Additional research by Timothy Palma

Emmanuelle, style icon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aRuWJi9T20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFFH8NEPUc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCsE5ty2d-o

Utterly cringe-inducing dance scene (we’ve all been there):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkAwWAvQduA

Oh! It’s warm is here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjIltgaU0Zg

Who doesn’t have a recumbent bike in their office?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8MI9ottUQ

And here is the piece we ran with in our March-April 2010 edition:

An icon of liberated sexuality for over half a century, Emmanuelle has been the subject of the most successful series of skin flicks ever made. Her name became a by-word for blue movies and her imitators travelled the earth and beyond, from the Italian sexploitation gorefest Emanuelle and the last Cannibals to the Emmanuelle in Space series. She has inspired fashion collections, chair designs and satire aplenty, but beyond the free love and exotic locales, who is the real Emmanuelle?

Writer Hettie Judah, Illustration Steve Jakobs

“Emmanuelle aime les caresses manuelle et buccales…Emmanuelle aime les intellectuels et les manuels…” Serge Gainsbourg, theme to Goodbye Emmanuelle

First released in a clandestine pressing in 1959, Emmanuelle carried neither the name of its author nor its publisher, it was just Emmanuelle a novel centring on a bored clique of expats wiling away their life in Thailand on a diet of sports, saphism, intrigue and passion-dampening erotic philosophy. The eponymous heroine is a nineteen-year old with a genius for sex (and a time-consuming masturbation habit) who is inducted in the ways of the new eroticism – a doctrine of free love that abhors the banal and routine.

The Parisian publisher Eric Losfeld purportedly received the manuscript in a hefty parcel with a Bangkok postmark. He split it into two separate books – Emmanuelle and L’Anti-Vierge –but despite receiving considerable attention in the alternative press, restrictive obscenity laws kept both books underground until 1968.

In its official version, Emmanuelle appears as the work of Emmanuelle Arsan, purportedly the nomme de plume of Marayat Rollet-Andriane, the Thai-born wife of a French diplomat. Marayat kept details of her identity deliberately vague, saying that everything that needed to be known about her was to be found in her writing.  What biographical information there is gives her date of birth as 1940, which would have made her 17 in 1957, when the manuscript arrived from Bangkok. There has since been considerable speculation that the Emmanuelle Arsan writings were largely the work of her husband Louis Jacques Rollet-Andriane. Certainly the long conversations on moral sexuality at the heart of the book read more like the rationalising of a free-living middle-aged diplomat than his teen bride.

Never the less, Marayat associated herself fiercely with the character of Emmanuelle: a slight, full-breasted figure with waist-length black hair and precocious physical allure. As the first Emmanuelle movie went into production, Sylvia Kristel recalls ‘Emmanuelle Arsan’ as being so horrified with the director’s choice of casting that she refused to meet her; “She is the heroine of her own book,” recalled Kristel. “It’s her story. She is Eurasian, dark-haired, short, an emancipated woman before her time. I am tall, pale, docile, with strict morals, shaped by my religious education. She comments that Emmanuelle would never have brought her partner to the set. She would have devoured the crew and the natives with contagious nymphomania.”

Sylvia Kristel back in her Emmanuelle heydays...

In the end, of course, it is the lean, fair Utrecht-born Kristel who won Emmanuelle. The strong-willed beauty queen – who became the lover of Belgian intellectual Hugo Claus when he was 45 and she 22 – was condemned to spend her life identified with this single character, to which she had not even been allowed to give a voice. Her relationship with Claus pre-dated the Emmanuelle films (although he encouraged her participation in them) – and it seems significant that it was perhaps the only ‘pure’ relationship that she had with a lover. The intoxicating character of Emmanuelle dominated all the rest. “Men have loved my body,” she wrote recently. “I have been their fantasy, but I’ve seen few hearts. My fans were faceless, and I didn’t belong to myself….I wanted to be big when I was nothing but a child. I wanted to be looked at and that’s all that ever happened.”

Through a life scarred by alcoholism, cocaine addiction, exploitation and bad relationships, Kristel time and again found herself wooed by men unable to separate her from her most famous role. Even in her 50s, recovering from major surgery, she was treated like public property, a walking emblem of liberal sexuality submitted to intimate questions about orgasm on French TV shows.

Sylvia Kristel today...

It has become a cliché to describe the original 1974 Emmanuelle movie as tame by modern standards – what is much more striking, in fact, is its coupling of force to female enjoyment. While the women happily toy with one another and masturbate openly, most of the penetrative sex seems to be initiated in circumstances little short of rape. Watching the film you can see a vista of ‘when a woman says ‘no’ she means ‘maybe’’ thinking and date rape rolling out in its wake. Emmanuelle may end the movie as a sexually liberated woman, but she attains this status via enforced pain and humiliation. Matters are not helped by the fact that Kristel so rarely looks as though she’s having a good time – her faked orgasms have an edge of disgust to them, and certainly in the later films, she has an absent demeanour assisted by her hearty uptake of coke and champagne.

The free-loving ethos is shattered in the third movie by marital jealousy – the new erotic philosophy that provides the series with its raison d’etre is implicitly discarded and normal service resumed. But while the sexuality of the film is very much of its time, the book is genuinely transgressive, with a lingering fascination with childhood sexuality that leads to some unforgettable pronouncements – “The erotic woman is the one who, at snack time, calls her son and tells him to make a sperm sandwich for his little sister.”

While the books are almost an exercise in sexual philosophy strung out between physical diversions, the films communicate this new libertinism via the lush exoticism of their locations (Thailand, Hong Kong, the Seychelles) and artful mise en scène. Both the first two films were made by fashion photographers, the first by the Dutch-born Just Jaekin, the second by Francis Giacobetti, whose softcore aesthetic was honed on the Pirelli Calendars, and who was also responsible for the iconic publicity stills from the first movie. With wardrobes raided from Balenciaga and beyond, it’s not surprising that the style of the films has had a particular influence all of its own. Everything from Sylvia Kristel’s haircut, to the heavy kohl eye makeup to the rattan furnishing to the peek-a-boo eveningwear became a cultural reference. The Emmanuelle style has influenced fashion collections (notably from Veronique Branquinho) and is still visible on women of a certain age. Unlike Sylvia Kristel, of course, the generation of copycat Emmanuelles really did choose to align themselves with an image of sexual hedonism and availability – and thus perhaps most deserve the title of the real Emmanuelle.

Writer Nick Amies, additional online research Timothy Palma.

Back in the late 1960s, British dancehalls were filled with young, working class white skins and their West Indian neighbours decked out in immaculate clothes and hot-stepping to the sounds of reggae, ska and rocksteady brought to their ears by a small subsidiary of Island Records called Trojan. Formed in 1967, Trojan Records came into its own a year later when businessman Lee Gopthal took the helm. Gopthal recruited a number of iconic Jamaican producers such as Lee Perry, Bunny Lee and Clancy Eccles, as well as fostering a host of new talent from Britain’s burgeoning reggae scene. A year later, Trojan started releasing its own material, tasting mainstream success with the Upsetters’ Top 5 smash Return of Django in 1969. Hit singles followed from Jimmy Cliff and the Harry J All Stars, and a British number one, Double Barrel by Dave Barker & Ansel Collins, in the spring of 1971.

The Upsetters – Return of Django

Dave Barker & Ansel Collins – Double barrel

Jimmy Cliff – The Good Good Old Days

Trojan’s rapid rise had much to do with the embracing of the direct, unpretentious approach of Reggae by the skinheads. Perversely, while the skins helped Trojan to scale the heights, the label’s mainstream success and increasingly sophisticated sound ultimately alienated its skinhead fanbase.

As well as racking up hit singles, the label continued to showcase virtual unknowns from Jamaica including Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, and a certain Kingston-based vocal trio called Bob Marley & the Wailers.

While its commercial power began to tail off in the mid-70s, Trojan continued to showcase emerging talents from the Caribbean. By the turn of the century, Trojan had found its new niche in the market as a purveyor of classic, vintage Jamaican sounds.

We page-perfected the label in our Skin Issue, giving it the exposure and merit it deserves. Here, we select some of our favourite tracks coming out of the label’s jukebox

Harry J All Stars – Down Side Up

John Holt – You Baby

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyXbOktwvjc

Ken Boothe – Everything I Own

Toots & the Maytals – Johnny Cool Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrntbL2Q41I

Inner Circle – We ‘A’ Rockers

Take a look at some of the “virtual unknowns” showcased by Trojan.  Perhaps you recognize a name or two?

Dennis Brown – How could I let you get away

Gregory Isaacs – Reasoning With The Almighty

images courtesy of Trojan Records

Lots of cakes, lots of ideas ( photo: Veerle Frissen)

Three issues back to back – November, December, January – by the time we came to brainstorm the third one, we needed a mountain of sticky pastries in the middle of the table to get our poor, tired, brains kick-started.

After all the attention they got for their Japanese series on our blog, we HAD to invite Arnaud and Adrien, and they ended up being the only men at the table; jeez, I’ve only been editor one month and it’s already become a chick-fest around here!

Arnaud, Adrien, Ulrike (photo: Veerle Frissen)

January is going to be The Morning After issue, which lead to some pretty base trains of thought – the absolute worst-ever morning after stories (most of which seemed to involve pee  and/or amnesia), the most embarrassing-ever late night text messages (most of which seemed to involve sex), the freakiest before-after photo stories (none of which would have made it onto the pages of Flair.)

Hettie-the-editor makes that tricky more caffeine /more sugar choice (photo: Veerle Frissen)

We finally forgot all the gross stuff long enough to get down to the business of serious content, and laid down some the treats that are in store for you in January; what happens to a band’s musical output once it goes through rehab? Has being watched by Facebook changed the way we behave on a night out? Who takes the first metro of the morning? What happens to doomsday cults when the apocalypse fails to happen when predicted? How many days does it take for a full English breakfast to go really mouldy? How do you get your space ready for the morning after an almighty binge?

Meli, keeping us grounded (photo: Veerle Frissen)

Loads to get working on – too many ideas, too little time – we’re already tempted to cancel Christmas to make sure this issue gets to you super perky and looking fresh for the morning after.

Obama checks out the brainstorm notes (photo: Veerle Frissen)

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Scatalog

Daisy and fellow designer James King collaborated with the Cambridge team that produced the Grand Prize winning entry, out of 1700 participants and 112 teams, which we think is a real testament to what happens when you bring intelligent designers in on projects right from the outset. Daisy and James  worked alongside the students in the lab over the summer, and encouraged them, as she put it to “think outside the petri dish”.

E.Chromi in the lab - Mike Davies

Their proposals for the resulting project – E.Chromi: a pigment-producing variant of the E.Coli bacteria developed in the Cambridge labs – was certainly eye catching. Daisy and James rocked up to MIT with a secure briefcase containing a selection of lightly polychrome turds, with each colour variant created by the bacteria designed to highlight the presence of a particular disease in the delivering body. Rather like bacterial disclosing tablets, this futuristic diagnostic tool is proposed as an inexpensive way of monitoring your own health, and checking up on the presence of diseases to which you might already know you have a genetic susceptibility.

The Scatalog Suitcase - James King

The Scatalog was one of seven separate futuristic proposals that Daisy and James presented to the Cambridge team, all of which were intended to help the scientists thing of the real-world applications and impact of their creations (good and bad), and how the results of their research might one day be translated into commercial products. The designers also helped the students understand the importance of being able to communicate what they were doing effectively to the outside world, by encouraging them to think about how their work fitted into developments taking place beyond the laboratory.

Yesterday's lunch box - James King

photo by Veerle Frissen

There was a day last week when girls outnumbered boys at The Word office, and we finally managed to get our new favourite lady, Cate Le Bon, playing on the stereo. Her first album Me Oh My is an addictive exercise in dark folk rock – vocal sweetness measured out against earthy lyrics, occasionally buzzing guitars and touches of off-kilter noise in the background. The hint of something nasty going on in the lyrics is mirrored in the intimacy of the recording – there’s a hint of horror stories whispered in a darkened room. Ex associate of Neon Neon, Cate’s delicious voice, coupled to her unpretentious delivery comes off like a richer Welsh version of Nico (we must admit to not being the first to make that comparison – it’s something in the combination of purity and imperiousness). She’s a nifty songwriter – tracks like Burn Until The End and Shoeing The Bones have been buzzing round our head all week – yet nothing feels compromised.  The neat ten track album is structured for a time when music releases actually had two sides rather than the featherweight digital ambiguity of a cover shot on iTunes. The English probably won’t admit this, but since we’re Belgian we’re going to come out and confess to finding the accent gives us a bit of thrill in some really surprising ways – who’d have thought we’d get off on somebody singing the word ‘vitamin’? ‘Cocoon’ was pretty good too…

Cate Le Bon, Me Oh My  is out now on Irony Bored

photo by Veerle Frissen

Jatopa - Studio Job facades

An outlying Amsterdam housing project is now the home to 800 square metres of ornamental friezes designed by Studio Job. Decorating the façade of 5 large new buildings commissioned as part of a development by Far West, the designs feature a rich collection of the Studio’s iconic graphics, from gymnasts to guns, insects to syringes, fighter jets to flowers.

We’ve been corresponding a lot recently with Studio Job – they’re putting together a special something for our Heritage issue in December – so when they send us a little email about a project they’ve been working on in Amsterdam, we felt that we had to go up and take a look. It seemed particularly intriguing since the work formed part of a social housing project and as such contrasted pretty dramatically with other their other recent activities (the giant Swarovski crystal-studded globe that they lent for the Viktor and Rolf catwalk show in Paris, for example).

The building project, Jatopa, is in the far west of Amsterdam, in an area known for its high unemployment and large immigrant population. It’s not the kind of area that usually makes it onto the route map of cultural tourists. After a long ride on the city’s light rail system I finally got to the area at the end of the working day on a rainy Wednesday.  I (predictably) got lost (twice) and wandered around the streets checking out Turkish and North African bakeries, mother and baby care centres and schools for children with special needs. There were wide cycle lanes, clean playgrounds and when I finally stopped to ask directions, people were friendly and helpful – this may have been an area with problems, but it felt as though a large amount of investment, infrastructure and goodwill were being pumped into it.

Jatopa - Studio Job facades

Job and Nynke’s involvement dates back 5 years, when they were contacted by Gabi Prechtl of Kunst en Bedrijf, an organisation that matches artists to architectural projects. “When I went to the site a few years ago I saw a huge chance to make a change in Amsterdam, and I wanted to see if the director of the development was interested in combining it with an Art or Design project and he was, and this was the first big project.” At that time Studio Job was still a young and less known design outfit; this was to be the first time that they were involved in a project of this scale.

Because of the nature of the development, the budget for the art was tiny, so Gabi and the architect decided to use an existing aspect of the building’s design. “The lintels and concrete panels were already on the plan – so we made an extra effort to make them nicer.” Gabi’s brief to the Studio was to produce work for a public space that must be interesting to all kinds of people from different cultural backgrounds. “It’s not easy to find a new way of communicating with a society and community like this.”

Jatopa - Studio Job Facades

Studio Job’s work has been known for its provocative edge, and certainly on other projects they have seemed to enjoy winding people up. This last April, for example, they displayed stained glass windows featuring missiles and monsters at a seminary in Milan and were certainly ready for the priests to raise objections. The friezes for Jatopa certainly pull no punches –  there are spermatozoa and death’s head skulls laced in there alongside the flora and fauna, not to mention the reference to socialist art that comes from both the location and the format. “I don’t think it’s provocative,” shrugs Gabi with a smile. Well, this is Amsterdam – there’s a heck of a lot worse on public display around these parts if you take a wrong turning. “There are a lot of images on the friezes, so you can pick what you see; it can be nice and easy, or maybe not, like the real world.”

For Gabi, the architectural significance of the project is particularly exciting; “Dutch architects are wary of using ornaments,” she explains. “But now it’s changing; this project is quite big for Holland.”

Jatopa - Studio Job Friezes

Back on the street at Jatopa, residents are starting to come home from work. The housing complex covers almost a whole block of the neighbourhood and the buildings alternate between private apartments and social housing. I get talking to one of the residents of a private block and he lets me into the building to show me the garden – it’s communal, shared between private and social blocks. I ask him who maintains it? He admits that the space is paid for by the owner-occupiers, but he explains that he likes the idea that he’s part of an important social change in the area. The private block is fully occupied, and my new friend greets the other residents as they walk past him; they have formed a housing corporation and the buzz of social cooperation is in the air. I ask what he thinks of the artwork on the outside of the building – he says that he’s very proud to live somewhere so beautiful, (although he can’t remember the name of the artist).

When tenants started moving into the area at the beginning of September, Gabi helped put together a glossy brochure about the friezes that was given out to everyone in the block; “they can read about it, pick out their own building in the photographs and show other,” she explains. “You can really recognise the buildings now and that works – it’s different from the other blocks.”

Kunst en Bedrijf is still involved in two other art and design projects; a pair of sculptures that will be ready late next spring and a staircase to go into a building slated to complete in 2011. “This renovation and renewal project is a huge operation;” Gabi admits. “It will take a lot of time to change the area, but Far West is really interested in putting effort into the cultural and social side of the development.”

Christien Meindertsma’s project to discover all the products made from a single pig (the titular 05049) ended up taking her 3 years, and included such unexpected products as wine, carbonless paper, zinc, medicine capsules, paint, cigarettes, toothpaste, heart valves and train brakes. The products were all exhibited at an installation in Rotterdam last year; for the book she has photographed them all on a 1:1 scale.

This is both a beautifully produced object (we particularly love the stud on the cover) and a very revealing piece of research; it totally chimed with our fondness for great graphic design and restless inquiry into the peculiar workings of the modern world.

Many thanks to Lisbeth Juul of the INDEX awards who very sweetly gave us a copy of PIG 05049, which won INDEX’s  Play category.

The book is available via Amazon.com. A limited edition of 50 have also been produced with pigskin covers and photo of Pig 05049.

It was the closing event of Design September – the professionals’ day – with conferences featuring an impressive line-up of key speakers.  The packaging speakers had a kind of wary defensive aura to them; Fabrice Peltier of Paris’ DesignPack Gallery admitted that when people asked him what he did he’d sometimes joke that he “designed waste” – which pretty neatly indicated the elephant in the room. Sustainability – still an afterthought, still a buzzword, not yet centre stage. Packaging people – there’s no excuse.

Over on the award side, Peter Zec of Red Dot did point out that it’s not just the packaging people that were failing to grasp the sustainability nettle. During the most recent Concept Awards; Red Dot’s Singapore based awards for younger designers; 300 works were entered for the Green Design section but the jury was so disappointed that they ended up not actually giving the award out.

Lisbeth Juul of Index Awards made Copenhagen seem like design-loving right-on community spirited heaven. The awards go to works that improve human life – this year’s laureates included a system of microcredit loans, and an integrated infrastructure to support electric cars – and the events connected to the awards are all held in the homes of local design enthusiasts. Which sounded like perfection until Jean-Pierre Blanc, director of the Villa Noailles’ Design Parade, started showing slides of the design conferences at Hyeres – long lunches in the Provencal sunshine during the early summer – and we considered asking whether he’d adopt us. Design, wine, sunshine, glorious architecture and fabulous conversation – it almost makes us weep thinking about it.

Karim Rashid unfolded his long pink-clad legs from one of the Festival’s Mini Coopers at 5 o’clock, just in time for a chat before he gave the closing address of the day. We decided not to bother with small talk (although for those of you lap up the incidental froth – he is very bright, charming, and super articulate, likes good quality coffee with milk (preferably a cappuccino), rates the architecture of the Flagey building and admits that his sideline in DJ-ing has fallen by the wayside since he discovered that even he needs to sleep occasionally).

Hettie: Since today is really about branding I’d like to ask you about you as a brand. If I say that there is a very recognisable Karim Rashid style, to you take that as a very positive statement; the result of really good branding on your part, or do you find it oppressive? Do you ever feel the need to break away from it?

Karim: Because I do such a broad range of work there will always be some brands that hire me because they expect me to be very Karim Rashid, but I never believed that I had a very specific style. Before I started my own studio 18 years ago I spent 10 years working for other design offices. During that time I designed power tools for Black & Decker, I designed humidifiers, medical and even military equipment. When you do that, there’s no personality that you can impose on the work – you are driven by the performance of the product.

I think there are two worlds of design; there is the more artistic commodity that occupies the popular domain of design and there are products that fill our everyday life where we don’t see the designer at all. Packaging design occupies the second area. Most of the brands prefer to keep the designer out of the equation – Issey Miyake is the brand, not Karim Rashid. If you walk through an airport Duty Free shop, I’ve probably designed 10% of what you see, but you’d never know it. Is that shouting my style or not?

It depends if companies have their own strong identity, or they ask me to be quite expressive. But I’m more interested in doing important things that in being a celebrity.

These days consumer culture is interested in who’s behind these things; they realise someone has had an original thought and that it’s become that particular product. Objects aren’t just generic. It’s a new phenomenon and I think it’s very positive; people know which bottle of water Ross Lovegrove designed and which was designed by Ora Ito, for example.

I’m working on a water bottle at the moment and I have convinced the company to make it out of sugar cane – I talked to six different companies before them and no one was interested – designers don’t just bring form, material and ergonomics, they can be responsible for major shifts?

Hettie: That leads pretty neatly on to the second thing that I wanted to talk about actually: the role of designers in industry. One of the speakers earlier pointed out a big difference between packaging in the Southern European and Northern European markets; apparently in the South the notion of quality comes from the earth up; they take their notion of quality from its provenance, whereas in the north we judge it on the packaging. Perhaps as a result, from a lot of quarters at the moment I’m getting the sense that we’re suddenly encountering a generation of designers that design identity rather than products; they understand packaging, branding, image and so on, but not about actually creating a genuinely new product. Does this chime at all with your experience?

Karim: I think it’s one of the things that modernism did – it was the age of specialisation – it bifurcated our profession.

I was recently working for a client on an ice tea – and I was trying to convince them that they couldn’t just change the packaging, they had to change the product; I was talking to them about the big shift towards natural and organic products, but I didn’t get anywhere, because I’m just hired to make the package. There’s a huge disconnect. For something like that you need to get all the people in the room together right at the start of the project, but that’s not how things happen.

Companies come to me, and other like me, because their sales are going down. These days the global competition is extraordinary; there are lots of little brands that are right on there, understanding the particular demands of the time, and larger companies miss the signals. Say you want to do a new sports drink – the competition is fierce precisely because there are all these smart moves coming out of these tiny companies. The companies expect that changing the label or bottle will get them back in the game, but they need to take a more holistic approach.

I had the same thing when I was designing a toothpaste brand – why do the big brands have nothing to compete with Tom’s? Method was one of the few product ranges I’ve done where I was part of a holistic approach. It was started by three guys with pretty small loans; now it’s worth $700 million. They’re young guys who reacted to the times. I’m so interested in the political and social life of the world – I want to be more proactive.

Hettie: I’m interested in this idea of the designer out engaging with the world and responding to changes. I was talking to someone about Rei Kawakubo and they were explaining how she kept Comme really responsive and ahead of the game as a brand because she was really engaged with political and social movements in that way. She really works with a team on the design, which her allows her to give her attention to these other elements. I imagine that your studio functions in a similar way?

Karim: Actually we are really small: only 12 people. I’m doing 90 projects now. I’m a bit controlling; it does hold me back but I don’t want to be a big company; I reject lots of work and stay small. I don’t know if I’m capable of doing it any other way; I’ve never really had the personal desire for it to get bigger. Unlike a united brand, we work for a plethora of different brands, and if you delegate the quality can become uneven.  When you have big overheads you end up having to do what the British critic Peter Dormer used to call ‘below the line’ work to pay the bills. I never wanted to be in that position. I take only one in ten jobs because they’re the ones I want to do.

We do have to produce quite technical prototypes for companies – they expect it, so two of the team are design engineers. I’ve gone in a bit of a full circle – my education was very rigorous, but then I went to Milan and saw the Italian design artistic the work was. My background (I’m half British) and my education have been a good balance for me; the practical, pragmatic and technical side balances the artistic. It allows me to work with big multinationals that create real mass products and to make real changes.

I think what I’d refer to as the ‘Droog School’ of design changed the world because it made people think that design was all about whimsical, craft like, artistic proposals, but that’s not design. Real design is a Nespresso machine. Design is about moving things forward. Of course it is very valuable to have someone doing something critical and radical too.

“Puma kicked off the launch to their newly-released Suede Classics with a pop-up street gallery and store of rough-around-the-edges cool. At Why Not/Blue Boy, a disused sex cinema in downtown Amsterdam, were Parisian artist Ettek’s portraits of 12 Belgian and Dutch trendmakers wearing the sneaks, done in the style of street art from the 70s perfect for the uber-slick kicks originally launched in that era. These had already done the rounds of Antwerp and Amsterdam, wheat pasted to walls in huge format, sealing along with them Puma’s name as a hands-and-feet-on streetwear brand. Down-sized, they were set against a white washout background and punctuated with a relaxed, urban feel; words black marker-ed onto cardboard on the floor, a gaffa-tape diamond on the ceiling and huge letters made of old vinyl’s spelling out Puma’s name leant haphazardly against the walls. In between, the best of Benelux mingled with cocktails before moving on to plush club Jimmy Woo’s for a 2 hour set from DJ Scratch, all famous and shiny from the US of A; in the mix was an enormous pair of Puma’s new footcandy, which those on the dancefloor were only too happy to try out. Sightings of the night included members of Starflam and Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig. The travel arrangements of your secret agent for The Word stood out as a personal highlight; a 50-seater coach had been commissioned for guests from Brussels and Antwerp, taking off from the iconic Atomium, but we were but 3 lonesome travellers in the empty bus, myself along with two lovely Antwerp stylists, Xandra and Marjan, who later disappeared, so the return was VIP all the way! And to the after-party, I perched on a bicycle with Puma organiser Matthijs in extra-authentic Amsterdam style.”

Here’s a selection of pics of the beautiful people present at the opening

In case you had any doubt about the party's host...

Our undercover agent posing in front of one of the works on display

Big footed

Hogging the dance floor

Belgian rapper Baloji keeping it down

A selection of Showstudio’s groundbreaking and genre-defining photography and art direction over the years:

Banquet © Nick Knight, 2004

Design_Download: John Galliano © Craig McDean, 2003

Erin O'Connor, Transformer © Nick Knight, 2002

Gareth Pugh, Dazed & Confused, October 2008, © Nick Knight, 2008

Naomi Campbell, 3D scan, © Nick Knight, 2007

Sweet © Nick Knight, 2000

Christian Dior, Couture Fall/Winter 2001-02 © Nick Knight 2001

Still from 'Untitled', Political Fashion © Nick Knight 2008

Lucid Dream by Eric Klarenbeek (photo by Paola Pieroni)

In Praise of Shadows is a concise meditation on light curated by Jane Withers. 20 works are displayed inside an existing gallery at the V&A; nestled in among the ceramics and inlayed furniture they provided the only illumination; visitors are given torches at the entrance so that they can read the exhibition text.

Light Bulb by Pieke Bergmans (photo Paola Pieroni)

There’s politics and science here, but also space for poetry; I really enjoyed getting another look at Drift’s Fragile Future: a light sculpture that combines LEDs with real dandelion seed heads that was on show the Carpenters Workshop Gallery stand in Basel this year. Here in the dark it looked even more beautiful, if, as the title suggests, terrifyingly fragile. Paul Cocksedge’s cool flower-powered vase lamp was here too, as was old Word favourite Pieke Bergmans with one of her giant melting light bulbs (above).

Stay away from the light

Shadows really are here to be praised, says Jane Withers; she thinks that we may all be crazily in thrall to illumination; too accustomed to everything being super-bright. The exhibition title is taken from an essay by Junichiro Tanizaki that argues that too much lighting robs culture of its aesthetic richness. Jane explained that she thinks many shops could certainly do with lighting their stock more selectively; having seen the effect that good lighting has on exhibition displays, I definitely agree. Decent display lighting can make things look much more alluring, and uses much less energy. The brochure for the show also cites research work by Claudia Dutson of the Royal College of Art suggesting that over-bright light, particularly of the wrong colour, can have a negative impact on health.

“The office may be the most demanding environment on a person’s physiology. Is a uniform, brightly lit room the best place to be productive and healthy?” Claudia Dutson, RCA

Sonumbra by Loop, photo Paola Pieroni

Fight the power

The show is pegged to the EU-wide  switch to energy efficient light-bulbs that came into force this month. Rather than a chastisement, the curator sees the directive as a stimulus and considers this to be a time of great creativity and change in lighting design. A reminder of why it’s so important to make the switch comes from Tom Foulsham’s film Light Balance, for which he built a merry-go-round inside the Albert Hall which he powered with the heat of one 400w bulb – 95% of the energy used by incandescent lightbulbs is given out as heat, only 5% as light. While the bulb managed to swing Tom around, it certainly didn’t light up much of the Hall itself.

There’s another video showing some direct action to power-guzzling; French activists Clan du Néon go around at night switching off the lights on shops’ street displays.  It felt irresistibly irreverent to stand in the grand old V &A watching grainy footage of jubilant activist shinning up drainpipes to flick off the emergency power switches. Anyone fancy starting a Belgian branch?

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Clan+du+N%C3%A9on/video/x8zwrw_clan-du-neon-on-eteint-la-lumiere_news[/dailymotion]

And now for the activists’ Belgian branch:

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Clan+du+N%C3%A9on/video/x4m3iz_clan-du-neon-namur-belgique_politics[/dailymotion]