A few weeks ago, an Irenebrination post was linked to a short piece written by Bruce Sterling on The Wired.
In the article Sterling wrote about the New Aesthetic concept (launched around a year ago by James Bridle and currently becoming quite fashionable) and wondered if inspirations that moved from microscope images could be deemed as part of this movement.
I was honoured to be linked to such a piece, yet, when I checked Sterling’s Flickr page to try and discover more about his visual views on the topic, I felt that this maverick thinker had somehow been left behind by trends, fashion and technology.
His galleries show indeed a rather strange fascination with Made in China garments and accessories of the kind you see in cheap and at times dubious shops all over Italy, with Sterling trying to spot a new aesthetic taste in a pixellated rucksack, a pair of average laser cut boots, kitsch pumps covered in Swarovski and skulls of every size and material that do not have any kind of relation with hackers, but are the product of a sad market regurgitating McQueen’s fascination with death.
I personally think that if New Aesthetic means to spot anything that may be remotely related to computers, colourful pixels, digital worlds and 3D manipulations, supporters of this new trend may have a heart attack if they saw the mid-‘80s experiments by Studio Alchimia that included pixellated Timberland boots.
In fact the more I think about the future of fashion and design, the more it becomes clear to me that it will not be about new trends and in spotting something that globally influences designers on an aesthetic level - may it be a print, a colour or an animated fashion illustration - but in the actual modus operandi that may lead us to the creation of an object or a garment.
Some of the most recent features on this site included interviews with designers who are trying to experiment with technology without forgetting about craftsmanship.
People experimenting along these lines have indeed perfectly pointed out how, while some craftsmanship techniques have become obsolete, turning to technology to produce something may leave us very unhappy from certain points of view (objects lose their individual touch, but we also lose the knowledge of how specific objects are made if we completely rely on technology).
Previous posts have highlighted how knitwear designers are probably among the best ones developing new strategies along these lines, using digital and handmade techniques to produce pretty unique items.
Yet this sort of hybridisation between different techniques was already hailed in the past by specific thinkers and creatives as the key to the future.
Between the ‘60s and the ‘70s, visionary Italian architect, artist, designer and theoretician Ugo La Pietra developed projects aimed at preserving traditional craft skills while modernising the final product, combining design and crafts or creating objects based on the concept of hybridisation.
Architects and owners of retail spaces nowadays often sit down and think about how to attract consumers in new ways, but, in 1968, La Pietra, Aldo Jacober and Paolo Rizzatto had already devised an ambitious project offering consumers the chance to shop in an innovative environment.
They designed the Milan-based boutique Altre Cose that combined a fashion shop and a disco: garments were showcased in see-through plastic cylinders and, if the customer saw a garment that took their fancy, they could press a button and lower the cylinder containing it.
In 1971 La Pietra also developed the Casa Telematica (Telematic House), a project that he first presented at the 1972 MOMA exhibition “Italy: The new domestic landscape“.
A perfect example of techno-utopia, the house turned into a place where information could be processed and communicated to the outside world, expanding in this way the field of perception and awareness of the dwellers and giving them back the power of influencing the environments surrounding them.
In 1983 La Pietra re-launched his project during the Milan Trade Fair coming up with a house loaded with appliances and video screens.
The house was divided in traditional spaces, but featured video terminals everywhere, tools that hinted at the development of information and communication systems that anticipated the Internet.
“What I want to show is not only the house of the future, but a house where computers and communications triumph”, La Pietra stated about his project.
Bizarrely, via very different projects based on interior design, La Pietra spotted decades ago that perfect interaction between human and machine that may influence future designs, generating new worlds with no horrid, superficial and useless fast trends, but where new dimensions and interactions are definitely possible.
Images 1, 2, 3 and 5 taken from http://www.ugolapietra.com
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