Eye | Luxury At V&A | London Craft Week | Lagerfeld In Bonn With Wanda Barcelona

DesignTracker

V&A Talks Luxury

Open now at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is ‘What Is Luxury’, closing on Sept. 27, 2015. Running concurrently with the blockbuster exhibition ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’, open through July 31, the collection of 100 objects set out to define luxury while predicting its future.

‘We wanted to show that no matter how gorgeous an object may be, it always exists within a larger context of ecology, economy, politics and culture,”’explains co-curator Leanne Wierzba. ‘Take Studio Swine’s ‘Hair Highway,’ (photo below) which sets human hair in natural resin, fashioning a dressing table, comb set and trinket boxes that look for all intents and purposes like wood. It’s all part of a commentary on the Chinese hair trade that highlights the material’s latent possibilities as a self-sustaining resource — one beautiful enough to put an end to the use of coral and tortoiseshell.’

The curators recognize that the future of luxury lies not with material goods but with discovery and exploration — or with time itself. Luxury has a historic and intrinsic link with craft, a relationship that will be supported and explored with the first London Craft Week, launching May 6, 2015. via

“Hair Highway” combs by Studio Swine, 2014. Studio SwineLondon Craft Week

May 6-10 London Craft Week

London has long had a Fashion Week and a Design Festival. From 2015, it will have the equivalent for the craft sector: London Craft Week, featuring the artistic flair, painstaking skills and raw talent of exceptional craftsmanship and, as a result, attracting an ever - increasing quality and volume of collectors and customers.’ says founder and chairman, Guy Salter.

Founded on the ethos of making, London Craft Week aims to introduce the talent, people and techniques behind beautifully made things to a wider audience.  They will be able to experience craft not just as static branded objects in smart shops but understand the context of how they were made, why they are special and even have a try themselves.

Lagerfeld Exhibition in Bonn

Karl Lagerfeld in Bonn through September 30, 2015.

From Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle Bonn museum exhibition website:

Karl Lagerfeld is celebrated as a fashion genius not only for continuously revitalising classics like the Chanel suit, but also for endlessly reinventing himself. Having realised by the early 1960s that the future of fashion could not lie in haute couture alone, Lagerfeld embraced the younger ready-to-wear (prêt-à-porter) lines: ‘Fashion that does not reach the streets is not fashion’ (Lagerfeld). In addition to clothing, Lagerfeld designs a wide range of accessories to accompany his collections. Equally progressive in matters of distribution and marketing, he advocates bold ideas and a paradigm change in the fashion industry. Since the 1990s Lagerfeld has been complementing his work for luxury brands with collaborations with companies that produce affordable clothes for mass audiences. In 2004 he was the first well-known designer to create an exclusive collection for the Swedish fashion retailer H&M – a successful concept that has since continued with other designers, among them Stella McCartney, Comme des Garçons and Versace.

Unknown to many people in fashion, Karl Lagerfeld is known for burning any drawing he doesn’t make into a garment. To acknowledge the decisive designer’s habit, paper art studio Wanda Barcelona laser-cut 15,000 pieces of paper in sculptures that appear to erupt out of books placed on the floor, then extends to the ceiling in columns to form a canopy effect.

Wanda Barcelona

Explore the treasure trove of paper installations on the Wanda Barcelona website.