Design Line: 7 – 13 January
Design Line lifts off this week (unlike the UK’s rocket ship) with red carpet fashion tales and fashionable tails, a smart tech solution to California’s power problems, and DIY design helping Ukraine with its war effort.
Paws for Pitti
Pitti Uomo is a tentpole in the annual menswear calendar: a biannual trade fair hosted in Florence that showcases all the lovely jumpers, jackets and chinos you can imagine. This week’s edition, however, put the cat amongst the pigeons with the launch of PittiPets, a new section of the show devoted to lovely jumpers, jackets and chinos for animals. Part of a growing market for pet apparel that the New York Times reports as being worth $5.7bn in 2021 (although this includes collars and leashes, which seems a bit cheaty – garments only, please), the section at Patti provided an opportunity for brands such as Lollipet, DuePuntoOtto and The Painter’s Wife to show their wares, offering coats, knitwear and, inexplicably, tuxedos. “Was there silliness?” asked the New York Times’s Guy Trebay. “[There] was.” Nevertheless, said silliness seems to be here to stay. After all, last September’s Maison&Objet also looked towards pets, with its Future On Stage programme highlighting the work of pet furniture company LucyBalu. It is the bold future that design has long promised us – high-quality goods for all, even domestic animals (who almost certainly don’t want said goods).
A red flower for a red carpet statement (image: Haus of Milad via Instagram).
Dress to protest
In general, far too much attention is paid to what celebrities wear on the red carpet. It’s gossipy, uncomfortably gendered, puts pressure on the wearer and, perhaps most importantly, is deeply tedious (unless someone does something truly batshit like insist upon wearing the clothes of a dead woman whose hair they also own). Yet in an occasion as rare as hen’s teeth, Disegno turned its beady eye towards the red carpet of the Golden Globes this week, where Iranian-American actor Sepideh Moafi put the format to good use. Having worked with the Iranian-American designer Amir Taghi, Moafi wore a sequinned gown adorned with a red poppy flower at the hip. Intended to draw international attention to the civil unrest and protests that have swept Iran following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, the dress’s poppy was adorned with the names of protestors who have been executed by the Iranian state as part of its bloody and cruel reprisals, their names written in Persian calligraphy by the artist Milād of Haus of Milad. “The dress has many stories, but the most important of which is this flower, which represents a blooming new Iran during this revolution,” Moafi said, while Milād also spoke movingly. “I wish I never had to write these names down,” they wrote on Instagram. “Real humans. Revolutionary heroes that history will remember and honor forever.”
The power of smart
This week, Google and Ford teamed up to create a network of Virtual Power Plants (VPP) that would create a backup to the electricity grid in California using solar power. Called Virtual Power Plant Partnership, or VP3, the plan is to network people’s internet-connected smart thermostats and electric vehicles (EVs) so that they can adjust their power usage and charging times to periods when solar power is most abundant. There is less solar power in the evenings, obviously, but this is also when people tend to charge their cars or use their home’s heating or air conditioning. Rather than fire up polluting peaker plants – power stations that run during periods of high demand – demand could be manipulated for when solar power is at its zenith. VPPs could also lend the battery power of EVs to make up energy shortfalls during unavoidable periods of high demand, such as extreme weather events. A VPP pilot last summer from Tesla and Google Nest prevented blackouts during the California heatwave. There’s no time to lose as the effects of the climate change make themselves known across the state; an atmospheric river of wind is currently blowing a series of intense storms off the coast, deluging homes with wind and rain and causing deadly floods.
Not even rockets can escape Normal Island (image: Virgin Orbit).
Leave doesn’t mean leave
Not satisfied with leaving the EU, Britain also attempted to leave the Earth’s atmosphere this week, staging the country’s first rocket launch of satellites. Surprise, the venture was a failure. The Start Me Up mission, launched by Virgin Orbit, saw a converted Boeing 747 take off from Spaceport Cornwall as part of a horizontal launch, before subsequently firing a rocket that was to propel nine satellites into orbit. Sadly, an “anomaly” was experienced when the rocket’s second-stage engine was fired and the satellites never fulfilled their destiny, instead burning up during reentry. “We will work tirelessly to understand the nature of the failure,” said Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, “make corrective actions and return to orbit as soon as we have completed a full investigation and mission assurance process.” As Hart promised, Britain is likely to be back (like a dreadful, unstoppable killer in a slasher movie). The UK Space Agency estimates that the nation’s space industry contributes £6.9bn to GDP and currently employs 47,000 people, but Britain’s involvement in the manufacturing of satellites disguises the fact that it does not have a single working launch site – and nor does Europe. For whichever European country manages to remedy this absence, riches will presumably follow, and Britain’s topography leaves it well placed to capitalise. Start Me Up may have ultimately failed to kickstart the industry, but you can bet that it won’t have stopped it in its tracks either.
Necessary inventions
This week, a piece in the New York Times collated the ingenious home-brew designs that volunteers in Ukraine have been making to help repel the Russian invasion. Products bought online were found to be either ineffective or counterfeit, so people have designed and refined alternatives from the materials at hand. Transmission belts from grain loaders used in the Odesa port have been cut up and duct-taped together to make bulletproof vests, while local businesses have gotten together to sew proper flak jackets. Engineers used water pipes and mirrors to create low-tech periscopes after 3D-printed attempts proved too slow and fragile. Fabric scraps sewn together in bomb shelters are being used as camouflage nets by snipers and, before proper military-grade tourniquets could be imported, soldiers improvised with inner tubes scrounged from bicycles. Elsewhere, fashion brands have switched from making clothes to stitching sleeping bags. There are high-tech solutions too, such as apps for air raid warnings or logging GPS co-ordinates of enemy drones and missiles. Design isn’t just something that practitioners come up with in their studios – it’s the clever solutions civilians devise in times of extreme crisis.
A right royal mess
It’s been a mixed week for royal publishing. While Prince Harry’s unsparingly detailed memoir Spare has reportedly already sold 400,000 copies, the Royal Institute of British Architects's (RIBA) publishing arm isn’t looking so hot. According to the Architects’ Journal, RIBA Publishing has pulled the plug on Marsha Ramroop’s Handbook on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Architecture, despite claiming that “timely and targeted action is needed to improve EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] in the profession.” Either times are tight at RIBA towers, or it’s a particularly petty and bizarre act of revenge against Ramroop, who was RIBA’s first director for diversity and inclusion. The former BBC journalist resigned from the post after 13 months. Cancelling the book with one hand, while professing to understand the dismal state of diversity in architecture with the other, is another episode of RIBA appearing flaky and out of touch in matters where it ought to be taking a lead. The institute, whose founding premise is to advance architecture, has also come under fire recently for failing to intervene when RIBA chartered practices advertise jobs below a living wage. Ramroop, meanwhile, has vowed to find another publisher for her timely Handbook.