The Design Line: 13 – 19 August
In this week’s edition of Design Line we look back on the pioneering career of Hanae Mori, get on the trail of missing Khmer artefacts, and embrace a more solar punk future.
Hanae Mori was the first Japanese fashion designer to show at New York (image: via Wikimedia Commons).
Hanae Mori (1926-2022)
Fashion lost its “Madame Butterfly” this week, as news broke of the death of Hanae Mori, the first Japanese designer to show in New York (1965), as well as Japan’s first member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (1977). Known for her work in combining Western designs with elements taken from traditional Japanese clothing (including the butterfly print that became her calling card), Mori was not as avant-garde as later Japanese fashion designers, but her success blazed a trail that figures such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto could follow, and she was highly respected and influential within the field. “She was a pioneer of fashion in Japan,” curator Akiko Fukai told the Kyodo news network. “At a time when the industry had not been established, she shaped what it meant to work as a designer. Being the first Japanese listed as a haute couture designer in Paris, the highest peak of the fashion world, means that she was recognised on the global stage. She has left a huge imprint.”
Turning the NCT into and NFT iImage: Noritaka Minami).
Reuse, rebuild, recycle
The architecture world mourned the loss of the Nakagin Capsule Tower this year when it was dismantled and demolished after years of failed preservation campaigns. But what is dead may never die in this era of posthumous holograms and other technology-based intellectual property grabs. Kisho Kurokawa Architect and Associates (KKAA), the practice founded by the late metabolist architect Kisho Kurokawa, has announced it will rebuild the Tokyo tower – in the metaverse. Or rather, it will sell the rights to rebuild it, as an NFT on the blockchain. Before it was taken apart, the building was scanned by architectural practice BDP. The auction on cryptocurrency platform OpenSea also includes the CAD files and rights to rebuild the Nakagin Capsule Tower anywhere in the (real) world, just so long as you comply with local planning laws. When Kurokawa designed the tower he envisaged its modular living capsules being swapped out ever few decades, a utopian vision of a constantly regenerating building that grew like a living thing within the city. It was an embodiment of a very particular point in Japanese history. Now it embodies the foibles of our own era: rampantly destructive and fairly pointless technological advances. The LAETOLI Corporation, which has partnered with KKAA on the project, says its NFT plan can help recreate Japan’s historic buildings that have been demolished in the name of progress. As a cultural preservation project, it’s unclear how selling the rights off to crypto bros will turn out, but let’s hope it’s a fad not a trend.
Don’t judge a bill by its cover
It may not have the sexiest name going, but the US’s Inflation Reduction Act (H R 5376), which was signed by president Biden on Tuesday, has plenty in it to excite architects and designers. A wide-ranging bill intended to reduce health costs and limit greenhouse gas emissions – while also raising taxes on corporations and wealthy investors – the Inflation Reduction Act invests $370bn in spending and tax credits to support the implementation of energy codes, the electrification of houses, and retrofits to homes to improve energy usage. The American Institute of Architects has already hailed the bill as "the largest federal investment to combat climate change in history”, and its attempts to support meaningful change across the industry are to be applauded. While its title doesn’t have much of a ring to it, let’s hope that the Inflation Reduction Act becomes a household name in the fight against climate collapse.
The blank wall to the right behind the palms was edited to remove the statures (image: via Artnet).
Spot the difference
You go to upload your photos to social media and realise you have to airbrush something awkward or embarrassing out. We’ve all been there. Spots on your chin, a photobomber, historic artworks that you have looted from the Global South. This last one may less relatable, but it happened this week to a couple who were rumbled by having their home shot for Architectural Digest. Heiress Sloan Lindemann Barnett and her husband had their $42m home in San Fransisco photographed for the January 2021 issue. But when a team of Cambodian investigators compared the images to the photos on the website of Peter Marino, the architect who renovated the property, they found that some large statues had been edited out, reported the Washington Post. The magazine said they got trigger-happy with the the clone tool because of “unresolved publication rights around select artworks”, but Cambodia suspects the pieces are in fact stolen Khmer treasures – part of a vast $40m collection of looted antiquities owned by Lindemann Barnett’s billionaire parents. Cambodia’s minister of culture Phoeurng Sackona has said the pieces are “of enormous historical and cultural importance” to the country and has called for their repatriation. Museums and private collections in the Global North are notorious for their light-fingered attitude to other country’s precious relics; this isn’t even the first AD spread to feature stolen Cambodian artworks. If a picture tells 1,000 words, this one is a true crime story.
Welcome to Barbie
As the world gears up for next year’s Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig (“It’s not just some ditzy movie about a doll,” one of its actors Rhea Perlman notes. “It is really going to be a great film.”), it is worth reflecting a little on the property as a whole. Created by Ruth Handler in 1959 to show that "a woman has choices”, the dolls have long fallen below this ambition, frequently reinforcing lazy gender stereotypes and damaging beauty standards. Yet Barbie remains an evocative and meaningful cultural figure for many, which is what made this week’s announcement of a new, more diverse lineup of Barbie and Ken dolls so resonant. The new range features Barbies with a hearing aid, a prosthetic limb and a wheelchair, while a Ken doll has the skin condition vitiligo. "When [a] kid picks up a doll, they know it's OK to look the way they do and that is an incredible thing,” said James Stewart, who is one of the faces of the campaign around the new dolls and who has vitiligo. ”It makes you feel better about yourself knowing that vitiligo and all other differences are becoming included into the [Barbie] world.” Sixty-three years after its launch, Barbie may be making good on Handler’s hope that the dolls can be a source of inspiration.
Solar powered headphones for listening to Lorde’s latest album (image: Adidas).
Shine on
There’s nothing worse than settling in for a long commute only to find your headphones’ batteries are flat. This will presumably be less of an issue with Adidas' new solar-powered headphones. The RPT-02 SOL Bluetooth headphones have been designed to recharge themselves. It doesn’t have to be sunlight – the cells work in indoor lighting conditions too, so they can survive a dark and depressing working day in the Northern Hemisphere. Plus if you live in a country where the cost of energy is going through the roof then a gadget that charges itself for free will save you a bit of cash in the long run. Once the preserve of nerdy calculators, this new class of sun-powered tech could have us living our solar punk fantasies (if we can just ignore the heatwaves around us). It’s an exciting application of personal solar technology, like the work of solar designer Marjan van Aubel, whose solar-powered lamps and stained glass windows embody her vision of “solar democracy” where there could be “solar energy for everyone, everywhere”.