News stories can provide us with unexpected inspirations or themes to ponder about, possibly in connection with art, design and fashion. Take the story about the world's biggest single-building pig farm that recently opened in the outskirts of Ezhou, Hubei province, China. The giant apartment-style 26-storey pig skyscraper can fit up to 600,000 animals and it can slaughter over 1 million pigs a year.
The farm opened at the beginning of October and most pictures you will find on the Internet show one skyscraper, but another one, identical to the first building and located behind it, is nearing completion.
China consumes half of all the world's pork, so the factory was opened to adjust this demand (pigs raised in these farms can be ready for sale in a few months, while farmers would need up to a year to raise them).
High-rise farms are supposed to reduce pressure on lands and they are considered to be the future of pig farming as they are highly automatic. Yet concerns remain about such establishments especially when it comes to the health of the animals. If such farms are well-protected, the risk of illnesses is reduced, but, if a disease does get inside the factory (think about the highly infectious African swine fever, harmless to humans but often fatal to pigs), it can quickly spread or even mutate.
Rather than thinking about building the giant farms of the future, we should maybe consider how to reduce meat consumption, as the meat industry is responsible for a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to global warming and direct environmental pollution. And, to think about reducing the consumption of meat, we may take a brief journey into art, graphic design and fashion to look at works or collections inspired by or in some cases even celebrating pigs.
Widely used in art, in grotesque and satirical ways or as metaphors indicating corruption, violence, greed and dystopia (themes inspired also by George Orwell's "Animal Farm" with its venal and violent pigs) or referring to policemen (especially in connection with students' protests in the US in the '70s), pigs appear in Paul McCarthy's irreverent silicone statue "Static (Pink, 2004-2009)", showing former American President George W. Bush in an orgy with pigs.
Pigs also appeared throughout the years in graphic design: the history of music boasts indeed plenty of record covers featuring pigs. The most famous pig in music remains Pink Floyd's flying pig: gracing the cover of their 1977 "Animals" album as a balloon flying over Battersea Power Station, it multiplied and appeared numerous times in concerts by the band, promoting concerts and record releases.
The original Pink Floyd pig, a 12-metre, helium-filled balloon nicknamed "Algie", was designed by Roger Waters and built in December 1976 by the artist Jeffrey Shaw with help of design team Hipgnosis.
Yet, rather than quietly flying over Battersea Power Station, Algie the rascal broke free, ending up being spotted by airline pilots at thirty thousand feet in the air and causing flights at Heathrow Airport to be cancelled. In 2011, the Battersea Power Station scene was reprised to celebrate the re-release of Pink Floyd's back catalog.
Talking about inflatable pigs, we shouldn't forget that, in the 1989 production of Karole Armitage's ballet "Contempt", there was an inflatable pig by Jeff Koons on stage.
Pigs are associated with the pink colour, an extremely desirable shade in fashion, where not many houses and designers dared to celebrate pigs, considering them not very fashionable animals.
Yet, quite a few luxury brands including Gucci, Moschino, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Chloé, Longchamp and Coach, jumped on the pig bandwagon in 2019, the Year of the Pig, coming up with a variety of products including jumpers, scarves and bags with prints of cartoon characters or stylised piglets to celebrate the animal and win the hearts of Asian consumers.
There is actually a designer in the history of fashion that was very fond of pigs, especially in connection with pearls - Cinzia Ruggeri. In recent retrospectives about the later Italian artist, fashion and interior designer, there was an emphasis on the use of pink in her designs.
Many tried to analyze the shade in connection with Ruggeri, but there was no special in-depth meaning behind it - the designer simply liked it. Pink must have been feminine in her mind, but it was also a punk, hilarious, rebellious, non-conformist, anti-authoritarian, anti-corporative, anti-consumerist and anti-corporate greed shade – adjectives best embodied by a pig, probably. The animal often appeared in her collections and installations.
There's a indeed 1983 black and white photograph of Cinzia Ruggeri by Alfa Castaldi wearing a belt with a silhouette of a pig's ears and a little three-dimensional nose and, next to her, a piglet-shaped bag.
In the picture she was also wearing socks decorated with pearls – as in the expression "To cast pearls before swine". This expression also inspired Ruggeri a faux fur jacket with three pigs eating pearls on the back (from an early '80s collection of the brand Bloom), and, later on in her career, the earring "Perle ai porci" with a string of pearls and a little plastic pig.
Ruggeri's passion for pigs could be considered as the antithesis of anything feminine and conventionally intended as elegant - a pig, an animal loathed by many of us and certainly not considered as elegant, was indeed turned in her designs into an adorable and fashionable symbol with a punk twist. Hilarious, if you ask me.
Guess Ruggeri would have hated the pig skyscraper, as, in her imagination, rather than being served on the table, a pig should have occupied the seat of honour at the head of the table, possibly wearing a precious pearl necklace around its neck.
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