The Design Line: 22 – 28 October
This week has seen Design Line glued to the television, with two shows offering contrasting perspectives on the value of art and design. Meanwhile, Made.com stands on the cusp of administration, while the UN has given its clearest warning to date of societies’ failure to address climate collapse.
Pretty in pink
It was a week of fashion highs and lows for Adidas. The Nigo x Adidas Japan special edition World Cup kit drops today, and has already been hailed by GQ as the ultimate winner of football fashion for the 2022 tournament. Nigo, the artistic director of Kenzo, has created an incredibly cute pastel pink-and-green kit that nods to Japan’s cherry blossoms and Sakuramochi – a popular sweet made of red bean paste wrapped in pink rice, encased in wrapped in a pickled sakura leaf. Nigo’s signature heart-shaped logo has been transformed into the petals of a cherry blossom and repeated throughout the collection, which includes a beanie hat and zip-through, as well as the standard shirt-and-shorts that will be worn by the players as their third kit – the alternate home or away game outfit option for when the competing team’s colours are too similar. While Disegno applauds men wearing pink on the pitch (which remains comparatively rare across the game), it’s a shame that Nigo christened the colour a more masculine-sounding “wonder mauve”. Adidas also narrowly avoided a spectacular own goal this week by finally ending its relationship with Ye. The artist formerly known as Kanye West has been rightly shunned by former business partners for his ongoing antisemitic tirades. German-owned Adidas finally pulled the plug this week, absorbing an estimated $247m hit to its profits. However, there are reports that the brand will still sell the disgraced musician’s Yeezy shoes – just without his name on them.
A failing report card
The news will have come as no surprise to anyone, but it was still depressing to see it set out in black and white: the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2022 was published on Thursday and found that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. In other words, we’ve done such a spectacularly half-hearted job (even “half-hearted” seems generous – “woefully inadequate” was the UN’s preferred wording) of attempting to curb carbon emissions that the only method left available to humanity to try and lessen the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”. “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme. “Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.” Design and architecture take note. These fields go hand in hand with industry and construction, and have both played their role in driving societies to the precipice of disaster (and, to be honest, the new report would suggest that we actually went over the edge long ago). Only unified political action will have any decisive impact in trying to avert catastrophe, but it is clearly time for design disciplines to stop fiddling around the edges of sustainability. No more eco-materials being bolted onto “business as usual” manufacturing; no more megaprojects that pay paper-thin lip service to sustainability. To quote Inger, we no longer have that luxury: “Every fraction of a degree matters: to vulnerable communities, to ecosystems, and to every one of us.”
A sign of the end as Made.com ceases making (image: Made.com).
Unmaking Made.com
Furniture brand Made.com is poised on the brink of administration, seemingly unable to find a rescue buyer. Founded in 2010, the e-commerce brand made a name for itself as a millennial staple for aspirational homewares such as velvet sofas. Yet despite valuations of up to £1bn, the company was only valued at £775m when it launched on the stock market last year. Like many design retailers, Made.com was poleaxed by supply chain issues during the pandemic – and left particularly vulnerable because of its business model. Rather than directly control its own manufacturing, the company commissions other factories to make its pieces and then distributes them through a network of warehouses. With factories in Vietnam and China closed and deliveries stuck in over-filled ports, however, customers with money to burn on home improvements during lockdown were left waiting months for their purchases. There are also some interesting theories circulating on social media that Made.com was stymied by the economic situation and environmental conscientiousness of its target market. Despite millennials now entering their 30s and 40s, the housing crisis in European cities means that many of them still rent and occupy shared accommodation, and are less likely to invest in big ticket items that are a pain to move when the rent goes up. They also value sustainable bargains, and tend to buy vintage or second-hand on online marketplaces. While the loss of jobs is nothing to be celebrated, the failure of a website-only furniture brand suggests there are hard limits to how many months people are prepared to wait for a lamp or a notoriously uncomfortable sofa to be delivered to their doorstep.
The magical kingdom of data capture (image: Wikimedia Commons).
Small world getting smaller
It’s hard to have too much sympathy for Disney adults, that subculture of grownups who base their entire personality around visiting theme parks and lining the profits of Big Mouse. But this week’s announcement from Disney CEO Bob Chapek was so incredibly dystopian that we are genuinely concerned for them. Chapek told the audience of The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event that Disney is working on technology that would somehow sync Disney Plus subscriber’s home viewing decisions with their park experience. “When you’re in a park, we should know what your viewing habits are on Disney Plus,” he said. The creepy concept is that if you visited a ride that was tied to a movie you’d viewed recently, you would receive “special programming” that is “personalised towards your preferences.” Tech that tracks you through your holiday in the park – where guests regularly stay on-site 24/7 – and back to your living room sofa represents an awful lot of individual and highly personal data to capture and use (and ideally keep safe from leaks). Disney already requires visitors to scan their fingerprints upon entry to its parks and uses “magic bands” with built-in chips and sensors to track where visitors are and what they’re spending money on, and the fact that they’re planning to further ramp up data collection is alarming. Those poor Disney adults.
Very pleased to be getting his things repaired (image: via Sky News).
A tale of two shows
What a week for design and art on British television. On the one hand, King Charles III cropped up on BBC’s The Repair Shop, a programme devoted to the pleasures and importance of restoring broken objects. Paired with host Jay Blades, Charles he lamented the “great tragedy” of the UK’s educational system failing to properly value vocational education, technical skills and education. Bar the mild controversy of a reigning British monarch criticising political policy (although, to be fair to Charles, his cameo was filmed prior to his ascension to the throne), it seems a fairly sensible and uncontroversial take – more clearly should be done to acknowledge and support the social value of craft, technical expertise, and practical knowledge. And perhaps the arts in general could be better supported while we’re at it, we hear you cry? Well, fear not, because Channel 4 also gamely stepped into the breach this week with Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, a sensitive and nuanced reflection on authorship, legacy and art’s social value, in which comedian Jimmy Carr lets a studio audience decide whether he should set fire to artworks from the likes of Pablo Picasso, Adolf Hitler and Eric Gill for… reasons? For anyone curious, it’s every bit as inane and ugly as you’d imagine, offering no insight into art’s intersection with ethics, or reflection on how society might seek to engage with and gain catharsis through struggling with and understanding contested legacies. Instead, it’s puerile and historically illiterate – a weird, superficial gamification of a topic that, properly dealt with, might have proven interesting.
Stock photography of what’s happening at Shutterstock (image: Dall-E Mini).
Shutterstock takes stock
This week, Shutterstock announced that it plans to sell AI-generated stock imagery as part of a collaboration with the creators of Dall-E 2, Open AI. The text-to-image model will be integrated into Shutterstock “in the coming months” reports The Verge. As part of the partnership, any AI-generated stock images from competitor models will be banned from the platform. The advent of widely available AI-generated images this year had many wondering if it would spell the end for stock image photographers, who will be hard pressed to keep up with the infinite number of scenarios that can now be produced by these models at the touch of a button. In a cruel twist, it transpires Shutterstock even handed over its photographers’ work to create the machine that will make them obsolete – the company sold its images and metadata to Open AI to train their Dall-E model. In what could be read as an acknowledgement of the iffy ethics of the deal, Shutterstock has set up a “Contributor Fund” that will reimburse the artists whose work was used to train the models in the form of royalties paid every six months. With no indication of what these payments might be valued at, human stock image makers will be left worrying if their careers just got automated. It also risks compounding the well-documented bias in stock image libraries that reinforce gender and racial stereotypes, as the AI model can only produce more of what it was trained on in the first place.