18/04/2012

Salone 2012 – Spazio Rossana Orlandi

Salone 2012 – Spazio Rossana Orlandi

The Salone fever has begun this year, punctual as ever. Hundreds of events have overflown the city, be it small independent designers that try to make their way into the design elite or already well-known companies always ahead of their time. On the first day of the Salone we had the thoughts on all the choices. Looking through the Salone’s agenda and picking the right start of our week-long design tour wasn’t an easy task.
So in order to kick this week a good start, we’ve decided to begin from one of the unmissable events – the fascinating collective exhibition at Spazio Rossana Orlandi.

Besides the charming garden where we spotted one of the Bouroullec brothers sipping wine (you can imagine how excited we felt seeing one of our heroes), the space has presented more than forty new projects from both acclaimed designers as well as new talents. Although Spazio Rossana Orlandi, as usual, offered a huge amount of experimental projects that both raised questions about form and material as well as production and distribution methods, we still had to pick a few favorites.


The first one is Luca Nichetto with his Swell series. Designed for the french design editor Petite Friture, the Swell series consists of a pencil case and a key holder made in colored concrete. The other objects produced by Petite Friture are Cairn boxes and Vertigo pendant lamp by Constance Guisset, Ikebana vases by Edward Robinson and Hollo stool and tables by Amandine Chhor and Aissa Logerot, to name but a few.

Another collection that has made an impression is the ceramics collection by Taruhiro Yanagihara for 1616 / Arita Japan. Together with Dutch designers Scholten & Baijings, Yanagihara as the creative director of the company coming from the birthplace of ceramic art in Japan, has decided to design a collection that reflects the European perspective on the Japanese tradition.

The last but not least, Ercol Furniture presenting beautifully crafted oak, ash, elm and beech chairs, that combine modern machinery with hand craftsmanship and intelligent design.

Without pretending to be exhausted from the first Salone visit, we have actually managed to give the week a real kick-start!

Our official Salone reporter: Rujana Rebernjak

17/04/2012

Southern Hemisphere

Southern Hemisphere


I got the chance to leave for work to Australia. Now that good weather had settled in in Rome, I didn’t think there would be much of a weather change, but it’s the scenery change that really works for me. I am spending most of my time with no ocean view, in meetings, indoors. But when I have a moment on the weekend, I will find my own way to Sydney to have a quick bite in its fabulous cafes, and sit and enjoy the sun.

I used to be surprised when Australians were nonplussed about Italian food. Then when I visited, I could see why! Bakeries like Bourke Street Bakery, restaurants like Longrain or Phamish, or cafes like Bill’s or Cafe Giulia just don’t seem to abound here. The vibrant Italo-Australian community makes sure that Italian food is great and not underrepresented, and the Asian is the best outside of Asia.

Kristina Gill

17/04/2012

Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language at MoMA

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA

In our everyday life we never actually ‘think’ about the language. While for most the language is often invisible, some are more attracted to its visible form – the letters.

Significantly, graphic designers sometimes get lost in this tangible form of basic human expression, often considering the visible part as an abstract form, thus ignoring its meaning. But they are not the only ones who work with material qualities of language. Since Apollinaire and concrete poetry movement, artist and poets have been handling language as a physical structure.

It is exactly this kind of approach that MoMA is trying to investigate in its latest exhibition entitled “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language”. The curator Laura Hoptman has decided to take an insight into material qualities of language explored by artist working with a wide range of media.

The exhibition provides both a historical look (even though some of the artist could still be considered contemporary) through the works of Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Chopin, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Giorno, Kitasono Katue, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and others.

While these modernist experiments are being presented through a timeline, in order to get a broader historical view of the phenomenon and tell the story of concrete language in visual art, the contemporary part of the exhibition focuses on the new ways of investigating the concrete language phenomenon. Hence, the ratios has become not only a poet but also writer, graphic designer, performer and publisher working with a contemporary mix of the available media.

Thus, the fact that among the impressive list of contemporary artist we can find designers like Experimental Jetset, isn’t a pure coincidence. Since graphic design has become an evolving collaborative approach, more than a defined discipline, this exhibition sheds some light on these kind of practices, that both open the discipline to contaminations from other fields as well as free it from the duties of (commercial) communication.

The exhibition, opening the 6th of May and running until 27th of August, will be accompanied by a catalogue curated by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister. If you actually manage to miss the exhibition, you must stay tuned for their Bulletins of the Serving Library where concrete language goes digital.

Rujana Rebernjak

16/04/2012

Kaleidoscopic cosmetics – Carolina Melis

Kaleidoscopic cosmetics – Carolina Melis

2012 Beauty Club Awards, the annual competition for cosmetics brands launched by Debenhams to involve cosmetics addicts to vote for their favourite beauty products, has its winners. To celebrate the closure of the 2012 edition, the British retailer commissioned 2DM’t talent Carolina Melis to design and direct an animated film, which shows the most-loved products chosen among six different categories – make-up, skincare, fragrance, new kids on the block, body and tan – and selected by a panel of experts.

Floating among colourful dots, lines, and geometric figures, Carolina Melis displays the winning cosmetics on the screen creating wonderful kaleidoscope effects and charming images. From the lipstick by MAC and the women’s fragrance by Marc Jacobs and Jimmy Choo, to the best night cream by Clarins (just to mention a few) the video presents in a magical and imaginative way an array of must-have beauty products women can do without.


From the Bureau

16/04/2012

Mundi – A Surreal Fashion Story from the North

Mundi – A Surreal Fashion Story from the North

Despite his young age, Guðmundur Hallgrímsson, better known as Mundi, is no rookie in the fashion industry. After having started his career in fashion as a pure accident involving the Icelandic phone book, he has been crossing boundaries, creating amazement and managing to stay an artist while pursuing a career in fashion. Barely 25 years old, he is one of Iceland’s most well-known designers and artists.

The young and somewhat avant-garde designers often get under the loupe with the discussion “Artist or designer, fashion or art?” In the case of Mundi there is no real need for discussion. He is not just a designer with an artistic angle to it, or an artist turned designer, more than he is an artist who also designs – and makes the whole discussion damn interesting. Ever since that first knit, which was made to be printed as the cover of the Icelandic phone book, also turned to be a sweater, he has managed to produce seasonal collections as a fashion designer while taking part in major art projects. His art collective MoMs has travelled the world, exhibiting and performing, and among the more famous projects you find collaborations with the Austrian, worldwide known group of artists, Gelitin. As a designer his skills in graphics as well as the Icelandic knits have become parts of the brand’s foundation and his understanding for art has become the way he presents it.


For not only does Mundi know how to put on a runway show or excite the audience of an art exhibition, he has also proved to master the art of fashion film. His first short, The Rabbit Hole, was launched during Paris Fashion Week 2010 and received tons of attention. Mundi himself was though strict on pointing out that the film wasn’t one in the category of fashion. In an interview with Dazed Digital he said: “If you focus too much on the fashion, the main subject falls apart. I only look at fashion in terms of extreme costumes that help to create the characters. If you are making a film it has to be more focused on a story, a character, a plot… I think in some cases ‘fashion films’ are nothing more than a long dramatic commercial. They come to life when a lost photographer realises his new Canon 5D Mark II has a video option, so instead of taking photos he makes a terrible video of skinny models jumping around in slow-motion!”

Despite this, the film amazed its audience, being like a seventeen minutes long surreal fashion editorial showcasing Mundi’s eccentric designs in the surroundings of the Icelandic highlands.

For the AW 12/13 collection, Mundi presented The Journey, another short film, but this time with the goal to create a pre-story for the runway where the characters would finally come to life. The Journey turned out to be far away from a long, dramatic commercial featuring skinny models, and even though we dare to say it’s a fashion film, it still has that Mundi ‘surrealness’ about it. The collection is shown in its full, from the distorted graphics to the careful details in the shirts, knits and accessories and was the perfect parallel to the later put on runway show.
Mundi seem to have a penchant for the futuristic side of things but the charm of his predilection is that it takes shape in something that could as easily be taken for an inspiration from the past. With a strong base in his Icelandic heritage, this is an artist slash designer who has already impressed the international fashion crowd and might be one of the stronger reasons for the industry audience to travel all the way to Reykjavík, even though the two last collections have been premiered during Paris Fashion Week. For SS13 Mundi will be showing his 13th official collection and by looking at the evolvement of his designs in the retrospective we can just guess that his graphic knits will take another turn, yet again.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe – Images courtesy of Fridrik Orn & Ruediger Glatz – Video from Now Fashion

15/04/2012

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

The simplest side of breakfast. Fresh fruits, milk and 3 biscuits. It sounds like perfection. It’s the best way to say hello to Springtime.

Alessia Bossi from Love For Breakfast

13/04/2012

Delfina Delettrez – Metalphysic

Delfina Delettrez – Metalphysic

We’ve seen and fallen for the jewelry work of Delfina Delettrez, the globetrotting fourth-generation Fendi, on The Blogazine before. But as the seasons tick by, her uncommonly intelligent and sophisticated brand of design always manage, however impossibly, to turn up the wow factor. Each collection is boldly, drastically different from its successor, as well as both subversive and beautiful.

This newest collection, called Metalphysic is Rome in jewel form. “Metalphysic celebrates the miraculous architecture in Rome’s churches and palaces from antiquity and the modern day, blending these two radically different eras. The neoclassicism of Canova and Piranesi combined with the intriguing metaphysics of Giorgio De Chirico.” And in spite of the usual grandiose marketing speak, we really do see it – the pieces not only look say “Rome” through their shapes and compositions, they also make fantastic use of materials not generally used in jewelry to solidify the image. By going back to her Roman roots, Delettrez has mined some powerful inspiration to imagine a collection that we daresay might be her best yet.

For the occasion of the new collection, 2DM’s illustrator Diego Soprana went way Dada for a collaboration with Delfina. Soprana’s trademark style proves a perfect match for Metalphysic, bringing out its Romanesque character while injecting it into a canvas charged with absurdity and decadence: a perfect foil to the collection’s rigorous neoclassical/metaphysical bent.

Excellent job, Delfina and Diego!

Tag Christof – Images Diego Soprana

13/04/2012

Kraftwerk Retro at MoMA

Kraftwerk Retro at MoMA

How much are you willing to pay to see Kraftwerk? The question loomed large on the 59,280 distressed minds who’d uniformly failed to get tickets the morning of February 22nd. “You are waiting in the queue,” the screen repeated for hours on end. “You do not need to refresh, this page will automatically redirect you when it is your turn to purchase tickets.” For the 99%, that turn never came. No surprise―the legendary electronic pioneers retrospective eight night stint at MoMA only had room for 400 people per night, and a quarter of those tickets went to Volkswagen to give away in raffles and promo plugs. The rest were shuttered to the Craigslist gutters, where the cheapest ticket would set you back a month or two’s rent.

Kraftwerk have been called many things: the Beatles of pop, the godfathers of hip-hop, the founders of electronic music, etc., but they’re also very funny, though you’re likely find water in hell before you see Ralf Hütter laughing. Are they trying to be? For a bunch of humans bent on disappearing into the technology they embrace, not bluffing is very important. “This show will be performed by robots and no one I know will attend!” one fan whined, and he was right. No one knew any real humans who were going, just like how no one knows how Kraftwerk makes the sounds they do, especially in a live setting. The aura that surrounds the music is almost as mysterious as the men who make it.

But there is something deeply ironic about four Germans making funky music while standing stoically behind pods, tinkering with computers, synthesizers and, according to one MoMA employee, iPads. They’re pop stars, yet their hips don’t shake, and I’ve never seen their eyes blink. Their attention to detail is astonishing, kind of like watching a master mechanic pound out a five-cylinder engine from sheet metal, only Kraftwerk’s engine is responsible for churning out some of the best pop singles of the last 40 years: “The Robots,” “The Model,” “Autobahn,” not to mention entire albums: Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Radio-Activity. So yeah, they work like robots, all day in night in their legendary Kling Klank studio just outside of Düsseldorf, but the music that comes out of it continues to be strangely warm and innately human.

Lane Koivu

12/04/2012

Reykjavík – The Other Scandinavian Fashion

Reykjavík – The Other Scandinavian Fashion

When thinking of Iceland, what first comes to ones mind might be far-flung landscapes and hot-tempered volcanoes, or one of Iceland’s most famous exports Björk. Singer/composer/musician/actress, known for her critically acclaimed albums as well as for her eclectic wardrobe. Somewhere here, between the scenic surroundings and artistic multi-talent, we are tuning in on what Reykjavík Fashion Festival (RFF) is aiming for. By gathering all that creative energy into one single event they form a common platform where the local as well as the international audience can discover fashion, design and music in the various venues that the city has to offer.


Being an emerging designer is hard enough in any country, but maybe even more so when being based on, well, let’s call it an island. The creative industry of Iceland has been growing over the past years, and promising creative individuals have been trying to go overseas, but with an often limited marketing budget and a not so obvious fashion scene, the way to reach out might become a little bit more jolty. Internet and social media have all their glory, but where does it take you if the contact stops there? The fact that the RFF for 2012 doubled the number of attendees is in itself an indication that the interest for the country has gone up and the focus during this year’s edition was not only to showcase the most skillful of creative minds but also to prepare them for an entry into the international fashion business. The interest and support from industry leaders and authorities are an important element in the success of young designers and in order to foster the Icelandic fashion, awareness has to be raised. It is for this reason that events like the RFF becomes so important for the country and the designer it holds.

Speaking of the designers. Scandinavian fashion is famous for its well-tailored and clean silhouettes, but the Icelanders take a leap and gives us a wider arrange of provocative variety. Sure there are the simple lines evoking the beautiful shapes of the body, but Reykjavík Fashion Festival also offered shows in the category of dramatic extravaganza. Even though a few of the brands no longer have their base in Reykjavík, the collections and identities of the companies still marks the importance and value they put in their heritage. The fashion world in Reykjavík has become an exciting place where modernity meats tradition and like every other Fashion Week the surrounding events are as important for the ambiance as the main event itself. The spots around the city showed off the musical industry of Iceland, one that might be as important to the country as the blooming design business, but the RFF 2012 also introduced the city’s first ever Fashion Night Out.

A small economy such as Iceland might never measure up with the importance of the main fashion cities, but they can for sure fight for their earned right to a few days in the spotlight. By fostering rosy designers and offer a few days of alluring nature, Reykjavík Fashion Festival might just become a stop to consider on the fashion calendar.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe – Images courtesy of Ruediger Glatz

12/04/2012

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