Everything you need to know about new products, innovative projects and creative thinking for the coming months. From art you can smell and glasses you can’t hear to new ways to navigate your city in the post Covid-19 world
The sweet sound of charity
Charity record-sleeve artwork sale Secret 7” returns in September to unite the music and art worlds for the seventh and final time. The idea is simple. First press seven iconic tracks onto 7” vinyl, each limited to 100 copies. Then ask for open submissions from artists to design one-off sleeves, before putting the 700 one-off disc sleeves on display for art aficionados and music fans to ogle, before a public sale. The project is run by Kevin King and Jordan Stokes, who run experiential agency Goodness together.
Contributors in previous years include Peter Blake, Yoko Ono and the Chapman Brothers, but the bidder only finds out whether their sleeve is by a world-renowned artist or a talented newcomer once they’ve made the purchase. That’s the secret part. Some are easier to guess than others. A watercolour by Antony Gormley for Massive Attack’s Karmacoma in 2014 echoed the artist’s sculptures, whilst David Shrigley’s scratchy portrait of The Cure’s Robert Smith for the first edition couldn’t have been the work of anyone else.
This year’s music selection spans 54 years of Columbia Records’ back catalogue, from Aretha Franklin’s One Step Ahead to 2018 singles by The Internet and Koffee. Buyers can revel in the warm glow of charitable giving while they listen to their tracks. Since it started, Secret 7” has raised more than £215,000 for good causes. This year’s charity is Help Refugees.
“By the time Secret 7” 2020 comes to a close we will have made 4,900 one-of-a-kind records for 49 different tracks,” say Kevin King. “It feels like we’ve reached its logical conclusion. Ending on the seventh year, feels wonderfully apt.” Augusta Pownall
The final Secret 7” exhibition and sale is held 4 - 13 September 2020
Forgotten mid-century masters
In their mid-century heyday, John and Sylvia Reid were one of Britain’s most prolific design partnerships. Like their post-war peers, the couple, who met as architecture students in 1941, believed good design should be accessible to all. During the 50s and 60s, their futuristic lighting and pared-back furniture brought a gleam of modernity to semis and bedsits across the country. The low-key Reids never courted publicity and now their work is largely unknown. But their eldest son, Dominic, an architect, has set out to restore his parents’ reputation by reissuing some of their key pieces of furniture. The ‘S’ range, originally produced by UK manufacturer Stag between 1959-1960, epitomises their knack for understatement: modular sideboards with a discrete flash of inlay; a bench floats on V-shaped legs. The new range is made by Nick Radford, whose parents originally owned Stag, and last year the new S230 chair was awarded a Design Guild Mark.
Through their work for the Festival of Britain the Reids met and mingled with design luminaries such as Arne Jacobsen, Charles and Ray Eames and Lucienne and Robin Day. Unlike their more vocal contemporaries, says Dominic, “there was a puritanical streak to Dad. He felt that talking about design was bluster. In his mind, design was about coming up with real solutions to problems. Because they never wrote about their work I felt it was important to tell the story of how they fitted in to the landscape of mid-century design.”
Their output was huge: cookware and office furniture, pubs, university common rooms and restaurants. They did everything; “right down to the carpets or door handles”. In those heady years, awards – from the Council of Industrial Design or judges at the Milan Triennale – were frequent. Innovation lighting was another Reidian speciality. Their Atlas kitchen light, designed in 1958, was the first domestic fitting that could be used without a transformer. Six million were sold. Original Reid lighting is now sought after, which has inspired Dominic to consider re-issuing some of their rarer designs. The challenge, he says, will be to replicate the quality at an affordable price. “One day I’d like to see John and Sylvia Reid back on the high street, where they belong.” Serena Fokschaner
Armani/Casa celebrates 20 years
Giorgio Armani’s knack for furnishing a space gave him his start in the fashion world. After university and military service, Armani worked as a window dresser at the upmarket La Rinascente department store in Milan in 1957 before becoming a menswear designer and eventually launching his label in 1975. Though he is now the most successful Italian designer in history, the love of furniture persisted, and Armani/Casa homeware celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
“I wanted to create a complete Armani lifestyle which reflected my ideas and which could be applied to various areas of daily life and not just fashion,” he says. Over the years, Armani/Casa has expanded to an international interior design company which can supply everything from your teaspoons to your bed. But Mr Armani still loves the first homeware piece he ever created: the Logo Lamp. “It was my first design, created in 1982. It bears witness to this interest of mine, this striving.”
2020 has been an unusual year for everyone due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Giorgio Armani was the first designer in Milan Fashion Week to hold his show behind closed doors as lockdown started across Italy in February. All of his Italian factories made medical overalls during the pandemic. The designer counts the community spirit forged by the fight against the coronavirus as a great achievement. “I successfully and independently led a company that gradually expanded into sectors beyond fashion to offer my all-embracing philosophy of lifestyle,” he says. “I can say this is an enormous achievement. But it’s the public support and feedback at the early and most dramatic stages of the current crisis that fill me with pride, as they demonstrate a solid relationship built over time.”
Though anniversaries are typically a time to look back, the designer’s continuing pleasure in the achievements of Armani/Casa is clear: “Today, Armani/Casa turns 20, but for me it’s still the wonderful opportunity it was at the beginning in 2000, when I launched my first collection. It’s a stimulating space for creativity.” Alice Fisher
Art that you can smell
“What does this smell remind you of?” asks Tasha Marks. The food historian and artist is discussing her latest olfactory artwork – a perforated bronze sculpture with a scented core, a collaboration with the sculptor Robert Erskine. First: a waft of Play-Doh. Then, top notes of freshly washed babygrows. Am I right? Almost, says Marks. The smell is, in fact, breast milk.
This piece was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection in London. “My challenge was to make a pleasing human smell that celebrated the microbiology of the body.” After consulting academics at the Wellcome, she hit on breast milk. It took two years of olfactory research to refine the aroma, which was made by a fragrance house.
Marks uses smell to tell stories. To evoke food writer Elizabeth David’s friendship with interior designer Anthony Denney, she used ceramics scented with orange and bay leaf, which enveloped visitors, to an exhibition at the National Trust’s Rainham Hall in London. For an event at the Fashion Space Gallery, she made a Last Supper from chocolate to spark debate about the ephemerality of art. When Kensington Palace put on a show about Queen Victoria and colonialism, Marks infused busts of the monarch with tobacco, tea and curry. “The smell is the tip of the iceberg; the rest is research,” she says.
Marks studied art history at the University of Sussex. When she wrote her dissertation on jelly, it drew her to the world of food and scent. “Food and fragrance go hand in hand. If you’re attuned to taste, you’re attuned to smell,” says Marks, who also trained as a chocolatier while setting up her business AVM Curiosities in 2011.
Now that galleries are looking at different ways to entice visitors, she thinks that scent events will become increasingly popular. “As more of our lives are lived in the digital sphere, we crave live experiences. I’m not a fan of audience participation, but I like the idea of an immersive experience, which you can do collectively with others. It’s opening up a new way to enjoy art.” SF
Get a grip
Long-time housebound, we’re all looking for small pleasures. These new ‘Symbols’ handles fit the bill. Prolific young designer Adam Nathanial Furman has designed this collection of small geometric handles for fledgling British firm Swarf, which specialises in handcrafted hardware for the home. Mutual Instagram followers, Swarf co-founder Kate Worthington contacted Furman after he expressed a desire to collaborate with emerging brands. ‘We’ve been fans of his work for a while and felt we shared a similar sense of playfulness,’ she says, ‘So we asked Adam to design a modular series of handles, to fit with the approach we’ve used in other ranges.’ The resulting seven shapes can be used horizontally or vertically – mixed and matched into various handle compositions and shades. ‘Symbols is a little celebration of diversity in the home,’ says Furman, ‘like a set of beautifully crafted geometric emojis.’ Bethan Ryder
Symbols is available in satin or polished brass, four power-coated RAL colours from £30 each, bespoke colours also possible
The school bag for creatives
Issey Miyake has always insisted that his work is design not fashion. Throughout his career – he’s now 82 – he’s embraced craft, technology and more recently recycling. He’s worked with paper, innovative fabrics and reused bottle tops to create clothing that is unisex and sculptural. While other designers started trends or made It bags, Miyake is known as the uniform of choice for creatives. Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck was Miyake. The designer has such a close relationship to ceramicist Lucie Rie that she left him her button collection when she died. Zaha Hadid was a fan of his oeuvre: one of her favourites was a padded kimono jacket that she preferred to wear upside down. She also liked to carry a Bao Bao bag.
The Bao Bao is the school bag of the creative industries. First and foremost, it is an amazing piece of engineering. Created from a mesh fabric layered with small triangles of polyvinyl, as it’s filled with items and then meets the body it’s transformed into a myriad of shapes. The first iteration of the bag was introduced in 2000, Miyake named it the Bilbao as a homage to the Guggenheim Museum that had opened there in 1997. That building – by Frank Gehry – became an instant architectural icon. It seemed to explode from the ground in the same way that Miyake’s clothing often appeared to take shape once put on to a human body.
The Bao Bao Issey Miyake bag was then launched in 2010 as a separate line, and has gone through many tweaks, in size and form and colour, but in its 20 years, has never been swept up by the It bag hype. Not quite expensive enough (the average Bao Bao is around £300-£400) and too clever by half, though a thing of beauty it’s more brain than arm candy. The V&A’s exhibition “Bags: Inside Out” (opening September) will feature a Bao Bao Lucent Metallic Tote.
The anniversary innovation is a dramatic reduction in size. Shrunk to just 25% of its normal scale, the latest Bao Bao is a dainty miniaturisation that – luckily for Miyake – is perfectly in tune with the dramatically reduced options we’re currently living through. Caroline Roux
The miniature Hello Bao Bao bag collection is available from Selfridges in August
Arcade games, African-style
Growing up in Soweto, Johannesburg, 23-year-old Lindelani Nedoboni remembers entire afternoons playing classic games such as Street Fighter and Pac-Man on “big old black arcade boxes” at local spaza shops. A spaza or tuck shop is an informal store that used to be found on every corner in townships, selling everyday essentials at cheap prices. They were also community meeting places.
But with the commercialisation of Soweto, spaza shops are no longer social spaces, and the arcade machines no longer have a home.
“This project is about reviving that whole culture and nostalgia,” says Nedoboni, who founded Masidlale Gaming to bring the township game experience to young people.
Last year, Masidlale collaborated with the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation festival to create the Arcade Box project, creating spaces inspired by the design of houses in Soweto to act as portable arcades and showcase games by local designers. “The design was about representing the space we are from,” says Nedoboni.
The boxes are flatpack and lightweight so they can tour. Tegan Bristow, the director of Fak’ugesi, says they flew an Arcade Box to a festival in Maputo, Mozambique. “Next we want to see the box going into rural areas in South Africa,” she says.
The local gaming industry is independent and lacks investment. So, as well as exposing communities to locally designed games, Arcade Box also wants to generate discussion about African gaming.
“As an artist it really helps to tell your own story,” says 22-year-old game designer and animator Thabo Plingo Tsolo, whose game Taxi Wheels is hosted on Arcade Box. Like Nedoboni, Tsolo grew up playing video games in Soweto. He noticed the games he played as a kid bore no relation to his culture. “I saw this gap as an opportunity,” he adds.
Taxi Wheels is a 2D platformer game set in Bara, a well-known minibus taxi rank in Soweto. Minibus taxis are “basically the backbone of South Africa’s economy,” adds the designer, who says the game is for “whoever wants to play a local game with a local story, a local environment and a local aesthetic”.
Tsolo hopes to tap into the wider sub-Saharan African market in the future. “There are more than a billion people in Africa but no one representing us, no one telling our stories. We’re the only people who can do that.” Alice McCool
Finding the way with Applied
Social distancing isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable and, according to research from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL at least two thirds of London’s pavements – so let’s assume much of the UK – aren’t wide enough to enable us to observe the two-metre rule. Applied, a global wayfinding agency, has recently worked on a new pedestrian-led city plan for Seattle and redesigned Toronto’s transit system. Now the agency is looking at how wayfinding can offer manageable solutions for navigating the next stages of lockdown.
Applied founder Tim Fendley, who recently created (pro-bono) a new system in Bath that enables NHS workers unfamiliar with the city to travel to the Royal United Hospital, more easily, is examining how this might work on a national scale.
“Because everything has changed, we can change how cities work overnight,” he says. “From part-time working to giving more road space to walkers, people are adapting to this new normal quickly. For example, Vilnius has closed streets to cars to make way for outdoor cafés; in Berlin, temporary cycle lanes have been painted on roads to encourage cycling.”
Fendley’s studio has also looked into social distancing on public transport. “There are simple ways we can help people feel confident about moving around in public again,” he says. “Using clear signage to encourage people to wear masks, and indicate when and where this is most important. Educating people on what two metres feels like.”
He suggests using coloured face masks to identify the most vulnerable and green wrist tags for the service industry, so that hairdressers and waiters can clearly identify they have been recently tested. “The realistic view is that inoculation and herd immunity is between 12 and 18 months away. We have to choreograph a dance between the virus and the economy.” Becky Sunshine
From hardware to homeware
For most of us, the first stop on a city tour might be a museum. For industrial designers Liang-Jung Chen and Shuei-Yuan Yang, it is the local hardware store. The designers, based in London and the Netherlands respectively, find that the items on these shelves tell them more about the culture, climate and habits of a place than a gallery show.
The pair come from rural South Taiwan, and the make-do spirit of people in their hometowns has inspired their work. When they went to Taipei to study, they started poking around local stores . “In the countryside they use hardware the wrong way, but in a creative one,” says Chen. “We thought we could learn from that.” So they set about creating new purposes for items on sale, with the addition of a few basic materials and a sense of humour.
The resulting project is The Misused, which the pair describe as “a geeky study in how to use metal hardware wrong”. Then they moved to Europe, and found local hardware equally baffling – and great inspiration for a second collection.
So, a nailplate punched through a cork base becomes a candlestick, a flagpole holder set inside a simple acrylic box becomes a vase, and bird spikes set in a concrete base are reinvented as a Brutalist dish rack.
Their designs are pleasingly minimalistand inventive and wouldn’t look out of place in a high-end concept store. The anonymity, though, is part of the appeal. “You have designer chairs, but you don’t have designer hardware,” Chen points out. They will soon open their own web store, allowing those of us without the knack of seeing a jewel box in a butt hinge to get in on the action. AP
Making the everyday better
Designer Anthony Dickens has worked with many big brands over the years – Anglepoise, Audi, Unilever – but now he wants to focus on fixing life’s small annoyances. His LittleSolves homeware line aims to make the everyday better. The first product exemplifies this idea nicely. The Quiet Glass is a tumbler in a colourful silcone sleeve. This tough base deadens the sound as the glass hits a table, improves grip and protects the vessel from smashing if you drop it. “We want our products to add a little enhancement to someone’s day, every time they use them,” says Dickens. We’ll drink to that. AF
Quiet glasses, £12.50 from littlesolves.com
