A one-thousand pound marble kettle bell and a three-thousand pound fancy Scrabble set. These were some of the most outrageously lavish items being stocked by The Conran Shop during London Design Week. It was fun to wander around gawping at preposterous price tags for nothing more than neat commodities, although I couldn’t help feeling a bit lackadaisical when I noticed how little thought had been put into the environmental and social aspects of them all. That’s why the likes of the Beazley Designs of the Year attracted my attention the most—the eighty-seven nominees had not only considered the aesthetics of their projects, but also addressed issues like public health, waste disposal, equality, and much, much more.
The experts behind the nominations clearly liked the idea of looking out for future generations. Amongst an isle of Dutch plastic-free grocery packaging and a ceramic carafe for cooling tap water through evaporation was a biofabricated ‘leather’ grown from collagen. As well as being completely animal-free, it has the remarkable ability to be grown in a mould meaning any texture, size, or shape can be realised. The museum piece was a t-shirt which boasted different possibilities such intricate breathable leather amongst other things.
It wasn’t just breakthrough technology featured in the exhibition: Nike’s new strip for the Netherland’s women’s football team takes the forty-six year old lion crest and brings it into the modern era by simply changing it to a lioness; Burberry added a splash of colour into their classic print to show their support for the LGBT+ community; and Lacoste swapped out the world-renowned crocodile logo so that endangered species had their moment in the spotlight.
London Design Fair was instead full of people looking – or should I say paying – for their moment in the spotlight. I swore not to take every booklet, leaflet, and postcard that caught my eye, but sure enough there’s about sixty sitting under my coffee table as I write this and probably also as you read this. I’m not going to pretend I looked into many of the products for more than a minute but many of them did well to catch my eye amidst six floors of bustling creatives.
In Hyde Park, it was interesting to visit Christo’s first actual-size Mastaba which floated on The Serpentine. It was not quite as grandiose as the proposed four-hundred-and-ten-thousand barrel Mastaba he planned to build in the Abu Dhabi desert, but at least he got his fix somewhat. It’s bright colours and sheer size certainly made for a spectacular first impression against the London skyline, but even though it was paid for in full by Christo (around three-million pounds) it still just seemed like a large waste of barrels. If it had been like the Abu Dhabi Mastaba in that you could walk right up to and around it, I think it would work better as a monolithic structure, but as it stands (or floats), it could just be a large water sports obstacle.
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