A couple of friends of mine were recently looking for inspirations for a catwalk invitation card and asked me to provide them with some suggestions.
I admit that my main suggestion was rather cryptic since I sent them a text message saying "Le Corbusier".
Between 1920 and 1925 Le Corbusier collected a lot of industrial catalogues and advertising brochures from different manufacturers.
The brochures were usually illustrated and featured lots of images of various products, ranging from automobiles (Peugeot, Citroen, Delage), planes and hydroplanes (Farman and Caproni), suitcases and trunks (Innovation), sports bags (Hermes), ventilators (Rateau) and industrial equipment (Rateau, Clermont-Ferrand).
Le Corbusier also collected department store mail-order brochures (Printemps, Au Bon Marché and La Samaritaine) and clippings from magazines such as Science et la vie, The Autocar and L’Illustré.
The architect actually seemed to have a passion for things that struck him visually, from brochures to the cover of a child’s notebook illustrated with geometric solids.
The materials he collected were usually employed to illustrate his articles on L’Esprit Nouveau, a magazine published between 1920 and 1925 by Le Corbusier and French painter Amédée Ozenfant.
The same materials also turned into the main sources for the images used in the volumes Vers une architecture, Urbanisme, L’Art decorative d’aujourd’ hui, Almanach de l’architecture modern and La Peinture moderne.
Le Corbusier’s features were actually based on a juxtaposition, almost on a collision, of images and texts and were influenced by advertising techniques.
I admit I have an ambiguous attraction to adverts since, while I share with Elio Petri his negative feelings about advertising, I find rather exciting writing treatments for them, especially when you’re teamed with the right director.
In fact I think that Le Corbusier’s pieces on L’Esprit Nouveau and his collection of images and clippings extremely inspiring from an advertising and a fashion point of view.
One of my favourite brochures collected by Le Corbusier and currently stored in the archives of L’Esprit Nouveau is a publicity leaflet in the shape of a wardrobe trunk by early 1900s trunk and suitcase manufacturer Innovation.
The main characteristics of Innovation’s trunks were the racks for hangers to avoid stacking. Apparently this idea of transforming the boring trunk into a portable closet came to Manhattan stockbroker Seymour W. Bonsall in 1897 during a vision in a dream. After his dream Bonsall hastened to build his first wardrobe trunk and, in 1898, he opened Innovation Trunk Co. launching his first products. Somehow I thought this image with its trompe l'oeil graphic would be the perfect idea for a catwalk invitation card.
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