Konjic. He established a woodcarving workshop and passed the now Unesco-protected technique down through family generations. Niksic started Zanat in 2015 with the aim of preserving this family legacy and he saw the recent pandemic as a chance to discuss themes of family and home.

Niksic took up discussions with some of Europe’s most celebrated designers, including Monica Förster, Ilse Crawford, Sebastian Herkner, Jean-Marie Massaud and Ludovica and Roberto Palomba. ‘Their enthusiasm about post-Covid-19 future and how Zanat’s vision relates to it was both heartening and inspiring,’ he says. ‘We all agreed that the future cannot look like the past, that environmental sustainability and ethics pertaining to how products are made, brought to market, and consumed can no longer be a matter of choice, but must be a design imperative.’ And so the Lockdown Dialogues Project was born as a way to channel these ideas and create objects that reflect this vision of ethical design.

‘Our aim was to create a collection of functional objects that improve the experience of staying at home and hopefully become heirloom pieces, objects made from responsibly sourced, renewable natural materials that clearly demonstrate the value of craftsmanship.’ The collection includes mirrors by Förster, stools and candleholders by the Palombas, and bowls by Crawford among others. They are small objects whose carefully considered craftsmanship, Nikisic hopes, can enrich our lives while creating employment opportunities as well as preserving important artisanal skills and cultural heritage.

INFORMATION

The Lockdown Dialogues collection by Zanat is available from Wallpaper*STORE

As the world went into lockdown in March 2020, so creatives, many without commissioned work, adapted to finding inspiration within their four walls, or amongst the streets or fields nearest their home. ‘With photographic shoots in our industry coming to a pause we wondered what we could do to harness some of that talent,’ says Robin Harvey, ECD at 360 degree creative agency Spring, which boasts studio spaces in London and New York.

Inspired by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, who moved to New York in 1936, and only shot images from his Central Park-facing apartment window, Harvey initiated Spring’s #shotathome project, a visual series of images featured on the agency’s Instagram, featuring shots of lockdown life, submitted by renowned photographers worldwide. The offering includes Mark Seliger’s shot of the hospital ship USNS Comfort, sitting in New York’s port, from the window of his West Village home, alongside Julian Broad’s photograph of a misty morning from a remote Cabin in Wales, lensed at 5am to the sound of chirping ravens. ‘It was important that this imagery represented a time where creativity still found a way to flourish,’ Harvey says. ‘It was interesting to see what became inspiring when you removed the industry construct.’

‘The photo comes from a series of shots taken while stuck in Mexico City during the first lockdown,’ says Paolo Zerbini of the knick knacks-focused image he submitted for #stayathome. ‘These objects filled the window of a kiosk and they reminded me of when I was a child. It has a strong evocative power’. Zerbini spent additional time writing during and working on personal projects when the world shut down, also ensuring he stuck to an exercise routine. ‘You should try my curry now!' he adds. ‘It's pretty good!'

Now, in celebration of Spring’s #stayathome project, the company has launched a virtual gallery of its most moving and inspiring images. It has been designed in collaboration with 3D and AR innovators Change of Paradigm, with a digital space evoking the clean and industrial aesthetic of Spring’s physical studios. ‘We wanted to recreate our space in New York to house the gallery, home to so many events over the years,’ Harvey explains. ‘CGI capabilities are continually evolving and opening up more and more possibilities and creative freedom in an industry that demands more and more content and new ways of looking.’ The project culminates in an online sale, with all proceeds being donated to the British Fashion Council, and its Covid-19 relief incubator, the BFC Foundation Fashion Fund.

INFORMATION

springstudios.com

As most of us have discovered by now, glasses and masks don’t get on – wear your specs when you’re popping to the shops and you won’t be able to see what you came in for thanks to the instant fogging of the lenses.

Fortunately, thoughtful design is here to save us. ‘We wondered if we could use glasses frames to support and hold a mask instead of ears, to offer a more comfortable experience,’ says Lily Cole, founder of glasses company Wires Glasses. The masks they have created in collaboration with Vivienne Westwood adhere to the same ethical foundations as the glasses, focusing on functionality quickly followed by aesthetics and principles.

The designs, which hang from your glasses rather than your ears, decrease the likeliness of the glasses’ lenses fogging. Crafted from off-cut fabric from Vivienne Westwood, they are cheerful and chic, as well as comfortable. The Wires Glasses frames are formed from stainless steel wire, with lenses created using 3D printing to ensure the process is zero waste; it was natural to extend this philosophy to the masks themselves. ‘Turning designer off-cut fabric that would normally be discarded into something new felt like an exciting and appropriate avenue to explore.’

Each detail has been carefully considered: ‘After a few rounds of prototypes, we found a shape that we were happy with - including a reversible design, so each mask could have two sides to it,’ says Cole. To create the masks, they looked to support those out of work due to the pandemic. ‘In terms of principles, we then looked for how we could make these masks in a responsible way, and hired tailors who normally work in the theatre industry. In terms of material sourcing, we focused on buying organic cotton because it is listed as one of the best materials for handmade masks in multiple studies; and organic because its ecological footprint is lighter.’

All proceeds from the masks, available at maiyet.com, will go to Cool Earth, Women’s Aid and The Black Curriculum.

INFORMATION

maiyet.com

The last A/W 2020 fashion show which journalists attended before Milan shut down in February was that of Dolce & Gabbana. Pre Covid-19, the Italian label presented its collections inside its own glamorous Metropol Theatre, where guests lined tiered seats and milled on red velvet carpet, and took in the splendour of the brand’s Sicily-inspired, baroque-drenched collections. 

Now, as the pandemic surges on, and with it, social distancing and travel restrictions, the label has announced an innovative alternative to its physical fashion show format. Each month, Dolce & Gabbana will stage a see-now-buy-now catwalk show on its website and social media channels. The first – titled ‘Walking in the Street’ – features an idiosyncratically embellished take on daywear, featuring bedazzled tailoring in tweed and pinstripe, distressed denim and swathes of gold jewellery. ‘We wanted to create something special for our audience,’ say Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce of the impressive online approach. ‘At a fashion show, a garment has emotion, it lives and walks.’ In celebration of the launch, here the duo dive further into their contemporary creative vision.

Wallpaper*: What inspired your monthly micro fashion show concept?

Stefano Gabbana: We always want to be very close to the market and to our clients all over the world. This is a completely new path for Dolce & Gabbana. Now you can watch the show, see the looks and the accessories and then buy them directly online through our website, or in our boutiques. In this way you don’t have to wait 6 months to have them. Soon, we will do a men’s  fashion show. Stay tuned!

W*: Staging a fashion show once a month is an enormous commitment. How has this decision affected your design process?

Domenico Dolce: A fashion show is always exciting, and we wanted to create something that was more than a catalogue with static images. Model casting and staging brings a uniqueness to a show. In this way it becomes a journey, a much more animated and lively project.

W*: What inspired your first ‘Walking in the Street’ collection?

DD: We’ve always loved seeing people in the streets, what they wear and how they are accessorised. Locked in our houses for the second time, we thought back to the Nineties, when we used to go to New York and people watch. So, we imagined the life of a girl nowadays in the streets of New York, London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and also Rome and Milan. 

SG: We imagined a woman, who although obliged to wear a mask, can walk around the city in a carefree way. This collection is relaxed, with a lot of sneakers, bags, blazers and denim. We wanted to have something that could mirror current times, but with a strong Dolce & Gabbana touch.

W*:  Where will your monthly fashion shows be held? 

SG: They are still staged at the Metropol Theatre in Milan, the location of our usual ready-to-wear shows. But this time without an audience, just us and the models.

W*: What are the biggest challenges you have faced in the wake of Covid-19?

DD: Like everyone, we have had to adapt to this new reality. Closing boutiques around the world is of course something very tough for a fashion brand. However, we are evolving online. In this moment, when are all obliged to stay home, we hope that our fashion shows will bring some liveliness and joy to those watching them.

INFORMATION

dolcegabbana.com

Dubai Design Week commissioned Iraqi-born designer Hozan Zangana to create an outdoors installation for the Arab Emirate’s design district. Titled ‘Fata Morgana’, the installation was conceived by long-term collaborator, Luuk Disveld of Generous Studio, and produced in Amsterdam by Joseph Crickett of WoodCast Designs.

The name of the project was inspired by the optical effect that commonly occurs in the desert or at sea, a visual mirage appearing on the horizon and traditionally thought to be linked to witchcraft. Zangana’s design recreates this effect with shiny copper and rammed earth, using a modern equivalent of the ancient Atuba building technique and sand inspired by locally available materials. ‘For the viewer, the installation might resemble something of a Fata Morgana, with the universal human curiosity we hope to invite people to closer inspect and discover it for themselves, and come together to experience a space designed for reflection and interaction,’ says Zangana.

Based in the Netherlands, Zangana works intuitively (‘Shaping from Intuition' also being the title of an early collection he created), his shapes are often abstract and inspired by language, tradition and rituals.

For this project, Zangana asked himself: ‘How can we (re)connect culture, history and people in a public space?’ The multi-purpose installation responds to is based on a modular system and features a circle of seven pillars, each representing an Emirate, with different elements designed for public seating. A central plinth anchors the space, and a structure that, according to Zangana, ‘highlights the cultural context of the installation. The intersections between the elements demand a blend of cultural meetings and line of sights, becoming an opportunity for conversation between strangers.’

Each pillar in the installation features a layered design, with each layer representing materials from a specific Emirate. The choice of materials and manufacturing methods and materials was based on a ‘responsible and sustainable design approach, in which the production process is a key to its visual appearance.’

The Covid-19 pandemic was on Zangana’s mind while designing the installation, which was created with social-distancing in mind. ‘Our installation provides a safe public space where people can sit down and facing each other at a safe distance,’ he observes. ‘We hope this will inspire them to start connecting with each other.’

INFORMATION

generous.studio/fatamorgana

ADDRESS

Dubai Design District
Dubai
United Arab Emirates

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This year, Dutch Design Week moves online, with a week-long programme of exhibitions, events, talks and initiatives showcasing design innovations and research by international design players. While the energy of Eindhoven’s creative scene will be difficult to replicate in the new virtual dimension, its contemporary creative thinking translates well to the digital programme.

With a structure that virtually mimics a physical exhibition, visitors can access individual 3D viewing rooms or follow specifically curated tours that focus on the different creative perspectives on offer. Social issues, sustainability, material innovation are focal points of the programme, with further projects dedicated to emerging talent, designing a digital world, as well as colour and textile research and furniture design.

The Virtual Greenhouse by IKEA

From creating a home sanctuary to setting the foundations for a more sustainable life, IKEA wants to help people thrive in these exceptional times and navigate this new life. This series of masterclasses, live talks and interactive experiences by creatives specializing in the fields of food, wellbeing, sustainability and botany was curated with the aim helping us live a more balanced life in our homes. The programme ranges from creating a mood with flower compositions to urban foraging and beekeeping, and is part of the Swedish company’s Big Home Reboot initiative, assessing our new relationship with living spaces.

Jugaad by Sachi Tungare

In colloquial Hindi, Jugaad indicates ‘the flexible approach to problem solving using the limited resources at hand innovatively’: this concept inspired Mumbai-based designer Sachi Tungare, who used this perspective to look at waste as a resource, extending its life cycle. Tungare looked at both organic materials such as flowers, and man-made waste like cigarette butts. While dried flowers from religious rituals were used to create a new plastic alternative material (which she is proposing as a substitute to the single-use plastic found in hotel amenities and toiletries), the the cellulose acetate found in cigarettes’ paper wrapping was dissected, treated to make it toxin-free and melted to be cast into various shapes (pictured).

Pomace by Random Works

A design experiment focusing on olive cultivation, Pomace is an initiative by an interdisciplinary collective based between the Netherlands and Turkey. With backgrounds in architecture, product design, urban planning, visual design and media arts (and with the participation of Turkish NGO Olive Academy Karaburun), the group set themselves the mission of ‘learning circularity from olives’, with projects including designs inspired by olive cultivation in Karaburun featuring a selection of specially-developed bio-based material experiments made with olive pomace.

Materialized by Isola Design District

The Milanese design district gathered an impressive group of designers, researchers and creatives under this multidisciplinary project, exploring the sustainability of bio materials. Exploring the work of over 50 international designers and studios, Materialized forms ‘a path between biomaterials and innovative sustainable furnishings’ to explore what the future of design might look like. The projects on show through the Isola Design District portal include BIOTIC by Studio Lionne van Deursen (pictured), who uses microbes to grow biological materials, or RCA researcher Valentina Dipietro’s cross-disciplinary approach merging design with biology and technology. The project also includes open-source tools such as Chilean designer Caro Pacheco’s Calcáreo, a composite made from algae and mussels, and Mumbai-born Rashmi Bidasaria’s research into repurposing the by-products from the metal industry. 

Symbiotic Futures by Romy Snijders

Dutch multidisciplinary designer Romy Snijders asked herself one question: if the current state of the world is the result of a focus on human exceptionalism, could we reverse this and create a better future by paying closer attention to nature and developing a life in symbiosis with plants? Her speculative design project considers fungi and their underground mycelium networks as ‘the internet of the forest’, developing imaginary tools to detect communication between the trees in a forest, to give nature a voice. 

The Embassy of Rethinking Plastic

This multi-project platform curated by Leonne Cuppen and supported by Yksi Expo focuses on the important role of designers in offering a new perspective and approach to the ubiquitous material. The projects include Sarmite Polakova’s PineResin (a byproduct of the timber industry transformed into a sleek glass-like composite) and Plasticiet’s quest to make recycled plastic into a desirable, collectible series of objects through their Mother of Pearl collection (pictured).

INFORMATION

Until 25 October. ddw.nl

Making sure that we are fully informed about a terrifying crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, and that we know how best to behave in different situations, is a fundamental role of design in emergencies. The best-designed public information programmes need to be as clear, accurate and memorable as possible. Sadly, most countries’ Covid-19 information campaigns have been the opposite. But there is one glowing exception, Unite Against Covid-19, which was commissioned by the New Zealand government and designed by Clemenger BBDO Wellington. Alice Rawsthorn spoke to Mark Dalton, creative director of the campaign and Clemenger BDDO, about the development of what she and Paola Antonelli believe is the most intelligently and sensitively designed public information programme in this pandemic.

Alice Rawsthorn: How did the project come about?

Mark Dalton: I think the main reason we were approached is that over the years we’ve done a few, much smaller emergency responses for the New Zealand government. The response to Covid-19 was coordinated across all of government, and the client team leading it had worked with us on some of those previous projects. They reached out to us because they were given a very short time to respond and were looking for people with relevant experience. 

AR: What was your brief and timescale?

MD: The brief was pretty broad. We had to come up with a way of communicating clear and helpful messages to New Zealanders across whatever platforms or media channels we thought would be appropriate. And we had to get it to market within a week.

AR: That’s a very short period of time. Was the choice of key themes and tone left to you, or was the government prescriptive?

MD: It was very much a collaboration. We knew that our best result would be to ask people to do something and tell them why. So, we had to work with our clients to work out what we could say that would be effective and useful. There were moments when we had to go away and think about things for a little while, and then go back in to talk about it. I think working so closely with them led us to solutions more quickly.

AR: How many days did you have to complete the concept?

MD: We were briefed on a Thursday morning. I’m pretty sure our managing director Brett Hoskin got phoned the night before, because he grabbed us that morning saying: ‘Hey, there’s some people coming in to talk to us about a rather interesting issue.’ It was still confidential at that point. On the Friday, we had a strategic and creative get-together at 7am and worked until 11am. We presented that strategic outline and plan to our immediate clients and spent the rest of the day finessing it, so it could go further into the government to seek approval. By early Saturday, we were starting to concept the platform and the way we’d bring it to life to show to New Zealand for the first time. We were all in the same space trying to figure out what the platform would be, and what voice the government needed to project to help people and to make them feel calm. As well as doing that, we were starting to sketch out what it could look like in terms of a brand or a design programme. I think by 8pm on the Saturday, we had something we could present to the prime minister’s office in terms of a brand identity. From Sunday, we were working out how we could make things to be in market by that Wednesday. I think that’s probably about as fast as you could do it.

AR: Could you describe the key formal elements and the design decisions behind them, starting with the typography?

MD: When we looked at what the world was dealing with, uncertainty, sensationalism, confusion and emotive responses were really, really common. We wanted to figure out a voice that would be objective, reasonable and helpful, and how to present it typographically so it would feel approachable and be easy to read and not too shouty with a nice kind of softness. Omnes is a really great typeface. It comes in a massive range of weights, which is useful. We had to work through scenarios in our design process and, worst case, we’d have to talk about people dying, and that’s not something you’d do lightly. You wouldn’t ever do it in Comic Sans, or in an imposing typeface that’s really strong, like a slab serif. That’s where we landed with Omnes, because it has a nice human feel, it’s really versatile and it made things faster, because we could use the same family of fonts for headlines, body copy, everything.

AR: And the choice of colours – the black, white and yellow?

MD: We were trying to find colours that would be really strong visually across different media channels. What we wanted was to balance the heaviness of a lot of the global work we were seeing by using a lot of white, and white space. Black was a logical colour to use, particularly for type and the Unite Against lock-up, and then we used yellow to highlight Covid-19. We were quite deliberate about not making the word Covid-19 and the wordmark bold and shouty, because everyone was so aware of it, you almost didn’t need to say it. The black was also used again in the pictograms. Otherwise it was led with white and yellow, to try and get people to realise that this is serious, but hopefully still approachable, rather than it just being a big scary hazard and safety message. We spent a reasonable amount of time looking at how to treat the yellow: radioactive leak yellow versus hazard yellow, things like that. We landed with a yellow that felt a little warmer and friendlier, without getting into orange, which makes it feel scarier again.

AR: And the pictograms?

MD: We wanted to try to make whatever we were asking people to do seem simple and achievable. We felt that trying to tell a story with a picture could be a good and fast way to help people to recognise what they needed to do, because no one wants to read 15-word headlines on posters when they’re walking around town. The pictograms also allowed us to add a human element. We tried really hard to make them look like they’d been drawn by a person, rather than coming from an icon library, so it felt like there were people behind the campaign who were trying to do whatever they could to help. We didn’t want it to feel like a robotic government announcement.

AR: One of the things I love about the campaign is the focus on unity, that New Zealanders are all in this together.

MD: That’s right. If you’re trying to help people, the last thing you want to tell them is: ‘No, don’t do this’. You need to tell them what to do to achieve a positive outcome. We’d found that in other campaigns we’d done over the years, and it was a strong driver for the pictograms particularly. Whether it’s as simple as coughing or sneezing into your elbow, washing your hands, staying home or being kind, those are all things that are achievable and positive. Just telling people ‘no’ doesn’t work when you’re trying to get them to unite and do something for the greater good. You don’t ever want to say: ‘Don’t go outside’; you say: ‘Stay home and save lives’.

AR: One of New Zealand’s great strengths as a country, but a complication in a national public information programme like this, is that it’s so culturally diverse. How did you allow for that?

MD: The main thing we did was to always have it in our minds. You should never approach these sorts of issues without being conscious of everyone you’re communicating with. What you want to avoid is getting to the end of the process with 50 things all in English, and going, ‘Oh, but what about all the other people that live here that don’t speak English?’ Then you’re in a mad panic to try to fix it. You need to do it all in tandem wherever you can. When we were making the wordmark for Unite Against Covid-19, we immediately made one in Māori. The Alert Level chart that our prime minister held up at a press conference was translated into about 22 languages, because we knew it would be the thing that people would gravitate towards as their guide. And if you don’t understand it, or if English isn’t your first language, there’s a real risk of confusion and fear, which we really wanted to avoid.

AR: How did you organise your team? And what additional complications did lockdown impose on that?

MD: When we first got the project to work on, we realised that we had to bring in as many people as we could from the agency, particularly from a creative, design and strategic perspective, because we had a really short time frame. As we moved on, we had essentially two streams of work. There was stuff that we had to do every day and there were bigger moments when we would be shifting from, say, Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3, so we had to think about broader or bigger pieces of communication, for example, a TV ad to communicate what the change of level would mean. On a day-to-day basis, there were probably eight or ten of us in the office, which was a little odd in itself because everyone else had to stay home. That would be a mix of strategy, creative, design, copywriting and studio to help make the things we were putting out, and our business team working closely with the clients. There were definitely moments when, even on that first Saturday, I was drawing stuff and thinking: ‘OK, who do I know that will be at home; and will be happy to help whenever I ask?’ One of the lessons you learn as a designer over the years is to be good to the people you work with, so you have a great network. Dean Proudfoot, who helped with the pictograms, is an illustrator in Wellington that I’ve known a long time. He’s very, very good, and whenever something came up, we’d talk and find a way to solve it. Lockdown was an interesting learning curve. We made one piece of AV in multiple locations, with the director in Auckland and the creatives in Wellington, all watching the same camera in what’s essentially a very high-tech version of Zoom used by the film industry. Embracing the fact that you can’t be there and can’t do it the way you used to do it makes things strangely possible.

AR: You worked across a huge range of media. Were there any platforms that you found more, or less, difficult to work with?

MD: For the majority, what we were trying to do worked. It’s a simple formula, which helps when you’re trying to articulate something complicated to a range of people. That has stood us in good stead and helped us to produce new work quickly. What we’ve found interesting is that some of the different media channels have their own personalities. With print media, outdoor and even AV, the conversation is one-way. What you’re saying is: ‘This is the thing I’m asking you to do, and these are the reasons. So please, please take this on board, and go and do it.’ And you don’t really know whether they have read it or done it. But when you move into social media you actually have to adapt to the personality of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or whatever. We were always really clear about who we were, but at times, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, we needed to be a little bit more lighthearted or encouraging by saying, ‘We’re doing well’, or, ‘Thank you’, rather than just going out there with big yellow stripes and a headline saying Alert Level 4. It was a really good lesson for us, because it can be really easy, particularly when you’ve got limited time, to put the same thing everywhere. And to a degree we did, because we had to let people know that washing their hands or staying home was vital, but we had to be a little bit more friendly to have good conversation. A clinical psychologist, Dr Sarb Johal, who had done a lot of prior work on the H1N1 influenza outbreak in the UK, and then helping communities in New Zealand recover from earthquakes, has been really helpful to us. He says that the most important thing you can do is have empathy. Whatever you do, you must try to be empathetic and helpful in your design work and the language you put into it. All people really want to know is what’s the right thing to do, whether they’re doing it, and if it is working.

AR: Where does the Unite Against Covid-19 campaign go from here?

MD: It’s always hard to put a timeframe on a pandemic. If SARS was around for about two years, probably the thing for Unite is to focus on how we can maintain the health of our population over a longer period of time, and how we can do that as a united group of New Zealanders. No one knows what will happen next. The best thing is to try to be empathetic, to help each other, and to be clear about what we do and don’t want to do. For us, Unite Against Covid-19 will be here, doing different things for whatever people need.

INFORMATION

A version of this story appeared in the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, guest edited by Design Emergency. A free PDF download of the issue is available here.

clemengerbbdo.co.nz
covid19.govt.nz

Michael Murphy is one of the co-founders of MASS Design Group, a non-profit organization with offices in the USA and Rwanda comprising over 120 architects, designers, landscape architects, engineers, builders, and other specialists whose work is inspired by the mission of ‘researching, building, and advocating for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity’.

He told Paola Antonelli how MASS developed extensive proficiency in designing healthcare systems in vulnerable countries and making them fit for the future; and how its experience during past pandemics and epidemics – including the cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2010 and the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014 – places the practice at the forefront of the design response to Covid-19. Its contribution includes advising Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on how to adapt its facilities to best treat patients, and producing Covid-19 design response strategies to share information with fellow designers and healthcare providers.

Paola Antonelli: What is politics to you?

Michael Murphy: All architectural decisions have social and political implications, whether we acknowledge them or not. The spatial world affects us every day, affects our ability to live healthy lives, affects our environment, affects our communities, and just the simple choices of a material specification, be it brick or concrete, have implications on labour and on the environment. There’s no neutrality in design decisions. We have to build an ethical framework so that we are always gearing towards the most positive impact on our communities.

PA: What did you learn from the Ebola crisis in 2014?

MM: When the Ebola outbreak happened, we had already been working with Liberia’s ministry of health for a couple of years on a national infrastructure plan – and with its great prime minister, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a real hero. The government of Liberia, while wrestling with the incredible impact of the Ebola outbreak, also was saying, ‘If we’re going to get all of this emergency aid, we need to also be investing in the long-term infrastructure that we will need on the other side of this emergency.’ Our work with them began right at the outbreak. We had teams living within the government’s ministry, working on trying to help establish and articulate that plan. Because of their great work and an incredible partnership, the ministry was able to argue for funding to support necessary long-term investments, which is how we came about designing a new national hospital – now under construction.

PA: So it was not only about immediate response to the emergency, but also about future preparedness?

MM: That’s right. Dr Paul Farmer [chair of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of Partners in Health, a highly respected and effective non-profit health organization] says that in every health problem, there’s staff needs, there’s stuff needs, there’s space needs, and there’s system needs – and all of them go together to create the health infrastructure that we need in order to respond to crises like the one we’re facing now. It’s about the design and the implementation, the maintenance and the care of the built world around us so that it keeps us healthy and protects us. And I think all of us are feeling that today.

PA: MASS has prepared a plan to redesign hospitals on the fly to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. Were you able to put it in action?

MM: Like many of these things, this happens through incredible activists and collaborators and people just trying to figure out problems. A few weeks ago, during the surge of the crisis in New York City, colleagues from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Dr John Bucuvalas, as well as a good colleague from the Ariadne Labs in Boston, Dr Neel Shah, reached out to us and said: we are seeing unprecedented spatial challenges in our medical facilities to cope with the Covid surge. We don’t have enough beds dedicated for isolation, we’re actively changing the medical floors to accommodate this crisis, and we are figuring out how to adapt existing spaces to match ideal infection control scenarios. We want to make sure that we are doing the best that we possibly can. If we could we do a design immersion with you all and walk through the facilities, we can gather evidence and see the sort of design hacks that could help us through or even manage the surge outbreaks that we’re facing now, as well as those that other hospitals will face as the surge moves around the country.

Design Emergency Instagram Live series

PA: What have you learned from all this – and from Liberia, and Haiti – that can help us if there is a new surge or a new pandemic?

MM: First of all, that space shapes our behaviour and our ability to live healthy lives. And the most specific spatial realization I’ve had from this is that breathing is a spatial issue. The air around us is as much defined by our ability to get outside and get fresh air, as it is by the air inside of the facilities that we’re inhabiting, forced to inhabit, isolated in, or living within. Ninety per cent of our lives is inside of buildings and the air is defining whether it is clean or healthy or not.

PA: MASS has a very decentralized structure, with partners all over the world. How does it work?

MM: Our first office was in Rwanda, where we have over 85 people. And our second office is in Boston, where we opened in 2012. We’ve opened an office in Poughkeepsie, New York, where we’re doing a lot of work with the city and in the Hudson Valley, and then our most recent office is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working with individuals and communities, especially in Indigenous communities around the country. To some degree, we have been working digitally and virtually for years, so remote work has been a relatively easy transition. I just finished a call with about 120 of us; we were discussing all the things that have emerged with Covid. We’re doing responses not just to hospitals, but looking at the space of incarceration, the space of restaurants, the space of schools. Over the course of the next two weeks, we’ll release a few rules-of-thumb documents to share the kind of infection control strategies around managing these different spaces.

PA: A lot will be about hacking the spaces that are already available.

MM: I think it’s recognizing the hacking that’s already going on by people in these disciplines. Restaurants are being redesigned right now and they’re making design hacks without the support of designers necessarily. Hospitals are being hacked daily by clinicians and staff just to make them less infectious. There’s an incredible spatial awareness that’s emerging. For designers to look at that, study that, work within that realm, I think, is one of the opportunities that we have as allies. To both understand where everyday people are making design hacks, but also then to support them when they need to make harder systems-level changes – like changing airflow systems, for example, or completely reconfiguring medical wards.

PA: Is there anything that you’ve seen in the past two months that has really impressed you, something that you will take with you?

MM: I go back to the work happening in the hospitals, for example to nurses and clinicians taping the floor and creating visual cues so that people know when they’re walking into dangerous contaminated zones. The simple design pamphlets that are coming up for easy donning and doffing strategies, to ensure that you are protecting the people around you. And then the kind of rapid rethinking of the public space around lobbies and restaurants and the street itself. One of the exciting things I think we’re going to see is streets being taken over, like we’ve seen in Milan and like we’re talking about in New York, and given back to the public. It’s one of these great dreams of the urban design community that we are able to reclaim that public realm. There’s all this opportunity to rethink our cities based on these needs, and also on these opportunities that are in front of us.

October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*

PA: Have you also really called upon your colleagues elsewhere in the world to work on local projects here in the East Coast?

MM: Absolutely. Obviously, proximity to the issues and to the client is important, but we intentionally create international teams so that there’s a sharing of knowledge across the offices. Before this kind of virtual office that we are now forced to work in, we were virtual and leaning on each other, even when it’s less ideal or difficult to do. We’ve been fortunate enough not to have had to do furloughs or layoffs. Our fundamental ambition is to keep cranking through this, knowing that the building industry and the design discipline will be facing real headwinds on the horizon. I think there’s such a desperate need for designers to just get into spaces and be of service, because everyone right now is facing a real design crisis and design need.

PA: What do you think is the area or the areas where designers and architects can apply their wisdom?

MM: Two things. First, I think we have to operate differently. I don’t think the design work that’s going to emerge in the next, let’s say, 90 days, or the 90 days after that, is going to happen through the typical process of competitions, and responding to requests for information. I think the design work is happening right now, right in front of us. We need to roll up our sleeves and get proximate to those entities that are trying to survive, and help them. I think of restaurants that are just actively trying to figure out how they survive. The recommendations for 6ft of social distancing between each diner could basically be the nail in the coffin of any financial model for a restaurant to survive. That, to me, is a spatial design challenge and one that every restaurant in America is trying to solve and that we, as architects and designers, could help think about. We can’t wait until November to help the restaurant because by then it will be out of business. It’s time for us to reconfigure the way we practice and just be of service, and I think that will lead to work. The second is from the urban dimension, or from the city scale. We may see by necessity what we’ve all long been calling for, which is the next great federal investment in infrastructure. We’re going to see such significant demolition and destruction of our public realm, there’s going to be just incredible demand for a larger-scale, non-privatized investment in infrastructure. That means that our cities will need to have shovel-ready projects in order to get the money that might come down the pipe. All those projects that have been on the shelf, those big city initiatives that so many towns around America have always dreamed of doing – it’s time to plan for those.

PA: Are smaller companies better positioned right now because of their agility and ability to pivot and adapt to this kind of situation?

MM: Yes, I think there’s some incredible need for flexibility and adaptation as we practice right now. And those who can do that might
find real opportunity in the next couple of months, for sure.

PA: Here is one of my favourite quotes from you: ‘We are in a very existential moment, not only for the world, but also for architecture and design. This is indeed the time to rethink from scratch.’ What are your final words today to this audience of architects and designers?

MM: I believe that great design is a human right. We have a right not just to housing, but to purposeful housing that serves our needs. We have a right to healthcare spaces that don’t make us sicker.

We have a right to the public realm providing for the needs of a community– and not hindering or injuring us. It is a right that we have, and that right has been, is being, threatened. We have a chance to stand up and fight for that as a right, and reaffirm the role that design and the spatial disciplines play in the fundamental delivery of our human rights, in the fundamental delivery of dignity. We have for too long been relegated as a passive backdrop to the basic functioning of society. That is not the service that we as designers provide. It is absolutely fundamental, and I think everyone is feeling that right now. They’re recognizing that the spaces around them threaten them, could injure them, are invisible, and that they need to be made visible. Those threats need to be made visible. The airflow in them needs to be moving more effectively, and the health of that space around them needs to be made more clear, more effective and more accountable. And that’s a role of the spatial disciplines, to be activated and to aggressively take on that charge, and show that what we do in the world is a foundational need and a delivery of human rights. I hope that is the paradigmatic, conceptual, existential change that is happening right now, and that we’re able to take hold of.

INFORMATION

A version of this story appeared in the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, guest edited by Design Emergency. A free PDF download of the issue is available here.

massdesigngrou

Wallpaper* and American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) announce Discovered, a new project to support and promote the work of 20 international designers from 16 countries.

Presenting Discovered 

Launching this week, Discovered offers a platform to a roster of next generation talent during these challenging times. Each designer will have the opportunity to create a new object or piece of furniture, which will then be produced by one of AHEC’s global manufacturing partners and shown at the Design Museum in London, in June 2021. The project will offer both an opportunity for the creative studios to (virtually) access a world-class manufacturing environment, as well as a chance to express their experience of working in isolation.    Concepts of touch, reflection and strength will guide the designers’ work, responding to the need for our everyday objects to combat isolation and help us reconnect in a pandemic-hit, increasingly virtual world. The international group was selected from Wallpaper’s annual Graduate Directories as well as its creative community at large, and through AHEC’s own network. Together, the participants represent a promising, hopeful new design generation. ‘We are really excited to be collaborating with Wallpaper* to engage and inspire the next generation of talented young designers,’ says David Venables, AHEC’s European director. ‘This project will enable us to give them an extremely valuable learning experience on product design and development with wood.’

The design process

Each designer is invited to think freely about their experience of isolation, and to create a piece inspired by the functional and emotional connections we have to our everyday objects. AHEC has selected three high performance hardwoods; American maple, red oak and cherry for the designers to work with. ‘We are continuing our focus on three of our most relevant species, which make a really important contribution to the long-term sustainability of the American hardwood forest resource, and could and should be much more widely used by design communities across the globe,’ continues Venables. All chosen woods offer great possibilities for furniture design, and the project brief will challenge the studios to experiment with the material from both a design and manufacturing perspective. 
 
The group will be supported and mentored throughout the project by Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas and by Venables, as well as a global group of designers, makers and design entrepreneurs. ‘This is a time when the next generation needs support more than ever,’ says Douglas. ‘So we are honoured to partner with AHEC in launching Discovered – to ensure the designers of tomorrow have the platform they deserve.’

Just days before the opening of Paris Fashion Week, new Covid-19 restrictions were implemented in France. Bars and restaurants in Marseilles were shuttered. In Paris, drinking spots were ordered to close at 10pm and gatherings of more than 10 people were banned in public places. The final city to host the S/S 2021 shows with the most sizeable schedule has been beset with travel restrictions – from the 14 day quarantine required of returning UK citizens, put in place in mid-August – to the announcement that those arriving in Italy from France are subject to a Covid-19 test. But for the City of Lights, and the epicentre of the French fashion industry, estimated at creating one million jobs and €150 billion in direct sales each year, the shows had to go on, if at least in largely ‘phygital' form.

French fashion behemoths including Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton staged live physical shows, in venues including the top floors of former department store La Samaritaine, which has been shuttered since 2005, and the rooftop of the office skyscraper Tour Montparnasse, while brands including Balenciaga, Thom Browne and new-to-the schedule Wales Bonner devised innovative collection films, featuring in Browne's case, a trio of Olympic athletes. When a week before in Milan, Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada debuted their co-creative collection via a live stream, so Matthew Williams also presented his first collection for Givenchy online, teasing out his debut designs days before on Instagram.

Maria Grazia Chiuri may have presented a softer Dior silhouette for spring – inspired by enforced ease with which we are living our lives – but she didn’t go soft on the set design of the maison’s show, which was live streamed for the first time on TikTok. Inside a socially-distanced tent at the Jardin des Tuileries, Chiuri enlisted Italian visual artist and writer Lucia Marcucci, to create 7-meter high stain glass collages, that sprung up in 18 illuminated columns, inspired by the 2011 artwork ‘ Vetrata di poesia visiva’. Collage has a visual resonance with Chiuri, and she uses the art form as a tool to convey her feminist methodology. For the brand’s A/W 2018 show, she pasted the walls of the brand’s show space with provocative magazine covers and slogans, in a collection which nodded to the student protests in Paris in 1968.

If Dior is defined by the cinched in silhouette, Chiuri relaxed this rigour for spring. Models sported loose gauzy gowns, dressing gown shape jackets, easy tuxedo trousers and utilitarian cagoules. While her silhouettes were made for our at-home habits, details had an escapist élan, incorporating nomadic tie-dye, tassels, crochet and faraway florals. Designs for social-distancing, but still with a dream.

If anyone was going to respond to the practicalities of Covid-19 with technical tenacity it was Coperni. The label has its finger on the pulse of contemporary life, incorporating the digital experience into its design DNA. For S/S 2021, founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Valliant developed ‘C+' a protective technical jersey developed using Swiss technology, which is lightweight, moisturising and anti-bacterial. This fabric – which is immersed in silver ions – was incorporated into streamlined designs, which worked to enhance the body, not restrict it, like elasticated trousers and loose buttonless shirts. The collection, shown on the roof of Paris’ tallest skyscraper, also featured wet suit leggings and technical blazers, with easy zip fastenings.  

Face masks and visors have entered the global accessory lexicon, and for his sophomore outing for Kenzo, creative director Felipe Oliveira Baptista tapped into this phenomenon. Inspired by an early 20th century photograph of a man wearing a structural 3D mosquito net and cap (complete with a hole for his pipe), he created silhouettes which spoke of soft protection. Models walking outdoors at the Institut National des Jeunes Sourds, wore mackintoshes and gauzy archival floral print cagoules, paired with beekeepers hats, some of which had transparent coverings protecting not only the face, but cocooning the entire body.

In 2020, the world accelerated in line with Marine Serre’s apocalyptic design vision, with proposes sustainable silhouettes for battling climate change, and environmental and social chaos. These mediate somewhere between sportswear and couture. In ‘Amor Fati', a film directed by Sacha Barbin and Ryan Doubiago, she presented a cinematically impressive sci-fi fantasy, with a circular narrative hooked around a laboratory, a natural landscape and an underground water-world. Serre’s cast sported balaclavas, Black Panther-centric berets and body suits, arming themselves against upheaval with recycled moire harnesses and holsters.

There’s also an apocalyptic armour behind Rick Owens’ designs. In recent seasons, the label’s creations have drawn on the garb of glam rock stars and mythological Aztec gods. For spring, Owens streamed a show from a piazza in front of Venice Lido’s casino – the spot where he spends his summers, and also the city where the term quarantine originated, when during the Black Death, infected ships arriving in the port where isolated for 40 days. An apt allusion to our times, the collection was titled ‘Phlegethon’, referring to one of the rivers in the Inferno described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Owens equipped his hell dwellers in jackets with bulbous shoulders, fluid gowns, leather hot pants, platform thigh high boots and face masks. Uncharacteristically optimistic hues of creamy pink, banana yellow and candy apple red nodded to Neapolitan gelato. In his show notes Owens said, ‘I might just be getting into a taste for the lurid that an undercurrent of threat and dread can inspire.’ 

Pepto Bismol pink was also a colour favoured by Kiko Kostadinov’s Laura and Deanna Fanning, who for S/S 2021, evolved the label’s womenswear lexicon, experimenting with both Victorian and 1970s shapes, in bold hues and textures. Standout were hand craft-focused shirred and smocked dresses, which pucker and crinkle around the body, retro wide-collared tailoring, and an update of the brand’s curved Louis heel, embellished with colourful crystal beads and accentuated with Gladiator ankle straps.

Wales Bonner showed for the first time on the S/S 2021 schedule, but her collection – presented in ‘Thinkin Home', a sunset-drenched film by Jamaican artist Jeano Edwards – was the second in a three-collection spanning exploration of the diasporic connections between Britain and the Caribbean. While A/W 2020’s ‘Lovers Rock’ considered the British Jamaican community in the 1970s in London – inspired by Bonner’s father’s family, and photographs of teenagers hanging at Lewisham Youth Club, ‘Essence' explores the early 1980s origination of dancehall music in her grandfather's home country. Bonner looked to the style of Augustus Pablo, the Jamaican roots reggae and dub record producer and musician, and her collection sung of dancehall vibrancy and sleek British smartness, featuring stripe caftans mixed with tailoring, and fluid knitwear and bold patchwork corduroy. The collection also continued her collaboration with Adidas Originals, on slimline shell suits and colour blocked tees.

‘Psychedelic optimism’ is how Acne Studios’ Jonny Johansson summed up the brand’s S/S 2021 collection, designed to celebrate the possibilities of life experienced on pause. Looking to astrological elements as optimistic symbols, the Swedish brand collaborated with the LA-based artist Ben Quinn on a series of star prints layered over organza tunics. Johansson also honed in on luminescent fabrics, finding illumination in pearlised cotton, metallic threads and iridescent paper, and celebrating fluid and diaphonous silhouettes, with handcrafted details. Akris’ Albert Kriemler also found inspiration in phosphorescence, namely the light-emitting sculptures of Imi Knoebel. He collaborated with the German Minimalist on a series of fluorescent and vibrant creations that nodded to the artist’s graphic and colour-focused oeuvre, including caftans and relaxed dresses and chic tracksuits. ‘A Knoebel line, colour or form is instantly recognisable as its own. It represents what felt very right for this moment,' Kreimler explained. ‘Something designed today should not be obsolete tomorrow.'

There have been diverse opinions regarding the return to the physical show format, and one designer content with finding alternative methods is Jonathan Anderson. For the men’s shows back in July, he devised a ‘show-in-a-box' concept for his eponymous label, and for Spanish house Loewe where he is creative director, containing interactive runway show-inspired ephemera. At Loewe, the label's S/S 2021 men’s design was imagined as a grey canvas index card box – conceived in collaboration with M/M (Paris) – packed with fabric swatches, a record, and a pop-up show set, inspired by Duchamp's ‘Boîte-en-valise', a box the artist carried in a suitcase with miniature monographs of his own work.

For S/S 2021 womenswear, Anderson broke out of the boundaries of the box, creating a ‘Show-on-the-wall', an artist's portfolio featuring S/S 2021 looks, accompanied by an interactive selection of ephemera, encouraging its receiver to immerse themselves in the collection's elements, as the viewer would at a physical runway show. Eagerly Instagrammed add-ons included a roll of wallpaper designed by Anthea Hamilton, plus a border roll depicting spring's voluminous and architectural shapes – enhanced with plumes of taffeta, ruffles of broderie anglaise, glittering knots and XL pleats – sent with Loewe monogrammed scissors, a canvas tool bag, paintbrush and glue. 

Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski also placed focus on the printed form, sending out a collectors' item scrapbook to accompany Hermès’ physical show, with atmospheric images lensed by creatives including Wallpaper* collaborator Katrien De Blauwer. The maison’s accompanying collection was a masterclass in seductive minimalism. Body suits with cut-out backs were paired with knee length skirts in the supplest leather, crisp trousers styled with bandeaus, while shawl coats featured rolled up collars that unpoppered into scarves. The colour palette was rich and restrained in tones including caramel, sorbet yellow and scarlet. The most luxurious house shoe for spring? The Hermès clog, complete with an ‘H’ detail leather upper.

Paul Smith – whose beloved British brand celebrates its 50th anniversary this year – immersed himself in his personal history for spring. The designer – who swapped a physical or digital show for a lookbook and walk-through press appointments in London – was inspired by over 30 holiday photo albums, featuring snapshots of himself and wife Pauline. ‘We designed it over the phone!’ Smith laughed of the creative process behind the soothingly optimistic collection which features easy zip-up jackets in stripe tailoring fabrics, silk skirts and beach shorts emblazoned with enlarged archive rose prints, plus unconstructed tailoring. A double-breasted jacket with tactile prick stitch detailing, was inspired by the retro shapes Smith spotted on trips to Havana. ‘If people have been wearing sweats and tees all year, we ned to ease them back in,’ he said of the soft shapes.

There was also a nostalic nod behind Miu Miu's spring offering, which featured super sweet girlish silhouettes, like tracksuit tops paired with retro briefs, stripe halternecks and tennis skirts, knitted polo shirts and micro minis shimmering with plastic pailettes. It spoke of the innocent joy on dressing up and was sublime in its celebratory tone.

Designers used the downtime experienced during global lockdown to reconsider the core values of their brand. In fashion cities across the world, labels have presented pared-back or streamlined collections, with fewer looks and more focus. This concept resonated with designer Satoshi Kondo, who, troubled by the sheer number of shipment boxes used to transport Issey Miyake's last A/W 2020 offering from Tokyo to Paris, conceived a collection so compact it fitted into one. S/S 2021 features a number of shrink-inspired silhouettes that nod to the brand’s prowess in fabric development and innovation, from a technical parka and poncho which can be folded into a garment bag, to zig-zag knit patterned tops and dresses that can be rolled into a shape of a sponge. 

Y/Project’s Glenn Martens also presented a vision which evoked the ‘essential meaning’ of the experimental brand. Celebrating the versatility of its hybrid silhouettes, an accompanying ‘How to wear’ film showed how pieces could shaped, with the incorporation of zips and poppers. At Schiaparelli too, Daniel Rosenberry’s third collection for the house was focused on ‘essential silhouettes in the best fabrics’ that assimilated the hand-focused flourishes of haute couture, like trouser suits in the brand’s signature hot pink with Rorschach test-centric prints, Delphic gowns and chain-embellished shirting. These silhouettes were anything but shy, and were paired with hammered gold jewellery with nose and keylock details – surrealist symbols of the house.

While few were physically able to attend Paris for the spring shows, brands chose to celebrate the city itself. At Ami, the brand held its first show on the womenswear schedule, on the bank of the River Seine. In a more seductive spin than previous seasons, models sported dresses with cut-outs at the décolletage and check pencil skirts paired with string vests, inspired by Nineties evening wear. The urban landscape also inspired the soundtrack to Paco Rabanne’s pared-back physical show at Espace Commines, which bought a relaxed, daytime ease to the brand's disco-centric shapes. Nostalgic noises, that were silent for so much of this year, accompanied the collection, like dogs barking, police sirens honking, cars indicating and bike bells jingling.

The fashionable flaneur was also a focus. In a digital film presented as a music video, Balenciaga's S/S 2021 models stomped towards the Place Vendôme and along the Seine in the dark, miming to a synthy take on Corey Hart’s electro pop hit ‘Sunglasses at Night,’ sporting chainmail dresses and hybrid sportswear, fluffy heeled hotel slippers and wraparound shades, naturally. Rokh’s Rok Hwang was also fascinated with the concept of walking outside at night - a pastime we’ve all appreciated in recent months - recalling teenage wanders with friends when living in Austin Texas. The brand’s cinematic show film, set in an otherworldly location, featured modern flaneurs in fighting forms, including ruffled and tartan Victoriana dresses layered with leather harnesses.

For his debut at Givenchy, 1017 ALYX 9SM founder Matthew Williams teased out snippets of his S/S 2021 showcase a week before on Instagram, posting low-fi close-up images of chains and padlocks, lensed by Nick Knight. Hardware was essential to the designer’s vision, which was revealed in a surprisingly low key lookbook, with metal elements designed as a luxurious interpretation of the much-coveted logo. Williams looked at the codes of the historic couture house through a Gen Z-centric streetwear lens, featuring sleek, architectural shapes like square shouldered leather capes paired with gauzy bejewelled gowns, severe tailoring and tube dresses with seductive exposed backs. Williams nodded to previous creative directors, celebrating the tenure of Alexander McQueen with animalistic accessories, like sandals with curving horn heels and caps with knobbly antlers, and to Riccardo Tisci, in a hardware-focused revision of the graphic Antigona bag, beloved of supermodels in the Noughties. Referring to the collection as a ‘sampler’ of things to come, William’s Gen-Z fans will be fixated on what is next.

Chanel is one of many red carpet labels that has lost out to countless cancelled occasions this year, although Julia Garner and Shira Haas did opt to wear the brand to the Emmy’s first ever ‘phygital' awards show. With a typically insouciant mindset, creative director Virgine Viard was attracted to the off-duty attitude of an actress before a photocall for S/S 2021. In the show's press release she spoke of women with ‘their attitude a little out of sync with the outfits they’re wearing’ – a feeling many people have experienced this year, dressing up for visual dinner parties and on-screen events. Models walked against a huge Hollywood-inspired Chanel sign – the letters of the house erected with huge scaffolding – at a physical show inside the Grand Palais, sporting fluid asymmetric dresses, power shouldered skirt suits, sequin bermuda shorts and slogan t-shirts inspired by neon lights. The show celebrated cinematic escapism, one of which was rooted in reality.

Also intrigued by the codes of dressing today, John Galliano dissected the haute couture shapes and techniques used in Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection, creating ethereal, finely crafted and avant-garde creations which were presented in ‘S.W.A.L.K 2', a Nick-Knight directed sequel to the brand’s video in July. The 40 minute film flits between fitting scenes in the label’s studio, and a sprawling estate in Tuscany, where Galliano’s models dance the tango, offering extensive insight into the creative process behind creating a collection.

Louis Vuitton's Nicolas Ghesquière was also fascinated by the concept of ‘in between garments' that reflect the on-pause lifestyle of today, somewhere between suiting and sportswear, at home clothes and ones for dreaming of going out. Usually showing in various areas of The Louvre, from its IM Pei-designed Cour Marly to its underground Pavillon de l’Horloge, the label decamped to the top floor of La Samaritane, the LVMH-owned department store which has been shuttered for refurbishment since 2005. In a physical and digital presentation blend, the Art Deco architecture and Art Nouveau frescoes were offset with green screen elements, which showed snippets of Wim Wenders ‘Wings of Desire' to audiences at home. Ghesquière's ‘stylistically vague' shapes featured 1980s power suiting, chainmail mini dresses and slouchy knitwear. Silhouettes appeared elegantly thrown on, like boardshorts paired with a long duster coat and a ‘Peace’ slogan tee. The show summed up a season that navigated the online and physical realms, creating clothing which caters to today's much changed lifestyle, one which shows no sign of settling come spring.

With retail mostly down in the doldrums and shopping (if any) being done mostly online, opening a physical store, especially one that specialises in beauty, certainly seems to go against the grain. However, for Jessica Richards, the founder of the cult beauty boutique Shen Beauty, which has been a pioneering force for the last ten years, a global pandemic wasn’t going to keep her plans for reinventing the store down.

Located in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighbourhood, Shen Beauty has long been a local staple. It was also one of the earliest destinations to stock an expertly curated selection of beauty products. After a decade in business at her ultimately overcrowded space, Richards decided to move up the street to Cobble Hill, where the new and expanded store would allow all the goodness of Shen Beauty to breathe. While the timing of things certainly threw some unexpected obstacles her way, Richards and the creative studio Mythology, who she enlisted to design the space, persevered, while making the necessary changes to ensure the boutique would be relevant in a post-pandemic time.

At 1,550 sq ft, Mythology has divided the new Shen Beauty store into three distinct components. The left side of the boutique is laid out by brand, with products displayed in clearly defined shelves to facilitate quick and independent browsing, while the right side of the space has been designed to suit more service-driven areas, like product testing, consultations and quick beauty fixes like brow threading and grooming. Along the space’s central axis, freestanding islands serve as showcases for Richards to share new discoveries.
 
In order to create a unified environment, while still housing a plethora of different products that vary both in size and colour, the Mythology team constructed the store’s interior mostly out of one material – plywood.
 
‘The challenge as a designer is how to create a space that feels holistic, so we used plywood, which we don’t typically think of in the context of beauty, and we used it in all its different facets,’ recounts Mythology’s partner and director of retail, Ted Galperin. ‘We used the face of it on the ceiling, on some of the cabinetry and the walls. We made our own end grain flooring. We made custom floor fixtures and retail displays – everything is our own doing.’

He adds, ‘[The store] is in a really prime location, with way better foot traffic, so we canted all the shelves towards the window so that [passers-by] can kind of be invited in. For Covid, we made [the shelves] six and a half feet wide, so that way, one person per bay is a really easy gauge of not being too close.’
 
Another adjustment that Richards and Mythology made to the store’s design was to install a sink in the space – a relatively easy feat given that it had formerly housed a restaurant. ‘Luckily, we were at just the right time where we could have it put in,’ shares Galperin. And because the ceiling had not been completed either, the HVAC system could be upgraded to one that facilitates sanitary air exchange and also comes with a temperature gauge.  ‘We really approached things by thinking about what would we need to feel secure if we were going to go into a store again,’ he says.

To tackle the issue of how customers could test make-up products hygienically and safely —undoubtedly the most cherished part about visiting a beauty boutique — Richards came up with the idea of a painter’s palette that subtly references the abstract portraits that the artist, Petra Börner, painted site-specifically onto the walls of the store. 
 
‘Make-up artists are artists as well, so this was [a way of] taking it back to the roots,’ Richard explains. ‘A sales associate will help customers and use a palette knife to slice off a little bit of each make-up or skincare product [and] you can blend it if you want, which is what most people do. It was a nice way to bring an added playful element to the process while still keeping it clean. Beauty is sensorial at its core, so not being able to test products in a beauty store really defeats the point.’

Completed by Thonet stools, lighting sconces by Lindsey Adelman and three treatment rooms, along with a dedicated waiting area, where the store’s cherished menu of beauty services, including facials, microblading, brows, waxing and lashes can be enjoyed with the assurance that health and safety protocols are front of mind, Shen Beauty proves that even at ten years old, it is still leading the pack. 

INFORMATION

shen-beauty.com

Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi’s office – NLÉ, meaning ‘at home’ in Yoruba – is based in two cities built on and from water: Lagos, in the country of his birth, and Amsterdam, the city where Adeyemi settled after a long stint at Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. Since its inception in 2010, NLÉ, just like the city of Lagos, has kept expanding, mostly over water, with the architect highlighting the importance of a new practice – more open-ended and versatile, not exclusively imposed from the top down but rather more conversant and recombinant, accepting of informality and of citizens’ imagination. Something we need now more than ever, when we come to regroup, rethink and rebuild after the pandemic. Adeyemi and Paola Antonelli discussed the potential of architecture in helping communities cope with urban density and withstand climate change by acknowledging the power of water.

Paola Antonelli: In 2007, while you were still working at OMA, you published an essay in the journal Log, entitled Urban Crawl. It was an occasion for the western/northern hemisphere to consider cities in developing countries as paragons and paradigms for the future, and also argued for a radical rethinking of the position of architecture.

Kunlé Adeyemi: The article was written shortly after my post-professional degree at Princeton, and I published it with a view in mind. My thesis at the time was on the role of market economies in rapidly emerging cities. I had a lot of reflection around the impact of cities of the Global South and how they would become more important in the future. It was a prompt to rethink our perceptions of cities, understanding that there’s a critical point where cities, just out of the growth of population and economy, begin to become a lot more organic in their expansion, and the nature of the performance of the city – whether economically, socially or environmentally – becomes exponential. That’s what we’re starting to see in several large, growing cities in the Global South. Without infrastructure, or with very minimal infrastructure and very minimally organised economies, they start to regulate themselves, just out of sheer population growth and impact.

PA: In that same essay, you argued that ‘the space of architecture as we know it is getting smaller and smaller’. How do you consider that statement now, 13 years later? Has architecture changed?

KA: I think there’s been a lot of changes in the practice, but not enough change to cope with the speed of development that is necessary to accommodate the growth of human population and the environmental impact of this growth. We’re also losing grip if we do not realise the implication of acting in the capacity of the public realm, as opposed to just providing solutions that are very specific to individuals. In my view, architecture is more of a service, and the client is really more public than private lately. Whatever we do even for private clients has an impact on a larger community.

PA: Would you call that acting in the public realm politics?

KA: For sure. There’s a lot of influence on politics, and political influence on architecture. And I think there are a lot more people that have done more specific work in that realm. In our way of understanding the role of architects or architecture in the built environment, we developed a tool for analysing this sort of urban dynamics, which we call the seven DESIMER Factors. Typically, the architect is trained to think about design as the first solution for addressing any problem, but we would like to analyse the context and the requirements through seven factors – Demographics, Economics, Sociopolitics, Infrastructure, Morphology, Environment, and Resources – that actually drive development. Indeed, politics and social context, even the shape and the topography of the environment are huge factors, and design is only a tool to orchestrate these complex dynamics into built form and to understand programme. Essentially, these factors are divided into two areas of research – issues of humanity and growth, and issues connected to the environment. And that’s what this is for us. Architecture in what we stand for is about diversity and coexistence of humanity and environment.

PA: Are you keeping humans and environment separate because of the agency that humans have over the environment?

KA: Yes. You keep them separate, but you also look at them together. It’s about their coexistence. Whereas as a standard practice we understand people as our clients, but we also at the same time look at the environment as our client.

PA: In 2014, you participated in the MoMA exhibition ‘Uneven Growth’, which looked at the idea of a postcolonial city in which a bottom-up material culture leads and complements a traditional top-down idea of design. What is the role of community in the vision that you have for architecture in the future?

KA: I presented a vision of Lagos in 2050, centred around three points: water, transportation and energy. The image is somewhat our general prototypical vision of what a city that has embraced water looks like. We were beginning to understand the role of climate change and the impact on the environment on our cities. Eighty per cent of our major cities and capitals all around the world are by the waterfront, by oceans, rivers, lakes. Our view is that the development and evolution of humanity are going to become somewhat more aquatic, there will be an increase in that relationship between cities and water. We should learn not to continue to fight it, but learn to live with it.

PA: Are you saying that we will need to expand over water?

KA: There are different conditions, all kinds of very specific site conditions all over the world. We hear a lot about cities that are by the sea or by the ocean, the threat of sea levels rising, the frequent flooding. There are also inland wet areas, wetlands, marshy areas, where groundwater is rising – they need different approaches. We think, generally speaking, that in the real estate that we allocate to the development of cities, the portion that relates to water should increase. We need to accommodate more water basins and have fewer hard surfaces. Even if it’s simply about increasing a drainage system and having more canalisation, that is already an approach to dealing with water and learning to live with it; having more room for capturing rainwater as part of our landscape and urbanscape; actually building on water as a form of habitation, and also reducing land reclamation, which is very, very invasive – it’s expensive, and literally reduces the area of water in a region.

PA: Your Makoko Floating School is a famous, and also tragic project. Can you tell us about the community and the school itself please?

KA: Makoko Floating School is a project that began in 2011. I was voluntarily trying to research affordable housing and offering my service to the Lagos State Government. I started to look at what may be considered the cheapest dwellings in a city like Lagos. I realised people who live in Makoko – in what would technically be defined as slums – on water, with very poor quality of construction, were able to build so much out of so little. I got the opportunity to visit the place, and was completely blown away by what I experienced there. There was, of course, a lot of hardship, a lot of environmental challenges but being in the community itself is a totally different experience. One of the community members I met said they would like an extension to an existing school. I thought that if we could improve on their building system, it could be a great collaboration. So we started conceptualising. At some point in the process, we were thinking of building on stilts, like they did. But a few months after we began, there was a huge storm in Lagos, and it occurred to me that a lot of the parts of Lagos that were on land were actually going to be flooded. It is a very vulnerable environment for a very large city of nearly 20 million people. Even though people in Makoko were building on water, they were still affected by the tidal change, so we developed the floating solution that adapted to the tide.

PA: In 2016, however, a seasonal storm destroyed the school. What did you learn from it?

KA: There’s a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the situation surrounding the collapse, especially from the public realm. A lot of people considered it a disaster, a tragedy, maybe out of our control, but it wasn’t that, and we have a full report on our website about the circumstances that led to it. The building was a test, it was a prototype. We had worked on it with the community and we saw it coming to its end. It was not literally brought down just by the storm; we had had many storms in the past. What we learned is to be completely relentless in innovation, and innovating means understanding that failure is also part of the learning curve.

PA: Indeed, you transformed the experience into an evolving construction system. It had different prototypes, shown at the Biennale in Venice, in Bruges (Belgium), in Minjiang (China), and the latest one is in Cape Verde.

KA: We’ve evolved Makoko Floating School into what we call Makoko Floating System, which is really a simple way to build on water by hand. We learned from the people of Makoko and then improved the process into a flat-pack system, prefabricated, easy to assemble, disassemble, highly engineered to European codes, which you can apply internationally. We’ve built it in five countries across three continents, tested it in different environments, tested it with different local materials, looked at the collaboration, understood different contexts and how it would adapt in its different variations and uses.In Bruges, we had some covering with panels, and it was used as a school. In China, we had bamboo. In Mindelo in Cape Verde it’s a floating music hub. It’s in the ocean now. We’ve made a lot of improvements to what started out as a handcrafted, guerrilla-style project. And I want to mention that while it was a school – an incidental use at the time – the project was actually funded and supported by the United Nations Development Programme under the Climate Change Adaptation programme. So it’s always been a project about climate change adaptation, about response to the environment, and the school was an example of the use of it.

PA: A very inspiring example, however, because it was in such a creatively energetic community.

KA: The community is the origin and the key, and the source of the potential of using the system as a way to develop a much improved quality of life for the poor or the rich, it cuts across social classes. It’s about local materials. It’s about local responsibility, understanding what is within means, and maximising it. So that’s where we’re at now, where you can use the system for housing, a resort, a library, all kinds of facilities – on water.

PA: What has the Covid-19 crisis taught you?

KA: There has been the opportunity to step back a bit, slow down, re-evaluate what is important, understand, try to be more efficient, connect with family, change my diet [laughs]. So it’s been a great time to be reflective, as with most people, but also to try to develop the focus on what we think would be important.

PA: Your research right now is about African cities and water.

KA: Water cities as a body of work for the last nine years, since we began Makoko Floating School. We immediately saw the potential, both globally and also for the African continent. I’ve continued the research at the various institutions where I’ve taught. We took students to different cities: Durban with Harvard, Abidjan with Columbia, Lagos with Cornell, and we looked at Mindelo with Princeton. There’s a whole world. A lot of African cities that we’ve been focusing on are on water – the African Water Cities Project. The students are looking at different approaches to tackle the urgent challenges we’ve identified from the research – the adaptation of cities to the changing climate.

INFORMATION

A version of this story appeared in the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, guest edited by Design Emergency. A free PDF download of the issue is available here.

nleworks.com

Having observed the explosion and progress of the infection in northern Italy, researchers at Surgo Foundation, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, set out to augment the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s established Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) with data concerning, for instance, pre-existing health conditions known to increase Covid-19 mortality (such as diabetes and heart disease) and the state of the community healthcare system. The outcome is CCVI, or Covid-19 Community Vulnerability Index, a stronger tool to analyse the progression of this particular pandemic.

Paola Antonelli asked Federica Fragapane – the Italian information designer who provided the visual dimension to this pioneering investigation on how different communities in the USA are vulnerable to Covid-19 – to tell us more about her work and about the importance of information design.

Paola Antonelli: What do you think the role of information design is, in the contemporary world?

Federica Fragapane: We have a huge responsibility, as people, and also as professionals. It’s like being journalists and having words to communicate what’s happening – or being photographers and using photographs to show what’s happening. As an information designer, I have at my disposal data visualisation, infographics, visual shapes to communicate what’s happening. I have to use my role, my tools, and my competence to talk about urgent topics, and also to give a voice to people.

PA: How did you become involved with Surgo Foundation and start working on the vulnerability index?

FF: I started working with them at the end of last year on a website project. And then in March, they asked me if I was interested in pausing that project to work on a new Covid-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI), a complement to the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) by the CDC. CDC’s SVI measures the expected negative impact of disasters of any kind. It is composed of 15 indicators, such as household composition, minority status and language, socioeconomic status, and access to transportation. Surgo Foundation combined four of these measures with Covid-19 specific indicators – such as healthcare system factors and epidemiological factors – to create the CCVI, and they asked me to help them visualise it. I live in northern Italy, and in March we were witnessing how in-time actions are essential, and how for certain areas in northern Italy, it was too late. So I knew how important it was to act in time, and to work on such a project. They asked me at first to design a map of the United States, showing the vulnerability index at a county level, and also the web page explaining how the index works, the data set behind it, and the methodology. The page – precisionforcovid.org – was then developed by Paolo Corti.

PA: We know about big data, but then there’s also ‘small data’, which you’ve been focusing on. What is it and why does it matter?

FF: We need both. We need big data because it helps us understand the global picture. Visualising small data can help us have a deeper comprehension of the topic. A few years ago I worked on a project, ‘The Stories Behind a Line’, that had no clients and no commission, but for me was one of the most important ones I’ve ever worked on. It was a visual narrative of the journeys of six asylum seekers who arrived in Italy in 2016, six people I met in my own town, Vercelli. I asked them to tell me about their travels from their homeland to Italy, because I wanted to show, to tell these stories and these journeys in a very simple way, using the data that characterised them. I asked them details about their travels, very small and simple data, because I wanted to show the whole picture, the shapes that these stories had. Combining small data and big data is a good way to talk about the complexity of a topic without losing sight of the humanity that stands behind it.

PA: How do you become an information designer at this level of sophistication?

FF: I am a designer, I studied communication design at the Politecnico di Milano and attended the DensityDesign Lab founded by Paolo Ciuccarelli, which is focused on data visualisation and information design. I don’t have a statistical background but I collaborate with data scientists and data analysts, when needed; sometimes when I work for magazines or organisations, I look for the data, explore it, and analyse it. And then it’s experience.

PA: You said there’s a parallel between information design and journalistic reporting. How do you discuss the commission with your clients? How much do you propose?

FF: Sometimes I propose an idea, sometimes I propose an angle to explore the story with. Many of my pieces are exploratory, they don’t want to prove something, but they aim to enable the exploration of a certain topic. Anyway, a human intervention is inevitable. There are cases in which I talk with data scientists or with the clients, and they tell me they would like to show certain aspects, and so we look for the best way to show the elements and the insights that are most relevant. When I worked with Surgo Foundation, I worked with data scientists, and there was a great dialogue because there was really a great combination of different competencies.

I think by now it’s clear that the role of design is essential in communicating data. A few years ago, I remember some tensions between journalists and data visualisation designers. I remember some discussions in Italy about the role of information designers – ‘Oh, they are going to steal our jobs, but they are not journalists. What are they?’ I think it’s not a problem anymore and I’ve experienced a very harmonious dialogue between different competencies.

PA: Have you worked on other Covid-related visualisations recently?

FF: I worked on another project for Marta Foresti from the Overseas Development Institute, showing migrants’ contribution in response to the Covid-19 emergency. I was, again, extremely glad to show migrants as essential contributors, not only as victims. ‘Key Workers’ documents the reforms, campaigns, and other initiatives that are dedicated to recognising the essential contribution of migrant key workers in the Covid-19 response. We wanted something informative and evocative at the same time, so I designed a few trees that are on the landing page. Each tree represents a geographical area: Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, and Africa. Then the trees are divided into branches, and the branches represent sectors such as healthcare or agriculture or transportation – essential sectors. The sectors are divided into other branches that represent the national or the local level. At the end are many red dots, and each dot is a story, is an activity, is a campaign. The user can interact with the trees and can explore the stories – and then of course, there is information about the geographical location, about sources, and about the story itself. It’s another angle from which to communicate the Covid-19 topic, but it’s an important angle. I think it’s an essential angle. I’ve worked on the project with Alex Piacentini, designer and developer.

Studio Frith’s newsstand (left) and limited-edition covers for the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, featuring the Design Emergency logo and bespoke typeface in signature blue and white

Co-founders Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn took over the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper* – available to download free here – to present stories of design’s new purpose and promise.

Here, Paola Antonelli talks to information designer Federica Fragapane

PA: How do you approach each data set and decide which visualising tool you’re going to apply?

FF: It depends first of all on the data. The data analysis phase is essential in understanding what is the best structure to allow the readers to explore the data, and in communicating. To see patterns, to see insights. Then I really spend a lot of time looking for visual inspiration. There are projects in which I can visually experiment more – and in those cases I really love to look for inspiration from nature, or art, or worlds that I simply love. I like to understand which shapes, elements, texts, or textures I can work on to start a dialogue with readers, because my job is not producing beautiful visualisations, it’s communication.

PA: Have there been other examples of data visualisation for Covid-19 that have really struck you?

FF: I constantly look at the Financial Times’ Covid-19 visualisations, and The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s, including while I was working for the Surgo Foundation project. I wanted to see how they represented Covid-19-related data. And then I’ve seen Giorgia Lupi’s project on re-visualising [New York governor] Andrew Cuomo’s update on New York’s new cases. She redesigned the slides that he used to communicate cases in New York daily, keeping in mind the human factor. I really liked her approach.

PA: What is the relationship between visualisation design and truth?

FF: I think that truth in data visualisation is connected to the transparency and honesty in admitting that there is human intervention behind it. I think that it’s very important to understand that a data visualisation piece has people behind it, designing it, deciding what to represent and why. So I think that it’s important to clarify what we are representing, why we are representing certain data and not other data. I think that data visualisation and infographics will always be subjective, because there is something or someone behind deciding what to show and why. The truth is in declaring that.

PA: Should there always be an introductory explanation by the visualisation designer?

FF: I think it’s very important. Very simple, short text. When I work with Corriere della Sera and do visualisations for them, I always have to explain. If I’m visualising data about, let’s say 50 countries, I always have to declare, ‘We selected the top 50 countries because of this reason.’ I think that using text, using words to explain what we are representing, combining words and visual elements, is very important. Protests stemming from George Floyd’s murder are happening all over the world right now.

PA: Are you itching to visualise anything?

FF: When the pandemic started, I decided not to take personal initiatives on it but to wait to be contacted by experts, because I didn’t want to create noise. Because I’m not an expert. In this case, right now I want to do something, but I also want to wait, I want to understand. Also, there are so many talented designers all over the world, African American designers that are so great and I think it’s important also to give them space, to see their projects, to see their work, and to see how they want to share their experiences. Right now I’m observing and I’m studying, and if I am contacted to help someone and to give my contribution, I would be very glad. But right now I’m in a waiting space.

PA: Can you tell us more about your background?

FF: After university, I started working at Accurat [a visualisation design studio based in Milan]. I worked there for a few years. It was essential for my career because I learned a lot and I was surrounded by inspiring people. Then after that I worked freelance. I have to say that social media really opened the doors of the world to me. I started working with clients from the United States thanks to social media, thanks to Twitter (more than Instagram). I wasn’t expecting that, but because there is a very strong data-based community on Twitter, I started working on projects – side projects and projects for clients – and I started showcasing them. This really helped me in connecting with clients all over the world – first in the UK, then northern Europe, and then the United States.

PA: Do you think that having this kind of connection with the rest of the world makes your vision more open and improves your design?

FF: Definitely, definitely, yes. Events are also great, not only social media. It’s not possible right now, but I’ve had the chance to speak and to attend amazing conferences around the world; it’s a great way to learn and to have new sources of inspiration. One of the conferences I attended that inspired me the most was Malofiej. Actually Malofiej is not a conference, it’s an award, and I was on the jury with amazing designers, not only from Europe and the United States, but also from Brazil, Mexico, Latin America. Being able to connect with colleagues who have to deal with different issues, who have so many different ways to communicate and deal with different political issues, was extremely inspiring. 

INFORMATION

A version of this story appeared in the October 2020 issue of Wallpaper*, guest edited by Design Emergency. A free PDF download of the issue is available here.

behance.net/FedericaFragapane

Designers in Milan – with a substantial reduction of international visitors – held a fashion week of sorts, with a mix of real shows and virtual presentations, all of which were streamed on their websites and via their social media platforms, in a bid to connect with their international clients. For those actually attending (I counted just two editors from France, a handful from Germany, six from the UK, and no one from the US or Asia) it was all about masks, hand sanitiser, temperature checks, self-declaration Covid-19 forms, very last minute changes to shows from real to digital or from digital to real and location changes. As for the clothes, as a rule Italian designers are collectively wishful that S/S 2021 is nothing like the summer before it.

Fendi kicked off the week’s proceedings with a significantly sized down runway show, which marked Silvia Venturini's final solo outing, before KimJones joins the creative helm of the brand next season. The mood spoke of sophisticated comfort, with models including Penelope Tree and Cecilia Chancellor wearing floaty shirts printed with shadows of windowpanes, snuggly duvet coats and buttoned dresses in quilted upholstery satins.

The N°21 show, held in the brand's own Garage Ventuno showspace, was a marker of how fashion shows operate during Covid-19. In place of the usual benches chosen to get as many bums on seats as possible (until now, there was always room for another guest) were stacking chairs spaced around two metres apart in a diagonal format. If clothes are being designed for our new less social lives, founder Alessandro Dell’Acqua created good looking knits and sweats amongst the looks, but matched with marabou incase you get the urge or chance to dress up.

Dolce & Gabbana’s purpose built Metropole show space can seat more than a thousand, but its S/S 2021 show was reconfigured to seat 300 on rich brocade cushions. Unlike a show with a 1000 guests, it was effortless to get in, with temperature checks and hand sanitising stations plus guidance on how to leave after, similar to new disembarkation rules on aeroplanes, sector by sector. A little like the famous Ford Model T motto ‘any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black,’ the message here was you can have anything you like as long as it's patchwork. This meant macro or micro silhouettes from mini dresses to caftans, signature sartorial tailoring through to highwaist jeans and sneakers imagined in brocade, lace, carré silks and denim. The brand covered all options for a summer of going out or staying in, depending which way the pandemic plays out.

Max Mara chose to show in the cloisters of the courtyard of the Accademia di Brera, and guests sat spaced apart on cubes, the preferred seating choice of the week. Protective Cloisters – of which Milan has many fine ones to offer – were to become the venue of choice seen also at Boss, Ports 1961, and Salvatore Ferragamo. Amongst the tailoring and coats that Max Mara is famous for, creative director Ian Griffiths interwove appropriate pieces for our changed lifestyle, like strong knits, raglan sleeve sweats, parkas, and sporty silhouettes made from thermo bonded lightweight technical jersey. After long periods spent at home the message was a clear: clients now expect comfort as well as style.

For his digital Emporio Armani presentation, Giorgio Armani hired directors Leandro Manuel Emede and Nicolò Cerioni to film ‘Building Dialogues', a seven minute film shot over three days outside the company’s offices adjacent to Armani/Silos and across the road at the Tadao Ando show space. Its architecture – which is almost entirely pale grey – formed an appropriately background for the collection.

Back in February, on the last day of Milan Fashion Week, Giorgio Armani, alone, decided to hold his fashion show behind closed doors and asked everyone already invited, even his VIP clients who had flown in to Milan expressly for him to watch it from their homes or hotel rooms. This season he streamed Giorgio Armani's show online and on Prime time Italian TV (adding around a million extra viewers). And with a larger audience in mind (who may find the average 12 minute show length somewhat short), it was preceded by a 20 minute ‘house made’ documentary called ‘Pensieri Senza Tempo' or ‘Timeless Thoughts', with archive footage of Armani fashion from 1985 onwards.

I watched ‘Building Dialogues' from the Armani/Hotel which reopened in July. Some luxury hotels, such as the Park Hyatt, have been shuttered for almost six months. It was also in my room where I watched the Prada show. It was odd to be in Milan and watch a show broadcast from three kilometres away and not actually be present. This was the highly anticipated debut collection of dual creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. Shot in a yellow carpeted and curtained room designed by OMA/AMO, models walked followed not by the eyes of guests but only the articulated robotic cameras. The show was followed by a Q&A session where Prada and Simons answered questions submitted from the public via social media, discussing topics around the importance of novelty, collaboration and what defines Prada-ness. The session was a much more comfortable and civilised way of learning about the collection than popping backstage for a bun fight to speak to the designers.

For his second season at Tod’s, creative director Walter Chiapponi opted to stream ‘The Song', a film directed by Antoine Asseraf shot at Casa Villa Necchi, where the protagonists including Karen Elson and singer Okay Kaya dressed up in suede, denim and frilled dresses and connected with each other over imaginary Zoom calls or face time links.

Sunnei – who just announced a new investment from Vanguards – celebrated Milan's summer spaces, inviting guests to the Lido of Milan in the north of the city. There, guests stood on designated circular markers inside an empty swimming pool (sheltering from rain with umbrellas) watching models wearing relaxed tailoring, caftans and loose dresses in the brand's signature bold hues.

Amidst Covid-19's new reality, designers are all looking for appropriate methods to show their collections. Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni, pulled off an most extraordinary feat, casting 48 members of his creative community for ‘Marnifesto', a film spanning locations from Tokyo to Dakar, with each model wearing one look from the collection that had been remotely fitted with the aid of video and local seamstresses. All 48 feeds were mixed live in New York, with each model setting out at the same time, filmed on a smart phone by their boyfriend, girlfriend or roommate at home, on the metro, in the supermarket or on the street. As I watched it at 4pm in a Milan cinema, Risso was sitting there too, seeing it for the first time. He'd gave up his creative control when he sent of his S/S 2021 pieces, passing the freedom of self-expression to the cast.

Moschino’s Jeremy Scott worked with The Muppets creator Jim Henson to create ‘No Strings Attached’, a fun and perfectly executed 40 look fashion show modelled by puppets, set in a tiny filmic couture salon set to schmaltzy classical music by Michel Gaubert. 

For Salvatore Ferragamo, creative Director Paul Andrew turned to film director Luca Guadagnino to produce a short film set in Milan. Although the men’s and women’s ready-to wear-and accessories were the focus, it was equally a homage to the city and its architecture. ‘Life in Technicolor', picked up the vibrant green, mauve, yellow and lobster in the collection and accessories, but also illustrated hidden colours found in the city.  The 40 looks featured in the film were also shown on the runway in the rounded cloisters of La Rotonda della Besana, the Florentine houses usual venue, albeit with a substantially reduced number of guests.

At Versace, the label presented Versacepolis, a show streamed live with everything aside from the usual audience (the brand decided a week before to run the show with no physical guests). Everyone participating from set builders to producers, models to hair and make-up artists, plus Versace staffers, had all been tested by the company as negative for Covid 19. The show, featuring both men and women was full of joyous colour and print. Stand outs were the pleated looks, plain or printed, with some sculptural ruffling nodding to Roberto Capucci. This was a very confident message. The brand is hoping their clients have reason to dress up next summer, those décolleté bra topped dresses are a little too saucy for Zoom.

The Ports 1961 show, held in the warm autumn sun of the cloisters of the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia was intimate for very few but filmed for a larger audience. Karl Templer wanted this collection to be tactilem ‘as touch is forbidden now and everything is on screen’, and with its classical references, spring was all about embrace and touch. Templer is optimistic about people still finding pleasure in dressing up.

Valentino is based in Rome and traditionally shows its men's and women’s ready to wear and couture collections in Paris. Exceptionally this season it came up to Milan to show in a metal foundry in the north of the city. This show was inside, with a small crowd in a enormous space, but safety was key so all guests (who all turned up in masks) were given a new FFP2 mask and asked to wear it for its duration. We were treated to a sound track performed live by Labrinth, while creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli offered plenty to like for real life including exclusive Valentino 517 boot cut jeans made in collaboration with Levi’s, which will surely get everyone wearing the styles again come spring, whether we have to stay at home or not. Piccioli paired the jeans with oversized mannish shirts in chiffon, taffeta and lace and accessorised with the new macro Rock Stud bags and shoes. There were of course some more dressy pieces including fluid long dresses and a chocolate brown slinky sequinned cape-shouldered and ribbon-sleeved dress. Even you don’t have anywhere to go or anyone to see sometimes its great to dress up just for you.

Alissa Eckert, a medical illustrator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, helped create the visual shorthand for Covid-19, an instantly recognisable and easily reproduced spiky blob. With a need for clear and direct public information, it has become a critical messaging tool during the pandemic. Creatives Tegen Corona is a collective of Antwerp designers that worked with local manufacturers, fashion workshops and community sewing clubs to create 100,000 pieces of PPE. It posted patterns and specifications on the internet, where they could be downloaded free. Roya Mahboob is an Afghan tech entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of the non-profit Digital Citizen Fund (DCF), dedicated to increasing the tech savvy and skills of Afghan women and girls. One of DCF’s projects saw five teenage girl roboticists in Herāt design and produce emergency ventilators. Marco Ranieri, head of anaesthesiology and intensive care at one of the largest hospitals in Bologna, ‘hacked’ ventilator design so that one unit could ventilate two people at the same time, a vital innovation in critical over-stretched ICUs.

These are just some of the disparate collection of ‘design practitioners’ interviewed by the design writer Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli, senior curator at the department of architecture and design, and director of research and development at MoMA, for Design Emergency, their Covid response and recovery-focused Instagram Live series. It has become a repository for stories of urgent and improvised problem-solving and now an ideas bank, a place to talk about how designers and design’s rigorous research and dedication to elegant efficacy will be central to any post-Covid reboot or renewal.

Rawsthorn, author of Design as an Attitude and Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, and former design columnist for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, has developed a sizeable Instagram following over the last five years, with a more considered, thematic approach and bigger chunks of expository text than is usual for the platform. As the Covid crisis took hold, she dedicated much of her feed to a series she called Design in a Pandemic.

‘Design is such a ubiquitous force, rooted in every aspect of our lives. As soon as the pandemic hit, my instinct was to investigate it through design,’ Rawsthorn says. ‘And as tragic as the pandemic has been, it also became an extraordinary platform for design, and made clear how resourceful, courageous, gutsy, public-spirited, and empathetic designers could be.’ Over regular Zoom catch-ups with Rawsthorn, Antonelli – a member of the crisis management team that helped MoMA navigate its way through the Covid catastrophe in New York – suggested that design’s response to the circumstances was worthy of an even deeper dive.

‘Design is about life,’ says Antonelli, who has explored this entanglement in several exhibitions and projects over the years – the 2015 book and online project Design and Violence and the XXII Triennale di Milano ‘Broken Nature’ of 2019 (W*239) among them. ‘And there’s no moment when there’s no emergency, violence, or health crisis. Alice and I both have platforms and authority; people listen to us. So, we said, let’s do something to highlight the importance, versatility and pragmatic imagination of design.’ The Design Emergency double act was born.

It is clear that the series sets out not just to celebrate design but also to redefine it, or at least confirm its new sense of purpose, mission and wider usefulness. In many ways, Design Emergency advances arguments Rawsthorn made in Design as an Attitude, published (what now feels) way, way back in 2018.

The book, spookily prescient and with László Moholy-Nagy and Richard Buckminster Fuller cast as guiding lights, is a kind of rallying cry. ‘The idea of design and the profession of the designer has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness which allows projects to be seen not in isolation but in relationship with the need of the individual and the community,’ wrote Moholy-Nagy in 1945, shortly before he died. ‘Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.”

It is an argument that Rawsthorn picks up and runs with in Design as an Attitude, insisting that ‘design has always had one elemental role as an agent of change that interprets shifts of any type – social, political, economic, scientific, technological, cultural, ecological – to ensure that they will affect us positively, rather than negatively.’ For Rawsthorn, design is a matter of shaping things and outcomes but in larger ways than we might have imagined; it is a way of seeing and engaging with the world, and of tackling problems as wide-ranging as climate change, dysfunctional social care systems, social injustice and, it turns out, global public health emergencies. Design Emergency continues in that spirit and makes clear that this kind of high-ambition, attitudinal design and design culture is not just for trained designers. As Antonelli says, ‘many of the people that we celebrated in Design Emergency were not trained as designers. Some were illustrators, one was an anaesthesiologist, others were different types of specialists. But all have embraced the design label we offered them. And this is when you see design becoming an attitude: when you set your mind towards a goal and you use the tools at your disposal, in the most economical, effective, safe and elegant way possible.

‘Design in all of its different manifestations is an incredibly vital and important discipline that comes to fruition in many different situations,’ she adds. ‘But it’s especially useful in situations of emergency. We generally think of design as a combination of skills that centre around form-giving. But they are also technical, social, political, scientific, and it’s sometimes the ability to speak in so many different languages so as to be able to bring people together.’

The Covid crisis has of course been seen as a wake-up call, an economic and public health catastrophe that asks urgent questions about priorities and practices at every level. National governments have floundered and failed, value systems and political programmes been revealed as venal and cruel, health and social care systems exposed as underfunded and poorly aligned with actual need. There is demand for reset or at least recalibration. And the Covid emergency is now part of a cluster bomb of environmental and social justice emergencies. In spotlighting design success stories during the Covid crisis, Rawsthorn and Antonelli’s mission is also to insist that much of what we now know we depend on – systems, institutions, public provisions, policy programmes, the misfiring mechanics of modern societies – are badly designed. The more recent batch of Design Emergency conversations looks at the potential of a post-Covid recovery and reconstitution. And how we might design our way out of these crises. ‘We both feel very strongly that this could and should be a landmark event,’ says Rawsthorn, ‘which means that there will be a fundamental redesign and reconstruction of our lives, post-pandemic. We feel that the extraordinary achievements of design during the pandemic would stand it in very good stead to be taken seriously as a powerful tool to help to address the social, political, economic and ecological problems that face us all.’ (Rawsthorn has an uncanny ability to talk in long, perfectly formed sentences.)

Interviewees, ‘leaders of the reconstruction’ as Rawsthorn calls them, include British social designer Hilary Cottam, Italian designers Formafantasma, and doctors Sara Saeed Khurram and Iffat Zafar Aga, who are developing Sehat Kahani, a telemedicine network in Pakistan, capitalising on the country’s vast reserves of ‘doctor brides’, qualified but not practising and desperate to contribute.

And while Antonelli and Rawsthorn insist that design has always stepped up in times of rapid change and rupture, Rawsthorn acknowledges that a number of shifts, some accelerated by the Covid crisis, have increased design’s potential and potency. These include the kind of digital technology that makes Sehat Kahani possible, as well as what she calls the ‘making revolution’. ‘We had a network of makers, fixers and “fixperts” who were ready to leap into action with PPE production, ventilator development and more,’ says Rawsthorn. Design education has also taken on board this more expansive, ambitious idea of what design is for. ‘There are humanitarian architecture courses, social design courses, there’s every possible manifestation of design in a much looser, more eclectic, elastic and improvisational sense, design playing an active role in our lives in a way that during the Industrial Age, it simply wasn’t empowered to.’ Rawsthorn also sees the explosion of community networks around the world as ‘among the greatest design feats of this crisis’. And notes that many of the design-led responses that Design Emergency celebrates are local responses to local problems, rather than well-meaning but Western interventions. ‘You’re talking about a bundle of factors that have come together and I think that’s a very important one. We’re drawing on a much wider talent pool which can only ever be beneficial.’

There is, of course, much, everything, left to play for. There are circular conversations about new normals and green recoveries, rebalancings and pivot points. And every day our multiple emergencies grow more dire and urgent. Rawsthorn and Antonelli are at least offering examples of ground-up, local, well-designed responses that could be adapted and adopted, of elegant ideas that have worked. ‘This is a period of extraordinary and, in many respects, agonisingly painful change for many people,’ says Rawsthorn. ‘And with further devastation and disruptions to come, particularly in economic terms. And design is not a panacea to any of these issues, but by working in an intelligent, thoughtful and responsible way, with relevant specialists from other fields, designers could make a major impact in trying to rebuild our lives for the better.’

‘It’s a moment we believe will change forever the way we think and work, not only as designers but as citizens,’ adds Antonelli. ‘At least we hope.’

INFORMATION

instagram.com/design.emergency
instagram.com/paolantonelli
instagram.com/alice.rawsthorn

With the fashion industry as a whole navigating unchartered waters in 2020, there was an extra level of unpredictability to New York Fashion Week this season, especially since as the one-time the epicenter of the global pandemic, the city still moves slowly towards reopening and recovery.
 
In a bid to control the limbo state that things are currently hovering in, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) unveiled a new digital platform, Runway360, designed not only as a portal for the season’s new collections, but a tool that will continue into the future that complements in-person events and shows. Still, many of New York’s heavyweight names – Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, Ralph Lauren, Tory Burch and The Row, to name a few, remained noticeably absent.

For the labels that did choose to present new offerings, the spirit behind many of the collections was a clear reiteration of ‘New York Tough’ – the popular adage of New York governor Andrew Cuomo that he constantly repeated during his pandemic briefings. Many designers crafted love letters to New York. One of the week’s opening highlights, Jason Wu, transported a small number of in-person guests to the sandy beaches and lush jungles of Tulum (albeit on the rooftop of Spring Studios.) With models meandering through tropical greenery and panoramic glimpses of the city skyline, Wu’s carefree collection of pleated dresses, crisp tunics and easy, tailored blazers, provided all the joy of an escape without actually needing to go anywhere.

Continuing in this uplifting vein was Ulla Johnson, who created her own ‘I Love New York’ moment by choosing the Louis Kahn-designed Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island as the setting for her latest collection. By juxtaposing the stoic serenity of the park with the dynamic vistas of the city, standing tall from across the water, Johnson’s sensual and voluminous collection, which was inspired by ceremonial dressing and featured shibori printing, boro patchwork and hand-loomed graphic elements, conveyed a power and strength in its femininity.
 
Maria Cornejo paid tribute to the raw energy, enduring resilience, and cultural diversity that makes New York, New York in choosing a pared back, industrial rooftop looking over Brooklyn as the backdrop for her newest collection. Her label Zero has long been locally made in New York, and this season, she renewed her commitment to ecological and responsible design by incorporating upcycled fabrics, using sustainable printing techniques and sourcing materials made from natural fibres and replenishable sources to create her sophisticated, geometric pieces – matching masks included.

Khaite S/S 2021

Elsewhere, designers articulated the change of the times by grappling with what fashion means now in a changed reality. Khaite proved that there was innovation to be found from adversity. In lieu of a physical show, designer Cate Holstein sent industry insiders a large box that deconstructed the show experience. The first component, a large hardcover book, was filled with imagery of the new collection, shot by photographer Hanna Tviete, with fabric swatches interspersed along the way. Aided by AR technology, scans of the book’s pages further enabled viewers to experience new footwear designs virtually in 3D. Designed by the creative studio Chandelier, the box also included a 7” vinyl record to set the mood, and a scented candle, created in collaboration with Regime des Fleurs, to complete the atmosphere. A folio, made from Khaite’s signature leather, additionally held a set of postcards, which could also be scanned to view the collection’s brooding video.
 
Collina Strada also seized the opportunity to push its vision into a new dimension. Pulling from its community of creatives, both old and new, designer Hillary Taymour constructed a colourful, multimedia utopia featuring the work of artist Alicia Mersy and floral illustrations of Sean-Kierre Lyons. Set to a psychedelic soundtrack and modelled by Taymour’s friends, classic Collina Strada silhouettes were presented in a colourful, virtual world of tie-dyed cornfields, floating gardens and a rainbow waterfall that together continued to reiterate the brand’s purpose of being a platform for social change.

Developed by the Institute of Digital Fashion and Cattytay, Tinnitus is a series with characters and narrative, seen here in progress

For Tom Ford, the king of glamour and current president of the CFDA, working through the pandemic and lockdown proved to be incredibly difficult. ‘Designing Spring/Summer 21 was a nightmare,’ he says with a refreshing honesty in the video accompanying the release of the new collection’s lookbook, ‘I could try to pretend it wasn’t, but it was an absolute nightmare,’ he adds, while detailing the restrictions on production and health and safety protocols that had to be followed in order to produce the images. ‘It was very hard to be creative.’
 
Ford’s response to the direness of the times was to create ‘clothes to have a bit of fun in.’ Simple dresses and generous caftans were rendered in boisterous florals and animal prints. Slouchy knitwear and button down shirts, worn with sporty trousers in acidic pinks, blues and purples, brought a high-octane energy to comfort dressing. With one eye on the work of the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez and the other on the make-up styles and icons of the 70s, Ford’s vision of the future is optimistic and hedonistic. ‘This is what the collection means for me: the hope of a happier time.’

For Theory, a label that has always been known for workwear, renewal and rebirth was at the forefront of its newest offering. In images shot by photographer Ethan James Green, the label unveiled new silhouettes that blur the boundaries of work and life. Relaxed tailoring, knitted ribbed trousers and A-line dresses were utilitarian in detail, yet inviting, thanks to the use of tactile materials such as suede, knitwear and flat twill, and ideal for wearing both in public and private.
 
Possibly the most uplifting of all were the moves being made to support and champion Black designers within the industry. From Harlem’s Fashion Row’s style awards and fashion showcase which centred around the theme ‘Black is the New Black’, to the announcement of designer Telfar Clemens’ new collaboration with Ugg, the glass ceiling appears to have been broken. The approach of Aaron Potts’ unisex label Apotts – suitable for all genders, sizes, ages and seasons - was particularly on point, with its array of artfully oversized tunics, shirts and long tiered skirts. 

Best of all was the revelation of Pyer Moss’ Kerby Jean Raymond’s new venture, Your Friends in New York, which has earned the backing of Kering after Raymond met with Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault in 2019. Encompassing an incubator program, an events and experiences arm, philanthropic initiatives and a merchandise label, while aiming to create and empower a community of new talent and innovation, the platform is poised to be the beacon that will lead the way forward. 

The pandemic may have put paid to physical fashion shows, but July saw an outpouring of creativity and ingenuity as designers and brands turned to other channels to present their S/S21 menswear and haute couture collections. The challenge to create designs and gure out new methods of showcasing them also occurred during lockdown, with teams collaborating remotely via Zoom and on socially distanced shoots. The big democratising upside of digital fashion weeks that started with Shanghai in March is that everyone worldwide has a front-row view. This week also sees the launch of RUNWAY360, a new digital platform launched by the CFDA to showcase New York Fashion Week S/S 2021 which will debut collections using a host of different formats, beginning with Jason Wu and concluding with Tom Ford.

Out of this year's chaos and seemingly impossible circumstances, fashion has been shot into digital space and it is proving a fascinating journey. The shows did go on, with designs featured on avatars (Ralph
& Russo, August Getty Atelier), in 3D animations (Botter, Louis Vuitton) and in delightful mini films that blend real and fantasy worlds. Iris van Herpen cast Game
of Thrones’ Carice van Houten in her Escher- in infuenced multifaceted film, with hyper-real close-ups of fabric and embellishments.
At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri enlisted film director Matteo Garrone (Dogman, Pinocchio) who created a schmaltzy fairytale short,
 Le Mythe, that saw nymphs frolic in CGI bucolic landscapes and encounter the collection in the form of miniature gowns that arrived in a portable ‘maison’ carried by bellboys. The piece was bookended with real footage from the couture atelier, featuring the petites mains making couture gowns
at 40 per cent scale, echoing the miniature mannequins that Christian Dior created to promote collections in 1944.

Meanwhile at Maison Margiela, John Galliano and Nick Knight collaborated on
 a thrilling film spun out through teaser
clips on Instagram to promote the Artisanal collection. It features models swaggering and posing in painterly chromatic compositions, like otherworldly spectres in dramatic silhouettes. You could call it hallucinogenic haute couture. Knight also worked on a film to accompany Valentino’s collection, debuted at a live show at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. 

Some presentations were punkish and DIY – Boramy Viguier’s spinning lookbook images overlaid on a Dadaist collage background – and others, airy and lyrical. Issey Miyake’s choreographed ‘show’, entitled Meet Your New Self, blended free-form dance sequences with fantasy ights across cityscapes and animations of blooming fabric houseplants made of the brand’s signature Pleats fabric. The lm was directed by Yusuke Kobayashi, with digital e ects by Whiteboard Ltd. 

While fashion creatives are acutely aware of what they are missing – the emotional and storytelling impact of IRL fashion shows – and editors and buyers yearn for the group experience and the tactile examination of collections, eyes have had to be opened to new alternatives. Just as football teams adjust to the reality of empty stadiums, fashion is adjusting to displaced realities. 

‘The pandemic in all its awfulness has allowed people to step off the treadmill and address how they want to express themselves creatively. The question of showing a collection through any means except for
a catwalk has stimulated invention,’ says Knight, who set up Showstudio as a hub for fashion filmmaking some 20 years ago. ‘The medium of the catwalk show really came into being in the 1940s. The fashion business is
 a different beast today, yet the show system has not changed and there’s a big disconnect. ‘I have been working with models on Zoom shoots,’ he says. ‘The make-up artist might be in LA, the stylist in Jamaica and I “direct” the web camera, working with the available light in the room. It’s thrilling and just as creatively demanding as working on set. I am a rm believer in using everything that comes to hand, whether that’s an iPhone or a thermal camera or a security camera or a 3D scan, or an X-ray – these are all tools like charcoal or oil or a pencil. Art has come out of the gallery and lm out of the physical “set”.’ It is strange, he adds that while fashion is a cutting-edge art form, the show system ‘has been so wedded to the past’.

During lockdown, Knight masterminded a CGI avatar of Kendall Jenner for Riccardo Tisci at Burberry. It started with Jenner photographing herself at home, with Knight creating a digital Jenner body using a model in a motion-capture suit, and was set against a minimalist architectural background in CGI resembling an empty pool. Burberry will be staging a live show in September outdoors but with no spectators. 

As brands turn to animation, CGI and VFX, there are learning curves on both sides. Creative digital studios might be whizzes at building immersive AR worlds for gaming, but rendering the lustre, embroidery, and detail of an £80,000 haute couture gown, and translating the ‘dream’ of fashion into movement and setting demands new skill sets, processes, deep pockets and patience. ‘There are a lot of similarities between a digital atelier and a couture one. We replicate seams and cuts so the clothes move in tune with the body, as the materials would IRL,’ says Leanne Elliott Young, co-founder of the London-based agency, Institute of Digital Fashion. ‘Yet brands often have no idea of the application involved, the timelines or the processes. The current crisis has acted as an accelerator.

Tuning into a digital experience would have been a massive ask for consumers, buyers and press; now we have found our audience much more open,’ says Young, who with co-founder and digital artist Cattytay is working on a series called Tinnitus for LA- based August Getty. The designer, an activist within the LGBTQ community, describes it as ‘a modern biopic, a bold alternative to the tired narratives of couture, a series not a show, a new world not our old one.’ The project will be introduced through social media, web and press as a series over six months. Says Young, ‘Strategically we built in a level of intrigue and a narrative with crescendos and characters. The characters and landscapes are beyond our realities, very fitting for a brand that is thinking beyond seasons. The viewing is no longer con ned to old hierarchies of front row or backstage, or the limitations of live streaming. This is a democratised viewing portal.’

Digital showcases can also be nostalgic. Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter, co-founders of the Botter menswear label, commissioned animation studio Trappist Monk to create a game featuring their character, Aqua Novio. ‘My first experience of virtual worlds was through Nintendo. We wanted to recapture some of the excitement of choosing your player and the outfit,’ says Botter of their amicable cartoon figure, who tries on out oufits with the click of a cursor. ‘The most important thing about fashion is to express emotions and put out something new, but you can’t compare these digital pieces to a catwalk show, which is when you invite people into your world with music and real emotions. It is a complement,’ says Herrebrugh, who also presented a short  lm shot in the atelier with two models.

At Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh likewise embraced a sense of playfulness. His cartoon The Adventures of Zoooom with Friends saw stowaway characters bursting out of shipping containers and gamboling through the sites of Paris in Abloh’s sunny clothes. The ten- minute work married FX animation by Re ieknow, of Fashion Figure Inc, with 3D modelling, texturing and scenic visuals. To note: the credit list, spanning studios, styling, casting and visual effects, was longer than the IRL fashion show equivalent. Such animations are not a budget option. It takes two days just to render a couture look on an avatar, and a suite of software tools. ‘We analyse the fabric weight and drape against the  esh and calculate this exact detailing when simulating the collision between garment and digital human,’ says Cattytay of digitisation’s painstaking process.

For its avatar-driven couture presentation, Ralph & Russo worked with Seoul-based digital design studio VSLB. Tamara Ralph’s idea was for a cyber model called Hauli (meaning strength and power in Swahili) to pose in front of the Seven Wonders of the World. Says Sarah Schmidt, VSLB’s CEO and founder, ‘First, we built the avatar body with the precise body type for haute couture and set the poses and created the textures for the skin, eyes and hair. Next, we modelled the base shape of the garments to the avatar in a T pose. From the T pose, the avatar was animated to the final pose to simulate the look. Fabric textures followed, while jewellery and accessories were created in dierent software. Each piece was brought as a raw file into the final rendering software, where we textured the look. Each back plate received special lighting settings to enhance colours.

The digital reinvention of the show might have been considered ‘counter-cultural’ ve years ago. Now, the medium appears a viable alternative. It’s also friendlier to the planet than physical shows and shoots, with their elaborate sets and vast teams that, along with the audience, y into fashion capitals from all over the world. The Fashion Innovation Agency at the London College of Fashion is working on a project with experience creation studio Helo, AR pioneers Rewind, and design agency Twin Studio. ‘The shift is being brought about by necessity, but the benefits will far outweigh the criticism in the long term. Covid-19 has accelerated the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution in many industries, including fashion. Digitisation is less wasteful and more inclusive,’ says Phoebe Smith, managing director of Helo, which has bases in London, New York and LA.

There is a cluster of brands and designers who are also choosing to show off-grid or in hybrid ‘phy-gital’ shows. Saint Laurent and Gucci will not be taking part in forthcoming September fashion weeks. Meanwhile, show design and production agency Bureau de Betak set up a division, Bureau Future, two years ago, specialising in digital strategy and technology that amplies the live event online. Says founder Alex de Betak, ‘One of the tools that will help fashion become more eco-responsible is digital broadcasting. Covid-19 has accelerated that need, as will the recession. Nothing can replace the live events and physical encounters, but the parameters of the show need to be updated with a reduction in the size of the audience.

Without the constraints that come with a huge audience, designers are freed up creatively.’ De Betak produced a Jacquemus show off-schedule in a Paris suburb in July for a restricted audience, and a Dior cruise presentation in Puglia, Italy. ‘We are looking at how to amplify the experience online with interactive features and AR. With that shift brands can attract fresh eyes and audiences.’ What the new era of showmanship is giving fashion enthusiasts as well as industry professionals is an unprecedented insight into the ateliers, the processes and the inspirations behind the collections. It is pushing the parameters and expanding the ideals and aspirations that fashion embodies.

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*257) – on newsstands now and available for free download here

With unemployment reaching unprecedented highs in the United States these past few months, it comes as no surprise that the need to provide housing and shelter for the country’s transient and homeless populations is more urgent than ever.

Earlier this month in Los Angeles, a new community housing project, named the Aetna Street Bridge Home, was unveiled as a pioneering model to help tackle the homelessness crisis in the city. Designed by Lehrer Architects and located in an underused parking lot in the city’s Van Nuys’ neighbourhood, the eye-catching complex is one of the centerpieces of the city’s emergency response. It is set to provide safe and inviting shelter in local communities until they are connected with a permanent home.

Designed in three weeks and built in just four months, Aetna Street Bridge Home occupies a quarter-acre site. It provides 70 beds within its structures, which are made from trailers. Lehrer Architects, one of the city’s 20 pre-approved architecture firms, won the Van Nuys project after competing in a request for a proposal. They also created the design under accelerated and streamlined budgetary conditions.

‘The City Department of Bureau of Engineering set the requirements for this project, part of a 15 shelter, city-wide ‘A Bridge Home’ program. We decided to pursue it as it is closely aligned with our mission of doing our share to house the homeless,’ recalls the firm’s partner and project lead Nerin Kadribegovic. ‘We are already working on hundreds of units of permanent housing, which take a couple of years to design and build, so a ‘bridge home’, or a temporary shelter, was a great way for us to engage and provide immediate relief to the crisis.’

At the Aetna Street Bridge Home, modular, prefabricated units have been shaped into accommodation. This includes shared dining and gathering spaces, a pet play area, showers and restrooms, laundry and a secure storage area. Lehrer Architects deployed a bounty of colourful, graphic details to create a sense of character and bring a unique design and aesthetic sensibility to the spaces – a speedy and effective strategy given the budget, temporary nature and time constraints of the project.

Set back from the sidewalk by a bright green stripe that continues up the sides of the buildings, the complex incorporates existing trees to bring a sense of reprieve. It also adds generous amounts of shade and soft-scaping to counter the angularity of the program’s pre-mandated use of hard surfaces.

In the dining area, a large, bright yellow canopy equipped with lighting and space heaters provides a space that can be used by all throughout the day. Solar reflective paving helps to cool the campus’ microclimate, while the construction of a raised deck between the structures transforms interstitial spaces into venues for interaction and support.

‘With little maneuvering room, we worked the pre-determined components into a composition of fields of colour, existing trees, and trailers, re-imagined as abstract elements,’ Kadribegovic says. ‘The trailers are like any other found at construction sites throughout the country. We removed all unnecessary details, either through paint or actual removal, hence their unorthodox appearance. As a design strategy, when forced to use ordinary objects, we place them in a field of similar colour to get extraordinary results.’

The firm’s graphic treatments are especially effective in the residents’ storage area, where the city designates standardised blue recycling bins that can be locked to be used to keep personal belongings safe. ‘We responded to this by painting the ground of the storage area blue, resulting in a fun and uplifting feeling for this utilitarian space,’ Kadribegovic shares.

Lehrer Architects also responded creatively to the mandated use of chain link fencing by adding graphic patterns onto them. ‘Using available vinyl privacy strips, we played with light, shadow, and background colour to create artful patterns to offset the industrial nature of the product,’ he says. ‘Naturally, we strive to infuse all of our projects with a sense of dignity and uplifting feeling that touches one’s soul.’ 

INFORMATION

lehrerarchitects.com

In February, when the Veneto and Lombardy regions of Italy recorded the first cases of Covid-19 in Italy, both areas entered a strict lockdown period. Venice – located in the former region – became a ghost town, devoid of the hustle and bustle of tourists and its usually teeming gondoliers empty. The Veneto region is also synonymous with leathermaking, and around Venice, factories and workshops closed and luxury production ground to a halt.

One of the multitude of labels affected was Manu Atelier, the Istanbul-based accessories brand founded by sisters Beste and Merve Manastır in 2014. The label produces its handbags in its home city and its footwear in Veneto. Both boast a graphic and sculptural sensibility, from the undulating heel Chae boots to the supple Cylinder bag, a long circular style with eye-catching gold hardware. ‘Creativity arises from slowing down and taking time to reflect,’ the duo say of the impact global lockdown had on their aesthetic approach. ‘We've focused on pieces that will stay in our wardrobes for years.’ Here, we present a photographic journal of Manu Atelier's factory production, which has now resumed, as Beste and Merve muse further on creative evolution during a time of unprecedented crisis.

Wallpaper*: Where have you both been based for the last six months, and what has your experience of lockdown taught you on professional and personal levels?

Beste and Merve Manastir: We stayed in our homes in Istanbul for months. Even though we are not as free as before, we're try to continue living our everyday lives, adapting to the new normal with precautions. As human beings we need to keep learning whatever the circumstances are. We are all the same and need each other during chaos.

What business difficulties did you encounter when the world went into lockdown?

We work with a very wide network, from producers to retailers. From our side, we have production in Turkey and Italy, and of course production slowed down and stopped for months. Our challenges arose from this first link in our chain. However, the period allowed us the chance to offer long standing products. Our customers prefer pieces for long term use, not just for a season. This allowed us to overcome the spring/summer season without major losses.

Your shoe production takes place in the Veneto region of Italy. How was your factory affected?

Our production both in Turkey and Italy stopped for months. Of course, the most valuable thing for us during this period was the health of our employees and business partners. Although our production is not progressing as quickly as before, it has now resumed.

Have you had any chance to return to Italy?

Unfortunately not. We have not had any opportunity to travel to the country or anywhere else.

What new styles have you launched for A/W 2020, and what are your favourite pieces in the collection?

We’ve reimagined our Cylinder bag in exciting new colours and in a mini size. Our Duck boots have new tones and material options, and their lace up and multi panel versions have been created in our first high knee styles.

Has the impact of Covid-19 had any affect on the design of your upcoming S/S 2021 collection?

As designers we used this period to reflect and find some headspace, researching out future collections and rethinking our business models. We combined our Pre/spring 2021 collection with our S/S 2021 offering and created new models using materials we already had. The collection was inspired by freedom and calmness - feelings we missed during the pandemic.

INFORMATION

manuatelier.com

Wedel Art Collective has collaborated with six leading artists to produce face masks, with all proceeds going to artist support for those affected by Covid-19 or to international relief efforts. ‘Good design enhances and beautifies function. It sweetens the necessity of an object,’ says Amelie von Wedel, art advisor at Wedel Art and founder of Wedel Art Collective.

Barbara Kruger

Pictured top, the first artist Wedel has partnered with, Barbara Kruger, has rethought the bold colour and statements which define her artwork. Sign Language is consistent with the effects of political structures which Kruger explores in her work, here emphasising how vital the role speech – or silence – can play in shaping our society.

Jenny Holzer

Succinctly cutting to the heart of the issue is Jenny Holzer, whose mask offers a useful reminder as to why they are necessary at all. You - Me is in the spirit of the powerful statements she makes through her artwork, with concise and thoughtful alternative commentaries.

Rosemarie Trockel

Rosemarie Trockel has created four different versions of her Wedel Art Collective mask, each paying tribute to four of the women she has featured in work in the past which explores issues around gender and identity. Hannah Arendt, Nina Simone, Marguerite Duras and Agnes Martin’s names are legible from only a safe distance of 1.5 - 2m. With no explanation, their names invite conversation.

Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson draws on his Broken Men artwork for his mask design. The works – uneven mosaics of anxiety – ask philosophical questions as to how we can endure and fight with dignity, issues which come to the fore in times of crisis.

Lorna Simpson

A preoccupation with memory and history is the driving force behind Lorna Simpson’s Daydream, a work she produced this year and has now translated onto a facemask for the Collective. It is part of a series of monochromatic paintings which she has created by layering the faces of women who appeared in adverts for Ebony magazine, a surreal take on the nature of gender and race.

Raymond Pettibon

The final artist collaboration is with Raymond Pettibon, whose work in the past has paid reference to an eclectic mash of sources, with everything from pop and commercial culture to classic literary texts sources of inspiration. For his mask design, he has returned to Vavoom, a figure inspired by Felix the Cat which he created in the mid 1980s. His voice is a superpower; the rallying cry he emits strong enough to flatten forests and redraw his environment. 

INFORMATION

wedelartcollective.com

During the course of the pandemic, several designers, brands and manufacturers have focused their creative experiments, research and production on creating a response to increased need for safety and respect of social distancing rules. The results of these efforts range from subtle screens to adaptable furniture, sanitizing lighting solutions and ideas for pandemic table setting and outdoors spaces. Here are some designers’ proposed solutions to social distancing.

Urban Sun, UVC light installation by Daan Roosegaarde

As a response to the pandemic, Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde unveils a new lighting project to clean public spaces and ensure safer human gatherings. The Dutch multidisciplinary designer has long made light his design material of choice, creating several striking installations such as the immersive Waterlicht virtual flood, or the ‘Gates of light’, an installation on Rotterdam's Afsluitdijk dike. 

Roosegaarde and his team (a global task force composed of designers, external experts, and scientists) have created Urban Sun, the first project of its kind that employs far-UVC light (with a wavelength of 222 nanometers) to sanitize public spaces. The team ‘challenged themselves to discover how the power of light can be used to combat viruses and therefore enhance our wellbeing.’ The design features a circular light beam projected from a central pole onto the floor, essentially cleaning the below space from covid. The first iteration of Roosegaarde’s Urban Sun was installed near Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge, with the potential for future locations. Used alongside current government rules and advice, the installation helps create an additional layer of protection as well as, the designer explains, ‘inspire hope’.

‘Suddenly our world is filled with plastic barriers and distance stickers, our family reduced to pixels on a computer screen,’ comments Roosegaarde. ‘Let’s be the architects of our new normal and create better places to meet and interact.’

studioroosegaarde.net

Bounding Spaces by Anna Dienemann

Graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in the midst of a pandemic, it came natural to Anna Dienemann to develop a project that tackled the issue of social distancing. Her Bounding Spaces wearables are a serious but playful response to the life-chaging effect of the pandemic and the new need to be responsibly distanced. ‘The pandemic is reshaping our lives in unexpected ways, and social distancing will stay as an evident rule for a long time to come,’ she says. To respond to the challenge, she created a series of ‘compressible accessories’ that transform on the body to create natural distance and protection around it. 

The New Normal by Boir Studio

Safe communal dining has been on many of our minds lately, and Croatia-based Boir Studio have created an 'artisan tableware collection that bridges the gap between intimacy and distance, enabling safe food sharing while simultaneously connecting and separating the served dishes'. The studio's social distancing table setting features a 'dessert for two' set (pictured above), a bread basked truncated in half, a serving plate where two sides are separated by a raw stone divider and a set for safely sharing a plate of sushi. With the collection, the studio wanted to consider 'how to achieve balance between intimacy and safe distance within the context of the “new normal”. Despite coronavirus safety rules, our conceptual tableware retains that important social and cultural dimension of dining – sharing. Minimalist, geometrically shaped steel forms ensure sterile and safe food serving, while unique pieces handcrafted from natural stone fragments soften the stern impression.'

Integralis and Discovery Space by Artemide

In the past few years, Artemide has been making great leaps in the scientific and technological aspects of lighting, and their accumulated expertise make them particularly suited to cater to the current social distancing requirements. Fresh off the shelves is Integralis, an innovative light that helps sanitise surfaces by illuminating them – the UV light can act against pathogenic microorganisms in the environment and slow the growth of bacteria, fungi and mold. Built as an open platform, the technology can be applied to existing lighting products, and activated via a specially-developed app. While it works combined with all of Artemide’s designs, it is particularly effective when paired with the Ernesto Gismondi-designed Discovery Space (pictured). A semi-transparent panel that can be installed vertically or horizontally, Discovery Space helps define the environment while offering a safe distancing solution.

COV by Matteo Cibic

Italian designer Matteo Cibic has conceived a range of partitioning glass screens, appropriately named ‘COV’, which play on the dichotomy of socialising in separation. Produced by FusinaLab, these delicate dividers are made from anodized aluminium and perspex and give a light and airy feel to environments such as office spaces, restaurants, bars or reception desks. The designs consist of subtle decorative details and come in various shapes and sizes including the fan-shaped ‘Flaneur’ model, all of which are defined by the joyful curves that are typical of Cibic’s works.

Hinoki by Federica Biasi

Wallpaper* Handmade 2018 veteran, Federica Biasi, has designed a range of freestanding and tabletop panels called ‘Hinoki’ for Italian office furniture maker Manerba. These slim panels come in subtle tones that are based on the chromatic scheme of Manerba’s existing product line. Made from polycarbonate, which was chosen for its wearable, scratch-resistant and flexible qualities, the translucent panels physically divide spaces without compromising the feeling of spaciousness. Thanks to the semi-transparent material, the panels still allow for a sense of closeness to others nearby, as shapes and forms can be discerned through the vertical surface. The panel can be freestanding, on wheels or attached to a desktop. The modular system has endless customisable potential with the option of additional accessories such as cork, magnetic board, hooks, elastics, shelves and mobile hangers, while for spaces that require more privacy it can be covered in sound-absorbing fabrics. 

L20 Sofa by JaK Studio

One of the biggest challenges in the face of the new work-from-home culture is the clash of our personal and work environments. Award winning JaK Studio have designed a solution for this by redesigning the classic L-shaped sofa to transform into a working pod. This versatile sofa can be folded out into a sofa bed with bedside table or turned on its side to create a sound proofed work space. Adapting to compact urban spaces, the L20 sofa concept looks at the most central feature in the home and how we can use this to transform the heart of the domestic space into a working environment. The idea behind the concept was inspired by JaK Studio’s director Jacob Low’s observation of his own children building dens during lockdown, using anything they could find around the home. ‘It dawned on me that the limit to what we can use our homes for is infinite if we are creative. The sofa bed was a revolutionary piece of furniture when it was first designed but it has not evolved further,’ says Low. Fitted with all the necessary work accessories including drop down desk, reading light, USB port and laptop charging points, this multipurpose piece of furniture gives us a real glimpse into future living.

Saltine and Toast by Pair

US-based Pair has devised two models of unobtrusive dividing screens for office spaces. The studio is specialized in functional furniture specifically for the workspace, and these two new projects expand on their expertise. Saltine (pictured here) is a clever solution that attaches a screen on brackets to existing office desks, eliminating the concern of these structures taking up valuable floor space. The adjustable height provides the user with the option of a completely enclosed private space or a more informal desk division. Made from materials that can be easily cleaned such as glass and acrylic, Pair has created a universal solution for a sanitised and focused desk space that reduces the spread of germs in compact working environments.

Toast is an adaptable, floorstanding space divider made from lightweight material and allows for work separation wherever needed, not least because it can be turned horizontally or vertically depending on the height required. This sound-absorbing panel comes in a variety of playful or subtle colours and tones. Made from recycled materials, it creates a quiet, private environment whilst also sparking collaborative innovation as its tackable surface is the perfect moodboard. 

Screens by Tihany Design

Experts in hospitality design, Tihany’s new solution to dining diligently in these unprecedented times is a series of elegant concepts featuring screens made of glass, and wooden decorative panels for his hospitality clients. These easily moveable and cleaned screens can be adapted in their design details to fit seamlessly with the interiors of the restaurant; so much so, that once in place they feel as if they have always been there. Providing a more intimate dining experience, the varying designs feature sleek geometric shapes evocative of the Art Deco style. ‘The screens are designed with wellness and comfort in mind, but they actually evoke a kind of public privacy that we feel might actually offer a positive spin on rebuilding the experience of dining out,’ says Tihany’s Managing Partner Alessia Genova. ‘It becomes an opportunity to focus on the faces and food in front of you while still enjoying the atmosphere, the service, and everything we’ve been missing while apart from our favorite restaurants’. These screens will help restaurants from Miami’s Novikov to Hong Kong’s Amber (pictured) as they navigate reopening safely and adapt to the new normal for dining out.

Clikclax by Zahava

Australian designer Zahava Elenberg has conceived a fun and uplifting desk tidy system which provides the necessary divisions to ensure a clean and safe working environment. Clikclax is a bright multicoloured and multi-purpose system of interlocking perspex sheets which nods to the vintage children’s game, Playplax, synonymous with toys in the 70s. Comprising varying shapes and sizes of sheets that interlock with the cylindrical bases to form shelves, divisions and storage solutions, the desktop system has endless functionality and adaptability to be erected on any flat surface.

‘Clikclax is a verb as well as a noun,’ Zahava says. ‘My dream is to see people Clikclaxing all over the world — in a range of situations, from offices and co-working spaces to schools and student accommodation, hotels, galleries and libraries, at communal tables in cafes and restaurants, and on floors for kids to play together, apart. I can also see Clikclax working on a larger scale, as people-sized partitions and wayfinding demarcations. There’s nothing we can’t click together.’

Dutch Invertuals

When it comes to room dividers, this Eindhoven-based design collective is not trying to blend in. Their custom-made dividers available in four varying shapes (circular, oval, diamond and crescent) ensure safe surroundings are achieved with a light and uplifting aesthetic. Distinctive in their bold and bright material options of acrylic transparent, acrylic translucent and fabric, they can also be customised in shape, size and colour combinations upon request. The dividers, which are made in the US, can be combined and layered to create life sized, vertical geometric montages. Mounted on a powder coated steel frame on wheels, they are easily moveable and bring life to anywhere indoors in need of a safe and sanitised solution.

INFORMATION
annadienemann.com
boir.store
atemide.com
matteocibicstudio.com
manerbaspa.com
jakstudio.co.uk
madebypair.com
tihanydesign.com
dutchinvertuals.nl

The rising use of face masks has meant that many connoisseurs of multi-hued pouts have seen lipsticks, glosses, and liners go unused for months. Rather than letting those products languish in your makeup bag, we provide some tips below on how to reinvent them for other uses across your face. 

Perhaps the most obvious second-life for lipsticks is as blush. Many brands already offer sticks and tinted oils designed for duel usage, like Rodin’s lip and cheek oil or Noto Botanics multi-bene stain. That said, you can always try getting more mileage out of your standard lipsticks by playing with the colour on your cheeks. Powdered pinks or soft corals can be dotted on either side of the nose and brushed upward towards the ears for a subtle flushed look, but reds are equally usable.

Take a note from the grande dame of style herself, Diane Vreeland, and cosmetically set your face ablaze with vibrant reds on your cheeks, temples, and ears. To achieve this, pucker your mouth and draw a red line upward along the cheekbone and brush upward with your fingertips. Then dab a bit of colour on each temple and tops of ears and gently rub into skin. 

Matte brown and nude lip colours like Pat McGrath's ‘1995' MatteTrance lipstick or Gucci's ‘Elliott Brown' shade can easily be applied to eyelids for a natural look but, here too, reds are perfect. Chanel's makeup and colour designer, Lucia Pica, has been instrumental in championing the use of red eye colour. ‘Putting red on the eyelids brightens the eyes and the complexion,’ Pica says, ‘it doesn’t make you look sick or tired… it’s very wearable and suits all eye colours.’ 

For a smoky eyeshadow look, rub the lipstick onto your hand and then apply to the eyelid with your fingertip. Or, for a more defined shape, use a soft eyeshadow brush to apply the lip colour outward from the inner ridge of the eye outward. Alternatively, go bold and draw the lip colour right onto the eye, smudging as necessary. Try running the tip of the lipstick along the bottom rim of the eye and smudging slightly with your fingertip for greater impact. 

Enhance a red eye with a matching red lip-turn-eye liner, or get experimental by adding some gold shadow along the eyelash line. Liquid lipsticks can also serve as an inventive stand-in for cream shadow and most wands work for easy application. Burberry Beauty's 'Liquid Lip Velvet' line is a perfect example of a rich matte texture that can be used on eyes or lips. With the colour complete, extra chapstick or lip moisturizer as a wax to define eyebrow shape or before applying powder. 

Have a play and see what works for you, but always be careful to try patch tests on your skin first to avoid irritation.

INFORMATION
chanel.com
notobotanics.com

Much has been said about coming to terms with the new normal that we now live in, but for some communities, the effects of Covid-19 continue to be far from being acceptable. Since the beginning of the virus’ rise in the United States in early March, the photographer Camilo José Vergara has been documenting how it has ravaged poor, segregated communities across the country.

Embedding himself into cities such as Oakland and Richmond in California, Newark in New Jersey, and in New York City, areas of Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, Vergara has produced a compelling portfolio of people who are often overlooked in mainstream media, to highlight their struggles in properly avoiding the virus.

A companion exhibition to this first body of work, which was entitled ‘Documenting Crossroads: The Coronavirus in Poor, Minority Communities’, is once again being exhibited online by the National Building Museum in Washington DC. Vergara’s complementary effort, ‘Documenting Crossroads: The New Normal’ now places the physical and behavioral adaptations of people in these impoverished communities under the lens. Created with Professor Elihu Rubin of the Yale University School of Architecture, the exhibition presents the ways in which such individuals have had to live in order to stay healthy while ensuring their economic survival.

‘I use the word ‘crossroad’ for a group of street intersections in several of these communities,’ explains Vergara, who is one of the nation’s leading documentarians and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002 and awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012. He writes in mid June: ‘during the past 11 weeks, I have travelled from crossroad to crossroad in order to document the pandemic in some of the most severely affected urban areas, most of them in New York City. These intersections are social condensers and amplifiers, yet barely mentioned in media depictions of the virus and its impact, despite the fact that the number of fatalities from Covid-19 were ten times the national average [at the time].’

The 71 images on display showcase the ways that people – ‘street vendors, evangelists, shoppers, security guards, school children, police, people on their way to work, going home or waiting in line,’ lists Vergara – have coped with this new way of life. Highlighting the direness, humour, occasional optimism and ultimately, the solidarity that comes with being in this situation, Vergara’s series, which will continue on, is a testament to the resilience and endurance of the communities it represents.

INFORMATION

‘Documenting Crossroads: The New Normal’ can be accessed on the National Building Museum website: nbm.org/exhibition/the-new-normal

Design Miami/ launches a new retail platform and presents a new collection of works on paper created by international designers, artists and architects, to offer support in areas most hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Featuring works by the likes of Annabelle Selldorf, Marlene Huissoud, Formafantasma, Kiki & Joost and many more, the full proceedings will support GlobalGiving’s Coronavirus Relief Fund, an initiative helping key workers worldwide. The collection was created in partnership with Anava Projects, set up by curators Anna Carnick and Wava Carpenter to support ‘design for good’, and will be available to purchase via the design fair’s new Shop platform.

‘From the beginning, we wanted to create a platform that could support our community at large. As the pandemic unfolded, it was important for us to use our network and our platform for the greater good,' says the fair's Director of Global Exhibitions, Jillian Choi. Designers were asked to create works that described their experience during the pandemic. ‘We were heartened but not surprised, by the overwhelming response and desire to contribute,' continues Choi. Available to purchase will be over 100 works ranging from the abstract to the practical, including a sketch from David Adjaye's Smithsonian project, a photograph by Germans Ermičs, collages by Humberto Campana and Justin Morin amongst others. 

Launching today, Design Miami/ Shop is a new online marketplace dedicated to collectible design, offering over 800 pieces from 52 international galleries. Having cancelled its Basel date this year, the fair has been exploring ways to support its international roster of design galleries, and this new project creates an outlet for both commercial as well as creative and collaborative connections. ‘The feedback so far [...] has been incredibly positive with almost every gallery that exhibits in Design Miami/ Basel participating,' observes Design Miami/ CEO, Jen Roberts. ‘The quality and quantity of works presented gives an excellent indication of just how excited the gallerists and studios are. Our galleries have been incredible partners in this effort and have generously shared material along with their expertise to create a more robust site. They have all been extremely supportive of this initiative while understanding that it’s really an effort to support them short and long term.'

Pieces on sale will start at $100, and will include unique works such as a 6x6 Demountable House by Jean Prouvé (priced at US$1,500,000). Collectors will be able to browse the catalogue by product, era and gallery, as well as  specially curated areas selected by the fair's team and including collections on Contemporary Ceramics and Brazilian Modernism.

‘While we are looking ahead to the Miami fair in December, we wanted to find a way to support our galleries and partners in the interim,’ says Roberts. ‘The collectible design market has seen some upsides to the pandemic as people have had to spend the majority of their time in their homes. When I speak to the galleries, they all note that these new circumstances have meant that their clients are finally able to spend time in one place which is helpful for making decisions about pieces they had been considering. We believe that our new online platform will be a valuable addition to the Design Miami/ portfolio, and become a destination where visitors can browse and purchase the best in collectible design from the foremost experts in the field as they would at our fairs.’

INFORMATION

shop.designmiami.com

Architecture is a field where change can be slow. It usually takes a couple of years minimum for new (permanent) buildings to rise and even smaller or temporary projects can be a matter of months, so an ‘immediate response' to anything can take a while to take off. As soon as Covid-19 hit the globe though, architects knew that change was afoot. Now, six months on, while physical space might only just be starting to register transformation, the discussion in the community has been gathering pace, with designers and architects sharing ideas, initiatives and design proposals that would help us navigate spatially this strange ‘new normal' for months now.

The debate has been wide, touching upon all building typologies and different stages of the architecture profession and its related fields – from education (what does the pandemic or post-pandemic school look like? and how can the academic world contribute to finding solutions?), to workspace (what might a ‘safe' office look like right now? and is there even need for one?), and even construction. As Modernism was at least partially shaped by the aim to create a healthy building environment during the first half of the 20th century, it is entirely possible that our current challenges will birth new inventions, philosophies and practical solutions for everyday life now too. And if they do, what form will this new architecture take? 

These new narratives have evolved fast and discussion platforms emerged quickly within the global architecture community, in the form of webinars, zoom discussions or digital festivals (hello, LFA Digital 2020), offering plenty of food for thought and opportunity to scrutinise and elaborate on positions and approaches. Some projects have even started taking shape, offering us a glimpse of how a post-pandemic architecture world might look like, and how the different facets of architecture can make our lives better in these challenging circumstances.

Education

With a large number of schools across the world currently still shut and the need to find a safe way to educate the new generations growing in urgency, discussion has been raging as to what education buildings can look like in this new context. Inspired by outdoor learning at schools in Denmark, London-based studio Curl la Tourelle Head Architecture proposed socially distanced tents, a design which they started implementing, as their first pop-up school proposal is currently being trialled at Manorfield Primary School in Tower Hamlets; and a second, at Fortismere School in Haringey, is already in the works.

In a different part of the world, Dubai-based architect Pallavi Dean of studio Roar looks at the crisis as an opportunity to rethink our education spaces altogether, putting together a white paper on the long term solutions we can apply (a suggestion pictured above). ‘Home learning has really made us think about the physical spaces in a school where the magic happens, both in terms of educational attainment and personal enrichment. We need to create more of these spaces – and not waste precious real estate on spaces for humdrum tasks,' says Dean. Clever, efficient and flexible design is a must in this context. 

Meanwhile at the Moscow Architecture School MARCH, a newly launched online discussion series ‘Architectural (De) Schooling in the Age of Quarantine' is bringing the discussion to higher education. Do we need architecture schools? Do we need them to change? It's questions like these that guests, including Tom Emerson, Sam Jacob and Salomon Frausto, are called upon to tackle, as the series unfolds through June and July. 

On the West Coast of America, the California College of the Arts Design Futures Lab is holding a series of virtual discussions as part of San Francisco Design Week, including a recent one on what matters now in architecture and design education, with speakers including Joseph Grima and Lesley Lokko. Tune in this week. 

Community and events

In the architecture community and beyond, digital events such as the ongoing London Festival of Architecture and Design Variations Virtual are looking at different aspects of design in the state of crisis and invite the public to take part. The Yeh Ideology 14th Annual Design Summit 2020 is going live on 25 June themed around ‘Design for Disruption', reflecting on the ways the built environment can be affected by the pandemic.

Similar issues are also touched upon in a new bi-monthly webcast – Design Disruptions – launched this month by New York based journalist, curator and regular Wallpaper* contributor Sam Lubell, exploring the substantial shifts in design resulting from issues like Covid-19, systemic inequality, climate change, the digital revolution, and the housing crisis. Guests include Moshe Safdie and Ma Yansong. 

In London, the crisis acts as a catalyst for discussions here too, on a series of wide ranging topics. A recent webinar (now available to view online) including architect Alex Lifschutz and lighting designer Mark Major looked at lighting, and the experience of London and its iconic architecture and public space at night, pre- and post-lockdown. (Pictured, above, a proposal by lighting specialists Speirs + Major for reducing illumination of interiors in order to improve the public realm and the area's night time experience). 

Construction

International architecture studio Hassell has been highlighting a different aspect of the architecture process; whether the pandemic might play a role in expediting concepts of automation within the construction industry. The idea is not new. Machines like drones, Spot® robot dogs by Boston Dynamics and smart, remote control technology are already is use in this setting, so could the need for social distancing make the use of robotics in construction more widespread and desirable, wonders Xavier De Kestelier, head of Hassell’s global design technology and innovation team.

Future proofing construction against similar pandemics might be a key concern in the field as building sites across the globe resume operations. And what does this mean for the industry's human resources? The firm recently explored creating a specially designed, fully viable Mars habitat, constructed by autonomous robots as part of the Design Museum's Moving to Mars exhibition (pictured above).

Workspace

With a large part of the global population working from home for the past few months, discussions about returning to an office environment, what it means and what changes are needed in order to create an appropriate workspace, are heated. London based office interior specialist Linda Morey-Burrows of MoreySmith feels that several areas within office design are bound to change (see sketch pictured above), from the overall density to the materials used, to ensure surfaces prevent virus transmission (natural materials, such as wood, seem to work much better on that front). ‘There'll be a reduction in density by about 50 per cent. Developers are asking me if they need more office space,' she says, although admits that while workspace is changing and companies will need to work harder to make offices attractive, the need for a more formal workspace will remain – just transform. ‘People are desperate to come back together for some social interaction. Wellbeing is going to be even bigger than ever before.' 

This is an area workplace design experts ThirdWay are addressing too. The firm has recently launched Hybrid Working, a new programme to help businesses navigate their return to the workplace (pictured above). The emphasis is on balancing an office and a remote setting, merging approaches to increase safety and life satisfaction. Spanning three stages – initial assessment, a six-month of smaller but permanent adjustments, and finally a 1-3 year long rebuilding and cost evaluation phase – the proposal is aimed at recalibrating workspace for the companies that need it. 

Returning to a pre-Covid set up seems unthinkable by many, but radical change is tricky too. Canadians ACDF Architecture feel the reality will be somewhere in the middle. ‘In speaking with many of our clients, it’s apparent that many of them are confident that they will return to the vibrancy of their pre-COVID day-to-day operations,' says practice partner Joan Renaud. ‘That being said, our clients are also very aware of the current environment. So, whether it be in response to this current pandemic, or preparing for the next pandemic, this new reality must form part of the conversation about every new layout that we approach. [...] It takes time to change our habits, but I think that there are ways to incorporate flexibility into office design without making Covid-19 the focus of a project.'

New York-based architecture studio FXCollaborative is already implementing changes in its workspace as the crisis caught them at a very interesting point in time; the firm was building 1 Willoughby Square, which will include its new office building in Downtown Brooklyn, when the lockdown hit. The architects moved fast and made a series of changes to the project's interiors, which are still in construction, so that their future home reflects current needs for a contactless environment and social distancing. Automatic doors, touch-free faucets, plenty of outdoors space, extra bicycle provisions and state-of-the-art ventilation systems were a must. ‘The biggest challenge for FXC in moving to a building we have designed is going to be proving our design principles hold water by swimming in them ourselves as the inaugural tenant,' says design director Angie Lee. ‘The most important thing we are trying to change is our addiction to business "as usual". I personally am looking forward to a different kind of pressure: the pressure to loosen our grip on old habits and model new behaviors to be more mobile, tech-savvy, remotely capable, and healthy.'

Housing

Housing is another area where architects expect developments – yet social distancing and stay-at-home quarantine guidelines have made this process even slower. One could argue though that the need for workspace at home and extra privacy are two key trends that are starting to emerge, pushing the once-coveted open-plan living space to the side. An environmental approach is also key within the new normal, weaving into housing concepts of nature and wellbeing – for both people and planet.

London-based architect Tara Gbolade, who heads an exciting emerging studio in the capital (her design for an energy efficient house in Kent, pictured above), works in both the residential and the sustainability realm and knows this pandemic will change the way we think on both fronts. ‘The quality of housing must adapt, as we continue to spend more time in our homes. This argues for far more energy efficient homes – and responding to both embodied and operational energy (therefore advocating for higher standards such as passivhaus as we strive to meet net zero carbon standards). And critically, ensuring the need for pre-occupation performance assessments and certification – to ensure that the performance gap we are used to glossing-over in the construction industry can be addressed,' says Gbolade. ‘Our post-pandemic housing and communities will also need to accommodate more diverse uses including locally available co-working spaces as more people work from home but may need respite from the four walls of their house or flat.'

Senior living, a sub-category to the genre that feels especially relevant in the context of the current pandemic, will no doubt be affected too. This is a typology that London based Morris + Company has been involved in and looking back at its experience, the studio points out open air spaces, generous apartment sizes and circulation space, and internal adaptability (all featured in the firm's most recent such project in Belsize Park, Belle Vue, pictured above) as two important elements to look out for. ‘I hope, however, that from these practical requirements to minimise risk in the future, the design quality for existing and future retirement communities will increase,' says director Miranda MacLaren. ‘Shared living is an opportunity to tackle isolationism in society and provide healthy communities that can support each other. There is an opportunity within this crisis to set higher standards for the future for retirement developments and offer a dignified and supportive environment for residents who are an integral part of our local community.' There's also no reason why such principles shouldn't apply to residential projects for the wider population too. 

Meanwhile, new concepts for adapting our homes to the new realities have already started to emerge, with this week's announcement of the winner of the Covid-19 Design Innovation Grant by the International Design Awards (IDA). Designer Sarah Goldblatt has created a concept for an in-home isolation pod, the low cost, easily assembled Safe Shed, where residents can self-isolated safely from others in a single household upon the appearance of symptoms. No doubt more inventive designs will continue to appear, showcasing the diversity and richness architecture has to offer in problem-solving. 

INFORMATION

clth.co.uk

designbyroar.com

u.university

sfdesignweek.org

yehideology.com

Design Disruption

Saving The Night

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morrisand.company

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