The flame still flickers for prodigal lighting designer Geoffrey Mance, whose work
is celebrated on a daily basis.
A man ahead of his time, the late Geoffrey Mance is renowned as one of Australia’s most important lighting designers. Known among friends and colleagues as a flamboyant character, Mance kept his radar on international trends, adapting them to his own work using Australian processes and materials.
Industrial designer and co-director at Mance Design, Dean Gaylor, describes Mance as a pioneer. “He was self-taught, very design literate, and left an extensive design journal collection.”
Since his death, the Mance Design team have been fine-tuning his range. “Geoffrey did not know how to use a computer so a lot of his designs existed only inside his head or in drawings,”
says Gaylor.
“Since his passing, we have tried to honour his work by applying technological processes and applications that we are familiar with, to ensure this historic body of work is preserved.” In doing so, the studio has also improved the production and affordability of Mance’s work, making it more accessible to a wider audience.
He may not be a household name in the design world, but he certainly has an influence on it. When Tim Yu says something is cool, we sit up and listen. Jess Noble catches up with Yu in cool capital, New York.
Sitting cross-kneed on the couch in Coolhunting.com’s Manhattan loft-style office, Tim Yu is totally without airs. His composed demeanor and low-key designer garb bring one word to mind. Cool.
As one of four editors behind Coolhunting, this softly spoken former Yale research scientist is a ‘cool hunter’, but Yu prefers the label of ‘curator’. His job is to scour the infinite pages of the web, the global media and the streets to seek out “stuff that inspires”.
The New York-based blog was started by Josh Rubin in 2003 as a personal reference tool. Now covering everything from design, art, fashion, food, cars, events, music and ideas, Coolhunting.com has captured trend followers the world over and pulls in over 250,000 regular readers globally.
Yu was offered the primarily editorial role with no background in writing, or design, or art, or anything particularly relative to the position. But his fashionably groomed exterior and palpable intellect give him value. And he holds a skill you can’t learn: he knows what’s cool.
In Yu’s world ‘cool’ is not what’s trendy.
“People misinterpret Coolhunting as a trends blog. Granted, within it you will see trends, but that’s not the aim. I think part of the reason we avoid the word ‘trend’ is because we are more interested in the timeless than the trendy.”
i Spy at i Saloni
Angela Ferguson reports back on her mission to Milan.
After all these years working as a designer and hearing everybody rave about the Milan furniture fair, I finally got to go! The event is officially called Salone Internazionale del Mobile (or i Saloni) and was held 22–27 April at Fiera Milano in Rho, Italy. There are 24 halls at the Milan fairgrounds reserved for the event and, can you believe it, it’s a 1.5 kilometer walk from one end of the event to the other.
The furniture fair component incorporated four halls of lighting, which was this year sponsored by Euroluce, and the under-35s show, entitled Satellite. As well as the fairgrounds, there is Superstudio: Zona Tortona, a temporary ‘design district’ that is about the size of an inner-city suburb in Sydney or Melbourne. During the four-day fair there are over 400 events occurring around the city of Milan; it is filled with an air of excitement, of being one huge celebration of design.
The event is so big that it’s impossible to pinpoint one or two trends, however there were some quite definite themes which are worth mentioning…
Read more on Angela’s trip to Milan in DQ34. Buy now or subscribe...
Architectural Fashion
Exploring notions of shelter, structure and the body, architectural fashion takes the built environment as a primary inspiration in the creation of fashion apparel. Penny Craswell looks at a range of fashion designers with architectural leanings.
The idea of architectural fashion is not new. Of his Spring 1947 debut collection, Christian Dior wrote: "I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, molded to the curves of the female form, stylizing its shape."
There have long been parallels between the two disciplines, with fashion designers who studied architecture bringing the methods and aesthetic of building design to the fashion world and vice versa. Both disciplines protect and shelter the body. And both also ‘construct’ with materials – whether its sheet metal, wood, whalebone, woven bamboo or fabric in the form of yarn, pleats and layers.
Bringing engineered fashion to new heights at last year’s Paris fashion week was British designer Gareth Pugh, who wowed audiences with his armour-like Jacobean-inspired spacesuits. Featuring stiff, curved, architectural shapes – often with facets or pleats – these outfits have shoulder pads to lift the roof. Even the way he describes his work gives you the sense he is speaking about a building rather than a piece of clothing. He told Time Out: “I’ve always been relying on interior structure to give it the shape – now I’m looking at the exterior structure to give the shape.”
Cross-disciplinarian Hussein Chalayan’s work is similarly architectural – the Design Museum London recently exhibited 15 years of his experimental projects as part of “Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back”. Exhibits include ‘Afterwords’ which explores the notion of ‘wearable, portable architecture’. His ‘Airborne’ dress is made crystals lit with over 15,000 flickering LED lights, while ‘Readings’ is a dress with 200 moving lasers to create a spectacle of light – both of these dresses can be said to be part clothing and part chandelier.
Other fashion designers take furniture or sculpture as their primary point of reference, including Swedish designer Sarah Backlund, whose knitted pieces are so sculptural, the forms no longer follow the shape of the human body. What’s incredible here is that the spires and turrets of Backlund’s work are all created by knitting. Other designers are explicit in their reference to architecture – American fashion designer Derek Lam told Fashion Wire Daily after a showing of his work in 2007: “Walking to work each day between Chelsea and the Meatpacking District I get to enjoy all sorts of views of Frank Gehry’s building, from which I got a lot of the impetus for this collection,” referring to Gehry’s design of Barry Diller’s IAC headquarters.
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