Brands and designers borrow from each other all the time: in some cases there have also been established fashion houses actively stealing an idea from a younger designer's portfolio or a contemporary designer replicating a design from a historical or maybe defunct fashion house in their own collections. At times there are so many echoes and references between certain designs and collections that you wonder where inspirations stop and copyright infringements begin.
Yet fashion is not the only industry where this happens: every now and then you see a design, architectural idea or project borrowed, reinvented and reapplied.
In May, for example, French designer Jacquemus launched "Le Bleu" for London's Selfridges (it was on until yesterday).
The sort of immersive and visual experience consumers love nowadays, "Le Bleu" consisted in three different spaces, the first one being The Corner Shop, a retail space covered in pale blue tiles and featuring in the window a giant tube of toothpaste à la Claes Oldenburg (remember his 1964 artwork "Giant Toothpaste Tube" View this photo?) spilling red, white and blue gel.
The space, inspired by the designer's own bathroom, also featured an oversized bathtub, sponges, shower facilities and sinks with display areas featuring Jacquemus' S/S 22 products displayed along the walls, including hoodies, T-shirts and towels and the brand's "Marseille je t'aime" photography book.
Behind the store, Jacquemus installed a 24-hour vending machine selling exclusive editions of the brand's Chiquito and Bambino bags and his hats, while at the Old Selfridges Hotel a pop-up entitled Le Vestiaire referenced swimming-pool changing rooms.
In this space, inspired by surrealist French filmmaker Jacques Tati, Jacquemus also included blue lockers and changing cubicles to create a surrealist 3D experience.
All the spaces were covered in azure tiles of the kind you may find in the changing rooms of a swimming-pool. The spaces were developed by Jacquemus himself in collaboration with experience design studio Random Studio.
These surreal experiences related to water and bathrooms with their azure tiles created a fun and surrealist world for visitors, the sort of fully immersive experience people are looking for nowadays while they're shopping, yet these spaces also called to mind a similar retail environment in another country.
Jacquemus' mock swimming pool environments with 3D experiences installations related to water and bathroom imagery, evoked indeed a swimming pool-inspired jewelry store in Mykonos, a Cycladic island in the Aegean, created by Greek design studio Saint of Athens for Italian brand Gavello in collaboration with Dive Architects.
The concept for this store combined a traditional Mykonos shop (the external part of the shop) with a modern immersive space resembling a swimming pool covered in light blue tiles.
In this case the jewelry items are displayed inside four niches embedded inside the tiled wall and lit with LED strips. Other jewels are displayed on a main rectangular table dominating the space. Just like in Jacquemus' case, a wide range of accessories and pieces of furniture - mirrors, cushions, sculptural display cones, towel pegs, inflatable beach balls, lockers and a pool ladder - enhance the pool concept.
In this case, as explained by the designers, the main inspiration came from Wes Anderson's visionary universe and pastel shades, combined with the works of artists such as photographer Slim Aarons and painter David Hockney.
It is obvious why, in both Jacquemus' and Saint of Athens' cases, the designers and architects involved in the projects opted for the swimming pool.
This space filled with water evokes carefree relaxing summers and contributes to provide visitors with a fun narrative frame for their shopping session, while triggering their curiosity with an experience that encourages exploration.
That said, Saint of Athens' design for Gavello precedes Jacquemus, so it is not unlikely that the designer saw the shop during a holiday and decided to recreate a similar environment for his installation.
While Jacquemus seems to be more focused on the surrealist aspects of the swimming pool, with changing room doors that opened one after the other to reveal a bag at the very end, the ideas, main materials and even conceptual props enhancing the realistic pool concept, are very similar.
While you may argue this is not a direct infringement of copyright (we can't prove Jacquemus actually saw the shop and borrowed the idea from it, even though he is a frequent visitor to Mykonos as proved by his Instagram account; besides, he made some changes with the vending machines and the emphasis on the surrealist experience as highlighted above...), it is worth using this post to remind ourselves that also the work produced by interior designers and architects is copyrighted. Therefore, before replicating specific ideas seen maybe while on holiday or during events such as design fairs and expos, for one's installations, shops and pop ups, we should maybe consider if we can collaborate with the designers who created those environment that originally struck our attention, rather than taking an idea, remixing and revomiting it.
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