Though his name may not be familiar to most, his work very likely is. Jay Ohrberg is Hollywood’s favourite car designer, having conceived and built hundreds of experimental vehicles with a remarkable range of appearances and features. His creations have been included in over 100 films, television shows, music videos and advertisements, earning him the…
Virgil Abloh, the American designer, artist, DJ and stylist, first came to prominence as Kanye West’s Creative Director, going onto make a seismic impact on the fashion industry with his luxury streetwear label, Off-White, and, more recently, his position as Artistic Director of Menswear at Louis Vuitton. Born in 1980 to Ghanaian parents, Abloh was…
Last week, Bottega Veneta announced the appointment of designer Matthieu Blazy as the Italian fashion house’s new Creative Director, only days after Daniel Lee’s sudden departure. Blazy had been working closely with Lee since mid-2020 on building Bottega Veneta’s refreshed image. In light of this, his new position at the helm of the brand is…
The Medu Art Ensemble was a collective of cultural activists operating out of Gaborone, Botswana during the apex of the anti-apartheid resistance movement during the late twentieth century. The collective first came together in 1977 as a group of Black South African artists mutually invested in regional liberation struggles and resistance to South Africa’s apartheid…
Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, known professionally as Hiro, was born on 3 November 1930 in Shanghai, China to Japanese parents. At the end of the Second World War, Hiro’s family returned to Japan from China. It was in 1954 that Wakabayashi made the decision to relocate to America, enrolling at the School of Modern Photography in New…
The Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative was set up in 1980 as an architectural practice and a book group that grew out of the Feminist Design Collective, itself an offshoot of the New Architecture Movement’s feminist group. Active in London from 1981-1994, Matrix was a women’s co-operative with a non-hierarchical structure. The collective worked solely on…
The 20th Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally, will open on 11 June 2021. Vally is the youngest architect to be commissioned for this internationally renowned architecture programme. Her Pavilion design is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging across London. The forms in the Pavilion…
Active between 1974 and 1980, the Combahee River Collective was born from a sense of dissatisfaction that both the feminist movement and civil rights movement did not address the needs of Black women and queer people. The collective joined together in the early 70s, seminally publishing The Combahee River Collective Statement, a key document in…