Design Line: 17 – 23 June
There have been ups and downs in both fashion and museum land this week. Pharrell Williams’ first collection as creative director of Louis Vuitton hit the catwalk, while Christopher Kane’s fashion house is sadly entering administration. Meanwhile the Design Museum showcased its latest Design Researchers in Residence cohort – and a new chief curator – while Resolve Collective walked out of the Barbican over allegations of discrimination. Read all about it in Design Line.
Clockwise from top: Marianna Janowicz, James Peplow Powell, Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Isabel Lea (image: Design Museum).
Research represented
A banner week for London’s Design Museum! Not only did the organisation cannily appoint Disegno’s founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross as its new chief curator (we are currently seeking funding to launch a reprisal hiring of senior Design Museum staff), but its Future Observatory programme also opened Islands, the exhibition of its 2022/2023 Design Researchers in Residence initiative. This annual scheme (which provides time, space, funding and support for practitioners to develop research projects) is always a treat, but this year’s iteration, overseen by curators George Kafka and Lila Boschet, has seen its four residents excel themselves in projects that circle issues of biodiversity and climate collapse. Rhiarna Dhawliwal’s Extracts of the Abyss is a fascinating exploration of the entanglements of deep-sea mining and green technologies; Marianna Janowicz’s 1001 Drying Rooms, a consummate and witty study of the sociopolitical and spatial significance of laundry; Isabel Lea’s Eroded Expressions, a warm and intelligent dive into graphic design as research, told through the creation of a new typeface for Britain’s Celtic languages; and James Peplow Powell’s Dovecote for London a compassionate and gripping look into interspecies relationships. Featuring exhibition design by Msoma Architects and Plan B, Islands is a delight – a show whose constituent projects stress not only the intellectual value of this form of research, but also its potential as an inclusive and powerful tool of communication. For anybody who finds themselves in west London between now and the show’s close in September 2023, we strongly recommend a visit.
Christopher can’t
This week, Scottish fashion designer Christopher Kane’s eponymous label went into administration. The fashion house has filed a notice to appoint administrators at Britain’s High Court, buying it time to find a buyer. Founded in 2006 with Kane’s sister Tammy almost immediately after his graduation from Central Saint Martins, Christopher Kane was once a darling of noughties fashion, with a regular catwalk slot at London Fashion Week and a much vaunted collaboration with high street brand Topshop. Kane’s safety buckle bags, for instance, have been a fashion It Girl stalwart. Fashion giant Kering bought a 51 per cent stake in Christopher Kane in 2013, but the designer negotiated to buy it back in 2018. Yet times are increasingly black for British fashion. Topshop went into administration in 2020 and was snapped up by online retailer ASOS, while Hunter Boots (of wellie fame) went into administration this week too, with the Edinburg-based brand in debt to the tune of £11.5m. Kane had to delay his re-entry to London Fashion Week after the buy-back due to covid, and his contemporaries such as Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham have moved on to show in Paris. With the country headed for a recession, British fashion designers will have to begin tightening their belts.
Resolve Collective takes a stand against hostility and censorship from the Barbican (image: Adiam Yemane).
A powerful resolution
If it’s been a week to celebrate the Design Museum, the same can’t be said for the Barbican. On Tuesday, in a searing Instagram post that led with an image captioned “we out”, Resolve Collective (the practice of Akil Scafe-Smith, Seth Amani Scafe-Smith and Melissa Hanif) announced that it would be pulling its Them’s the Breaks show from the Barbican’s Curve Gallery after a series of hostile experiences with the institution’s staff. The show had opened on 30 March and was due to run until 16 July, but Resolve determined that its continuation was no longer tenable after “a number of shameful incidents”. In the text accompanying its post, Resolve documents “hostility towards close family and friends at the exhibition opening; heavy-handed and overly-suspicious treatment when entering our exhibition with a group of other Black and Brown artists; and being publicly deprecated and infantilised whilst ushered out of our exhibition space at the end of Gut Level’s Cute and Sexy North rave on Saturday 3rd June (whilst the exhibition curator and producer remained inside)”. The breaking point, however, came when a planned talk between Nihal El Aasar and Palestinian radio station Radio AlHara (which sat within a wider programme developed around Them’s the Breaks) was censored by the Barbican’s communications team, who asked El Aasar to avoid discussing “free Palestine”. The decision to pull a major show cannot have been easy, but it is a powerful stand by Resolve and one that Disegno applauds. “We made this decision,” the collective wrote, “because each time we exhausted ourselves to forgive, unsee, or rationalise these experiences, we were left without solace and with Zora Neale Hurston’s cautionary words unheeded: “if you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it”.
Fashion hoopla
“It’s the convergence between entertainment and fashion, and mass appeal and luxury,” Osman Ahmed, fashion features director at i-D, told The Guardian. “I think it is going to be one of those moments when we look back and [see it] as a turning point.” Well, that’s one way of describing Pharrell Williams’s debut collection as creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear. Appointed in February, Williams’s remit at Vuitton was never likely to be about the design itself, but rather his ability to integrate fashion with other (highly profitable) streams of culture. Nevertheless, it was dispiriting to see how little focus on the actual clothes themselves there was in reports from the event, with press attention instead falling on the Pont Neuf location, the ludicrously A-list front row, and the after-show performances. Perhaps this was because the collection itself was largely… fine? There were some nice colours and patterns, a pleasant digi-camo take on the maison’s Damier canvas, and a general sense of polish and gleam (which, of course there was given the in-house talent and production capabilities available to Louis Vuitton), but that was about it – nothing overly different from or more ambitious than anything that’s come before. Williams’s talents, at least initially, were never likely to focus closely on design, but the sense of hoopla that surrounded the show seems to have formed the bulk of its content. Rather than a showcase for a collection, this was very much the catwalk as both the medium and the message – amidst the overwhelming sense of “convergence”, design itself was somewhat lost.
Michael Hopkins has died aged 88 (image: Tom Miller / eyevine).
Michael Hopkins (1935 - 2023)
Michael Hopkins, a leading British architect, has died this week at the age of 88. The designer of Westminster underground station, Glyndebourne opera house, and the 2012 Olympic velodrome, Hopkins received Royal Gold Medal for architecture in 1994 alongside his wife and partner Patty Hopkins. The couple met while studying architecture at London’s Architectural Association (AA) in the 1960s and went on to found Hopkins Architects together in 1976. Their self-designed Hampstead live-work home, Hopkins House, won acclaim for its use of an exposed steel frame and glass walls. After graduating, Hopkins partnered with Norman Foster as the project architect for Willis Faber headquarters in Ipswich, cementing his place in the hi-tech movement of British architecture alongside figures such as Richard Rogers and Nicholas Grimshaw. His pioneering of lightweight techical structures in historic settings is apparent in his design for the Mount Stand at Lords Cricket Ground – a design that even won over King Charles, a notorious hater of modern architect. “Michael was obsessive about architecture and tenacious in refining a design until he was absolutely satisfied with it. He was usually (and annoyingly) right,” Patty Hopkins said of her late husband. “He made the world – and the buildings so many people live, work and learn in – more beautiful. We will miss him more than we can imagine.”
The winner of the Davidson Prize 2023 (image: Studio Mutt).
Rage against the housing machine
Homelessness in the UK is a thorny problem, compounded by crumbling social housing stock, insufficient social safety nets, and a rental crisis that is spiralling out of control. Despite all the best will in the world, it’s a problem that designers alone can’t begin to hope to solve when the political will is absent. But that doesn’t stop the Davidson Prize from flying the flag for hope. Founded in 2018 in the memory of architect Alan Davidson, who died from motor neurone disease, the awards scheme invites a multi-disciplinary team that must include at least one registered architect to design a project that addresses a facet of homelessness. This year’s theme invited participants to imagine an amnesty on land ownership (imagine!) and “design a home community where people who have experienced the trauma of homelessness and housing insecurity are given time to settle, recover and find their bearings.” The three finalists rose to the task admirably, with Studio Mutt winning in collaboration with The Independence Initiative, Hugh Baird College, Islington Hostel Outreach, filmmaker Amber Akaunu, poet Peter O’Neil and the Dead Good Poets Society. Their proposal, Helping Hands, suggested a programme using under-utilised garden space tin Liverpool to create accommodation for care leavers and homes for the vulnerable that connects directly to local services already on site. In the face of such a crisis with a horrible human toll, such utopian dreams can seem futile and somewhat toothless in the face of wilful government blindness. But, upon receiving their award, O’Neil gave a furious rendition of his poem on disability and access, closing the night out on an appropriately furious note.