Long before UK hip-hop and electronic music were globally recognised, Eddie Otchere and Normski were capturing culture in motion, documenting dancefloors and scenes as they unfolded in real time. From the birth of British drum ’n’ bass, breakdancing and raves to the early intersections of rap, sound system culture, jungle and garage, their images amplified Black British identity and celebrated youth expression at a pivotal moment in music history.

As analogue architects, they documented homegrown movements while tracing the crossover of artists from New York, LA, and Detroit through a British lens. Their photos captured the energy, chaos, imperfection, and intimacy of both superstar subjects and underground subcultures on film in a way that could neither be manipulated nor replicated. From Wu-Tang Clan goofing around in east London to De La Soul in a grimy Brixton alley, and Estelle in the Bronx with an image that propelled her from London to the Grammys with ‘American Boy’.

Eddie Otchere is a cultural chronicler, educator, and author who treats his cameras as an extension of his heart. Born in Brixton with Ghanaian roots, he cut his teeth in the communities he would later document. As jungle breakbeats were beamed from pirate radio to London’s estates, he positioned himself not as an outsider but as an archivist of lived experience. Hand-picked as the official photographer for Goldie’s Metalheadz club night in the mid-1990s, he also captured Aaliyah on the verge of fame on a sunny hotel balcony in Swiss Cottage and shot headshots of every member of Wu-Tang Clan, producing some of their most enduring images. Today, he continues to document a new generation, from UK junglist Sherelle to Jamaican reggae titan Chronixx.

Normski is a natural-born hustler and sharp shooter. Born Norman Anderson and raised in a Jamaican household in north London, he built his first darkroom at 12 and taught himself to develop film before most kids picked up a camera. His magnetic prowess led him to document the birth of Detroit techno, East LA girl gangs, voice a generation as the electrifying host of the BBC’s Dance Energy and become an in-demand DJ. His archive includes some of the earliest, seminal shots of Public Enemy, Salt-N-Pepa, N.W.A., Ice-T, and the Juice Crew on London soil. Incalculably tenacious, he shot on the fly, sometimes cold-calling magazines from payphones with his last 25p to sell images before they were even developed. Today, he remains a pivotal ambassador of UK hip-hop.

In 2026, both their passions are still fuelled by storytelling and future chapters. Their work has appeared in i-D, The Face, Melody Maker, NME, Hip Hop Connection, and far beyond. They’ve both published hit biographies, including Normski: The Man With the Golden Shutter, Otchere’s Who Say Reload: The Stories Behind the Classic Drum 'n' Bass Records of the ’90s, and Spirit Behind the Lens: The Making of a Hip Hop Photographer. Their photos have hung in galleries worldwide, and now at V&A East as part of ‘The Music is Black’, a landmark exhibition marking 125 years of Black British music shaping culture.

For the first time, both photographers have come together in this interview to celebrate the impact of their images.

Ultramagnetic MCs

Normski: I’ve heard people compare my photos to an adrenaline shot; Ultramagnetic MCs, 1989 at Dingwalls, is exactly that. I love this photo. I titled it ‘Yo! Bum Rush the Show!’ after Public Enemy’s debut album, and because it was the wildest rushing of backstage doors I’ve ever witnessed.

At that time, Ultramagnetic MCs were one of the most dynamic, brilliant rap groups ever. Everyone who was into ‘real’ hip-hop was at that gig. It was a big deal, and the photo means a lot to me, not least because Dingwalls was my local.

A lot of US acts didn’t realise they had a fanbase here; people just like them, living the music. Hip-hop closed those gaps and brought people together.

The gig was totally oversold, and Dingwalls was teeny. Promoters thought hip-hop was a fad, like skateboarding in the 1970s. But the crowd rushed in so fast that I had to jump on stage to avoid getting crushed. I had no idea how bright my flash was, but it was powerful enough to capture faces, even outside.

In the end, they did the show with the back door open so folks could listen from the street.

So Solid Crew

Eddie: When garage came along, I wanted to contribute to that iconography by working with So Solid Crew and lock into those guys. Especially because they were local to me, Battersea people, who shared the same hood.

I set up a lot of their early photos, and had already shot Lisa Mafia, Romeo and Mega Man when I was commissioned to do the press shot for their defining track, ‘21 Seconds’.

I brought in Karen Binns (a superstar stylist) to style the shoot and the video, which was an executive move. That was an executive move. Garage kids weren’t afraid to be seen; jungle kids didn’t want to be seen. So when I told them, ‘I’m getting the best stylist in the world,’ they ran with it, ‘Whatever she costs, we’re in.’

On set, I was teasing them: ‘If you’re a crew, where’s the crew? We need that shot.’

That Saturday afternoon in Battersea, their whole crew pulled up. Kids were just walking out from the estates into the local park. I knew the spot because of the gas towers, proper south London. They’d just landed a big deal, and even though I told them not to spend the money on cars, Romeo and Mega Man both rolled up with Audis. To me, that image summarises the garage era. It's the photo I wasn’t paid for, but knew we needed.

It ended up in the VHS insert for the high-budget ‘21 Seconds’ video, which had its own Leicester Square red carpet premiere. The track went to number one, won a MOBO, was performed on the Top of the Pops Christmas special and is now hanging in V&A East.

Goldie

Normski: Eddie and I were probably the only two people who ever took pictures in Metalheadz. There was only one light above the DJ. It was dark as hell in there! It wasn’t about being seen; it was about being beaten up by the bassline and the riddim. Men used to be in the corner burning greenery, everyone was flying off of their heads. The place was crazy! A proper jump up!

That’s why this photo has a lot of meaning to me because that was my introduction to this sound and culture that was like ‘This is fucking me man! I love this shit!’ I went in there with a little snapping camera in my pocket. I didn’t push it too hard because it was not comfortable when a flash went off in that place! People hated that! That was ungracious behaviour.

Goldie used to walk around that club high-pitch whistling, so loud when the track dropped and making sure everyone was happy (I won’t try to do it cuz I’ll probably blow some teeth out.) But in this photograph, if you look at it closely, you can see my fist at the bottom of it. I called him over

Kemistry and Storm

Eddie: This photograph is a diptych taken in 1995 of drum ’n’ bass trailblazers Kemistry (1963-1999) and Storm. After linking with Goldie, they co-founded the Metalheadz label and launched the Sunday sessions at the Blue Note that became foundational to the UK drum’n’bass scene and cemented the club’s place in a wider musical revolution. I was deep in and documenting.

Goldie controlled the visual narrative; no one took a picture without his say. He handpicked me to capture the warmth, intensity, and essence. For me, this is the golden image.

Kemistry and Storm were the queens. They were the heads of the label, heads of the DJ line-ups, they ran all the business and made sure that all the boys, many with massive egos, turned up on time. They set the tone and tempo of what happened in the room, while Goldie and everyone else worked under them. I don’t think it’s said enough about how many women cultured and cultivated drum ’n’ bass to be what it is. This diptych encapsulates that. Storm's looking out to the crowd while Kemi's looking down at herself, keeping her eye on the decks.

De La Soul

Normski: Here’s De La in one of my 'five-minute sessions.' It was their first big gig at Brixton Academy. I had a girlfriend, Bliss, who DJ’d on a pirate station, and she said, ‘De La Soul are here! We’ve got to go. I’ve got an idea: get some daisies for the D.A.I.S.Y. Age,’ because that was De La Soul’s acronym for ‘Da Inner Sound, Y’all.’ They were rappers who weren’t about hypermasculinity or luxury, but instead about peace, culture, and harmony.

So I went to Camden Market, spent £1.50 on these dry daisies, caught the train to Brixton and blagged my way in. I caught De La right as they were about to go on stage, but promised I’d be quick.

We ended up in this tiny gap behind the venue, in the back street. It’s nighttime, and I’ve got my little softbox flash out, trying to light three faces with one bulb. I take a few shots, then say, 'Guys, would you mind holding these?' and pull out the beat-up bunch. They’re like, 'Not really! Why the fuck would we be holding those?!' I explain the concept. They go, 'Alright, cool,' but you can tell from the photo they’re not fully 'cool'.

The photo came out great. No one had thought to shoot them that way before. That’s what I love about connecting with a subject’s message and translating it visually.

Method Man

Eddie: Picture editors always asked me to shoot acts that essentially terrified them, and Wu-Tang most certainly fit that brief. They had a reputation for lifting the air with blunts, being loud like an army sharpening swords, and carrying the spirit of gladiators. I’ve been lucky enough to photograph every member and have plenty of yarns from that time.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard once asked me to destroy the negatives. That moment has never left me. I watched the entire Wu-Tang Clan getting passport photos taken in a booth at Earl’s Court station. Popa Wu invited me onto their bus, where we listened to Stax records from Putney to Kentish Town. It was my first encounter with them, and their first time outside the US.

The Method Man photograph feels definitive of that era of Black British music culture. I shot it on Ilford HP5+ British film in a scrubby space behind the Forum, while Masta Killa and Ghostface were scaling walls like Spider-Man. These NYC kids were like comic book characters showing off their superpowers. Method Man came over and said, 'Let me show you a trick.' He pulled his cap strap over his eye, snapped his eyelid back and made the face, the rest is history.

The vibe reminds me of cult vigilante films Death Wish 1,2 and 3 which were filmed in the brillantly gritty east London which was meant to be the Bronx.

She Rockers

American hip hop was about shiny clothes and afros, fur coats, crocodile skin shoes. The golden era was colours, flare and noise. Rappers wore varsity jackets and old-school shit I loved, like FILA tracksuits and big Porsche glasses.

Our look in the UK was based on the reggae/raggamuffin scene. It was Clarks, corduroys, pin rolls, argon socks, yeah! Just a completely different take on it, and an independent identity.

I took this promo shot of the She Rockers, a pioneering British all-female hip-hop group in Shepherds Bush. They were wearing high-top Adidas Erwing trainers, layering the chunky gold jewellery of Black Atlantic hip-hop scene with their own identity. They’re projecting that sexuality isn’t about showing skin, it's about looking cool and being accessorised with plenty of attitude. This picture has been reposted and repurposed more times than I can count, and was acquired by the V&A museum for its cultural significance in depicting the Black experience in the UK.

Normski on Eddie: Estelle

One photographer, I've admired from the day I met him, was Eddie. If someone asks me ‘Who’s the best other UK photographer?’ I’d say Eddie Otchere, straight away. You know why? Because Eddie's always loved photography, he loves taking pictures, he loves the cameras and playing with all different types of film. He'd rock up carrying a Rollieflex camera or some secondhand old piece of shit and take a beautiful shot. He’s not somebody who takes pictures, he’s a master artist of the photography world.

He came up about ten years after me, at that point, magazines only wanted to feature me as a TV star, a celeb. I was the one who started it, yeah, but I also stepped back when I got on TV, just as everything I loved was beginning to happen, when Eddie kicked up and I thought, ‘Damn. He’s shooting everything I wanted to shoot.’ He was working for all the magazines, getting the time to really capture people and transform British artists into stars across the globe without the 'grab-the-shot mentality' I’d had.

Eddie on Normski: Public Enemy

Junglist Lads

Eddie: You asked me to select a photo I’ve taken that feels definitive of Black British music culture and this is it; Junglist lads outside an old Jungle record shop (with its own folklore) called De Underground in Forest Gate.

Silver Bullet Posse

Normski: I love this photo. It’s a perfect example of 1990s street style and commanding your environment. Different races, different haircuts, different fashion, taken on the steps of a Lloyds Bank.

Looking back now, I realise I was one of the only people photographing a burgeoning 1980s/90s era. A load of my work is just portraits of young, mostly Black, inner-city kids. It was a moment in culture and society where, had I not taken these photographs, there would be far fewer records of that scene.

‘The Music is Black: A British Story’ is at V&A East until 3 January 2027

When Dizzee Rascal took to the stage at the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony, it marked more than a career milestone; watching a Grime MC from east London on the world stage signalled something greater – the global reach of a music that was unapologetically Black and quintessentially British.

Now, little more than a decade later and just a stone’s throw from that landmark moment, V&A East Museum opens its doors with its first major exhibition, ‘The Music is Black’. Exploring 125 years of Black British music, it traces the resistance, resilience and joy that has fuelled it.

Running until January 2027, the show brings together more than 200 objects spanning fashion, music, painting, film and sculpture, and of course, sound. The V&A is an institution with its own colonial legacy, and lead curator Jacqueline Springer remarks: 'Music has a unique ability to hold up a mirror; there's a real sense of worthiness that this music and this culture deserve this loud and trumpeting celebration.'

From the outset, the exhibition lends itself to an intimate auditory affair, as headsets provided deliver curated soundtracks that respond to your location within the gallery – underscoring artefacts, films, and paintings with a sonic experience that feels personal.

Sidestepping a strict chronological timeline, the exhibition unfolds in two distinct yet interconnected halves. The first traces the African origins of Black music, the birth of the Black diaspora and its transatlantic imports such as Jazz and Reggae. The second turns to what is distinctly Black British, exploring eight key genres – including Grime, Jungle, and Lover’s Rock – leading up to the present day.

Charting the initial strands of a musical culture beginning in Africa, traditional bow instruments take pride of place at the exhibition entry, a symbol of the foundational underpinning of Black diasporic music. Not shying away from discomfort, works such as The Evolution of Swing, by Raymond Steth, represent a musical journey from Africa, through violent enslavement, to the sprawling metropolises of the US.

'Black music took this country in a different musical direction through the texture of sound and the texture of rebellion,' Springer says. In reference to what she terms ‘creative illegality’, works such as Police in Blues Club by Denzil Forrester capture, in a sparse yet intense charcoal sketch, the moment law enforcement enters a dancehall, reflecting the risk of collectively enjoying and sharing music.

In contrast, a quieter register of sanctuary emerges in Sonia Boyce’s Lover’s Rock, which embosses the lyrics of 'Hurts So Good' into wallpaper, evoking the tenderness and intimacy of music within the domestic space.

Ingenuity comes further into focus through technological improvisation: dub legend Metro’s pre-amplifier, which revolutionised dub sound systems, sits across from Grime MC JME’s Nintendo console, used to produce music before he had access to professional software, one of the many appropriated tools that shaped some of Grime’s most iconic instrumentals.

While 'The Music is Black' is extensive, it's not exhaustive. A little over a decade on from that Olympic stage, the global recognition of Black British music feels less like an arrival and more like an apt point of collective inflexion. Lovingly looking back at the growth of musical strands across generations, continents and diasporas. A reminder of the unique unifying quality of music possesses and its continual ability to speak truth to power.

The Music is Black' at V&A East, opening on 18 April 2026, until January 2027

vam.ac.uk

The opening of the V&A East Museum marks an important moment for London's much-loved Victoria & Albert Museum. When the new venue throws open its doors to the public on Saturday 18 April 2026, the popular cultural and design destination will have completed its East London presence with two hubs of creativity and culture, the other being the V&A East Storehouse (opened 31 May 2025).

Located near each other in Stratford's East Bank, in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, they share an important mission: to bring culture and design to the fore, and welcome everyone to engage with their displays and explore the V&A's rich collection. And if Storehouse is a celebration of the notion of archive – albeit, as we discovered at its opening last year, not as we know it – the brand-new V&A East Museum is all about the process of making, inviting both locals and young people in, and generously opening up to the city beyond the museum's immediate site. Says Jayden Ali, head of JA Projects, who worked with creative studio A Practice for Everyday Life and artist Larry Achiampong on the space's permanent ‘Why We Make' galleries: ‘We want 16- to 24-year-olds to feel comfortable walking in and spending time here.'

Explore V&A East Museum, London's shiny new cultural destination

The new building is certainly eye-catching – an elegant and dynamic form, featuring patterns, a geometric, faceted façade and a permeable ground level with different points of entry. Designed by Dublin-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, the architecture stands its ground in an impressive waterside line-up, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the BBC Music Studios, and a 2025 Stirling Prize nominee, the London College of Fashion by Allies and Morrison.

The unusual shape is not random. It came out of an idea born during an exhibition about Balenciaga, which took place in 2017-18 at the V&A in South Kensington. One of the items on show was an X-ray of a silk taffeta dress and its interpretation by artist Nick Veasey. ‘I began to think about the space between the figure and the form, what it is and what it can be,’ Tuomey told us when we previewed the project with a tour of the construction site in 2023. ‘They are not visibly connected, but they are very connected, and you move in between the body and the fabric.’

V&A East Museum was designed as 'a place for people to meet, find ideas and encounter making in all its forms', the architects write in their statement at the opening – and their concept, centred on 'the space in between', the Japanese concept of 'Ma', draws on this. Its ground floors (one entrance is on a lower level than the other, but both open to communal areas with no barriers or ticketing booths) are free and porous, crafted to invite the city and its people in, rather than control who enters, as traditionally has been the case in many organisations of its kind.

The flowing, accessible ground levels feature retail and a café, slowly morphing into a dramatic circulation route and a generous, winding staircase that takes visitors all the way up to the galleries – two permanent and a 900 sq m temporary one, as well as offices, education spaces and a multifunctional event area at the top. All displays are conceived to put an emphasis on 'making' and the process of craft and creation.

The building itself is a work of craft, featuring a façade made from 479 sand-coloured precast concrete panels. They are all different and cut bespoke to fit a large, three-dimensional surface puzzle. Their patterns reference the V&A’s distinctive logo, which also has pride of place over the entrance and the very top of the structure.

Three public terraces are carved out of the façade, not only adding to the formal composition but also providing additional al fresco space for activities within, as well as ensuring light comes into the interior as needed (although the main exhibition spaces are placed at the building's core, so they can be protected from sunlight if the exhibits require it).

The exhibition areas launch with two permanent 'Why We Make' galleries, composed as a fresh exploration of the V&A archives; and the largest-ever exhibition on Black British music and its impact in the UK, 'The Music is Black: A British Story'. The artistic programme aims to be timely and topical, investigating topics that will speak to a broad range of audiences. Elsewhere, special commissions and displays have been co-produced with local artists and young East Londoners – this and the new museum's expansive live events programme work towards the same goal, emphasising how youth and people help shape global culture right now.

'V&A East Museum’s Why We Make galleries offer a new way in to experiencing the V&A’s collection. Topical and resonant, the galleries look at objects through a contemporary lens and explore themes and issues that matter to our audiences most,' says Zofia Trafas White, senior curator at V&A East.

The museum promises to be dedicated to all people, addressing key issues of our times, from representation, identity and wellbeing to social justice and environmental action – all we have to do is visit.

V&A East Museum opens on 18 April 2026 in London, UK

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It wasn’t Roland Penrose, nor was it Herbert Read. It wasn’t André Breton, nor even Peggy Guggenheim. No, it was Elsa Schiaparelli who first brought surrealism to London – three years before the landmark London ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ opened in 1936. When the Italian fashion designer introduced her extraordinary designs to Britain via her Mayfair store, it became the first surrealist space in the country. It is hard to imagine how the sight of this very foreign incarnation of flamboyance and glamour would have appeared to Depression-era Londoners, but, of course, Schiaparelli lived to shock.

This revelation, of the designer’s immeasurable impact on British art and cultural history, is brought to the fore at V&A South Kensington’s excellent ‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’, which opens on 28 March 2026. The first of its kind in the UK, the show comprises over 200 objects, including garments, accessories, jewellery, paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture and perfumes, from the 1920s to the present day – with a particular emphasis on the reciprocal relationship that Schiap, as she was known, had with the avant-garde art scene of interwar Europe.

‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’ at the V&A

‘It started,’ we are told, ‘with a sweater.’ In 1927, Schiap debuted her famous tromp l’oeil sweater, a black-and-white knit with a bow effect in pour le sport style, by wearing it herself to a party. It was an instant hit, and the ‘things are not as they seem’ approach to design remained a hallmark of her creations for the rest of her life. In fact, Schiap’s cultural fluency, which put her totally in step with the modernist zeitgeist, was already being cultivated pre-sweater. Born to an erudite, aristocratic family in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini, today a Baroque art museum, Schiap was exposed to modern art from an early age, attending lectures given by Italian futurists and later moving in bohemian circles following a move to New York City during her short-lived marriage. It was here she was introduced by her friends Gaby and Francis Picabia to some of the key players in the nascent surrealist movement – relationships that would shape the direction of her work for years to come.

What did this influence look like? Unlike some of the other artists in Breton’s surrealist orbit, Schiap wasn’t utilising techniques such as automatic drawing or harnessing the subconscious to unlock creative potential, yet her preoccupation with quintessential surrealist themes and motifs – the uncanny, the fragmented, the animalistic – placed her firmly within their world. A silk dress from the 1938 ‘Circus’ collection is printed to look like fabric being torn away to expose pink negative space beneath; the inspiration for the silhouette is taken from Salvador Dalí’s Necrophiliac Spring (1936), but the tromp l’oeil is pure René Magritte. An evening coat designed in collaboration with the artist, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau features the double image of two faces in profile and a vase of roses in bloom atop a plinth. A sculptural evening coat from circa 1937, made from bulbous gilt braid, sits somewhere between scarecrow and papal cassock. Virtually every fastening, whether zip or button, is an opportunity for intrigue: a smart wool suit is finished with discreet buttons featuring Commedia dell'arte masks, a sleeveless, body-contouring dress of ruched silk jersey features a suggestive front zip from hem to belly button.

‘I think it's interesting how Schiaparelli's fashion kind of flips a surrealist interest, particularly in accessories,’ Dr Rosalind McKever, the V&A’s curator of paintings and drawings, tells Wallpaper*. ‘Gloves, hats, shoes are all fetishised objects which were of real interest to the surrealists because of their ability to stand in for fragmented body parts. And so Schiaparelli takes those images, and kind of flips them back on themselves.’ If it feels as though design is fundamentally at odds with surrealist methodology, then objects such as these say otherwise.

Like others in the movement, Schiap was an enthusiastic collaborator. The exhibition is peppered with examples of works created in conjunction with her artistic contemporaries, from the iconic bust-shaped perfume bottle for ‘Shocking’, designed by Argentinian artist Leonor Fini, to the A-line dress with Dalí’s phallic painted-lobster printed onto its skirt, worn by Wallis Simpson before her marriage to Edward VIII, or a painted screen and Garden of Earthly Delights-esque collage by Marcel Vertès.

Daniel Roseberry, creative director for the house since 2019, following its resurrection five years prior, explains the importance of these exchanges. ‘There was a distance between culture and most French couture houses back then,’ he tells Wallpaper*. ‘Elsa’s focus wasn't just on good taste or lifestyle or even beauty, it was more cerebral than that. It was about how the expression of the surreal can create a more intimate connection between art, pop culture and fashion and between the designer and client.’

Roseberry’s contemporary take on Schiap’s original propositions also plays a role in the show – and presents a very clear picture of just how culture has changed in the years since her death, in 1973. Where Schiap’s designs are full of subtle witticisms and cheeky visual puns, Roseberry’s tenure at the brand reads more like a nuclear bomb – bold, and unmissable. What was shocking or outrageous then just won’t cut it in the attention economy, and so the solution for Roseberry is to go bigger. ‘I think that this age will be remembered less for global conflict and more for the rise of social media, alternate realities and the lack of connection that we have with each other,’ he says. ‘The language that Elsa used to address her political reality, we're using to address our digital reality.

‘My mission now is to pierce that digital veil and create moments of lasting connection. Fashion is ancient, it’s pre-biblical,’ he continues. ‘People are always going to want to decorate, adorn, and express, but we've never lived in a more performative era. Designing a link between expression and genuine connection is something that feels urgent.’

‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’ runs at the V&A from 28 March 2026

vam.ac.uk

The Victoria & Albert Museum is having a moment at the crest of the cultural zeitgeist. Not content with opening up some of its vast archive of objects to public scrutiny, courtesy of the newly opened V&A East Storehouse, the august institution is now venturing into another field of curation; online.

Today marks the acquisition of the museum’s most nebulous accession to date: YouTube. On the face of it, the global video platform is an ever-mutating, impossible-to-bottle snapshot of modern culture, used by some 2.5 billion around the world – making it the world’s second-most visited website (after its parent company, Google, which acquired YouTube less than two years after it debuted for around $1.65bn).

According to the platform, around 20 million videos get uploaded to YouTube every day, petabytes’ worth of content (1,000,000 gigabytes) that either contribute to an invaluable archive of humanity or represent a tidal wave of cultural cruft, awash with slop, trivia, the morally dubious and constant, relentless copyright infringement.

But that’s the modern day. Where did it all start? Digital media might be incredibly transient – and a curatorial headache – but YouTube’s origin story is fairly well documented. The new acquisition takes you back in time nearly 20 years to one of the earliest iterations of the website, presenting it as a snapshot of the early platform, along with the very first video ever uploaded to the platform.

This artefact – 'Me at the zoo' – features and was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, then 25, following a visit to San Diego Zoo. Just 19 seconds long, it’s the internet’s equivalent of the first cave painting, the first vinyl record or the first ever fax. Those 19 seconds have endured however, remaining in the public realm ever since, viewed nearly 380 million times (and given 18 million likes) since it debuted on YouTube on 23 April 2005.

It’s grainy, low-res and low-fi, an indication of just how quickly the quality of portable technology has evolved (it was shot on a digital camera, not a phone). Me at the zoo is important for all sorts of reasons; it’s the first piece of user-generated media, marking the start of the inexorable shift towards content creation, the rise of the influencer, the permanently online and the digital economy that has come with it.

Naturally, YouTube has driven, supported, and promoted this economy every step of the way, enabling the monetisation of content through a slick, algorithmically generated advertising system that turns your viewing habits into a stream of purchasing opportunities.

With this cultural shift has come a necessary shift in the role of a museum like the V&A, originally founded in 1852 ‘to educate designers, manufacturers and the public in art and design’. With some 2.8 million objects in its collection, the V&A has long championed the value of the esoteric and the ephemeral, whether it’s trawling high streets for pizza flyers or acquiring chunks of lost brutalist masterpieces.

The digital collection already include items as diverse as the Chinese social platform WeChat, the deliberately infuriating mobile game Flappy Bird, the EUKI app, and the illustrator Aphelandra Messer’s design for the mosquito emoji.

YouTube 2006 will sit in the Design 1900 – Now gallery at V&A South Kensington. According to Corinna Gardner, Senior Curator of Design and Digital at the V&A, ‘these galleries are full of objects that we use to navigate our place within the world, be it watches, be it chairs… Our everyday world is digital devices, smartphones and the internet platforms. They're all part of that designed environment that makes up how we live our lives. For a museum like the V&A, it is important to bring these types of objects into the collection. It enables a critical curiosity about how these things are created and designed.’

In 2014, Gardner launched the V&A’s Rapid Response Collecting programme, acquiring contemporary objects ‘in response to major moments in recent history that touch the world of design and manufacturing’. It’s taken 18 months to bring this display to life, working with YouTube’s own User Experience team and oio, an interaction design company founded by designers Matteo Loglio and Simone Rebaudengo.

The reconstructed watch page also highlights the innovations YouTube brought to the web, with the ability to share, like and recommend content; the building blocks of the modern internet. The page is dated 8 December 2006 – this is the oldest archived version of the YouTube page on The Internet Archive. Technical challenges included working around the now-defunct Adobe Flash Player.

‘The reconstructed watch page also has ads that are of the time,’ says Gardner, ‘The original video player was built to run on Adobe Flash, but today it’s being emulated with an open source project called Ruffle. So it shows the original video, with the documented comments from that underneath it.’

For YouTube itself, the inclusion of their history in the V&A is something of a fillip. Unsurprisingly, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, called the museum’s decision ‘wonderful’, adding ‘by reconstructing the original 2005 watch page, we aren't just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon.’

VAM.ac.uk

oio.studio

Ever since the V&A East Storehouse opened in May 2025, it has become the centre of our cultural lives. A museum like no other, it was conceived by architects DS+R to house some of the V&A’s vast collection, and has been designed as a series of ‘floating’ floors, with each level featuring a central viewing gallery alongside many more, less accessible but still visible, shelving areas. The rigid formality of more traditional museums was abandoned in favour of a visually overwhelming staging (and we say this in the best possible way).

In September 2025, the V&A doubled down on this mammoth feat with the opening of the David Bowie Centre, where the late artist’s personal collection of costumes, musical instruments and general memorabilia has now found a permanent home (it includes fan-made objects, too, further highlighting the new museum’s ultra-democratic calling).

Browse the Wallpaper* picks from V&A East Storehouse

Here's how the V&A East Storehouse works: anyone can choose up to five objects they’d like to view up close, request them through the V&A website, and see them in the flesh at a private appointment that can last up to four hours.

So to honour the winner of our Launch of the Year, we decided to go crazy with the archives, each member of our team picking out the five objects they’d be most excited to see. Every item shown above can be ordered for a private appointment: from ancient Egyptian fragments and punk socks to early Japanese tech and modernist designs that we don’t often get to see in the wild. Happy treasure-hunting.

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Like the sweet-smelling powder with which she’d perfume her wigs, mythology has trailed Marie Antoinette for two-and-a-half centuries. 'Marie Antoinette Style,' a new exhibition now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, gets up close and personal with the French monarch and examines her enduring hold on visual culture, from her own belongings (like a pair of delicate silk slippers) to be-ribboned couture confections worn on the runway, stage and screen.

One of the show’s most sumptuous moments, though, lies quite literally in the background. In the final section of 'Marie Antoinette Style,' behind a trio of Dior gowns by John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, is an elaborate, all-white toile de jouy tableau. Look closely and you’ll discover that the opulent pattern is made of thousands of three-dimensional porcelain miniatures. Peer closer still and you’ll recognise scenes from Antoinette’s life, rendered in kitschy – and often – haunting detail. Here, a diminutive porcelain model of Marie Antoinette on a swing; There, a tiny model of her shepherd’s hut at Versailles. But all is not as it seems in this fondant universe: an executioner lurks atop one of the mirrors in a Chinese Chippendale-style folly, while a bust of the queen herself has a mini guillotine tucked into her wig.

This intricate installation is the handiwork of New York-based ceramic artist Beth Katleman, who’s long been captivated by 18th-century decorative arts and Marie Antoinette’s tragic life. ‘I am just fascinated with her, it’s the same fascination I think we have with Diana,’ she explained on a summer afternoon in her studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. ‘It has all the ingredients – beauty, power, an early death.’

Katleman has been baking these ironies into her ceramics for the last 15 years. From afar, the artist’s work appears like heavily-ornamented antiques; up close, though, they reveal secret, and sometimes disquieting, narratives by mashing up the florid decorative styles of the past with kitschy 20th-century tchotchkes, often cast directly from Ebay finds and thrift store treasures.

‘I like the idea that people can construct their own narratives. They think they’re viewing a historical wall and it’s all about luxury,’ she says, ‘but then when you get in closer you have to piece it together for yourself.’

Katleman, who began her career as a painter in the mid-’90s, has gained a loyal following; her delicate creations have appeared everywhere from galleries to private collections to Dior boutiques in Hong Kong and London. She also caught the attention of V&A senior curator Sarah Grant after the duo bonded over their mutual love of toile de jouy – a charming French cotton fabric printed with pastoral scenes. What if Katleman were to create a backdrop for the Marie Antoinette show? ‘The question became, what would it look like if a toile de jouy wallpaper exploded into three dimensions?,’ the artist recalls.

Katleman was well aware that life at Versailles wasn’t all cake, ribbons and perfumed sheep for Marie Antoinette: The ill-fated queen was under constant surveillance of the court, had difficulty conceiving, was lampooned in the press, imprisoned and finally faced the guillotine in October 1793. So Katleman fired up her kiln, wanting to tell Marie Antoinette’s story her own unique way.

Katleman’s studio, located in a former can factory, is a wunderkammer of miniatures. A set of floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled entirely with chalky white molds, with labels like ‘small snails,’ ‘palm tree’ and ‘leaves and flowers,’ all of which will make their way into one creation or another. ‘This is where I go shopping,’ Katleman explains.

The molds are cast directly from found objects – often with quirky provenances. There’s a figurine representing Antoinette’s lover, Swedish count Axel von Fersen, cast from a shirtless bachelorette party figurine. Katleman sourced a mini guillotine from a company specializing in fantasy boardgames. There are antique pencil sharpeners and old dog chew toys; antique confectionery moulds and Kewpie dolls. ‘I like to find objects because they bring their own history to the piece,’ she says.

Katleman will often spend hours making a mould, sometimes doctoring them by hand to create the people or creatures she desires, like delicate Sèvres mutants. Katleman favours biscuit porcelain (pronounced bis-kwee), a fine-grained unglazed porcelain that, after being fired, has a creamy texture, like buttercream atop a cake. ‘It has a texture you don’t get with anything else,’ Katleman explains.

‘They’re all hand-made, which is such a weird anomaly in this day and age,’ she continues. ‘From a distance, people will say, “It’s probably 3D-printed,” and then when they realise it's handmade – their body reacts to it in a different way.’

The resulting backdrop for 'Marie Antoinette Style' unfolds as a two-part tale via a pair of wall-mounted mirrors. ‘I divided the piece into two halves – the two parts of her life I responded to the most,’ Katleman says.

One mirror is inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, with a model of Antoinette gleefully aloft in front of a hunky reclining male figurine symbolising von Fersen. But the story takes a darker turn in the second mirror, where, among other symbolic figures and objects there’s a weeping doll representing Marie Antoinette’s son, Louis XVII, and petite decapitated heads dangling horrifyingly from flower-ornamented garlands.

Smaller-scale ‘islands’ protrude from the surrounding wall shelf-like and host sheep, more dolls, snails and princesses and are festooned with porcelain strawberries and garlands of roses. Taken as a whole, the installation brings to mind a sinister version of Snow White. Then again, it may bring something entirely different to mind. But that’s the point, according to the artist.

‘I take the narrative thread and literally embellish it,’ Katleman says. ‘I'm not really interested in being historically accurate so much as using the historical tidbits, the little crumbs, and seeing where they lead.’

Opening this week (20 September 2025) V&A South Kensington is presenting a landmark exhibition on the most mythologised queen in European history: ‘Marie Antoinette Style’. Across 250 objects, this exhibition, sponsored by Manolo Blahnik, traces the 18th-century monarch’s origins as a fashion icon, concluding in the present day with pieces from contemporary designers exemplifying her enduring legacy.

The show’s curator, Dr Sarah Grant, has gone to great lengths to present Marie Antoinette as both queen and young woman. As befits a queen, we are confronted with diamond jewellery of disarming, dazzling proportions, sumptuous textiles crafted by the most skilled hands, sinuous Rococo furniture, and elaborately decorated fans. But for the young woman: her spittoon, her toiletry case, her letters complaining about her incompatibility with her husband. These objects, many of which have never been exhibited outside of France, offer more of a sense of the corporality of their former owner than any number of exquisite dresses can.

‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A

But Marie Antoinette doesn’t make it easy. The exhibition makes a valiant effort to pull away her mask and show us what lies beneath. But ultimately, what lies beneath is yet more mask. At the Petit Trianon, the queen’s pastoral idyll in the grounds of Versailles, where she retreated from the rigours of court life, gorgeous toile de jouy depicts scenes of bucolic bliss which surely the hungry French peasantry would have laughed in the face of, and a set of embellished gardening tools designed more for playacting than tilling. At every turn, a hall of mirrors with yet more artifice.

‘We’ve really tried to peek beneath the veneer of Marie Antoinette with these displays,’ Grant tells Wallpaper*. ‘But it’s important to remember that actually, her entire life was a performance. She eats in public, gives birth in public, washes her face in public. Every move she made was in front of the whole world.’

It was a public who were suspicious of Antoinette from the moment she first arrived in France from her native Austria, aged 14, to marry the dauphin who would become Louis XVI. She got the blame for many of the woes that befell her subjects for the next twenty years. Humiliating caricatures of her likeness on display at V&A demonstrate the ugliness of feeling towards her. Unfair, misogynistic pornography, or a valid political statement from the ones with nothing to eat, towards the one eating off a gilded plate? The jury is still out.

Four ceramic busts are impregnated with scents designed by Tasha Marks – smells which capture a vignette from Marie Antoinette’s short life – a stroke of curatorial genius, effectively inviting the audience to step into the queen’s size 3.5 shoes in a powerfully elemental way. ‘The 18th century court was a much more highly perfumed world than we’d recognise today, so scent is an essential way of understanding it,’ says Grant. ‘According to contemporary sources, Versailles was a bizarre combination of ornate interiors and the stench of open cess pits. Fragrance was used both to project allure, and to mask the visceral stink of a palace built with very few latrines.’ The most confronting fragrance is the final one, capturing the queen’s jail cell, a vile blend of raw sewage and mildew which Antoinette tried to mask with juniper. The result smells something like fear.

The world today is one that, in many ways, the French queen may have recognised. Political violence is top of the news agenda, the cult of celebrity still reigns supreme, the divide between those who have and those who have not is increasing once again, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. Even panniers, ruffles and bows are in fashion again, thanks in part to the likes of Jonathan Anderson, Simone Rocha, Cecile Bahnsen, and Pierpaolo Piccioli. Is it any wonder that her image has endured? In her lifetime, and in the centuries since her execution, Marie Antoinette exists as a symbol: of beauty, of elegance, of excess, of inequality, of scapegoatism. This exhibition offers a glimpse into each characterisation, and even dares us to consider that actually, behind the artifice, she was just a woman.

Marie Antoinette Style, sponsored by Manolo Blahnik runs from 20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026 at Galleries 38 & 39, V&A South Kensington. Tickets are on sale now.

Collective memory and loss has always been delicately intertwined with joy and celebration in Lebanon, a country that seems to wake up to new crisis every day. London-based Lebanese artist Ramzi Mallat’s powerful installation Not Your Martyr at the V&A – staged as part of the 2025 London Design Festival – is a bittersweet memorial that seeks to crystallise a moment of Beirut tragedy.

Not Your Martyr: Ramzi Mallat at the V&A

Created to honour the victims of the 2020 Beirut Port Blast, which this August marked five years, Mallat’s installation is made up from 260 colourful glass representations of ma’amouls – a traditional Levantine date or nut-filled shortbread eaten during Easter, Eid and other festivities – each one symbolising one of the lives lost.

The display is co-curated by Rachel Dedman, the V&A’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East, in collaboration with London Design Festival. Inspired by the patterns and forms of ma’amouls the project also draws on a shared food heritage that transcends religious and cultural difference, celebrating community and resilience in the wake of tragedy. It also doesn’t shy away from vulnerability and grief.

'After the blast, I was picking up glass for months and I started thinking about the fragility of the whole medium,' Mallat tells Wallpaper*. 'There were many artistic memorials made for the first anniversary, but I wanted to sit with it longer, and it was a solemn decision that every viewer should engage by looking downwards, rather than looking upwards at some kind of glory-filled grand artwork.

'I knew I wanted to use an item of heritage that tied in multiple religions and communities, and ma’amoul was the perfect form. The patterns are all like flowers, sunburst, leaves, raindrops and circles, and they also spoke of the shifting of seasons, still very much within the domestic sphere, so something that all of us engaged with that permeated generations.'

The installation has a quiet intimacy to it, drawing on a collective memory of joy, to honour a collective amnesia of tragedy. Mallat spent years collecting the wooden moulds from around the region, even carving a few himself, immersing himself in the manual process, before making a mould that would be suitable for a kiln and producing each glass sweet by hand.

'There’s a touch of Memento Mori to them. They elicit memories of celebration, but also showcase a lot of ephemerality, transience and death as well, because the fact is that ma’amoul doesn’t last too long, they’re only around for a brief time,' Mallat says. 'To make them out of glass was important because it speaks of the fragility of the material, while also allowing for light to permeate them. It also tied into a lot of violence that glass had brought during that time, as so many people were killed or injured by flying glass.'

The installation also seeks to act as a counter-monument, as 2025 marks 50 years since the onset of the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War. No monuments or memorials were ever built for it, and no official monuments have been built for the 2020 port blast either.

Mallat’s work seeks to offer a monument, which though small in scale, is appropriate in tone – moving away from detached, symbolic statues that plaster over the real human loss, and instead celebrating those individual victims, offering a touch of healing.

‘Not Your Martyr’ will be on display at the Medieval and Renaissance Gallery (50A) of the V&A South Kensington from 13 September – 19 October 2025

Amid Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, the starvation and displacement of millions of Palestinians, and the deliberate targeting of Palestinian heritage, ‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ at V&A Dundee brings together a vital and urgent display of hundreds of garments and textiles, personal photographs, and rare artefacts that span nearly 150 years of Palestinian history: from the late 19th century through to the British Mandate, the Nakba of 1948, the First and Second Intifadas, into today’s catastrophic siege on Gaza. The messaging behind the exhibition is clear: to bear witness to the resilience of the Palestinian people through the clothes and garments that tell stories and hold memories, and embroidery that resists erasure.

More than a textile exhibition, the works on display are preserved from the ongoing destruction of cultural heritage sites – including museums and libraries – in the region. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities-Palestine, more than 200 culturally significant sites have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023 alone, while Unesco has called for their protection. Among institutions destroyed are the Central Archives in Gaza, the Rashad Shawa Cultural Center, and the Beit Hanoun Public Library. The exhibition at V&A Dundee is presented in collaboration with the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank and Hayy Jameel, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is free to the public, and it could not come at a more critical time.

‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ at V&A Dundee

‘It’s an ever-evolving project and opportunity to keep telling stories in different ways through different objects,’ says curator Rachel Dedman. ‘We’re addressing the genocide in Gaza and the brutal occupation of Palestine, but more broadly, I think, glimpsing the ways in which grief is written into objects, the way clothing was connected to love or motherhood. These are very simple and quiet ways in which garments can speak to us.’ In Palestine, tatreez (embroidery) is not merely decorative; it is a language. Passed down through generations of women, it is a vernacular of identity, belonging, and resistance, stitched into dresses, jackets, and shawls to tell stories and preserve cultural memory. Each village (many of which have since been destroyed and erased from the map) once had its own distinct patterns, colours, and motifs; visual dialects that carried personal and communal histories.

A single dress might record a woman’s marital status, the number of her children, her region, or losses that she carried. The exhibition documents garments made during the British Mandate era in Palestine (1920-1948), a period of colonial rule that played a significant role in shaping modern Palestinian identity, and in laying the groundwork for the structural violence that endures today. Tellingly, many garments from this time include linings made from British imported tartans and textiles, remnants of a colonial power whose policies of partition and displacement continue to reverberate through Palestinian life. And yet, even in these materials, Palestinian women found ways to assert their heritage and quietly subvert domination.

As violence escalated during the First Intifada in the late 1980s, embroidery became an act of resistance. One particularly striking dress on display was likely stitched in secret by candlelight, using synthetic threads dyed in the banned colours of the Palestinian flag. To wear it in public was to risk arrest. The act of creating it was a form of slow resistance, or sumud – the Arabic word for steadfastness in the face of oppression. Colours carry deep symbolic weight: magenta, for example, is tied to Gaza and believed to offer protection; red, most often used in wedding garments, signifies joy; while indigo blue conveys mourning and loss.

After the Nakba in 1948, with communities uprooted and homes destroyed, many of the garments now on display became living archives; in many cases, they are the only surviving evidence of a destroyed village. One such garment is a 1920s wedding dress from Beit Nabala, a village wiped from the map in 1948. The dress is plain and modest, apart from red embroidery that climbs up each side. The body of the dress is patched, and clearly worn, with fingerprint marks and a nursing slit, which was later sewn shut and the bodice has been widened over time to fit multiple women as it passed down generations of women. There is only one known photograph of Beit Nabala, displayed beside the dress. Its faded pink threads and scorched fabric bear the brutal signature of war. ‘Palestinians have faced targeted destruction, which is part of the cultural genocide strategy, and keeping these objects safe, and keeping them visible, is the priority,’ Dedman says. ‘They should continue to tell their stories.’

Over 500 villages were erased during the Nakba. And today, the destruction continues as museums, libraries, mosques, alongside 90 per cent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed, and hospitals, homes and cafés in Gaza are continually bombed, their resources, archives and belongings turning to ash. One of the institutions lost was the Rafah Museum, which was bombed and flattened by an Israeli airstrike in 2023. During the blast, a child’s embroidered dress was blown onto a neighbouring rooftop, where it lay for a year, exposed to sun, wind, and rain, until it was salvaged and eventually loaned to the exhibition by the Palestinian Museum, and now it's on display at ‘Thread Memory’. Along one gallery wall, the scale of loss becomes achingly clear in an installation by Scottish-Palestinian artist Leena Nammari. The wall is covered in 626 porcelain tiles, each one stamped with the cypress tree (a symbol of endurance) and each marking one of the 626 Palestinian villages destroyed since 1948.

The final gallery shifts from traditional garments to the cutting edge of Palestinian fashion today. Here, a new generation of designers wrestles with what it means to inherit a tradition under threat. Designer Zeid Hijazi has created a tartan-tatreez hybrid look inspired by a Tunisian sci-fi film, Bedouin Hacker. His sharp-shouldered silhouette evokes punk defiance and technological resistance, reflective of a metaphorical hacker cracking through the occupation’s system. The look honours Scottish tartan while celebrating Palestinian embroidery as a form of code; a language embedded in material, passed on and hacked into new forms. Also on display is Look 5 from Palestinian Central Saint Martins graduate Ayham Hassan Musleh’s ‘IM-MORTAL MAGENTA’ collection, a piece centred around his experience of growing up under military occupation. The oversized padded jacket is complete with a white skirt with silver details, and makes reference to the bullet-proof vests worn by local journalists. More than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 2023, according to the UN.

What gives ‘Thread Memory’ its depth is its interweaving of past and present. Since October 2023, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. But beyond the unfathomable human cost, another slower, quieter violence, which persisted for decades, is brought to light. The exhibition pays homage to decades of solidarity work, including the 45-year twin city partnership between Dundee and Nablus in Palestine. Since 1980, when it was illegal to fly the Palestinian flag even in parts of the occupied territories of Palestine, Dundee raised it above its City Chambers. One room displays personal photo albums from these exchanges, documenting some of the many fire engines that Dundee has sent to Nablus. Visitors can also see a dress worn by Nadia El-Nakla, wife of Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, at his 2023 inauguration. The image went viral, as Dedman explains: ‘I remember seeing that moment and thinking how powerful it was: how a single dress can represent so much, and how the act of wearing it can resonate globally.’

‘Thread Memory’ is both archive and act of resistance. ‘I think here in the UK in particular, for those bearing witness to the suffering of Palestinians from very far away, and feeling helpless, watching that suffering, and watching the dehumanisation of Palestinian life in the media,’ Dedman says, ‘being able to read people’s names, to immerse yourself and celebrate Palestinian joy and creativity, while also acknowledging what’s happening now, has felt cathartic, beautiful and meaningful.’ In the face of a genocide, the show offers not a passive lament but a radical insistence: that Palestinian life, in all its colour, complexity, and creativity, will not be silenced by bombs or bulldozers. Because in thread, there is memory. And in memory, there is defiance.

‘Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine’ runs at V&A Dundee until Spring 2026.

vam.ac.uk

‘Design and Disability’, a major new exhibition at the V&A South Kensington in London, spotlights the contributions of disabled, Deaf and neurodivergent people to the world of design. ‘Disabled people have always been here, they’ve always been designing and making things,’ explains exhibition curator Natalie Kane. ‘People haven’t been invisible, even though it feels like society has made them so.’

As well as centring on disabled creativity – challenging assumptions about who gets to be a designer – the exhibition shows how, through embedding the experiences of disabled people, design can be a tool for social change and justice. Objects created with such lived experiences in mind challenge ableist attitudes, including within the design industry itself, and point to a more inclusive society where a broader range of needs and desires are met and valued.

‘A lot of disabled people can feel like they’re still guests in the room – but I think the temperature is shifting,’ says Kane, who hopes the exhibition will help challenge assumptions around disability.

While the 170 pieces on show span the 1940s to today, ‘Design and Disability’ is not envisaged as a complete historical survey – such an endeavour would be ‘impossible’, says Kane. Instead, she adds, ‘we wanted to grab what the contemporary conversation around disability was – and establish disability as an identity and a culture in itself’.

The exhibition is divided into three sections – ‘Visibility’, ‘Tools’ and ‘Living’ – with objects spanning design, art, architecture, fashion and photography. The exhibition itself is also designed to be inclusive, featuring British Sign Language (BSL) guides, audio description, tactile surfaces and floors, additional seating, and rest areas.

For Kane, the experience of curating the show has been an important one, combining her experience researching the intersection of design, ethics and society with her lived experience as a disabled person. ‘I’ve been thinking: how do I bring all the joy and interest and things that are important to my community into a museum which thinks really hard about design?’

Here, Kane talks through five key objects from the show.

Hands of X, by Graham Pullin, Andrew Cook, Eddie Small and Corinne Hutton, 2016–20

This project invited prosthetics wearers with a limb difference or amputation to design collaboratively with prosthetists, including selecting materials, in a process that built a sense of agency and creativity. It challenged the idea that designs for disability should simply be technical and practical. ‘You go to a glasses shop and get custom glasses, why can’t you get custom prosthetics?’ asks Kane. ‘A lot of what’s in this show is going beyond compliance. It’s the idea of: it’s OK for you to have the beautiful thing.’

‘The best lovers are good with their hands’ by Harry McAuslan, 1987

This poster was part of a campaign by the British Deaf Association and the grassroots organisation AIDS Ahead, which provided counselling and advice to Deaf people on sexual health. Here, the message expressed in BSL fingerspelling is to ‘Use a condom’. ‘It’s a really important poster,’ says Kane. ‘It uses all the mechanics of advertising for the Deaf community. It points to the fact that there was little to no information at that period around HIV and AIDS prevention for the Deaf community. And the fact is, that lack of health information for BSL users still exists today.’

Photographs of the Jaipur Foot project by Simon Way, 2014

The Jaipur Foot project makes free prosthetic legs, feet and arms for people across India, many of whom became disabled because of landmines or illnesses. ‘Disability can happen through colonialism, through capitalism, through war and conflict,’ says Kane, adding that the conditions by which people become wearers of prosthetics can differ all over the world.

Made in labs across India, the Jaipur Foot prosthetic limbs are designed to allow for squatting, sitting cross‑legged and going barefoot, in response to community feedback and local cultural and religious norms. In ‘Design and Disability’, the project is showcased through a series of photographs by Simon Way, documenting the makers and wearers of the prosthetics.

Squeeze Chair (chaise longue) by Wendy Jacob with Temple Grandin, 1997

‘When we think about neurodiversity, it can sometimes be about treatment rather than pleasure,’ says Kane. Not so with this luxurious and intimate chair, developed by artist Wendy Jacob with autistic scientist and inventor Temple Grandin. The design embraces the sitter between two red mohair-covered arms, providing comforting sensory feedback for those who appreciate deep pressure stimulation.

‘It’s an object which I personally love,’ says Kane, describing it as a ‘demedicalised’ version of something with a particular function. ‘It helps you to regulate and to be squeezed and held. And if you're someone like myself who needs that, it enables you to feel it. You get the luxurious thing, but you also get the thing that you need.’

Engineering at home by Cindy Wack Garni, Sara Hendren and Caitrin Lynch, 2016

When Cindy Wack Garni became disabled in her seventies, she couldn’t use certain everyday objects in the same way as before, limiting activities like applying make-up. But her simple, practical and inventive adaptations – to objects including a zip purse and an eyeliner pencil –changed that. ‘I really love this [project] as an example of: everyone is an engineer, in many different ways,’ says Kane.

Garni collaborated with her occupational therapist and prosthetists, showing how designs needed to adapt based on circumstance. ‘It’s such a central thing to our show, the fact that across design and disability history, there are so many examples of where disabled people have been fundamental to our shifting perceptions around design,’ says Kane.

‘Design and Disability’ is on show from 7 June 2025 to 15 February 2026 at the V&A South Kensington, London

Cartier is celebrating its rich, culturally illustrious history with a major new retrospective at the V&A in London. Set to open to the public this weekend (12 April 2025), the exhibition is curated by Helen Molesworth and Rachel Garrahan, and will encompass more than 350 objects, from jewels to gemstones, watches to clocks and unseen drawings, as well as pieces lent by King Charles and other private collectors.

‘It’s been a long-time dream on our side to see a Cartier exhibition organised by the V&A,’ says Pierre Rainero, Cartier image, style and heritage director. ‘The discussions with the museum started, I think, ten or 12 years ago, creating an interest among the team at the V&A to dedicate an entire exhibition to Cartier. What is important for us is not only to see that the Cartier creations are a subject of interest, but also to see how a new team of curators and a new scientific approach adopt a new angle, showing the public a new vision on the work of Cartier. This exhibition includes entire new chapters not treated in previous exhibitions.’

British architect and artist Asif Khan (behind London's new Canada Water bridge) heads the exhibition design, creating a Cartier scenography that makes an immersive backdrop for the storytelling at its heart. The exhibition is divided into three distinctive sections: Cartier’s creativity and inspiration, the Cartier workshops and the shaping of a now-iconic image.

‘It was quite complex for the team of curators on the V&A side to create the narrative, because they had many aspects they wanted to focus on – the history of the creation, the history itself, the dimension of Cartier as a company, the analysis of Cartier all through those different periods of time,’ Rainero says. ‘Also, because the exhibition takes place in London, [there is] the idea to give a focus on the specific British history of Cartier, so, the construction of a narrative was very interesting and I think they did achieve a very consistent approach. The journey of the visitors will be from one discovery to another discovery, and, at the end, it will leave a marvellous impression about not only the exhibition but Cartier itself.’

Spectacular highlights on show include the Scroll Tiara, commissioned in 1902 and worn by Elizabeth II at her coronation (and also by Rihanna on the cover of W Magazine in 2016), Grace Kelly’s engagement ring from 1956, and a brooch commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, featuring the rare 23.6 carat pink Williamson diamond.

The jewellery and watches pinpoint Cartier’s story, which goes from a decorative arts history to a look into the technical innovations of the craftsmanship, and a spotlighting of the actors, musicians and royalty who have loved the maison over the years.

‘We are always happy to see the public discovering the works, because, in fact, that’s what Cartier is about,’ says Rainero. ‘We are proposing real objects and they are enjoyable, desirable and subjects of curiosity and, I hope, also admiration. I think an exhibition like this is a way, especially given the approach of the V&A team, of showing the human adventure on the side of Cartier as a company; how Cartier was organised, who were the personalities at the origin of every decision taken and why and how.

‘Also there is the interaction with clients, which is a dedicated section of the exhibition, and how clients also “made” Cartier in many, many different ways. The fame of Cartier, the reputation of Cartier is linked to the importance of our clients and the way they adopted and shared their Cartier creations with the rest of the public. I think this is an important dimension, which is visible and people could perceive the human dimension of Cartier in many ways.’

Cartier is at the V&A, London, from 12 April – 16 November 2025, vam.ac.uk

Art has been a cornerstone of The Peninsula Hotels’ identity since the luxury group’s inception, weaving a rich cultural tapestry across its 12 properties. From The Peninsula New York, showcasing works by icons like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to The Peninsula Tokyo, home to 1,000 pieces by nearly 60 Japanese artists, art is a unifying thread.

Building on this legacy, the group launched its Art in Resonance series in 2019, spotlighting emerging and mid-career artists. By offering funding, curatorial expertise, and exhibition space, the programme empowers creators to produce engaging public art while delivering something new for guests.

The Peninsula and Victoria and Albert Museum announce partnership

Now, The Peninsula Hotels embarks on a new chapter with a landmark partnership with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The collaboration will feature co-curated exhibitions, beginning with a showcase at The Peninsula Hong Kong – the group’s Grande Dame – during Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

The first iteration of the partnership will unveil a commissioned work curated by Dr Xiaoxin Li, the V&A’s Asia Department Curator, prominently displayed in the hotel’s lobby. Two additional commissions by Art in Resonance creators will round out the exhibition, reimagining the hotel’s storied façade and interiors in a rather different light.

This partnership isn’t the first cultural bridge between The Peninsula Hong Kong and the UK; a previous collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts brought works by luminaries such as Tracey Emin and Michael Craig-Martin to the hotel.

‘Working with The Peninsula to create a greater reach for these works reflects the V&A’s mission to champion design and creativity in all its forms, advance cultural knowledge, and inspire makers, creators and innovators everywhere,’ says Tim Reeve, deputy director and chief operating officer of the V&A.

peninsula.com, vam.ac.uk

The V&A and Art Jameel's international award exhibition for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition is returning to the V&A South Kensington's Porter Gallery for its seventh edition. Open from 30 November 2024 to 16 March 2025, the free London exhibition highlights the rich artistic heritage of the Islamic Middle East and South Asia, showcasing the vibrant connection between contemporary creativity and the region's historical legacy. The winner of the Jameel Prize, worth £25,000, will be announced on 27 November 2024, and the work of all seven shortlisted artists will be on show.

‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’ takes an in-depth look at issues relating to water, ecology, landscape and spirituality through the lens of moving image and digital media. The shortlisted artists, whose practice spans film, sculpture, photography, installation, sound, performance and VR, confront the way in which extractive industries and political dynamics shape the environmental and social fabric of the Middle East and South Asia.

Chosen from among more than 300 applicants, the finalists of ‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’ are Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Jawa El Khash, Alia Farid, Khandakar Ohida, Zahra Malkani, Marrim Akashi Sani, and Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh & Hesam Rahmanian (as a collective).

Drawing on different aspects of Islamic tradition, the artists address how history is written – exploring the creation and iconoclastic deconstruction of monuments alongside new approaches to museums and collections. Many works use hand-drawn animation and photography to powerfully convey personal testaments to community, resilience, and connection.

The ‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’ exhibition is curated by the V&A’s Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East, Rachel Dedman. Following its run at the V&A, it will be showcased at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, the UK's City of Culture in 2025, and will then travel to Jeddah, where it will be displayed at the cutting-edge arts complex and creative hub, Hayy Jameel.

‘Jameel Prize: Moving Images’, 30 November 2024 to 16 March 2025, vam.ac.uk

In David Rockwell’s Manhattan office, there is a room filled with dozens of models for the musical and theatre sets he has designed over the years. The shelves are lined with miniature worlds rendered at a half-inch scale: tiny cardboard cut-outs of the shoe factory in Kinky Boots; a remarkably realistic Streamline Moderne train carriage from the set of On the Twentieth Century; and matchbox-sized versions of the pool table that appeared in the production of The Nap. In the centre of the room stands a long table for meetings with directors and choreographers, and toward the back are the desks of the designers busily at work on new productions.

‘That room, for me, was like how you imagine Father Christmas’ workshop to be, filled with the most magical toys and gems that you’re ever going to find,’ says Simon Sladen, senior curator of modern and contemporary theatre and performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which has recently acquired the original set models for four David Rockwell-designed performances – the aforementioned productions, plus Hairspray. ‘When I first walked in, I was probably just a rage of jealousy that we would never be able to acquire all of those materials or have so many on display.’

David Rockwell standout stage sets

Rockwell, who launched his cross-disciplinary architecture and design practice in 1984 (and features in 2024’s Wallpaper* USA 400, a guide to creative America), has created more than 50 sets for plays and musicals, but the role of theatre in his work runs much deeper than any individual project; it’s integral to the way he thinks about architecture.

He doesn’t have a signature style, but he does have a signature ethos: to Rockwell, the core principles of theatre and good design overlap and involve the thoughtful consideration of narrative, movement, scale and intimacy in order to create memorable and empathetic experiences. Architects, after all, are builders of worlds, whether it’s the set for a performance dreamed up by a playwright or a hotel, office or restaurant. ‘Architecture and theatre are both defined by the people that inhabit and animate them,’ he writes in his 2021 book Drama.

‘We start by asking not how something is going to look, but how we want the audience to feel.’ Rockwell’s love of theatre – both real and metaphorical – predates his career as an architect. He was raised in suburban New Jersey, where his mother, a vaudeville dancer and choreographer, organised community theatre productions, and he participated in all aspects of them, from acting to playing in the orchestra and working on sets.

When he was 12, he visited New York City for the first time to see the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, after which he was hooked on Broadway. Soon after, his family moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where he encountered a vibrant public life, particularly its restaurant scene

It’s no wonder, then, that his work has involved building spaces that foster conviviality. ‘There were things that connected those experiences, and one was a hunger and a love for live experience,’ says Rockwell. ‘And I felt very compelled by that.’

A continual feedback loop exists between his work for theatre and the rest of his creative practice. He thinks like a director when it comes to his hotels and restaurants, which include a 30-year collaboration with chef Nobu Matsuhisa and establishments for culinary heavyweights including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, José Andrés and Daní Garcia. Meanwhile, he thinks like an architect when it comes to sets, which is rare in the world of theatre.

There’s an element of realism to his designs and a keen awareness of movement that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Moreover, the audience is often let in on the scenic transitions that happen in a production he works on. For his Tony Award-winning set design for the 2016 production of She Loves Me, a musical set in a 1930s-era perfume shop in Budapest, Rockwell created an art nouveau-style building that opened like a jewel box.

‘Architects have a great visual and three-dimensional awareness of space, and not all theatrical designers work in that way,’ says Sladen. ‘They might work from a sketch of a visual picture or they might start with colour palettes. From the beginning, David is always thinking, “How is this going to work?”’

In Kinky Boots, a realistic-looking factory floor was transformed into a fantasy world using a change in lighting and by converting a conveyor belt into multiple moving treadmills on which the actors danced. ‘The models were critical for studying how things could rotate in space and how dance might integrate with that,’ says Rockwell. ‘You can’t really study it any other way than with a model; they don’t misrepresent the truth. In renderings, you can convince yourself of a lot of realities.’

Set models represent the private conversations between a stage designer and a production’s director, lighting designer, choreographer and costume designer. They are also kept on hand at rehearsals, allowing actors to build their characters, and are continually modified as they perfect their movement across the stage. Unlike models for buildings, which are designed to be displayed, set models are workhorses that the public never sees. Because of this, a model becomes ‘a little bit like the playbill’, Rockwell says. ‘It’s a collection of memories.’

Rockwell himself is a student of other theatre designers’ models, especially those of Boris Aronson, who designed the original set for Fiddler on the Roof. Aronson’s widow gifted Rockwell an original set model for the Tony-winning 1971 production of Company, which sits in his office. He’s also a frequent visitor to the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the few locations that publicly displays theatre set models. Sadly, few wind up in collections because they rarely survive due to their delicate nature.

The ephemerality of theatre makes the genre especially difficult to collect. But its material remnants, set models in particular, are particularly evocative objects. The V&A often hosts special tours for people with dementia, and its theatre collection is a favourite destination. ‘Visitors will see a set model or a costume or a poster for a musical and they’ll start singing,’ Sladen says. ‘They know the words perfectly because that memory is so strong.’

Rockwell appreciates that more people will now be able to see and experience the models he has made following their acquisition by the V&A. ‘I’m intrigued and honoured and terrified all at the same time because they’re objects I love having,’ he says. ‘It’s sort of a step in letting go of the object, keeping the memory, and then being part of this collective memory.’

rockwellgroup.comvam.ac.uk

This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available to download free when you sign up to our daily newsletter; in print on newsstands; on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS;and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

At every show across the world, the gallery attendant is on permanent display. They are, along with their functional chair, as much a part of the furniture of the art gallery as its meticulously positioned frames or silent white walls. Since the invention of the exhibition, these workers have kept a close eye on the works that surround them, handed out literature, offered visitors impromptu art history lessons and ensured that Do Not Touch signs are adhered to.

Or not adhered to, perhaps. After all, in recent years, climate activists have glued themselves to displays, as well as launched a Warholian tin of tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and slashed ancient masterpieces. Elsewhere, a banana on display worth £90,000 was eaten and an 18ct gold toilet was stolen. The art gallery has never been more infiltrated.

But, more strikingly, there’s also been a change in the way we see art. With a collective attention deficit thanks to our phones, demand for more immersive experiences and the strange social hangover of the pandemic, our general interaction with exhibitions has changed. Visitor experience workers get to experience this experience; looking at people who are in turn looking at art. It makes for a surreal chain of perception.

Many gallery attendants are also artists in their own right, working at exhibitions to finance their own creations in the hope that, one day, their own work will be displayed. But what is it really like staring in silence for hours on end, a sitter without a painter? We spoke to gallery attendants currently working at London’s Tate, Serpentine, Barbican and V&A to hear more about the role.

Assaf Hinden's photography, viewed throughout, is exhibited at Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv until July 6 2024

bravermangallery.com

Gallery attendants on watching you looking at art…

Eleanor, Tate

Eleanor: I started at Tate Modern in December 2022 after studying Art History at University. At Tate, we're ‘visitor engagement assistants’, so there's a focus on creating a safe environment and talking to visitors. Having conversations with visitors who are enthusiastic about art is a genuine pleasure at work. Some of the art on display really evokes strong reactions in people, especially impressive large-scale ones like those in the Turbine Hall.

Tastes may have changed over time but big names have always attracted a lot of interest, with many visitors still asking for Picasso, Warhol, Rothko or Pollock. Social media may have had an impact on the increase in interest in immersive or interactive art exhibitions. Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms was hugely popular and Yoko Ono's new exhibition is also proving to be busy due to visitors activating the art themselves.

You can become somewhat indifferent to the works after seeing them so often. But reading the wall text for a piece of art that you have seen thousands of times and never really been interested in can sometimes end up in you finding out something that you didn’t expect to learn. 

Attention spans really vary, with some people rushing through the galleries barely stopping to look at anything and some spending hours reading every piece of text available; apparently, on average, people look at a work on display for just eight seconds.

Laura, Barbican

Laura: The gallery is a space that shows the absurdity of life in the most delightful of ways. It's not for everyone. Many people quit within a few months. You have to be comfortable with your own thoughts and endure visuals and sounds for a long period of time; one piece, from Rangar Kjartansson, featured the same song for seven hours; another, in the Carolee Schneemann exhibition, featured a mop consistently dropping onto a TV. These might interest, inspire or amuse you, but also irritate, shock or bore you.

Interacting with the visitors can be very rewarding, but people frequently don’t acknowledge an invigilator’s presence, which means you can often be a fly on the wall to some entertaining conversations and behaviour. I’ve witnessed crying, laughing, screaming and, one disturbing day, a couple being overly amorous believing they had the gallery to themselves!

Often visitors feel like they need answers from you. Some come purely to take photos, never truly taking their eyes off their screen. Lots of people use it as a space to catch up with family and friends, dipping in and out of rooms and occasionally muttering comments about the work but mainly focusing on conversations with the people they’re with.

One of my most challenging moments was when a member of the public broke a very delicate sculpture right in front of me by suddenly slapping it with their hand. After seeing my shocked expression, she said, ‘I don’t think it’s art‘, and then walked away as if nothing had happened. You learn quickly that people have a natural desire to touch or get closer to things they’re not meant to.  

Some of my best ideas have come from my role here, from fictional exhibitions I've designed to stories I've written about anthropomorphised works of art. As an artist as well as an invigilator, I fully appreciate the importance of protecting artists’ work, but sometimes a little voice inside of me thinks: ‘It’s just things, made by people, that someone decided were important.’

Hazel, Serpentine

Hazel: You truly know it’s a successful exhibition if people are engaging and asking questions, and as gallery attendants we spend a lot of time researching to help with this.

For the first couple of weeks of an exhibition, I tend to focus my mind on the artworks, trying to understand each decision and each outcome made by the artist. After a while, my mind will wander and I find myself thinking about my own art practice. It’s an obscure skill to house a studio in your mind and I’ve definitely acquired it from my time as a gallery attendant.

Staring at the same artwork for hours can really change the meaning of the work and theoretically it is a privilege, but I think there’s something poignant and ephemeral about visiting an exhibition once.

Eleanor, V&A

Eleanor: The job sits at the intersection of visitor experience and security: we have to ensure that the millions that come to the museum have an amazing experience and get the very best out of their visit, all while keeping a watchful eye over the collection so millions more may enjoy it for years to come. We inspect the condition of the collections like a gardener tending their flowerbeds – constantly aware of any little changes or warning signs. 

Over the years I have learned so much from visitors. Sometimes, being asked very specific questions that I couldn’t answer was the impetus to go home and study so that I wouldn’t be caught short again – in some cases starting new passions of my own.

One enquiry about one of the smallest, most humble pieces of pottery sparked a fascination that led me to sift through archives, import books from abroad, and eventually, develop a talk that I still give to visitors to this day. I’ve even taken pottery classes since. 

There is so much to consider when walking through a gallery. The art of the objects, of course, but the curation, too: after a while the stories and the links between pieces and displays leap out and illuminate themselves, gradually weaving together in a magnificent tapestry of art and design history. You begin to imagine all the hands that each object has passed through on their individual journeys to their modern home. It’s a magnificent illustration of the enormity of human creativity.

The act of looking, and continuing to see, requires effort. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to let the art fall away and the objects just become things you happen to be walking past. To continue to engage with them is to keep them alive – engaging with the visitors is an excellent way of doing this. Perhaps, in a glance, they see something you have never noticed in years and share it with you.

People like to make conversation too, and I have noticed recently how the chat has swung away from the objects to the big picture: what’s the point of museums? Who do they serve? Who do these objects really belong to? This type of questioning about inclusivity is really healthy. After all, it’s the same questions museums are asking themselves.

The V&A’s ‘Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence’ is a bold exhibition that takes on ideas of colonialism, post-colonialism and how architecture and aesthetics can operate as both propaganda and a tool for liberation. In this complex show we discover the Indian and Ghanaian architects who took this Western aesthetic and modernist architecture, and made it their own, adapting it to their cultures and climates. 

‘Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence’ at the V&A

The exhibition starts by looking at the legacy of British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and their work in both India and Ghana at a time when India had achieved independence and Ghana was just about to. 

As these architects were coming up with iterations of the tropical modernism genre, a style of architecture which adapted to the different climates of each country, the cogs of change where turning and their work evolved through the energy and passion of those rebuilding countries and continents after independence. Gold Coast prime minister and Ghana’s first post-independence president Kwame Nkrumah, and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru were taking their countries into new eras after the end of British rule, through the late 1950s and the 1960s.

'They wanted to have a kind of architecture that looked back to the past, not in terms of copying, or pastiche,' explains Dr Christopher Turner, the V&A’s Keeper of Art, Architecture, Photography & Design, and curator of the exhibition, 'but in terms of using those methods of climate control that have been learned over thousands of years and incorporating them into this modernist vision. So it was like some fusion that they were advocating for. It's modernism with this kind of spirit of the place that was lacking in previous projects, they thought.'

The initial focus is mainly on the Le Corbusier-designed city of Chandigarh, the capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana, and takes a deeper look at the Indian architects, designers and builders, who created the city with the French-Swiss architect. 

Built quickly and from scratch, with cheap local labour, the city didn’t take on board Indian street culture or customs of living. While it was a huge achievement, its most visited attraction today is a village of statues by artist and local road inspector Nek Chand made using detritus knocked down to make way for the new Chandigarh, explained Turner. 

'Nehru had very strong ideas about how everything should work and he stipulated that the Western architects should not bring their own architecture offices with them, but use Indian architects – and the project would serve as a kind of school,' Turner told Wallpaper* on a tour of the exhibition.

On view are a beautiful defendant’s box from the courthouse, and chairs designed for the library, as well as architectural models and photography bringing to life the stories of the people who worked with the Western practitioners to make the idea of Chandigarh a reality. 

'We have an armchair by Pierre Jeanneret, who did design a lot of the furniture for Chandigarh. But a lot of the Indian architects were also involved in the furniture design and didn't necessarily get the credit for it,' explained project curator Justine Sambrook.

The exhibition also tells the story of Ghanaian architect Victor Adegbite, who was asked by Nkrumah to return from the United States to lead the design of a post-colonial Ghana. He designed sites including Accra’s iconic Black Star Square. 

We also see the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, which was built in 1952 to train a new generation of African architects, and the modernist buildings on campus have the functionality, brise soleils, and use of light and shade that are the trademarks of African Modernism. The senior staff club house, designed by Miro Marasović, Nikso Ciko and John Owuso, features in the exhibition, as well as a film directed by Turner and architects Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed, which was also screened at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Featuring objects, ephemera, painting, sculpture and film alongside architectural drawings, models and plans, the exhibition charts not only the evolution of modernist architecture outside the West. It also looks at how buildings and aesthetics can represent culture and mirror societal change. It shows how a generation of architects built and expanded on visions of a post-colonial future.

In highlighting the work of the architects and designers who worked with the big Western names that kickstarted the tradition of tropical modernism, the exhibition also shows us where the former took these ideas going forward, both in theory and in practice. The exhibition also nods to the development and ideologies that threaten these buildings today, the legacies of their makers, and what we can learn from this climate-conscious architecture.

'We deliberately set out to complicate the history of tropical modernism by looking at the architecture [in the context of] the anti-colonial struggle of the time, and by engaging with and centring South Asian and West African perspectives,' Turner said. 'As we look to a new future in an era of climate change, might tropical modernism, which used the latest building and environmental science then available to passively cool buildings, serve as a useful guide?'

'Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence' is on show at the Victoria & Albert museum from 2 March to 22 September 2024 www.vam.ac.uk

Ambika Hinduja is showcasing her latest sculptural design at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dubbed ‘Harmony of Nature - A Concerto of Art’, it features a gold leaf enveloped baby grand piano with nature as its muse. The piece was envisioned and privately commissioned for Sangita Jindal, patron and great supporter of the arts. Inspired by the autumnal leaves, the sculptural instrument was brought to life by Goldfinch by Edelweiss, who carefully constructed Hinduja's intricate design.

Unveiled in October 2023, the piano - an acoustic Edelweiss Goldfinch baby grand piano, hand built in the UK with self-play and manual play options - informed Hinduja’s work from the beginning. This accompanied her studies on a range of foliage in a variety of colours, to help inform her work to recreate an ideal leaf-like structure that unites nature, sculpture and technology. 

Ambika Hinduja’s ‘Harmony of Nature - A Concerto of Art’

Warm toned materials add to the autumnal feel, with the baby grand encased in Bronze, and clad in 22.5k moon-gold leaf, further mimicking the textures of nature. The design is whimsical, with the sculpture casting a silhouette of a curled dried up shape, creating movement of a leaf gracefully falling from a tree.

The semi-abstract design gives an illusion of its appearance, with its true form being revealed when the fallboard is lifted and displays its keys, held open by a delicate twig-like support when the piano is in play.

From above, you can see the inner workings of the piano, with an exposed frame and sound board protected by an invisible mesh. From this view you can see the true form of the design, with fine curvature and indents. To finish, a matching 22.5 karat gold leaf stool in the shape of a small pebble to complete the piece.

With the design uniting sound with sculpture, Hinduja reflects:  ‘The piano was designed as an exploration of where and how sound and sculpture converge. [...] Listen to the soft whisper of a falling leaf and the song of a moonlit stone. Rustling trees play a wild symphony to awaken the soul, their roots cradled in wisdom, ever ready to be shared.’

impeccableimagination.com

‘It was important to go back to the garments,’ says V&A fashion curator Oriole Cullen about the museum’s latest blockbuster fashion exhibition, ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’ (which we previewed earlier this year). ‘Coco Chanel’s personal life is something that people are very drawn to and interested in. But less is said about the clothes.’

It is not difficult to see the appeal of Gabrielle Chanel’s colourful life story. There was her poor upbringing in a French nunnery, a youth spent as a shop girl and café singer, and the opening of her first millinery shop on Paris’ Rue Cambon in 1910. Then her dalliances with high society, fated romances, summers on the French Riviera with Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and journeys to golden age Hollywood to costume its biggest stars. 

Inside ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’ at the V&A

And though ‘Fashion Manifesto’ uses these moments as backdrops, the focus remains largely on her design sensibility, which set a template for the modern woman’s wardrobe. ‘She defined her approach to fashion quite early on,’ says Cullen. ‘It’s about chic, simple clothing, looking at movement and the body. These elements she creates – the jersey, the little black dress, the suit – these are the things she comes back to time and again and refines them.’

The Storey Studio-designed exhibition is divided into ten parts and begins with a 1916 marinière blouse, one of the French couturier’s oldest surviving pieces. Crafted from fine-gauge silk jersey and tied loosely around the waist, it is decidedly modern – it would not take a stretch to imagine one of the current exhibition’s attendees wandering past in it. Also on show are early iterations of her signature garments and a staggering display of two-piece suits encased in double-height glass boxes, as well as a recreation of the faceted mirrored staircases at her Rue Cambon apartment, where she would stage client presentations.

Particularly striking are her diaphanous evening gowns (some pictured here, photographed within the V&A archive by Oskar Proctor). ‘They’re very drapey,’ says Cullen. ‘They aren’t worn over lots of petticoats so they move beautifully.’ A Parisian glamour is suggested in glimmering surface decoration from sequins and paillettes on otherwise minimal gowns. Her garments are very minimal and clean, but to use something like all-over sequins is amazingly effective. It’s not superfluous decoration, it’s just the body of the dress.’

The exhibition spans Chanel’s six-decade-long career in fashion, from 1910 to her final S/S 1971 collection (Chanel would die in 1971 in her apartment in the Ritz Hotel Paris). Cullen finds her later work particularly fascinating, transgressive in its use of colour and gleaming contemporary fabrics like lamé. ‘Some of the colours and textiles she was using were incredible,’ says Cullen. ‘We wanted to bring that vibrancy, because she was experimenting all the time.’

What Cullen hopes people take away from the show is the idea of Chanel as a ‘fashion maverick’ and early brand-builder. ‘When she started, couturiers weren’t really received in polite society; you might have known their names, but not what they looked like. But Chanel changed that. She was happy to be front and centre.’ 

‘Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto’ is on show until 25 February at the V&A, London SW7.

This article appears in the November 2023 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

vam.ac.uk

It only takes a quick walk around Stratford station to realise that there are changes afoot in this corner of east London; and one of the biggest is swiftly taking shape, its concrete pleats seemingly moving in the summer breeze. V&A East Museum and its dynamic, soon-to-be instantly recognisable volume is somewhere midway through construction. The cultural destination is working full steam ahead towards a 2025 opening, as part of a twin scheme alongside V&A East Storehouse (designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with support from Austin-Smith:Lord), the V&A’s upcoming immersive archive experience. The new museum’s architects, Dublin-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, stress that in their project, this urban context was key – as was creativity, making and design itself, which not only will be celebrated in the content and exhibits, but also offered inspiration for the structure’s shape. 

V&A East Museum: the background

The two V&A outposts are part of East Bank, the Mayor of London’s £1.1bn ongoing Olympic legacy project, which is slowly but steadily transforming the area beyond its well-documented facelift during the 2012 Games. Other important future additions to the neighbourhood are the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the BBC Music Studios, and the UCL East campus - with architects Allies and Morrison being lead consultants on the overall Stratford Waterfront project.

‘We were involved in the masterplan for East Bank, and had to envision the space for what is now V&A East, bridging an edge of the Olympic Park,’ explains O’Donnell + Tuomey’s co-founding director John Tuomey, who set up the studio with his wife, architect Sheila O’Donnell. ‘From the masterplanning work, we had the volumetric solution, which we then had the opportunity to develop. It has been a very special project from the beginning.’ 

V&A East project director Claire McKeown adds: ‘One of the ambitions was for the building to be a civic one, open to all, and that visitors can access all floors.’

It certainly feels inviting – a beacon for this new cultural district. Seen from a distance (and there are publicly accessible vantage points nearby that allow that), the building stands out for its upwardly tapered, abstractly pleated, textured shape. It’s easy to imagine it becoming visual shorthand for the creativity it will contain, as well as the whole area. ‘We wanted it to read as a special thing, but we didn’t start with it being a symbol in itself,’ says Tuomey. ‘Even so, the project’s looks are squarely rooted in the design disciplines. In 2017-18, the V&A in South Kensington held an exhibition on Balenciaga, and one of the items on display there, an X-ray of a silk taffeta dress and its interpretation by artist Nick Veasey, caught Tuomey’s eye. ‘I began to think about the space between the figure and the form, what it is and what it can be,’ he says. ‘They are not visibly connected, but they are very connected, and you move in between the body and the fabric.’ It sparked an idea about a building that would allow space for people to do the same. 

A craft-based, eye-catching building

The result is V&A East, subtly mysterious in its semi-opaqueness, with enclosed and open spaces designed to house temporary exhibitions, as well as take visitors on a journey through the V&A’s collections, its artefacts protected by high-spec climatic conditions. The outcome is a vertically-organised building, spread across five floors, with an immersive circulation area that wraps around open-plan spaces. The ground level is scheduled to remain open – no barriers or gates that one needs to cross to enter beyond the café and store. It needed to feel ‘invitational’, stresses Tuomey. 

The building’s façade is made of distinctive, individual concrete panels. ‘We wanted a façade that exploited the possibilities of the material and reinterpreted the façades at the V&A South Kensington – such as the sgraffito on the Henry Cole Wing,’ says McKeown. Visitors can get a closer look at the panels from one of the three terraces, while taking in the striking vistas, which also played a key role in the spatial development. ‘The journey [through the museum] ends with a view at the top, and the openness towards the park is a big part of the project,’ says Tuomey.

 As building works are underway, efforts are now ramping up on the exhibition design. The permanent Why We Make collection galleries will be created by JA Projects with A Practice for Everyday Life and Larry Achiampong, focusing on global creativity and inclusivity, and craft of all kinds. The aim is for content and building to operate in sync, fostering physical and virtual space for the imagination to unfold. ‘There’s a tendency in architecture to try and control everything, and this is not the most interesting way to carry on,’ says Tuomey. ‘It is a better test of a concept to see that it can survive while it is translatable and inhabitable by entirely different beings. It tests its robustness.’ And that, as they say, is where the magic happens.  

odonnell-tuomey.ie 

vam.ac.uk 

A version of this article features in the September 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, on sale now, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Young V&A, formerly the Museum of Childhood, is ready to open its doors, following a three-year-long redesign process, which aimed to realign the institution's purpose and refocus it on its dedicated audience – children of all ages, families and young people. As indicated by its change in name (which was implemented to highlight that the new space is more 'for' rather than 'of' childhood), the new, free cultural attraction in east London's Bethnal Green is squarely orientated towards younger audiences, who will now be able to re-enter its original building's spectacular space from 1 July 2023. 

The Young V&A, a London museum reimagined

Young V&A is housed in a Grade II*-listed building with a 150-year history, set on Cambridge Heath Road. It is a dramatic Victorian building with a partly prefabricated iron structure and plenty of original features, such as its central courtyard and 19th-century marble mosaic floor. 

Now, with the help of architecture studios De Matos Ryan (which led on the spatial planning) and AOC (spearheading the visitor experience), as well as the V&A’s own curatorial and project management teams, and while preserving the historic legacy of the structure, the building has been transformed into an open, light-filled, flexible space that is fit for purpose through a wide selection of offerings. 

There are three new galleries, a suite of new, larger and better-equipped workshop and learning spaces, a purpose-built 515 sq m gallery for showcasing major exhibitions, and a new shop and café, the museum's representatives explain. 

Everything has been reworked with inclusivity, accessibility and visitor engagement in mind. Interactive elements abound, from the red velvet stage set, which young visitors are welcome to take over, to optical illusions, and the numerous displays, with objects dating from 2,300 BC to today and from across the world. The main galleries' themes, Play, Imagine and Design, aim to capture little ones' imaginations and promote creativity for all ages.

'[The project was] a call for creativity in young children and teens,' said Helen Charman, director of learning, national programmes, and Young V&A at the launch. 'Creativity and imagination are not skills to thrive with, they are survival skills. Young minds and creativity are at the centre of this museum.'

Creating a 'joyful' museum

'We took these cues, to make the world's most joyful museum, and tried to make it manifest,' explained Philippa Simpson, director of design, estate and public programme at the V&A. Crafting design gestures that allow the interior to become awash with light, making even walking up the stairs exciting, and more playful touches everywhere, took centre stage in the project, which was crafted heavily in consultation with children. Simpson continued: 'It was about ceding control of it, and letting them say what they needed and wanted.' 

Young V&A will throw open its doors on 1 July 2023, and will host a free summer festival on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 July, filled with activities and performances for young audiences – and beyond. 

vam.ac.uk 

The V&A's 'Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa' is located at the heart of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale’s revolutionary re-framing. Organised by the museum and the Architectural Association (AA) in London, along with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana, the show focuses on the legacy of the British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and the development of what they called ‘Tropical Modernism’. It is an exploration of modern architecture in newly independent Ghana, and a fascinating insight into the shape-shifting interplay between modern architecture and colonialism.

V&A's Tropical Modernism

Drew and Fry were archetypal modernists, the power couple of inter-war British architecture. In the UK, Fry had worked with Walter Gropius, and after the war, both moved to India to collaborate with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret on the plans for Chandigarh. They were also involved in designs for Nigeria and Ghana, then both part of the British Empire (when the latter was known as the Gold Coast). 

In 1956, Fry and Drew published Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, an influential book that used their considerable experience to show how the Corbusian five point of architecture could be applied to equatorial conditions. So far, so predictable – a classic example of the International Style bulldozing its way towards global cultural hegemony. But Africa was in the throes of massive change, and one of those at heart of the independence movement was Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. 

The structures of colonialism across Africa made modern architecture more of an imposition than a collaboration, but Fry and Drew’s experience, as well as the benevolent support of Nkrumah, saw Tropical Modernism briefly flourish as the newly independent state's de facto style, as much a counterpoint to the fortifications and other colonial institutions that were indelibly linked to first the slave trade and then economic subjugation. How these post-Corbusian ideals became a strong symbol of pan-Africanism is the subject of this exhibition, curated by the V&A’s Dr Christopher Turner, and Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed from the AA.

The show is defined by an exhibition wall shaped like a brise-soleil, a typically Corbusian architectural device that screened and shaded a façade; Fry and Drew used these large-scale screens in many of their Ghanian projects. Into the gaps of this 35m long wall goes a host of archive imagery, tracing the story of this new architecture and its role in the changing political landscape of the country. In the UK, Fry and Drew founded the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture, ostensibly for European architects to learn how to design for the colonies, but also a place for the new generation of post-colonial architects to study. 

Here the waters are muddied. Architectural intervention in Ghana was both benevolent and cynical, a way of mollifying a populace that was increasingly agitating against colonial rule. Nkrumah was an instrumental figure, and after his inevitable accession to the country’s presidency following independence in 1957, he made full use of funding from London to build educational infrastructure for the country. This quid pro quo arrangement not only involved Fry and Drew, as well as links with the AA’s educational programme, but also architects from Eastern Europe and China, driven by Nkrumah’s socialist leanings; even Buckminster Fuller, who was invited to contribute to the Ghana International Trade Fair Centre in Accra. 

The exhibition culminates in a film installation, three screens showing a mixture of unseen archive footage, contemporary views of the key buildings, and interviews with Samia Nkrumah, politician and Nkrumah’s daughter, as well as Ghanaian architects who worked alongside Drew, Fry and the AA’s John Lloyd, thanks to Nkrumah’s insistence on local involvement at all levels. Through this blend of co-operation and misaligned interests, Tropical Modernism emerged as a symbol of a new Afro-centrism, shaping not just universities and administrative buildings, but also monumental structures that celebrated independence.

The exhibition showcases some of the key buildings of the era, including the Wesley Girls’ Senior High School, Cape Coast, the George Padmore Library in Accra and the extensive KNUST campus, a ‘Bauhaus city within the forest. In 1966, a military coup overthrew Nkrumah, damaged by the new country’s plummeting economic prospects and increasingly autocratic rule (‘He was a very good African, but a poor Ghanian’, as one of the interviewees notes in the film). It was also the end of Tropical Modernism, and the AA closed its department in 1971.

Ultimately, the imported modernists of all political persuasions never quite grasped the social and spiritual aspects of Ghanian culture, even though Lloyd – a younger generation from Fry and Drew – had a more open and inclusive attitude towards vernacular architecture and tradition. 

The UK and Ghana remain intertwined both socially and culturally. The Biennale’s curator, Lesley Lokko, is Ghanaian-Scottish, whilst one of the most prominent contemporary architects showing in Venice is Ghanaian-British David Adjaye, whose office is currently working on 100 hospitals in the country, amongst many other projects. The buildings and histories presented in Tropical Modernism are a vivid slice of cross-cultural pollination, a social and political pinch point where, amongst other things, aspects of the Afro-futurist aesthetic took root. 

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa is at the Applied Arts Pavilion, 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, LaBiennale.org 

This morning, London’s V&A museum has given a first glimpse of what to expect from its upcoming fashion exhibition ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’, which will arrive at the London institution’s The Sainsbury Gallery in September 2023. 

Introduced by Tristram Hunt, the museum’s director, and curator Oriole Cullen at a special presentation in the V&A Creative Studio, it coincides with the release today (23 March 2023) of a limited number of tickets for the first few weeks of the exhibition, with further tickets available in June 2023. 

The latest in a slew of high-profile fashion exhibitions at the institution, which include blockbuster successes Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion and Dior: Designer of Dreams, it promises an exploration of the life and career of the pioneering French couturier Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel ‘[who] paved the way for a new elegance and continues to influence the way women dress today’. 

First look: ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’ at the V&A

The exhibition is based on ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’, which ran at the Palais Galliera, Fashion Museum of the City of Paris from 1 October 2020 to 18 July 2021. The new iteration – taking place in a space designed by London-based Storey Studio – will have significant changes, with 122 new looks among those on display (several have been taken from the V&A’s own extensive fashion archive).

The exhibition will remain curated by Miren Arzalluz and Véronique Belloir, who were behind the original version at Palais Galliera, though adapted by the V&A’s own curatorial team. As such, a greater focus will be placed on Gabrielle Chanel’s links to Britain, particularly in her use of tweed and textile firms based in the UK. 

‘Gabrielle Chanel devoted her long life to creating, perfecting and promoting a new kind of elegance based on freedom of movement, a natural and casual pose, a subtle elegance that shuns all extravagances, a timeless style for a new kind of woman,’ says Arzalluz. ‘That was her fashion manifesto, and it’s never gone out of style.’

The exhibition in London will be split over ten parts, spanning the creation of Gabrielle Chanel’s first store on rue Cambon in Paris in 1910 to her final collection in 1971. The various rooms will capture different elements of her design legacy – from the emergence of her clean, fluid style to an exploration of the signature Chanel tweed suit, as well as dedicated sections on the introduction of Chanel No. 5 perfume (‘the invisible accessory’), costume jewellery, and the 2.55 quilted handbag and two-tone slingback shoes (‘two of the most enduring accessories in the world of fashion’). The exhibition will also explore the house’s return in 1954 after the Second World War, and Gabrielle Chanel’s diaphanous designs of the 1960s. 

Some of the highlights include the designer’s costumes for 1924 film Le Train Bleu, a rare silk jersey blouse from S/S 1916 (one of her earliest remaining pieces), and a suit ordered by actress Lauren Bacall in 1959. An original Chanel No. 5 bottle, from its launch in 1921, also features. 

The exhibition is supported by the house of Chanel, which will also be the principal sponsor for ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York, which opens in May 2023. 

‘We are happy and honoured that the first exhibition dedicated to Gabrielle Chanel to be held in the UK will be presented at the V&A, one of the most prestigious museums in the world,’ says Bruno Pavlovsky, president of Chanel SAS and president of Chanel Fashion. ‘Gabrielle Chanel was a legend in her own lifetime... this exhibition will analyse her contribution to fashion and her radical vision of style.’

‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’, supported by Chanel, runs from 16 September 2023 – 25 February 2024. A first run of tickets is available now, with more being released in June. 

vam.ac.uk
chanel.com

Displaying at the V&A until 2 November, and part of London Design Festival 2022, ‘R for Repair’, curated by Singapore’s Hans Tan Studio and Britain’s Jane Withers Studio, is intended as an experiment. In an open call, the studios requested people to send in objects to be repaired and, through a selection process that involved both the tugging of heartstrings and the opportunity to explore the crafts that emerge through repair, they chose ten snapped, torn and fallen-into-disarray objects to be mended for the show. Each item was then sent off to craftspeople in the UK or Singapore, who discussed with the owners how best to display and structurally reaffirm their sentimental relics.  

‘Repair has been reduced to a bit of glue,’ explains Withers, ‘but we need to explore the language of crafts that can go into fixing something.’ The cracked wing of a puffin toy has been repaired by Ng Si Ying with a fine rattan weave, and multidisciplinary artist Attua Aparicio Torinos has made shards of glass from a Jewish wedding ceremony into a chain using lampworking – reconfiguring the pieces 15 years after their breakage. 

A highlight in the show is the repairs carried out on a sewing chest by Japanese-Austrian designer Rio Kobayashi. The chest was opened up by a woman after her grandmother’s death to reveal paintings, and in turn a hidden dream of becoming an artist. Kobayashi used cherry, sapele and walnut to fix and extend the legs of the structure. ‘I wanted to show the ageing of the piece; it’s already got a story and I wanted to add and repair it with something that could age with it again,’ he says.

Next, he opened the chest’s elements and lay them flat to become a table: ‘I wanted it to blossom like a flower into something new,’ he says. He’s painted flecks of green onto the foot of the now-table, creating a modest symbol of foliage. 

There is a theme of international connection in the array, too. A designer from Brown Office, who repaired a ‘Winnie the Pooh’ clock from its former glory into a tri-time-zoned contraption explains its origins. Inspired by a fictional British bear, then designed by an American company (Disney) and made in China, the clock went on to sit in a childhood bedroom in Singapore and – when its edges peeled and elements began to detach – it came to the UK to be fixed by Brown Office and is now displayed in the V&A. ‘It was sometimes as much about repairing a memory as the object itself,’ explains Withers, and the accompanying stories allow for a sentimental appreciation of otherwise-ordinary items. 

The major lesson from this intricate exhibition is our need to utilise design to reduce waste. Withers explains that ‘you have to design value’ and is using this show to discuss ‘why people keep things, and how to design things that people want to keep for a long time’

NFORMATION

R for Repair is on view until 2 November 2022
vam.ac.uk

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South Korea is feeling very much loved in London this autumn. Not only has the V&A South Kensington opened its highly anticipated exhibition, ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’, the Coronet Theatre, an old cinema turned international arts venue in Notting Hill, is running a month-long Korean festival (until 1 October) with an impressive line-up, aptly titled ‘Tiger is Coming’, and Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s spectacular installation of giant inflatable fruit hangs on its façade.

‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’ show, the first international exhibition to celebrate South Korea’s colourful and dynamic ‘K’ culture, is a great introduction for a Western audience. The result of painstakingly extensive research, this ambitious show attempts to cover a vast range of topics from K-pop, K-drama, K-film, K-fashion and K-beauty.

No matter your knowledge of Korean culture, this is a show where you cannot avoid learning something new, whether that be the foundations of K-Pop prior to the generally acknowledged forefathers Seo Taiji and Boys, or how K-beauty capitalised on YouTube to deliver three minute-manuals for transforming your skin.

Koreans are particularly excited about the selection of Berlin-based Na Kim as the lead space designer for the show. Kim, who is known for her bold, boundary-busting approach and wishes to provoke diverse perspectives on Korean culture, picked contemporary hybridity as her key theme. To illustrate hybridity, she adopted a combination of squares and rooms to illustrate hybridity in the spatial identity of Korean culture.

The exhibition begins with a relatively small section titled ‘From Rubble to Smartphones’. Exhibition curator Rosalie Kim explains that in order to illustrate South Korea’s history,  she selected items which would make sense as visitors move between sections exploring K-pop, K-drama, K-fashion, and K-beauty. Shin Gwang’s ‘We live in Seoul’ poster captures poor Koreans’ yearning for a more affluent urban life and an uplift in social status. There are exhibits relating to the fascinating early days of Korean Chaebols, the conglomerates which have worked so closely with the government to build modern South Korea. The country’s first mass-produced car, the Pony by Giorgetto Giugiaro for Hyundai Motor Company, occupies a small space next to a little jar of Lucky Cream by Lucky Chemicals, the first product of the brand which went to become tech giant LG. A monumental 1986 video sculpture by Nam June Paik, the founder of video art, featuring 33 TV monitors, hints at how young Koreans would become the masters of a new digital era.

Section two, entitled ‘Setting the Scene’, focuses on the remarkable success of K-drama and film, through multimedia, installations, posters, storyboards, props and costumes. The iconic pink guard costumes and green tracksuit from the hit Netflix series Squid Game, and a recreation of the bathroom set from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite are both highlighted here. Delightful details abound, such as the grooming kit and a handwritten letter from Sook-hee, the main character of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden along with prop photographs of the family in the acclaimed independent film Minari.

The show seems rather shy about sharing certain beliefs on what shaped Korean culture’s success. For instance, an example of Chaeekeori, a folding screen showcasing books, scholarly equipment, and precious items, so emblematic of the knowledge, self-cultivation and refined taste of the scholar-gentleman during Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), is displayed here merely to reflect academic pressures often represented in K-drama. Koreans’ unquenchable desire to acquire new knowledge has long been a driving factor in the success of contemporary Korean culture. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough space in this section to illustrate the many bold young female filmmakers in South Korea, although there is a quick mention of Kim Bora’s film, House of Hummingbird.

‘Global Groove’, charged with hefty energy and a thumping K-pop soundtrack, is destined to draw the crowd to the show. An interactive dance challenge offers you the chance to dance like a K-pop star. You follow the moves created by B.B. Trippin, choreographer for ‘That That’, and see them become part of an evolving collective dance displayed on a wall created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab. Watching yourself on the screen dancing with other visitors will make you feel that you’ve just become a part of a famous K-pop music video.

Visitors enter the gallery through a corridor lined by fan lightsticks, which glow in different colours associated with K-pop fans’ favourite bands. G-Dragon, the first K-pop idol and a global style beloved by the late Karl Lagerfeld, looks invincible in Gwon Osang’s sculpture, Untitled G-Dragon, A Space of No Name. Look out for new ‘Idol’ looks created for the V&A show by celebrated K-pop style and visual director Geeeun, who has styled Blackpink and Big Bang, and style director Balko, who has worked with BTS and NCT.

The final section, titled ‘Inside Out’, presents K-beauty and fashion, underlining their origins whilst showcasing the innovative and experimental approaches that have led to new aesthetic standards. There’s a strong focus on how designers are reimagining the silhouette of traditional Korean costumes such as the hanbok, including Beyond Underwear, specially created for the V&A by acclaimed stylist Suh Younghee and a purple cheollik dress by Tchai Kim, who transformed the traditional Korean men’s coat into a gorgeous woman’s ensemble. Colourful garments by young designers with a link to Britain such as Minju Kim and Miss Sohee are also on display.

If there is a criticism, the show is a bit light on the smart juxtaposition of past and present for which the V&A is known, and doesn’t seem to clearly present an overarching theme or storyline as to what brought the success of the Korean wave. Still, it is a delicious and fun amuse bouche to whet the appetite of those keen to immerse themselves in the dynamic new area of K-Style.

INFORMATION

‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’, runs from 24 September 2022-25 June 2023 at the V&A South Kensington, vam.ac.uk. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism - Republic of Korea and Genesis

Fiona Bae is the author of Make Break Remix: The Rise of K-Style, published by Thames & Hudson. As part of Korean Culture Month at London bookshop Foyles, Bae will be in conversation with Na Kim, lead designer for ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’, on 18 October, foyles.co.uk

ADDRESS

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Canadian artist and designer Omer Arbel stands in the John Madejski Garden at the V&A, watching the most recent element of his series 113 unfold. ‘Material Experiments’ sees a small team of glass-blowers carry out the ongoing series in a ritualistic re-calibration of materials until Friday 23 September and ending in a special late-night performance. 

The process of Arbel’s series begins in local charity shops around London, where a group of 11 artists have selected items made from glass and copper alloys. The objects are then displayed in the V&A’s Santa Chiara Chapel, where they sit until they are chosen by the team to be repurposed. The glass pieces are melted down and blown to form irregular vessels; bowls are stretched into hollow, elongated droplets and a sherry glass is morphed into a lopsided sphere. 

Next, the team melt down the chosen metal object and pour the molten liquid into the quickly contracting containers, causing them to shatter on the surface of the metal and resulting in a carefully designed collision of science and art. 

Arbel’s work is process-based, ‘so a set of parameters are given to us for the design process’ explains Jay MacDonell, glass-blower and director of material explorations at Bocci, ‘then we just choose whatever it takes, and the different aspects come together to form a pathway’.

The input from each decision leaves imprints of the individuals involved in the process. MacDonell describes the patterns within the copper alloy structures as ‘like a memory of the glass form’, and this thread of memories runs smoothly through Arbel’s concept for 113. 

The outcome of the ongoing works, which Arbel started experimenting with in 2019, are spindly copper structures, fragments of metal are left suspended, floating but maintaining their new-found form. The exterior surface of the metal contrasts with its opposing side, having been protected from oxidation by the seal of the now-shattered glass – another shining detail in the experiments that, planned or not, nods to the characteristics of the natural materials. 

Arbel oozes with excitement for the potential of a material overhaul: ‘What I'm proposing is kind of a total reconfiguration of the same raw material,’ he says. ‘I want to ask – what are precious antiquities, what have they lived through and what is their spiritual presence?’

Macdonnell takes a similar tone, explaining that ‘we create this play on the value of pieces from thrift shops that cost so little, but now they’re being shown at the V&A’.

Arbel’s inquisition begs the question: should we melt it all down and start again? And why do we hold so firmly onto relics of the past. His explanation feels like a philosophically fuelled delve into how we value physical forms, and with that query lingering in the air, he sets another intriguing parameter within which our thoughts can flourish. ‘It’s a perfect metaphor for the kind of changes that are happening. Taking old things, melting them down, and then a form being shaped by something that breaks.’ 

See the performance and process

INFORMATION

vam.ac.uk

Visual identity for the V&A exhibition ’Alice: Curious and Curiouser’, by Hingston Studio. Video courtesy of Hingston Studio

Art director and graphic designer Tom Hingston is best known for his work with the world’s top musical artists, including Nick Cave, Grace Jones, The Chemical Brothers, The Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga and Massive Attack. He’s also widely respected in the world of Wallpaper*, creating visual identities and campaigns for the likes of Christian Dior, Orlebar Brown and Veuve Clicquot. Here, he tells us about three recent projects: visual identities for the Serpentine Galleries and the ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ exhibition at the V&A museum, as well as the newsstand cover of our August 2021 issue, dedicated to Design for a Better World. 

Tom Hingston and Serpentine Galleries

Ahead of Serpentine Galleries’ 50th anniversary celebrations, Hingston Studio was commissioned to redesign its visual identity in 2019, replacing a much lauded Pentagram design that was introduced in 2013. The brief, which proved prescient when the Covid-19 pandemic compelled cultural institutions to move into the digital realm, was to create a digital-first identity, with ‘a dynamic presence and a greater level of flexibility across multiple platforms’.

Hingston recalls he was drawn to ‘the notion that the urgent voice of the gallery, with its location in London’s Hyde Park, known for its history of protest and free speech, would be coupled with this sense of nature and openness to surround it. Space to think and breathe.’

He created a modular identity to reflect Serpentine Galleries’ duality – championing cutting-edge art and ideas in serene surroundings, occupying a small space compared to its peers while punching well above its weight. The flexible construction of his visual system, and of the individual letterforms, ‘allows a process of deconstruction, a kind of open invitation for artists and practitioners to reinterpret the identity in infinite ways’. On a more practical level, it also lends itself to versatile applications across social media, on the galleries’ website, digital screens within physical spaces, and the physical spaces themselves.

As part of his research, Hingston looked at patterns found in nature – growth rings from trees, wind patterns, the movement of water, and light passing through leaves – and then applied these behavioural characteristics to the typographic system. The headline typeface is bespoke, with bold, condensed letterforms that evoke strength and urgency. Its title, Platanus, derives from the Latin name for the London Plane tree, which dominates the treescape of Hyde Park. ‘Knowing that it will predominantly be in-house teams who use [it] on a day-to-day basis, the naming serves as a gentle reminder to the relationship the identity has to the park and its surrounding environment,’ Hingston says.

Within the wordmark, Hingston introduced radial cuts to the Platanus letterforms, adding a sense of movement and further referencing the irregular geography of the Serpentine Lake. Elsewhere, Platanus is complemented by two existing typefaces – Schick Toikka’s Noe, with large, wedge-shaped serifs that come to a sharp point; and Michael Mischler’s T-Star, a subtler sans serif with laterally flattened, round basic forms. 

Rounding off the system is an extended series of glyphs, including functional elements such as arrows and wayfinding symbols, and more playful forms that serve to add character and personality. As Hingston explains, ‘some reference the motifs you might find in the surrounding element, others act as a playful punctuation to the information system’.

serpentinegalleries.org

‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ at the V&A museum

A stone’s throw from Serpentine Galleries, Hingston has designed the visual identity for the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition, ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’. The show explores the origins, adaptations and reinventions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, charting its evolution from manuscript to a global sensation, so its identity is suitably ambitious. 

The museum wanted ‘to express its own interpretation of this iconic cultural figure, but also connect in a much wider sense with a multigenerational audience’, says Hingston. The timings of the show added to the burden of expectation; originally scheduled for 2020, it wound up opening in May 2021, when London’s museums could finally welcome the general public again after many months of closure: ‘So the campaign had to serve a dual purpose – announcing the Alice show, but also welcoming visitors back into the physical space.’

The messaging was complex, ‘and rather than try and work around that, we made a strategic decision to embrace it in a celebratory manner and flip the conventional hierarchy – text and messaging would become hero’, Hingston recalls. So it made sense to explore historical examples of design that featured a contrasting mix of messaging and typography; in particular, vintage circus posters with proclamations such as ‘roll up, roll up’, and ‘the greatest show is coming to town’. These posters would offer an expressive framework for the language of the Alice show, but also offer an opportunity to introduce various characters from the book. 

Within the visual identity, the calls to action became ‘Step Into Wonderland!’, ‘See the Amazing…’ and ‘Don’t be Late!’ Another departure from the vintage circus posters is the use of a sans serif, condensed font, which puts a fresh spin on the typology and allows it to feel more elastic in behaviour.

‘Different segments of messaging are treated as a series of building blocks, which are reconfigured, scaled and stretched to fit any given format in both digital and print. This in turn makes reference to the book’s famed exploration of perspective and shifting scales and size,’ Hingston explains.

Complementing the typography is a cast of characters from the book, including Alice herself, the rabbit, and the caterpillar. The two animals were created in collaboration with BAFTA-nominated puppeteers Jonny & Will in another meticulous process. Natural references such as fur textures and caterpillar skin were developed into sketches and then clay maquettes, and finally remodelled in CGI so they could be moved and manipulated in any way necessary for the visual design. 

Meanwhile, Alice was cast as a young actress who was filmed in live action, always from behind so her face would be concealed. ‘Alice means so many different things to so many different people, [so] maintaining this level of ambiguity around her character, whilst also retaining some obvious visual clues in her wardrobe, was essential to us.’ 

Hingston’s identity went beyond the V&A’s walls and promotional material to include the main entrance to the show, which leads down the striking wooden staircase in the museum’s Exhibition Road Quarter by AL_A. ‘It was an opportunity to transform the entrance into something more unexpected,’ explains Hingston. ‘We designed a glyph set of arrows which could act as a signposting device to help guide visitors in and down the space. These multidirectional arrows were also a nod back to the book itself – where Alice is being pushed and pulled along different paths.’ 

‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’, until 31 December 2021, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London, vam.ac.uk

the V&A’s ‘Alice: Curious and Curiouser’ exhibition, and his newsstand cover for Wallpaper’s August 2021 issue

Wallpaper* August 2021 issue cover

Wallpaper’s relationship with Hingston dates back a decade – he was first interviewed in our April 2011 issue about a bespoke typeface and phone icons he’d created for a new Danish mobile phone company called Æsir, and in 2012 he was one of 30 cover artists (selected from 20,000 submissions) for our August Handmade issue. We have long been admirers of his ability to combine striking typography and distinctive forms with contextual rigour, so when we decided that we wanted a typographic newsstand cover for our August 2021 ‘Design for a Better World’ issue, he was our first port of call.

‘It’s wonderful to be invited back to create a cover for what is the new Handmade initiative – it’s a fantastic issue, featuring some incredible thinkers. Plus I share the honour with Piet Oudolf [who created the issue’s limited-edition cover], of whom I’m a big fan,’ says Hingston.

The issue celebrates the creative leaders and projects that are addressing some of the biggest challenges and concerns of our time – among them the Turner-Prize nominated Cooking Sections, who advocate for more sustainable food supply chains, architect Fernanda Canales, whose social housing encourages us to reconsider the meaning of luxury, and artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, whose epic VR experiences foster attention and engagement with the natural world. In response, Hingston wanted to ‘convey this notion of something that was incomplete, or a work in progress’.

Hingston and his team recalled their early development work for the Serpentine:

We were talking a lot about this notion of flexible systems, or rather, frameworks that were open and invited re-interpretation. That concept definitely seemed to resonate with the themes of the issue, as does the idea of something which is evolving or fluid

The cover typeface, which Hingston had started to draw in 2020 as part of the Serpentine identity, takes on a new appearance: ‘The more open letterforms invite the viewer to fill in the gaps, so there’s an interesting game at play here.’ Because the letterforms are of equal width, they could be treated like a series of building blocks that shift around the grid, which allowed for a more dynamic configuration – two of the lines are indented, and there is a double space between ‘for’ and ‘a’.

Early iterations of the cover design were two-dimensional, ‘about plotting points, defining parameters, and then testing how much or how little was needed to retain legibility’. But Hingston eventually decided on three-dimensional forms, to suggest ‘something more architectural, more physical, like an emerging structure’.

Unlike Platanus, the Wallpaper* cover typeface doesn’t yet have a name. ‘It’s an evolving identity, so I’m sure it will continue to take on a number of manifestations in future projects,’ Hingston says. ‘We’ve also been discussing the possibility of making it freely available. I’m interested in how other designers or individuals might choose to interpret the template.’

The August 2021 issue of Wallpaper* is now available as a free PDF download

INFORMATION

hingston.net

With thanks to Gillian McVey

The life and work of artist Theaster Gates are famously intertwined with Chicago – the city where he was born, raised, and continues to be based, whose South Side neighbourhood he has revitalised and transformed one building at a time. Lesser known, but no less interesting, is his long-standing affiliation with London. He remembers his first visit vividly: in 1998, while a master’s student at the University of Cape Town, he came to the British capital on a holiday and visited the Crafts Council Gallery. ‘I remember being so excited that I could see a Julian Stair work, and a Michael Cardew, a Shoji Hamada, and a Bernard Leach,’ he says, listing the ceramic artists who would come to shape his artistic practice. ‘It was a very important time for me.’

A subsequent sojourn, in 2012, was just as formative. Soon after Documenta 13, where Gates showed 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (restoring an abandoned hotel in Kassel, Germany with labour and materials from a derelict South Side building), he arrived in London for his first exhibition with White Cube, which involved suspending a fire truck from the ceiling of its Bermondsey gallery, with a cabinet full of Ebony and Jet magazines on its tether. Titled Raising Goliath, the work pointed to culture as a way to alleviate the Black American struggle. The audience ‘was so kind and generous, and my practice really flourished’, recalls the artist. ‘London has been like my second home. And while Londoners can be quite critical of a bad exhibition, because I’ve had such good reception in the past, I’m very excited to offer this proposal to this place that I love so much.’

Theaster Gates’ London cultural takeover

The proposal he refers to is ‘The Question of Clay’, an ambitious project involving some of the city’s top cultural institutions: a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery (until 9 January 2022) and an intervention in the V&A’s ceramics galleries this autumn, followed by a commission to create the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion. Add to this a show at White Cube Mason’s Yard (until 30 October 2021), and you have the biggest takeover by a single artist that London has witnessed in recent years. A seminal moment for sure, but Gates, who has become one of America’s leading cultural figures, feels no cause for anxiety. ‘Now that I have no more points to prove, I would use these next years to really share and explore my interest in ceramics. The shows are all varying exposés around craft, craftsmanship, the cultural connections between places, and my training as a potter.’ 

In parallel with his conceptual inclinations, Gates has always had a fondness for craft. He took up pottery as an undergraduate student at Iowa State University, eventually completing a residency in Tokoname, Japan, where he worked with a group of master potters. His 2007 exhibition ‘Plate Convergence’, often considered his breakthrough moment, showed a collection of his pottery, only disguised as the work of a fictional Japanese potter who moved to Mississippi and married a Black civil rights activist; three years later, his show ‘To Speculate Darkly’ paid homage to Dave the Potter (also known as David Drake), an enslaved 19th-century artist who created extraordinary stoneware pots. Gates believes that training in craft involves ‘thinking with the hands’ and is a necessary complement to the study of art, history, and philosophy: ‘If you bring contemporary art and craft together, you have the best of two really amazing worlds.’

Not surprisingly, craft was the starting point for the Whitechapel Gallery show. In 2015, Gates and Lydia Yee, the then-newly appointed chief curator at the gallery, sat next to each other at a lunch in Venice. They talked about ‘Spirit of Utopia’, a 2013 group show at Whitechapel for which Gates had installed Soul Manufacturing Corporation, a working pottery studio where visitors could learn how to make bricks and throw clay on a wheel from a skilled potter. Gates registered his interest in doing a follow-up show, thus kicking off a series of conversations. ‘And the more I talked to Lydia, the more I thought, there are so many places in London that have amazing craft histories and things in their vaults, but they’re rarely seen in a contemporary light. Could we connect with these places?’ Gates wondered. He thus set on a path to draw from other collections to create a history of ceramics, displaying the work of his artistic ancestors alongside his own.

An invitation from the V&A to undertake a research fellowship came at the right time. Given free run of the museum’s ceramics collection, Gates naturally gravitated towards craft potters he long admired. He was particularly interested in those who worked across different cultural contexts, such as Leach and Hamada, who co-founded the Leach Pottery in St Ives a century ago; and Ruth Duckworth, who fled Nazi Germany, studied in London and became known for monumental stoneware murals in Chicago.

But Gates also took the opportunity to explore more practical uses of clay: searching for the oldest bricks in the collection – including one marked with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BCE – and surveying the output of the Wedgwood factories, which represented the apex of 19th-century industrial manufacturing. He sought out ‘perversions’ within the collection too, namely ceramic figures of enslaved Black people from the early 19th century, some serving double duty as tobacco jars or candlesticks; though commissioned by abolitionists, these figures have exaggerated physical features that perpetuated racial stereotypes. A selection of these ceramics have made their way to Whitechapel, complemented by loans from other public and private collections (including a storage jar by Dave the Potter, who is not yet represented in the V&A collection).

‘The V&A was so excited that a contemporary artist was interested in these things,’ says Gates, who characterises the museum as an extremely open environment, deftly confronting its colonial past by championing openness, equity and diversity. ‘All the big institutions have the challenge of making right these complicated paths, and the only way to do that is to open your museums up to more artists of colour, more queer artists, artists across the gender spectrum, people who are trying to say new things with old objects.’ 

In this case, the juxtaposition of old objects – such as 18th-century Chinese earthenware, an emancipation medallion commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood, a series of Black ceramic caricatures, and Dave the Potter’s storage jar, all within in the same vitrine – speaks to the relationship between global trade, colonial expansion, slavery and abolitionism.

They accompany Gates’ own ceramic work across two decades, including his ‘Afro-Mingei’ sculptures, which incorporates Japanese elements with the culture of Africa and its Diaspora. For instance, a 2019 piece, titled Afro-Ikebana, comprises a bronze cast of an African mask paired with a rotund ceramic vessel containing a single branch, presented on a tatami mat. 

‘I’m trying to couple Mingei, the folk craft movement in Japan, with the Black Arts Movement in the United States. In this moment [in the 1930s] Japan was saying, “Who we are is beautiful, we don’t need Western culture to reaffirm our beauty and the importance of our craftsmanship and our people.” In the United States 20 years later, Black people were saying, “Our hair and our skin are beautiful, and the objects and foods of our culture are important.” The resistance to a certain kind of Western whiteness created both movements, which I’ve brought together. That very strong philosophical meld led to a material meld, which is very exciting to me.’

Also part of the show are Gates’ new stoneware vessels, installed on custom plinths of hand-milled wood and stone, referencing African sculpture, the human body, and industrial and utilitarian objects. Many of these were made at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, where ceramic artist Peter Voulkos had begun his career in 1951. Voulkos’ work ‘is very material and muscular, masculine and action-oriented’, describes Yee. ‘He would often work in an improvised way, even down to allowing some degree of chance to happen in the kiln. Some of the work that Theaster has made is in response to this.’ 

Gates additionally brought his band, the Black Monks, to Montana to make music that explores themes of craft labour and spiritualism; at Whitechapel, their performance becomes part of a new film that explores the history of clay practice in the UK, US and Japan. The spiritual aspect ties in with the title of the show, ‘A Clay Sermon’.

‘Theaster grew up in the Baptist church in Chicago, and he’s said that he learned about art every Sunday by going to church: the aesthetics, the way people put themselves together, the music. I think that goes very much to the fact that music, and the community spirit of being part of a church, is integral to his work today,’ explains Yee, adding that Whitechapel Gallery has a similar history of community engagement.

‘A Clay Sermon’ coincides with Gates’ intervention at the V&A. ‘Because they are loaning me works from their ceramics galleries, I will replace those works with my own, so their vitrines are not empty. There’s a little bit of trade happening, and I think it’s an interesting way to get people into the museum,’ hints the artist.

Serpentine Pavilion 2022

And while the design of his 2022 Serpentine Pavilion is yet to be unveiled, Gates is brimming with enthusiasm for the commission and already eager to talk about it, unfazed when I point out that he will be the first non-architect to take it on (previous participating artists have partnered with architects – Ai Weiwei with Herzog & de Meuron, and Olafur Eliasson with Kjetil Trædal Thorsen). ‘I’ve restored a lot of buildings,’ says Gates of his work on the South Side, through the Rebuild Foundation. ‘And while I’m not a trained architect, I think about space more than anything. Black space, especially, is core to my practice. And I feel that making space is such an amazing power move within art, for people like Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, Donald Judd, or Hiroshi Sugimoto. I’m part of a continuum of artists who have been thinking about disruptions and interventions in the public sphere and in nature – in my case, the urban environment in a Black neighbourhood.

‘My art has always been kind of land art. So if we can open up the architectural project to one that is actually concerned about land, its politics and complexity, then it seems quite reasonable that not only me, but more artists in the future, will do substantial things [with the Serpentine] commission.’

The first thing about making a space, Gates contends, is to create the conditions for a gathering of people, which is why he’s thinking not only about physical architecture but also ‘the sound system, the food, the energy, the lighting’. Since 2013, he’s run an annual gathering called the Black Artists Retreat, and he hopes that his Serpentine Pavilion ‘will be a place where we might also convene, converse, party, reflect, and celebrate together’.

Looking at the various elements of ‘A Question of Clay’, it becomes clear that Gates wants us to engage deeply with art, design and architecture, not just taking them at face value but also understanding their social function, and the political implications that come with putting them on display.

‘Sometimes politics are on my mind, and sometimes the colour red. And I want to have self-permission to talk about either. There are moments when a truth should be shared, and I don’t want to hide behind the colour red, out of fear it would diminish my artistic practice. Some people choose not to talk about politics because it can be a little messy. I never want to lose that courage. I want to grow in courage to be as sophisticated in my knowledge in politics, as I am in my belief in colour.’

Exemplars of Black excellence

It follows naturally that Gates’ creative leaders of the future for Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project would be creators of elegant, distinctive forms who are advancing a social message with equal confidence. His pick of five talents are exemplars of Black excellence in Britain and the United States, ranging from fashion to architecture to furniture. He lauds shoe designer Kendall Reynolds, co-founder of the Kendall Miles brand, for delivering ‘an elegance, luxury and femininity for Black women’, menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner for ‘offering a new lens through which to consider conversations on race, identity and sexuality’, and fashion and textile designer Tolu Coker for being ‘a fierce advocate for Black models and models of colour’.

Gates selected architect Germane Barnes for being ‘unafraid of uprooting contemporary notions of scale, ideological complexity, or boundaries within his design. He moves me to have deep conversations about what design can achieve for the masses.’

Also on the list is Norman Teague, a more established talent who worked with Gates on 12 Ballads for Huguenot House. ‘Brother Teague designs collaboratively, thinks strategically, and is committed to training Black and brown makers. His determination and design vocabulary continue to inspire me,’ Gates enthuses.

He acknowledges that his mentors – among them artists Kerry James Marshall and Ingrid Lilligren, curators Okwui Enwezor and Thelma Golden – had a major role in shaping his practice, encouraging him to study abroad, learn about other cultures and indulge in craftsmanship. ‘Those moments were very important to me, and I’ve always tried to create opportunities to have that time and space to speak to younger people, to offer them support and advice.’

With support from Prada Group, Gates has just launched the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, a three-year programme that will provide emerging artists of colour with opportunities for exchange, training, critical feedback and exposure. 

‘I’m trying to mimic what I was blessed to receive,’ says Gates. ‘And I’m excited to be able to invest financially, invest emotionally, invest lots of different kinds of resources into designers, artists and other creatives so that they can do more of the great things they want to do.’

Meet Theaster Gates’ five creative leaders of the future: 

• Kendall Reynolds
• Grace Wales Bonner
• Norman Teague
• Tolu Coker
• Germane Barnes

INFORMATION

theastergates.com

‘Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon’, until 9 January 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London, whitechapelgallery.org

Theaster Gates: ‘Oh, The Wind Oh, The Wind’, White Cube Mason’s Yard until 30 October 2021

A version of this article appears in the October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue of Wallpaper* (W*270). Subscribe today – 12 digital issues for $12,£12,€12

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

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

With the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale launch approaching, we catch up with author and architect Shahed Saleem, one of the curators at the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project, a collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and London's Victoria & Albert Museum. The project, which will be part of the Arsenale displays, is titled ‘Three British Mosques', and looks into ‘contemporary multiculturalism through three adapted mosque spaces in London'. Our discussion spans from religious spaces to visitor experience at the display, which is set to open on 22 May in Venice.

W*: Tell us about this year's special V&A project at the biennale. What attracted you to explore this particular theme?

Shahed Saleem: I've been studying and designing mosques in Britain for over a decade, so when the V&A approached me to develop my work into an exhibition for the biennale, it seemed a meaningful response to this year’s theme of ‘How will we live together?’, because it is about how different cultures and communities can coexist side by side.

W*: How did you choose your three case studies?

SS: Mosques in Britain are mostly created through the adaptation of existing buildings, and these three case studies exemplify this.

The house-mosque is the simplest form of mosque, where domestic space is altered to become religious, and this is vividly illustrated in the Harrow Mosque. Many of the earliest mosques were made from houses, as they were the easiest type of building to acquire. Historically, many other minority religious communities in Britain created their first places of worship from house conversions, such as Nonconformists and Jews a hundred years previously. So the house mosque is a continuation of this tradition. 

Brick Lane Mosque represents the re-use of a former religious building. Again, many mosques have been made in this way, as religious space lends itself to easy re-use for Muslim worship. Brick Lane Mosque has a unique religious history: it was built as a Protestant Church, was then a Methodist chapel, followed by a synagogue, before it became a mosque. It shows how religious uses can layer themselves into one architectural space.

Old Kent Road Mosque was a former pub. It shows how the existing decoration and features of the pub have been adapted to become part of the mosque language. This combination of aesthetics and styles is a feature of adapted mosque buildings, where a new Islamic visual language emerges through the hybridisation of cultural references. 

W*: What attracts you to an adapted mosque structure like your case studies? What excites you in this type of mosque?

SS: These buildings are mostly self-designed, and in many cases self-built by the community who have established them. The design decisions are often rooted in the memories and visual culture of these communities. The design process is often ad hoc and collaborative, so it's a very democratic process with decisions made as the work progresses. The needs of the mosque are also continuously changing as the community grows and evolves. So this type of architecture is quite organic and improvised, and highly responsive to the needs and emotions of the community that uses it. I find this very exciting as it throws up new and unexpected design juxtapositions, and new symbolic and architectural meanings.

W*: Assuming adapted mosques are not unique to the UK, are there any international examples that really stand out to you?

SS: Adapted mosques are characteristic of the Muslim diaspora in Western countries, so you see them as the main mosque typology across northern Europe and the US. I find that some of the most striking are in former religious buildings or large spaces. One that stands out in my mind is the Fatih Mosque in Amsterdam, set in an imposing and elegant brick former Catholic church dating from the 1920s.

W*: What would you like the visitor to take away from the exhibition?

SS: I'd like the visitor to feel that they have gained a familiarity with the mosque and have physically engaged with these buildings. Through this I hope that people can further appreciate the inventiveness and richness of the architectural and aesthetic decisions that the mosque congregations have made in the creation of these unique places of worship. 

INFORMATION

‘Three British Mosques’, Sale d’Armi A, Arsenale, 22 May – 21 November 2021

Stepping into the V&A’s new blockbuster exhibit is like being catapulted back centuries and across the ocean into 17th century Japan. Centre stage in the first room sits an intimate tea house, crafted from spun paper, which is set against a matcha green backdrop where freestanding bamboo accents punctuate the space; over the speakers, a custom audio was created to evoke the sounds that might have been heard at the time — horses clacking against rudimentary roads, china cups clinking and the sound of feet shuffling across tatami mats.

The immersive space is the handiwork of London-based set designer Robert Storey and his team, who were tasked by the V&A to bring the exhibition — which charts the kimono’s cultural relevance from 1660 Japan to today — to life. ‘We always think, "how do you create moments of wow?"' says Storey, referencing the tea house which has a circular peephole where visitors can peek inside; an identical window on the opposite side gives a view of a kimono in the adjacent room. (It’s just one of 300 items on display, from Paul Poiret’s flapper-era gold tunic to a 2015 wrap coat by Nigerian-born, London-based designer Duro Olowu.) ‘It’s a beautiful visual that goes all the way through it,' he says. ‘It’s a moment within the tea house, but the other window gives the excitement of what’s coming next. Our work is all about storytelling, and we had to create this narrative to make the exhibit feel discoverable.'

Some eight months in the making, it’s perhaps surprising that this is Storey Studios’ first ever exhibition; the Dalston-based team more frequently work with brands like Hermès and Nike on store windows and shop fits. But Tanya Eskander, lead designer on the exhibit, insists the two go hand in hand. ‘We approached it like we would a fashion show or like a store in a way,' she says. ‘Of course, we had to be sensitive to the objects and their history, and consider things being behind glass. But rather than it being a pastiche exhibit nodding to too many traditional things, it was important to reimagine it in a contemporary way.'

Key features of Japanese design are present throughout; from gravel taken from rock gardens to bamboo and woven flooring; even the graphic signs were printed on Japanese paper scrolls affied to beechwood structures. Within the exhibit, a mirrored ceiling and an angular mirrored column create all the drama of a runway show; reflecting and refracting the dozens of technicolour kimonos that decorate the walls. ‘The idea is that the kimono is coming from Asia to Europe, and it’s this idea of the kimono being reimagined and how they were reinterpreted,' says Storey. ‘So we created this meeting point of them looking at each other, reflecting them off each other within this central column, to symbolise that.'

The exhibition’s set follows the chronology of the kimono’s sartorial history, with three rooms each communicating a different era. ‘With the tea room, the aim was for it to feel intimate in the beginning based on how the kimono was worn in a more private setting. Then we have the kimono in the world, which is its transition into the West,' says Eskander. ‘Lastly we have the kimono transformed, which is the kimono in theatre, dance, performance and film — it’s a future-ish, white space. The exhibit starts more private and opens up as you move through it,' she says, referring to the garment’s transition from ceremonial garb to becoming a mainstay in popular culture, seen in films like Star Wars and on the runways of Alexander McQueen. ‘It shows that the kimono is constantly evolving and changing,' she says.

INFORMATION

Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk, V&A Museum, until 21 June. vam.ac.uk

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Musuem,
Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge,
London SW7 2RL

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Mood board: ‘What excited me about this collection is the strange mix of colours, which is something we touched on last season but has really now become part of the DNA of Victoria Beckham,’ said the designer backstage. A riot of colour cavorted down her S/S 2020 catwalk at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in Westminster, from spearmint to violet, candyfloss to caramel. Silhouettes were presented in contrast, from sleek bourgeois tailoring – like houndstooth suits with a trenchcoat thrown atop and slashed knee length skirts with chain belts – to easy, loose dresses with romantic ruffles, corsage details and a daring amount of décolleté. ‘There is a strangeness to the colours that really works,’ Beckham added. ‘A lot of people are afraid of those tones.’

Best in show: Beckham celebrated her 10th anniversary last season (A/W 2019 also marked the launch of her YouTube channel, S/S 2020 aligns with the anticipated release of her beauty line). At its launch a decade ago, Beckham’s brand was synonymous with slinky, skintight dresses. For spring, the silhouette skimming silhouettes marked a new seductive nonchalance. ‘They’re sexy without being tight and constricting,’ she said. ‘The ruffles on the dresses dance around girls' bodies and are so light.’

Finishing touches: An abstract scribble print emphasised the ease behind the collection, corsages had a splash of 1970s romanticism, and suede Mary Janes were imagined in Beckham’s bold colour palette.

Brand and design consultancy dn&co has designed a new wayfinding system and map for London's V&A Museum. The design helps visitors navigate the maze-like site's seven miles of gallery space, and aims to tempt them to explore the lesser-known parts of the museum.

With seven floors across three interconnected historic buildings, five temporary exhibition spaces, four shops and three cafés, the wayfinding had to be varied, dynamic – and most of all clear. But as Philippa Simpson, the V&A's director of design, estate and futureplan explains, ‘this wasn’t just about getting people from A to B, but about nurturing and allowing for unpredictable behaviours.'

To achieve this, the map correlates both digitally and in print, with vertical circulation points that align across floors. Informed by archival research, the new dn&co design is more legible, compact and easier to carry around – with the hope that visitors will take the path less trodden, with the new benefit of a handy guide.

‘Wayfinding is not a static process, it’s a dynamic one,' explains creative director of dn&c, Patrick Eley. ‘It’s concerned with the way people move through spaces, and the cues they follow. Signs are one of those cues; architecture itself is another, as we are innately guided by it. And what architecture! The V&A is a monumental environment – airport-scale – but richly detailed with no one space the same as another. Our design had to live comfortably in this world-leading museum of art and design and to do so it treads a careful line.

In a building characterised by its range of architectural finishes, quality of signage material was of the upmost importance. Made from tulipwood and dyed black, the signs convey a sense of quality and permanence. Small pops of colour act as beacons, drawing those visitors who have paid for an exhibition through the ground floor to their destination faster, with the intention of supporting revenue generating activities that help to keep the permanent galleries free to enter.

Another central theme will be invisible to all but regulars – the floors have been renumbered. Based on a more coherent sequence, the new numbering reinforces the perception of the museum as one building and aims to make it seem more manageable within a single visit.

But Eley is keen to point of the scheme's limitations. ‘We knew that no wayfinding solution could ever solve all the challenges on its own; not in a building of this scale. Our system is designed to work alongside the unsung heroes of any great museum — the gallery assistants, who are key when it comes to creating an outstanding visitor experience.'

INFORMATION

dnco.com; vam.ac.uk

‘For one thing, I love being in a country where the past lies so vividly around me’ explains Christian Dior in his autobiography, of his affection for England. It was a sentiment born from his first trip to the country in 1926, to hone his language skills before beginning military service. It’s wholly fitting, then, that the history of the couturier himself, and the nip-waisted heritage of the house of Dior, is the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the V&A in London. 

The largest show ever staged in the United Kingdom dedicated to the Parisian maison, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a reimagined take on the seminal Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition staged in Paris in 2017. It places particular focus on Monsieur Dior’s affection for Britain. Not only did the couturier favour Savile Row designed suits, ‘the days of Gainsborough’ and British gardens, he was a famous fashion favourite of Princess Margaret.

Dior established his maison in London in 1952, and staged a fashion show at the historic Blenheim Palace (at the behest of the Duchess of Marlborough to raise money for the Red Cross) in 1954. His youthful successor Yves Saint Laurent also held shows there in 1957 and 1958.

‘Dior in Britain’ is one section of what is an eleven-part exhibition, curated by Oriole Cullen, and designed by Nathalie Crinière. Others include ‘The Ateliers’ – a breathtaking monochromatic representation of the maison’s historic toiles, displayed inside floor-to-ceiling vitrines, and ‘Designers for Dior’ a history-spanning celebration of the key artistic directors since Christian Dior’s death in 1957.

Across a series of resplendent rooms, in the V&A’s recently opened Amanda Levete-designed galleries, vitrines, dioramas and resplendently-clad mannequins convey the history of the house, most renowned for its groundbreaking reinterpretation of the female form, when M. Dior introduced 1947’s Bar Jacket and its waist-accentuating ‘New Look’.

M. Dior was passionate about horticulture, an affection that began during childhood, when he admired the gardens surrounding his seaside home of Granville. The couturier had a particular passion for roses, and even helped erect a clifftop rose garden in his family’s grounds. We gravitated towards ‘The Garden’ section of the exhibition, which explores the importance of flora to Dior. This space features an impressive laser-cut and hand-assembled paper installation, created by Wanda Barcelona, featuring a new flower based on the Princess Margaret rose. Here, in an exclusive film you can see the installation bloom into life.

‘Each of my subsequent visits to Great Britain has given me the same sensation of happiness and personal liberty, which I experienced in the first visit’ M. Dior revealed in his memoir. This exhibition is sure to reveal similar sensations.

V&A “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ installation view. Photography: Adrien Dirand 

INFORMATION

‘Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams’ is on view from 2 February until 14 July 2019. For more information, visist the V&A website; Dior website

ADDRESS

Cromwell Road 
London
SW7 2RL

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New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Dublin practice O’Donnell + Tuomey have revealed designs for their new buildings for the V&A. Both buildings are earmarked for London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. They are due to open in 2023 as part of East Bank, a £1.1bn hub which is to include BBC studios, a venue for Sadler’s Wells and a new site for UAL’s London College of Fashion.

The Irish firm’s scheme for a five-storey V&A museum with three terraces sits on a square in front of the canal. Its form was inspired by Cristóbal Balenciaga. Co-founders John Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell visited the V&A’s exhibition on the Spanish couturier and were taken by the transparency and structure of some images. ‘We have dropped a jacket over the skeleton, to give the building an identity,' says Tuomey of the design. At the other end of the site, O’Donnell is working on the design of Sadler’s Wells East. The two projects will act as ‘bookends to the cultural quarter', she says.

With the closure of the V&A’s West London storage facility in Blythe House, 250,000 objects and 917 archives will move into DS+R’s collection and research centre. Unusually for such a building, it’s intended as ‘a place of storage where the public is welcome', says Elizabeth Diller, whose firm was responsible for the High Line in New York. Her design adds two mezzanines to an existing building ten minutes’ walk from the museum.

‘I think of this as an immersive cabinet of curiosities’, she says, adding that the V&A is ‘my favourite museum in the world'. Exhibits will include Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s plywood office for Edgar J Kaufmann, and enough wall space for a 15m-wide theatrical backcloth designed by Natalia Goncharova for the 1926 Ballets Russes London production of Stravinsky’s Firebird.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of O'Donnell + Tuomey

A major new body of work by German artist Thomas Ruff bridges digital manipulation with one of the earliest important achievements in analogue photography. Commissioned to celebrate the opening V&A’s brand new Photography Centre on 12 October, the series Ruff/Tripe reimagines a set of 1850s images of temples, palaces and monuments in India and Burma (now Myanmar) captured by British Army captain and photographer Linnaeus Tripe.

The Englishman joined the East India Company in 1838, moving to the south of India in 1840. However, Tripe only became interested in photography after relocating to Bangalore in 1854, following a four-year leave in England that was extended due to his poor health. Remarkably, he spent only two years making images in southeast Asia, but ten years printing them.

‘There’s a golden moment where [Tripe] made an incredible survey of all these places in India and Burma, some which had never been photographed before,’ says Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at the V&A. ‘It’s balancing between being a topographical military ordinance survey and admitting he was thrilled by the artistry of making these pictures.’

Ruff embarked on his own expeditions to the V&A’s viewing room, ultimately selecting 20 images from the 400-strong collection of Tripe paper negatives in the archive (ten works from the new series feature in the inaugural display). The negatives were photographed on a light-box at the London museum and delivered digitally to him (the artwork titles noticeably read like file names).

The artist began by layering Tripe’s sepia-toned negative with that of the positive albumen print on-screen, selectively teasing out areas of blue before enlarging the image to over three times its original size, and amplifying the structure of the paper and minute details hidden within it. There’s a quiet majesty to Ruff’s adaptation of Tripe’s images, as he pays homage to their scale, beauty and pictorial quality.

‘I did not want to compete with his printing. I really wanted to show the negative – or the state of the negative – 160 years later,’ says Ruff when we visit his Düsseldorf studio ahead of the opening. ‘All that was in the negatives is left and visible.’ Every scratch, speck of dust, water stain, mark of discolouration, and crease is shown in unapologetic glory in the 80 x 140cm prints, which Ruff  – unlike Tripe – insisted on displaying them uncropped.

It’s the first time Ruff has ever worked with paper negatives and was intrigued by Tripe’s early ‘retouching’ processes, especially his hand-painting of the reverse of the negatives to add clouds or emphasise the ripples on water. (Early photographic emulsions were over-sensitive to blue and would not register clouds, so 19th century photographers would often retouch the sky to add interest to the picture).

Tripe’s photographs were the subject of an exhibition at the V&A in 2015, but seen in this ‘super-charged’  context the works take on a new lease of life. ‘Now the time is right to look at the aesthetics of the pictures and really rethink them as objects,’ says Barnes. ‘Thomas spans the world of analogue and digital, so his language of understanding the chemistry, the optics, and the ambition in making these pictures allows him to digitally draw [unique] things out of the pictures. Being able to translate them to the digital world allowed us to see what has never been revealed on those negatives.’

The Ruff/Tripe commission sits in poetic symmetry with the 150-odd cameras at the entrance of the revamped galleries – the installation, too, spans 160 years. ‘When most people think of photography, they think only of [the time] since Leica invented 35mm [in 1913]. Then it went on and film was exchanged to a digital sensor. That’s what photography is for them – this kind of straightforward photography,’ muses Ruff.

The artist continues, ‘I would say that’s only 5 per cent of the photographic world. If you go backwards, you’ll find every photographer who practiced photography in the first 50 years had to find their own technique. Everyone was a scientist, or an engineer. It was a really rich and wide world of photography.’ The new Photography Centre sets the perfect stage for Ruff’s latest series – a highly gratifying portal into the long history of the medium.

INFORMATION

The V&A Photography Centre is open to the public from 12 October. For more information, visit the V&A website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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Launching its largest project to date, David Kohn Architects has just unveiled its work for the V&A Photography Centre, the London museum's fully redesigned galleries dedicated to the art of observation. The prestigious commission was awarded to David Kohn in 2016, and involved the reimagining of the museum's existing photography display areas, but also its extension, giving the institution's growing collection of some 800,000 photographs valuable space to breathe. The architect dully obliged, bridging in his design old and new, photography and architecture, exhibition and building design in one fell swoop. 

Opening up the space by taking down existing non-supporting walls, Kohn masterfully creates three discrete spaces through spatial arrangements and colouring that do not detract, but in fact enhance the existing rooms' grandeur within the V&A's historical setting. 

There's a generous gallery in a dark petrol-blue that houses shows from the museum's permanent collection (these will rotate every two years); a smaller, mustard-coloured area for new commissions and special shows, which opens with beautiful work by Thomas Ruff; and a part dedicated to new acquisitions and contemporary photography, which includes a digital wall for cutting-edge photo-art pieces.

Even the entrance landing got a refresh, with a large twin set of display cases showing off prized possessions from the V&A's camera collection. ‘Now what was effectively a landing, will become a real foyer for the Centre', says Kohn.

Kohn not only worked on the galleries' architecture, which included carefully hiding state-of-the-art lighting and systems that secure a stable environment, but also conceived a series of tailormade display cases, which are movable (the only ones in the museum with wheels) and modular, so they can adapt to each exhibition's needs.

He also worked together with the museum's curatorial team on the very first exhibition from the permanent collection, entitled ‘Collecting Photography: From Daguerreotype to Digital’, a refreshingly unusual arrangement of groupings in a chronological succession that look at a history of photography through the theme of collecting; it includes prints and some 140 cameras and other objects in a fascinating display.

This level of holistic design and an approach that encompasses different layers of space and history are key focus points of Kohn's work here. ‘We wanted to create this idea of the wunderkammer; a rich and dramatic feel that showcases the whole of the collection together', says Kohn. ‘There are so many different layers and connections between the museum and photography. This is a medium that is as old as the V&A.’

A separate room at the rear of the first gallery is aptly entitled ‘Dark Tent' and will be used for projections and special events. It is built as a separate structure within a structure, subtly referencing its environment through its shape, but also the travelling darkrooms of photography pioneers of the 19th century. Rich colours inside create an almost transportive, cinematic experience, while a side wall can be drawn back to unite this area with the gallery next door, creating a flexible, larger multifunctional space.

Opening the new space to the public this week is not the end of this exciting project. The museum is currently starting to plan the Photography Centre's second phase, which will include further expansion with more gallery areas and more space to showcase the V&A's extensive holdings in the field.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of David Kohn Architects

Curator Jane Withers and collector Charles Asprey have joined forces to launch the London Fountain Co, which is set to unveil a contemporary public drinking fountain during London Design Festival next month designed for modern day life by Michael Anastassiades.

Free public drinking fountains have been in use across England since the mid-19th century – a time when fresh drinking water was scarce and beer, more often than not, was the only alternative. However in recent decades these stone fountains have been slowly disappearing from the country's city streets or falling into disrepair. It's a fact that few will have noticed, as they were quietly usurped by the now ubiquitous and environmentally damaging plastic water bottle.

For Withers and Asprey however, their disappearance has become the focus of this new and particularly pressing project to reinvent and reinstate the drinking fountain into the urban streetscape. ‘We have both loved fountains for years and spot them wherever we travel,’ explains Withers. ‘It seemed a pity that in the UK despite such an illustrious fountain tradition the ones installed recently are mainly rather basic utilitarian models. We wanted to see if we could commission a beautiful and functional fountain that could become a loved feature of the city in the tradition of the Wallace Fountains in Paris or Rome’s Nasone.’

Cypriot-born London-based Anastassiades, who is more commonly known for his ethereal lighting designs, has realised a new cast bronze fountain that will be installed outside of the V&A Museum with another close to South Kensington tube station. ‘Michael combines an extraordinary ability as a form-maker with a strong focus on technical aspects which is essential for drinking fountain design,’ praises Asprey. ‘We wanted a contemporary fountain in the tradition of British street designs like the letterbox and telephone box that has a strong character but is not adding unnecessary noise to already crowded streets. He has done this beautifully with The Fleet Drinking Fountain.’

Made from polished cast bronze – which references historical fountains and other street furniture but is also hygienic – the faceted form, Anastassiades says, is an abstraction of a classical column with a scooped top to imply drinking from a bowl. ‘It needed to be more of an experience than just a place to stop and fill a bottle,’ says Anastassiades. ‘It needed to blend into the environment and not to scream for attention.’

The footprint has been kept deliberately small, while the scale allows for a wide variety of people to use it and also facilitates filling a bottle. A shadow gap runs the fountain's length, providing drainage while also concealing the spout, nozzles and pipes so that, like Anastassiades’ gravity-defying lighting, it divulges nothing about its inner workings.

‘It is my first public-space project, on this kind of scale and of this nature. Especially here in the UK,’ says Anastassiades. ‘In terms of process, I didn’t treat this any differently to anything else that I’ve designed; it’s a design object, the requirements are different when you are dealing with the public domain, but once you understand the limitations you work around them. It has a great potential to grow into something very interesting.’

By making drinking water freely available, the trio hope to persuade people to stop using single-use plastic bottles and make the shift to a refill culture. They are working in collaboration with the Blue Marine Foundation and #OneLess, with the goal of implementing the fountains on a larger scale in the capital and beyond.

‘There are challenges in terms of planning and permissions largely because we have lost the habit of drinking fountains in the public realm,’ explains Withers, ‘but hopefully this is being reviewed and streamlined. It also takes time to change behaviour as people are so used to the convenience of plastic bottles but as fountains become more common this will change.’

INFORMATION

London Design Festival is on view 15 – 23 September. For more information, visit Michael Anastassiades’ website and the London Design Festival website

ADDRESS

V&A Museum
Cromwell Rd
Knightsbridge
SW7 2RL

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Kengo Kuma cites the craggy coastline cliffs of north eastern Scotland as a key reference for the new V&A Dundee’s striking, angular form – but it wouldn't go amiss to liken the new building to a boat, moored on the River Tay, nearby the city’s old docks. Clad in stone, yet light in appearance, the new museum dedicated to Scottish design seems to have dropped anchor and following three and a half years of construction is now opening its doors to the public this weekend.

This is Scotland’s first dedicated design museum, and it’s also a gesture that has great significance for the beloved London institution – an idea born out of a suggestion by the University of Dundee. ‘We have a responsibility as a national museum to be truly national’, explains V&A director Tristram Hunt. Phillip Long, V&A Dundee’s director, adds: ‘it is a new institution with a new vision. Good design creates opportunity and entrepreneurship, and it can change people’s lives. We want it to be this place of inspiration, discovery and learning.’

Kuma won the completion back in 2010 with his ambitious design for a museum that takes references from its context and fuses them with the Japanese architect’s signature sensibilities and light touch. ‘When I first visited the site, the city and water felt separated by other buildings’, says Kuma. ‘Nature and the city should be integrated so what we tried to achieve was to create a gate.’ His design aims to merge nature and architecture and create a new landmark that celebrates architecture and design in the Scottish city.

The team used the city’s central Union Street as an axis for their design – this way, the building can be seen from the city centre, drawing people towards it. ‘We wanted to bring life back to the waterfront’, says project architect Maurizio Mucciola. A void between volumes helps attract people to the water. A second void in the form of a dramatic central lobby helps visitors orientate themselves and connects different internal areas. It also offers a new public space, ‘a new living room for the city’, as Kuma puts it.

Modern construction technology also played a key role. Its distinctive façade is made of 2,500 cast stone elements hanging off a concrete frame. It was important not to completely conceal the frame, both inside and out, explains Mucciola, so materials were carefully selected. ‘We wanted materials that can withstand the elements externally – but inside we wanted something that is warm and welcoming, an approach not dissimilar to that of traditional Scottish architecture’. So, the interior is clad with natural materials, such as warm timber panels at random angles, which ‘soften’ the space, explains Kuma.

Inside, the Scottish Design Galleries feature some 300 exhibits from various collections, including of course the V&A’s own, celebrating the best and brightest of Scottish design. A key highlight is the magnificent Charles Rennie Mackintosh Oak Room (an interior designed by the great Scot in 1907 for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms), which has been meticulously restored, conserved and reconstructed and is now on display. ‘I am most proud of the restoration. [The room] was lost for generations and now its back into public view, it’s very special’, says Long.

‘I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity. I am delighted and proud that this is my first building in the UK and that people will visit it from around the world’, says Kuma. V&A Dundee is now gearing up for its big opening to the public this Saturday with an array of weekend festivities that will no doubt launch Scotland’s first design museum with a bang.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Kengo Kuma and Associates

Iraq-born artist Mehdi Moutashar and Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum have been announced as joint winners of the Jameel Prize 5. It is the first time two finalists have been awarded the prize, which is aimed at artists and designers who have been inspired by Islamic tradition. Fady Jameel, president of Art Jameel, presented Moutashar and Tabassum with the £25,000 prize during a ceremony at the V&A in London.

Tabassum won the judging panel over with her expressive design for the Bait ur Rouf mosque, built in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012. Inspired by Sultanate mosque architecture, the mosque ‘breathes’ through perforated brick walls, keeping the prayer hall ventilated and cool while also creating entrancing patterns in light. ‘Light is a beautiful material to work with,’ says Tabassum. ‘If you can use it properly – how you bring in the light, the openings and apertures – I think it can make it spiritual and very contemplative.’

Moutashar, meanwhile, received the award for his minimalist abstract works, which have roots in Islamic geometry. Now based in Arles, the artist left Iraq in the late 1960s and settled in Paris, where he encountered forms of minimalism, including geometric abstraction, which he integrated with the Islamic traditions of his homeland.

Established in 2009 after the renovation of the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, the Jameel Prize is awarded every two years in partnership with Art Jameel. Previous winners include Turkish fashion label Dice Kayek, Pakistani artist Ghulam Mohammad, Algerian sculptor Rachid Koraïchi, and Iran-born artist Afruz Amighi.

An exhibition of work by the Jameel Prize 5 winners and six other shortlisted artists and designers – including Kamrooz Aram, Hayv Kahraman, Hala Kaiksow, Naqsh Collective, Younes Rahmoun and Wardha Shabbir – runs until 25 November at the V&A. The show has been curated by Tim Stanley, senior curator of the V&A’s great historical collection from the Islamic Middle East, with Salma Tuqan, the V&A’s curator of contemporary art and design from the region.

INFORMATION

An exhibition of work by the Jameel Prize 5 finalists is on view until 25 November. For more information, visit the V&A website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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From the intricately coiffured hair, carefully applied makeup, multiple earrings, necklaces and rings, down to the flounces of her long Tehuana skirts, Frida Kahlo’s heavily constructed image retains a powerful resonance.

Her identity was so tied up in her chosen decorations – even her gold teeth were studded with diamonds – that when the artist was on her deathbed in Mexico, age 47, her nurse knew the time was near when Kahlo could no longer muster the energy to adorn herself.

Claire Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum and co-curator of its new exhibition ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’, reflects that Kahlo’s unique look was a construct, an armour against the physical frailty she suffered.

The artist had polio as a child and then, at the age of 18, was involved in a devastating tram accident that would leave her in abject, restrictive pain for the rest of her life. Yet, as Wilcox observes: ‘When you looked at her, you didn’t see a sick person, her limp or scars or special shoes. You were struck by her beauty.’

Kahlo’s exquisite eye created a highly personal style combined of traditional, regional adornment and precious elements. Her singular sartorial choices were also a symbol of her and her artist husband Diego Rivera’s fierce sense of Mexican nationalism. On one necklace she strung together tiny tin arms and legs with votive charms offered in Mexican churches between chunky coral beads. The artist was also a champion of local contemporary designers such as Matilde Poulat, whose bold, silver and stone pieces are still collectible today.

Among Kahlo’s favourite possessions was a string of outsized pre-Colombian jade beads, which she frequently wore. ‘The Mayans had buried their dead with these beads,’ says Wilcox, ‘In choosing them, Kahlo was quite literally wearing her country’s history around her neck.’ §

Revlon compact and powderpuff with blusher in ‘Clear Red’. Right, Revlon lipstick in ‘Everything’s Rosy’ and nail varnishes, c.1954. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums

Left, string of irregular pre-Columbian jade beads with a central pendant carved as a fist, excavated from a Maya site. Right, pre-Columbian jade beads, acquired from an archaeological site, both assembled by Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums

Left, necklace of silver, enamel, turquoise and coral with hinged compartment, by Matilde Poulat, Mexico City, c.1950. Right, necklace of coral beads with metal milagros – votive charms, in the form of legs Mexico, early 20th century. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums

INFORMATION

The ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’ exhibition is on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 16 June to 4 November

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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At the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum will launch an exhibition titled ‘Robin Hood Gardens: A ruin in reverse’ curated by Dr Christopher Turner and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner that explores the legacy of the infamous London housing estate.

For the V&A’s third collaboration with the Biennale, the London institution will transport a section of Robin Hood Gardens, the housing estate in East London by Alison and Peter Smithson completed in 1972, to Venice. In the face of the failed social housing scheme being demolished, the V&A salvaged a large piece of the building for the collection – a provocative and exciting move in itself.

‘The case of Robin Hood Gardens is arresting because it embodied such a bold vision for housing provision yet less than 50 years after its completion it is being torn down. Out of the ruins of Robin Hood Gardens, we want to look again at the Smithson’s original ideals and ask how they can inform and inspire current thinking about social housing,’ say the curators.

Today in the borough of Tower Hamlets one half of Robin Hood Gardens still remains standing – surrounded by developer’s hoarding sectioning off a large space where the other half once stood – yet still populated, encircled by kids on bikes, wafting cooking smells and odd pieces of furniture discarded on the street – a scene familar to any Greater London neighbourhood resident.

Photograph of Robin Hood Gardens completed 1972, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. London

Phase one has begun on the £300m redevelopment scheme named Blackwall Reach on the site, which has been criticised for it’s marketing strategy that has targeted overseas investors – a sensitive and sad topic for Londoners priced out of the current housing market. The Balfron Tower nearby, which at least has been preserved architecturally, has similarly been marketed to a luxury audience, yet time will tell to see whether luxury buyers will want to live on the fabulously dystopic and polluted cusp of the Blackwall Tunnel northen approach, where lower-income families have lived for decades. It’s a fascinating cultural debate worth having with the international architecture audience at Venice.

In a statement, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, presented the two sides of the debate: ‘The estate is just one of scores of post-war housing projects that are currently earmarked for redevelopment. Critics argue that regeneration is destroying existing communities and doing nothing to ease the housing crisis that is gripping metropolitan centres. Defenders point to the provision of affordable housing within these schemes and to the improvement of living conditions.’

This piece of Robin Hood Gardens will join other large-scale architectural elements in the V&A collection, including the 16th-century façade of Sir Paul Pindar's house in Bishopsgate, demolished in 1890, and the 18th-century music room rescued from the 1938 demolition of Norfolk House in St James's Square – in this context, it seems like a proud moment for Robin Hood Gardens to be added to this British heritage of architecture, as well as a poignant reminder of failure for future generations of architects.

In Venice at the pavilion located at Sale d’Armi A in the Arsenale, the pre-cast concrete elements of Robin Hood Gardens will be reconstructed on a scaffold, designed by ARUP – who engineered the original building – with muf architecture/art – who first proposed the V&A’s acquisition of the section. The installation will allow visitors to ‘walk along a street in the sky’.

In addition, a film and animation installation by artist Do Ho Suh, who will also have an exhibition showing at Victoria Miro in Venice at the same time, will explore the fabrics, materials and shapes of the concrete monolith using 3D scanning and photogrammetry looking to capture individual lives through domestic interiors within the modular plan.

See all the latest from Venice Architecture Biennale here

INFORMATION

‘Robin Hood Gardens: a Ruin in Reverse’ is on view from 26 May – 25 November 2018. For more information, visit the Venice Architecture Biennale website and the V&A website

ADDRESS

Sale d’Armi A, Arsenale Sestiere Castello
Campiello Tana 2169/F
30122 Venezia, Italy

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London’s V&A Museum is engaging in a spot of reverse archaeology. For its latest exhibition, ‘The Future Starts Here’, it has scoured labs the world over – from Silicon Valley giants to Scottish start-ups – to collate more than 100 objects that point the way ahead.

Filled with prototypes, ongoing experiments and finished products, the exhibition avoids sci-fi fantasy and shaky speculations and is thoroughly grounded in ‘the real’, explain curators Mariana Pestana and Rory Hyde. With the input of expert advisors, they have assembled a collection of objects, from personal-use satellites to home DNA labs, that promise to change the mechanics of everyday life. And soon.

Tech titans such as Apple and Google are here in numbers, alongside a catalogue of smaller crowdfunded projects that have a chance of becoming Google-sized tomorrow. ‘The exhibition doesn’t aim to position good technology against bad, or big against small – all of it is exciting,’ says Pestana. ‘Contemporary technology spans the human and the interplanetary – and we want to represent all increments of it.’

By presenting new developments in their infancy, the exhibition hopes to demystify the future, not cower from it. It’s what the V&A has been doing since its inception – its original collection was formed of the cutting-edge products of the Industrial Revolution, first displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Now, we’ve come full circle; the age of technology fizzes around us. Here is our pick of eight objects displayed in the exhibition that outline the shape of things to come.

DIY Bitcoin Miner, by Raspberry Pi, Adafruit and GekkoScience

Technology is developing its own new, improvised and sometimes awkward design language, and this is one of the ‘rawest’ objects in the exhibition. ‘It’s more or less an exposed, cobbled-together circuit board,’ explains Hyde. ‘There’s been almost no consideration for its aesthetic. Precisely because of that, it somehow ends up being extremely beautiful.’

The robot-shaped creation was assembled for the V&A out of elements easily available on the internet, including a Raspberry Pi 3 miniature computer and GekkoScience USB miners, and programmed to earn Bitcoins (although, due to its modest size, the amount is likely to be negligible), a digital currency issued via peer-to-peer networks on completion of complex maths problems. Invented in 2009 by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the cryptocurrency is now the subject of scepticism and hype in equal measure, and has become the de facto currency of the Dark Web.

DIY Bitcoin Miner, comprising a Raspberry Pi 3; 32GB SD card; Adafruit Pi B+ case; Adafruit RGB 16x2 LCD + keypad kit; and GekkoScience Compac USB miners

Eternal 5D Data Storage, by University of Southampton

No larger than a coin, this deceptively robust nanostructured disc can store around 360 terabytes of data for up to 13.8 billion years, even when exposed to temperatures of up to 1,000°C.

Developed by the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, the technology can be used to create digital copies of major cultural artefacts and documents – such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, pictured here. Content is added using ultrafast laser writing, and the glass discs can be read by combining an optical microscope with a polariser.

In an exhibition centred on what comes next, the discs remind us of the past’s importance, preserving evidence of our civilisation for future generations. And, just as a diamond is highly organised compressed carbon, the discs compress data into a digital gem – they are the precious stones of the technological age.

southampton.ac.uk

Geological Epoch Marker, by International Commission of Stratigraphy

Orthodox geological thinking suggests we are in the Holocene epoch and have been for the last 11,000 years or so. However, a growing number of scientists suggest we need a new geological marker and talk about the Anthropocene, or the ‘age of humans’.

Since the 1970s, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has been recognising important geological moments past with so-called ‘golden spikes’ (or Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Points), which may be embedded in rock strata at symbolic spots around the world to mark one epoch shifting to the next.

There are now more than 60 spikes dotted across the earth, but where we will mark the Anthropocene era is still up for debate. One suggestion is to place it by a tree on Campbell Island in the Southern Ocean, which records in its wood a radioactive trace from the A-bomb tests of the 1950s. Wherever it is placed, the marker will reflect the ‘Great Acceleration’, when human impact on the planet intensified and went global and irreversible.

As well as being a symbol of passing geological ages, the spikes are also a sign of ‘important international scientific cooperation’, says Stanley Finney, secretary general of the International Union of Geological Sciences. The decision where each spike should sit is a complex, hotly debated matter, often put to a vote by an international panel.

stratigraphy.org

DNA Testing Kit, by Bento Bio

A symbol of democratised biology, Bento Lab allows anyone to experiment with DNA analysis, without expensive software or specialist knowledge. Perfect for field scientists, students, or anyone who wants to test their lactose intolerance at home or identify genetically modified organisms in their food, it is even being used by a brewer seeking to understand the genetic make-up of beer.

The testing kit was developed by Bento Bio in a tiny studio tucked away in Makerversity, a warren of creative spaces in London’s Somerset House.

The start-up got its big break in 2016, hitting its crowdfunding target in just one day. Without Kickstarter, ‘fringe tech projects like this might not be able to happen,’ explains Bento Bio co-founder, Philipp Boeing.

£999, by Bento Bio, bento.bio

Artificial Leaf, by Julian Melchiorri

Just like natural leaves, this delicate artificial version made of silk protein absorbs carbon dioxide and produces oxygen, offering a potential solution to climate change. Its creator, Julian Melchiorri – the V&A’s first engineer in residence – looked into our natural environments to help find a way to preserve them. ‘When nature has already found a solution, in use for billions of years, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel technologically,’ he says.

The leaf’s inclusion in the exhibition aims to promote ethical debate: just because we can recreate nature, should we? Meanwhile, Melchiorri is not stopping at folioles – he’s currently on a mission to make a bionic tree.

julianmelchiorri.com

Personal Satellite, by Clyde Space

Space exploration is no longer defined only by NASA and Hollywood. Private space fleets are launching across the globe – including from Glasgow, a city with strong engineering schools and a haven for ‘new space’ firms such as Clyde Space.

The company produces CubeSats, small open-source satellites that allow individuals, institutions and private companies to conduct research in space for a fraction of the cost of a full satellite. Weighing around 1.4kg each, CubeSats can be customized to host sensors, cameras, solar panels or propulsion units. Similar models have been used to search for new planets, detect earthquakes and demonstrate the use of solar sails.

clyde.space

Powered Clothing, by Yves Béhar and Seismic

If the Bitcoin Miner represents undesigned, raw technology, Seismic’s super suit lies at the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, encasing futuristic tech inside familiar shells. ‘For me, the future of wearable tech, robots and smart environments lies in how technology is in the background, a non-interruptive experience in the flow of our life,’ says Yves Béhar, who designed the suit in collaboration with new specialist company Seismic. ‘The suit represents how technology should be worn rather than displayed, and integrated into our everyday lives in ways that are discreet and personal.’

Made from lightweight and flexible material, and intended to be worn under everyday clothes, the ‘Aura’ powered clothing is ‘an early conceptual design of an electronic exoskeleton’, explains Rich Mahoney, CEO of Seismic. Marketed towards an older audience, it is integrated with sensors that react to the body’s movements, offering extended muscle power to the wearer, assisting with actions such as getting up, staying upright or sitting down.

‘Since this initial concept, Seismic has progressed significantly with both the technical development and design,’ adds Mahoney; expect the new-look suits to be on the market later this year.

myseismic.com

3D-Printed Prosthetic Hand, by Refugee Open Ware

Established in 2015, Refugee Open Ware (ROW) aims to encourage innovation in conflict-torn countries, and provide the tools, training and skills to teach displaced people how to digitally fabricate the things they need. One of its many endeavours is to invest in businesses that 3D-print prosthetic limbs cheaply and effectively.

This model is a replica of a prosthetic hand co-designed with a six-year-old Yemeni refugee, who was badly burned in a house fire. ‘Prosthetic devices are highly personal. Additive manufacturing simply allows a new medium for the creator to expand the intimate relationship between user and device,’ explains Adam Arabian, associate professor of engineering at Seattle Pacific University, who worked on the design. ‘This object represents the ability of a global community to convene and solve challenging – and often very unique – problems.’

After extensive interviews with the child, the ROW team 3D-printed a prosthetic hand in ABS plastic, customising a Flexy-Hand by British mechanical design specialist Gyrobot with branding from the child’s favourite television show.

row3d.org

As originally featured in the June 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*231)

INFORMATION
‘The Future Starts Here’ is on view from 12 May - 4 November. For more information, visit the Victoria & Albert Museum website

ADDRESS

Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, Knightsbridge
London SW7 2RL

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Four years ago, when curator Edwina Ehrman started thinking about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, ‘Fashioned From Nature’, she envisaged exploring how fashion designers had been inspired by the natural world over time – how, for example, they incorporated floral motifs into their clothing. When she started working on the show more seriously, she had a realisation: ‘I thought, "I can’t do that – it’s no longer appropriate". It had to be [mainly] about the impact of the fashion industry on the environment.’

The result is a sweeping survey of the industry’s relationship with nature over the past 400 years, exploring both our fascination with and exploitation of animals, birds, plants and natural resources. It has the air of a campaign about it. ‘We’re asking two questions,’ Ehrman says. ‘What can we learn from the past? And how can we design a more sustainable future?’

The first of these is addressed chronologically: outfits from the V&A’s historical collection are paired with materials such as raw wool and silk-worm cocoons, as well as photos of live animals (beavers next to a fur hat, for example) to reminder visitors of the origins of these items. Displays explore the use of products from endangered creatures, such as ivory, turtle shell, mother of pearl and whalebone. A soundscape of birdsong is slowly interwoven with the noise of humans seizing nature’s offerings – water wheels, looms, machetes – as the story shifts from the era of handmade and natural energy to industrialisation, fossil fuels and mass fashion.

The section spanning from 1600-1900, focused mainly on Britain, reveals that our relationship with nature has always been anthropocentric – from enclosing the countryside, to farming, taming and hunting animals, we have long viewed nature in utilitarian terms. During this time, imperialism and the expansion of trade brought new, exotic items into British wardrobes and demographic changes led to the scaling up of production. A single dress from the 1760s made with precious metals from Peru, dyes from the Caribbean, furs from North America and Russia and silk from Europe and Middle East, is a reminder that fashion was, even then, global.

The later years – the 20th century and beyond – show the growing environmental impact of the industry, and a greater awareness of the damage it was causing. While exciting manmade fabrics were introduced, many of these were made from toxic materials, petroleum and using harmful pesticides. Recently, designers have consciously highlighted environmental concerns – Alexander McQueen’s S/S 2010 show ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ referenced the melting of the ice caps, while Giles Deacon’s 2016 ‘Fabergé’ silk georgette printed imperial gown, elevated bird’s eggs to the level of the revered gold and jewelled ones. Nearby, is a display of protest material from the 1970s onwards, and a film that depicts oil spills, deforestation and polluted rivers.

The protests shown here are relatively recent, but it’s clear throughout that our concerns about the environment are not new: we’ve always wreaked havoc on the natural world globally, and there have always been those who have sought to protect it. What is different today is the sheer scale on which the fashion industry operates, and our technological capabilities. This complexity, Ehrman argues, demands nuanced solutions: a thorough consideration of how and where an item and its materials are sourced, processed and distributed, rather than a simplistic division between natural as good and manmade as bad.

The last section looks to the future, with a series of proposals for a more sustainable future. Some demonstrate an interest in traditional ideas (materials such as flax and hemp and the aesthetic of mending) while others suggest more innovative solutions (materials that weave themselves and biodegradable outfits).

The exhibition falls at a fortuitous time. In the last year, a host of luxury, high street and sports brands have announced they will be operating from a more environmental and ethical standpoint:  American label Theory has launched a sustainable ‘Good Wool’ capsule collection, burgeoning Swiss-born label Germanier uses recycled fabrics to create dazzling couture-like creations, Adidas has started upcycling plastic waste to create sock-like trainers, and H&M has collaborated with Control Union on a digital service which allows brands to monitor every step of its supply chains. In the last six months too, houses including Gucci, DKNY, Versace and John Galliano have pledged to go fur-free.

Finally, a series of interactive displays suggest that it is us – everyday consumers – who can shape the industry through our choices and demands. As Ehrman says: ‘When people talk about sustainability being a modern luxury, I don’t like that – it has to become the norm.’

INFORMATION

’Fashioned From Nature’ is on view from 21 April until 27 January 2019. For more information, visit the V&A website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London
SW7 2RL

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Video games are about to level up as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announces a major exhibition dedicated to the medium, opening later this year. ‘There is a wealth of creativity to explore, from the craft of the studios to the innovation of the audience as players,’ explains V&A director Tristram Hunt, who considers video game design as ‘one of the most important design disciplines of our time.’

The V&A exhibition will focus on video game design from the mid-2000s, and while this will mean the stunning omission of history-making games such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), there will be plenty else to feast the eyes on, from concept art to moving footage, prototypes, character design sketches, and interactive installations.

Highlights will include glimpses into the creative process Nintendo’s Splatoon (2015), and of The Last of Us (2013) – a breathtaking post-apocalyptic marvel from Naughty Dog (a sequel is currently in the works). Also on view will be the painstakingly accurate recreation of the continent of Westeros from Game of Thrones in Minecraft, and a section exploring DIY arcade games and grassroots gaming culture.

Video games are big business. The eSports industry alone cracked the $1 billion mark last year, earlier than predicted (footage from the League of Legends World Championships will be shown as part of an immersive installation at the exhibition). Independent studios will get their dues too: take Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero (2013), a magical realist adventure game. Its parallax scenography draws on brutalist architecture, theatre, set design, typography and – surprisingly enough – René Magritte’s 1965 optical illusion painting La Blanc Seing (The Blank Signature).

‘Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be jointly curated by Marie Foulston – who arguably holds one of the world’s most enviable museum posts as the V&A’s Curator of Videogames – and Kristian Volsing, research curator. Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio will oversee the exhibition design, with support from Squint Opera (AV design), Julia (graphic design) and Coda to Coda (sound design). To coincide with the exhibition, the V&A is also inviting applications from UK-based artists, designers or makers involved in the video games scene for a Videogames Residency, which will run from 15 October 2018 until 15 June 2019.

While it may seem an unlikely move by the 166-year-old institution, it’s not the first prestigious art museum to do so. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC staged an exhibition in 2012 exploring the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, and the MoMa in New York has a number of video games (and a console) in its permanent collection.

‘There is a rich universality to video games in contemporary culture,’ adds Hunt. ‘This is the right time for the V&A to be building on our active interest in video games to investigate this exciting and varied design field at the intersection between technology, engineering and broader visual culture, presenting the influences, inspiration and debates that define it.’

INFORMATION
‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be on view 8 September 2018 – 24 February 2019. The exhibition is supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more information, visit the V&A website

We’ve scoured the globe this February to find the most captivating, uncanny and memorable design shows; from retrospectives and major blockbusters to thematic exhibitions and solo shows. So here's our list of must-see design events this month..

Soviet Design: Red Wealth (1950-1980) at ADAM - Brussels Design Museum, Brussels

Together with Moscow Design Museum, ADAM presents a retrospective of daily objects, drawings and graphics from the USSR. Delving into the Soviet lifestyle, from the 1950s through to the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the exhibition is divided into sections including engineering, industrial production, sports and public events. Highlights include a 1962 Spidola Transistor radio and covers of the Technical Aesthetics magazines from 1960-1980s.

24 January- 21 May. ADAM, Place de Belgique Belgiëplein, 1020 Brussels

Wonmin Park: Plain Cuts at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, New York

Resin pioneer and Eindhoven graduate Wonmin Park debuts in the US with this first solo show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. The exhibition celebrates Park's latest venture ‘Plain Cuts’ – an experimental collection of aluminium tables that launched at PAD in London last year. In addition, the New York gallery is exhibiting new, unseen additions to his signature ‘Haze’ series of resin works (pictured). Courtesy Carpenters Workshop Gallery

24 January - 14 April. Carpenters Workshop Gallery, 693 5th Avenue, New York, NY 1002

Ocean Liners: Speed and Style at V&A Museum, London 

An exploration of transatlantic seafaring design opens at the V&A Museum, tapping into many of our contemporary fascinations and obsessions - glamour, nationalism, class, art, design, sex and death. Curated by Ghislaine Wood and Daniel Finamore, it tracks the ocean-liner origins from the transatlantic crossing of mail and immigration, to its tranformation into a grand hotel at sea with an emphasis on the theatrical, recreating room-sets, artwork and furniture.

3 February - 17 June. Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, Knightsbridge, London SW7 2RL

Muller Van Severen: Fireworks at Valerie Traan, Antwerp

This is a chance to view Muller Van Severen’s colourful ‘paravents’ or screens which they originally launched during Salone del Mobile in 2017. It’s the duo's fourth show at the Antwerp gallery and the curved metal forms are part of their ongoing research into the interactions between space and objects. In addition they are showcasing new tables in the same material, playing upon horizontal and vertical planes within the architectural folds of Valerie Traan. Photography: Roberto Marossi

1 February - 17 March. Valerie Traan, Reyndersstraat 12, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium

No-Thing - an exploration into aporetic architectural furniture at Friedman Benda, New York

The New York gallery appointed Juan Garcia Mosqueda to curate this latest show that sees the owner of the now closed Chamber Gallery commission new works from nine emerging architectural practices that possess an academic bent. They were challenged to pursue a non-dogmatic approach to creating furniture, producing interesting and diverse results. Photography: Daniel Kukla

18 January - 17 February. Friedman Benda, 515 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001

Welcome to a huge, overbearing concoction of glittering surfaces, richly embellished craft and careful attention to everything from the biggest object right down to the tiniest detail. This is the V&A’s new blockbuster, ‘Ocean Liners: Speed and Style’, a suitably grand evocation of the golden age of one of history’s most venerated forms of transport.

‘Ocean Liners’ taps into many of our contemporary fascinations and obsessions, including glamour, nationalism, class, art, design, sex and death. The liner represented the apogee of the first industrial age, a floating city of unparalleled sophistication built on the raw power of shipbuilding and steam. The very best artists, designers, architects, craftspeople and stylists were employed to shape these vessels, pouring themselves into every last conceivable detail, from curtains to cutlery, while the industrial might of nations ground out the iron, steel and millions of rivets that shaped each boat.

The V&A’s new show, curated by Ghislaine Wood and Daniel Finamore, tracks the origins of the transatlantic crossing from the early days of mail ships and mass immigration, when the cargo and the destination mattered far, far more than the cramped, uncomfortable journey. But as the moneyed, leisured upper classes started to spread their wings, the ocean liner came into its own, a grand hotel at sea offering glamorous social interaction and company, entertainment and dining of the very highest quality. Class mattered more at sea than on land, and different levels of social status were conveyed unambiguously through design.

Governments started to see their liner fleets as floating embassies for national identity and strength, and the Blue Riband – awarded to the fastest Atlantic crossing – changed hands several times in the 1920s and 30s. There were other factors at play; the big liners had an essential role in carrying troops and equipment during the war, so it made sense for governments to bankroll their construction in times of peace. The boats provided the capacity, but the shipping companies – Cunard, White Star, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, United States Lines and so on – provided the glitz, as liners evolved from the cluttered Edwardian splendour seen in White Star’s Titanic and Olympic to the sleek, populist modernity of the art deco era.

The exhibition emphasises the theatrical, from the room-sets containing reclaimed artwork and furniture to the large-scale recreation of a grand salon, all mannequins and mirrors and wall-to-wall projections of the Atlantic horizon. The ocean liner inspired some of the most evocative and beautiful posters ever printed, but the total design approach extended to all areas, from menu cards to the corporate architecture of their head offices. The most splendid era of all – the late 1920s and 30s – was of course curtailed by war, and the sheer scale of the waste is still staggering; the Normandie, perhaps the ultimate art deco object, only sailed for four years from 1935–39, before catching fire and sinking as it was being converted to a troop carrier.

The post-war era was more populist, and the strict social stratification of the ocean liner started to become a little more relaxed. Names like Marion Dorn, Edward Ardizzone, the Cassons, Edward Bawden, Gio Ponti, David Hicks, Ernest Race, Robert Heritage and more, turned their hand to the interiors of the new-era liners, fighting an unwinnable war against commercial aviation. The exhibition captures these dying days of unassailable style, and the 250 objects take the visitor on an intriguing and bittersweet voyage, the extremes of which will probably never be seen again. Cruise ships are still a thing, of course (the exhibition is sponsored by culture specialist Viking Cruises), but the scale and drama of the big ocean liner remains a potent symbol of our vision of luxury travel.

INFORMATION

‘Ocean Liners: Speed and Style’ is on view until 17 June. For more information, visit the V&A Museum website

ADDRESS

Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London 
SW7 2RL

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To step inside the world of Es Devlin, the world’s most sought-after set designer, is to take a trip down the proverbial rabbit hole and into Wonderland. Her perennially curious mind questions everything, leading her to create unique concepts. ‘Machiko, can you look up the etymology of “indulgent”?’ she calls out to one of her design team during our visit to her south London studio space. ‘Sometimes the origins of words don’t get you very far, but more often they do.’

This instinctive curiosity, along with her seemingly boundless energy and imagination, has fired Devlin’s supercharged career. She filled the stadium at London’s 2012 Olympic closing ceremony with Damien Hirst’s 5,600 sq m Union Jack spin painting; sent Miley Cyrus down a tongue-shaped slide; mounted Jay Z and Kanye West onto two video cubes; and conjured a rotating cinema for Beyoncé. What she practises, she says, is the ‘suspension of disbelief’, and she is most comfortable when operating ‘on the edge of impossible’.

In her Peckham HQ, concept models fill every surface, while miniature props spill out of drawers and cabinets. On shelves, bulging folders with labels such as ‘Adele’ or ‘U2’ hint at Devlin’s jaw-dropping client list. ‘I’ve got to talk to you about the word “client”,’ she says apologetically. ‘I don’t really like it. It’s derived from the Latin clinare, meaning “to incline or bend”. Theatre is a collaboration, a set of ideas being constructed by people in space. So there are no clients, as such.’

Nearby, Devlin’s small team of five or so young designers busily click around screens building complex digital models for various projects – the next Louis Vuitton show, a mirror maze for New York and a top-secret hotel installation are all underway.

The daughter of a journalist and a teacher, Devlin grew up in the East Sussex town of Rye, a place that continues to inspire her. ‘When I was younger I made stuff for people,’ she says, pondering the origins of her creativity. ‘I’d start making a Christmas present for somebody in November and get it ready by Easter. There was often someone else involved when I was making stuff.’

Unsure of where to channel her talents, Devlin embarked on an art foundation course at Central Saint Martins, where a tutor suggested she complete the Motley Theatre Design Course. ‘At the beginning, I didn’t understand what a set designer did, to be honest,’ she reflects. ‘I walked into the room, which was not so different to this one,’ she says, glancing around her studio, ‘except it had mice and smelt of Pot Noodles. I thought: “OK, I like this room, this is a bit like where I’ve been all my life so far, playing with bits of cardboard. And if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just be happy to be here making stuff.”’

Luckily for Devlin it did work out. Upon her graduation in 1995 she won the Linbury Prize for Stage Design and with it, her first professional commission: Edward II at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton.

Over the past 20 years, Devlin has gone from small theatres to gigantic stadiums, but it’s only in the past 12 months that she has found herself creating standalone works. In 2016, her scent-infused Mirror Maze installation with Chanel delighted crowds in Peckham, while her PoemPortraits series with Google at the Serpentine Gallery saw a crowdsourced poem projected across visitors’ faces. ‘After 20 years of working in performance spaces, where there are certain invisible parameters, doing this allows me to escape those restrictions,’ she reflects.

This independent new direction coincides with another professional triumph for Devlin, the Panerai London Design Medal. Part of the British Land Celebration of Design Awards, the medal is distributed each year during the London Design Festival and previous recipients have included Zaha Hadid and Ron Arad. ‘I have been following the London Design Festival and the medal for the past decade,’ says Devlin, who also holds an OBE and honorary doctorate from Central Saint Martins. ‘It’s a festival that is infused with a spirit of inclusivity. It epitomises everything that London represents to so many, and that has shaped my character and my practice. “Design” stems from the Latin designare – “to plan, mark out or designate”. I design in London; but it was London that designed me.

‘My work is transitory and exists only as this skeletal trace through the memories of those who were there at each performance. Sometimes the work feels invisible once it’s passed. Sometimes I feel that it exists as a complete body of work only in my memory, so to have it recognised and made visible in the design community is overwhelming.’

As part of the celebrations, a 1:10 recreation of Devlin’s spectacular lakeside stage set for the Bregenz Festival’s production of Carmen will be on show within London’s V&A Museum, as will a showcase of all four British Land Celebration of Design Award winners, with exhibition design by Devlin. ‘I need to encapsulate 20 years of work in one piece,’ she says, looking again around her studio. ‘I haven’t quite nailed it yet.’

Having found herself in a moment of reflection, Devlin tells us that she has also been pondering a book and possibly a retrospective exhibition. ‘I need to create some kind of thesis of my 20 years of work,’ she reveals, eyes twinkling with excitement as her imagination sets alight. ‘I’d love to create an installation where you could travel through my stage sets. You could walk in through Kanye’s mountain, and then out through Wagner’s Parsifal tunnel and then slide down Miley’s tongue. Wouldn’t it be fun?’ We’re waiting on the edge of our seats.

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

INFORMATION

‘British Land Celebration of Design Medal’ is on view until 24 September and ‘Hide Tide for Carmen’ is on view until 5 November, both at the V&A. For more information, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website and Es Devlin’s website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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As the 2017 London Design Festival draws near, so too does the British Land Celebration of Design Awards. Over its past ten editions, London Design Medals have been awarded to figures such as Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Sir Paul Smith and Ron Arad, among others.

Now in its 11th year, the awards honour exceptional creativity and innovation in different disciplines, celebrating the past, present and future of design. During a ceremony held at the Gladstone Library of the National Liberal Club later this month, set designer Es Devlin will be awarded the Panerai London Design Medal – an accolade bestowed upon an individual who has demonstrated constant design excellence (more in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper*, out on 15 September). Additionally, PriestmanGoode founding director Paul Priestman will receive the Design Innovation Medal, an award celebrating merit in entrepreneurship, both on a local and international scale.

This year’s Emerging Talent Medal goes to Julian Melchiorri, an RCA and Imperial College graduate and the first Engineer in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, while the Lifetime Achievement Medal honours British typographer and graphic designer Margaret Calvert, whose signage system for Britain’s roads is still very much relevant today.

The awards traditionally offers a panoramic view of the state of design in London and its constant power of reinvention, and this year is no different. Calvert’s career trajectory, for instance, and her client list (ranging from the NHS to the British Rail and British Airport Authority, up until the more recent redesign of the UK government’s website), demonstrate how good design and typography can be a guiding force at the service of the community.

Melchiorri, meanwhile, proposes environmentally-friendly industrial solutions. His ‘Silk Leaf’ project, which attracted the jury’s attention, springs from the designer’s interest in biology and natural processes, creating an artificial object which aims to replicate nature’s efficiency at the service of man-made industries. And the breadth of Paul Priestman’s work, ranging from airplanes to hotel, is another fitting example of how design can reach and affect people globally.

For the first time this year, the medals will be accompanied an exhibition of works by all four winners – complete with an exhibition design by Devlin – hosted at the V&A throughout the duration of the London Design Festival. Devlin’s work will also be showcased in a separate presentation, displaying her set design for Bizet’s Carmen, staged on the lake of Bregenz, Austria, this past summer.

INFORMATION

‘The British Land Celebration of Design Medal Exhibition’ is on view from 16-24 September. For more information visit the V&A website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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Fashion designer Molly Goddard grew up a stones throw away from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She remembers running through the halls as a child, and she's au fait with its many grand galleries and vast collections.

On Friday, she dashed through the museum again. This time, to hearty applause, after her 2018 Resort collection paraded through the newly opened, subterranean Sainsbury Gallery, in the kind of immersive showcase Goddard's known for.

'My run-on at the end was so embarrassing!' she says, out of breath after the show, dodging gaggles of congratulatory audience members. She's trying to find her boyfriend and her parents, who were instrumental in pulling the event together, as they have been for many of Goddard's performative runways.

Her parents, Sarah and Mark, designed the elaborate set – though Mark is keen to point out Sarah has been the driving force. 'I just carried things about,' he laughs.

Dining room mise en scène.

The amount of crafty, resourceful work evident in the set belies his modesty. ‘Absolutely everything is handmade, hand painted, and on a shoe-string budget,' Sarah explains, picking up a handful of paper plates that, from a distance, look like priceless Delftware pottery housed in the gallery above. They help make up the dining room scene, complete with bread rolls and kitsch napkins. Opposite, an enormous bed imposes itself. 'It's inspired by The State Bed from Melville House, as seen in the gallery upstairs,' Molly adds. 'It's flamboyant, like the clothes.'

After weaving through a makeshift sculpture gallery, mimicking that of the V&A Sculpture Court, models congregate in the bedroom and dining area, folding their trains daintily underneath themselves on the bed, or sipping from a (plastic) glass. They are teenagers playing make-believe.

It's a colourful, Alice In Wonderland-esque display, filled with girlish joy and childlike abandon. Thankfully, the abundant, billowing tulle that Goddard favours is here in full force, including an impressive blue gown that made waves earlier this year at her Tate Modern show. Indeed, many of the clothes are archival, stretching back to pieces made while studing at Central Saint Martins. They are interspersed with a handflul of new designs. This new collection marks itself apart with punk-ish pops of tartan and more wearable shapes. 'The new pieces are paired down,' Goddard explains. 'They're free and easy, compared to all the big grand dresses that I have been making.'

These lightweight, slim silhouettes act as a reprieve mid-showcase. Their inclusion hints toward a more serious moment in the designer's career. Despite the infectious, light-hearted whimsy that overwhelms the show, it's these quieter moments that prove Goddard's mature complexity. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Molly Goddard website, and the V&A website

ADDRESS

V&A Museum
Cromwell Rd
Knightsbridge
London
SW7 2RL

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