Turning a dream into a Compasso d’Oro, the story of Vibram Furoshiki

Tommaso Berra · 5 months ago · Design

The Compasso d’Oro is perhaps the highest international award for industrial design projects, Vibram has managed to win it with its Furoshiki, turning a dream into one of the most relevant projects in the history of technological innovation and design.
Collater.al met Masaya Hashimoto, the designer who participated in the development of the project from its origins, listening to a story that tells a lot about design and its cultural and social role; starting from the traditions of Japan to create a wrapping sole, an innovative concept that can lead to a new behaviour, a new way of understanding shoes.

How did the Vibram Furoshiki project come about?
In 2011 I was working in the design studio of Isao Hosoe, who at that time was collaborating with Vibram on an innovative concept around the future of the sole, one of the ideas was to reduce the amount of moulds for each sole. Usually there are 10 to 12 moulds for each model, and one of the company’s goals was to optimise production time and costs, thus creating a new product that was more sustainable in many ways. Together with Vibram’s R&D team, we therefore began to think about how to integrate multiple numbers in a single mould, a complex research because the upper usually does not fit different numbers. The prototype that turned out to be successful was made with liquid rubber, a transparent sheet and some fabric, from the intuition of wrapping the foot in a sole coupled with fabric. As soon as we put it on, we knew immediately that it worked.

What was it like working on the most technical details of the design, managing to create a beautiful and durable shoe while still pursuing an essential approach to the elements? Is there anything in particular that inspired the design of Vibram Furoshiki?
I work with the Italian methodology of Gio Ponti or Alberto Rosselli, but my master is Isao Hosoe, the culture of furoshiki is connected to the Japanese one. The shape originates from an object-carrying cloth, which historically serves to contain a gift one brings to someone. Furoshiki is a way to protect and reveal a product with surprise. Each furoshiki is related to the content and the season, they are customised according to the occasion or clothing, a concept similar to the one that makes us choose shoes according to our mood, everyone wears the ones that represent them best.

Vibram Furoshiki has transformed a historically anonymous object, which had to give importance to the content, into an inverse mechanism, with the container becoming the object and the content (the foot) not being revealed, so it is anonymous and, what’s more, it adapts to every conformity and type of foot. Vibram’s role was fundamental from the point of view of technological innovation and for the development of the product from a concept to a sole that envelops the foot; the choice of fabrics was also important, some models for example are made together with a company that produces swimwear, the elasticity of their fabric helped us.

Inventing a product for the first time is tiring but fun, you have to think of everything, from the production method through to analysis and sales. It wasn’t difficult because we were working with trained Vibram technicians. Design is a game, you have to combine technology and culture, if design is not fun it becomes boring, you feel the pain. Design is about creating a new behaviour, leading to a new behaviour. Vibram Furoshiki are this, no longer an object that has to be worn but an object that has to be wrapped, already the gesture is different.

“I have learnt that in the West we try to reason with our heads, but the most important and rewarding decision-making is done with our bellies. The modern world reasons with its head, but the body has a longer historical experience, and the experience it has accumulated comes from deeper needs, related to fear and emotionality. It is important to lower the level of emotion and emotionality so as not to create problems.
In design and creativity the greatest source of energy is emotion, if you deny emotion the design becomes flat. So you have to regulate yourself and channel emotion intelligently to the end consumer. The risk is to do something crazy. Excessive creativity is fine for physicists like Einstein, but he needed it to get away from logic”

The figure of the stylist has been replaced in recent years by the concept of the designer, what do you think about this change in the way of defining who creates a collection, can it lose the sense of design, of the technical study of materials and forms?
In history there are designers who could have won the Compasso D’Oro, such as Giorgio Armani or Coco Chanel, because they created with innovation. Chanel created the idea of a modern woman entering the working society, Armani brought the quality of tailoring into the industrial world. There are fashion products that could win great design awards, but now the fashion world has flattened out a bit, because designing also involves a lot of risk.
Today the market is saturated, before you looked at the world of design in relation to the innovations it proposed, now you look at the philosophy of the brand and its concepts, things on which you don’t have too much entrepreneurial risk but which help you to withstand the wave of products you are called upon to produce. Design has changed from an entrepreneurial point of view and this has also changed the approach to production, it is not easy to come up with innovations.

When you look at Vibram Furoshiki do you feel more fashion design or product design?
Of product, because the product is precisely ‘product’, that is, something created and sold. If I am a cook, I am a product designer, I cook and sell, but first of all I think of it according to the needs of my guests. The designer must accommodate requests and pamper customers in some way, with the tools I have at my disposal.

Did you expect the success of the Vibram Furoshiki when it was designed? Did the 2018 Compasso D’Oro help open up the model to the general public?
Every project I do I try to bring it to the same level, then for me the judgement of the outside world is important, to understand what people think to know if that idea can have potential. I can’t understand it before.
With Furoshiki we also won two important awards, DFA Design For Asia from the Hong Kong Design Center and the DIA Design Intelligence Award. In the latter Vibram was invited as a European project, which was a very hard award to get. These two awards were important because it is the first time that a European shoe approaches all the diversity of feet, the Asian foot shape is different from the Western one and shoes do not fit well. I am sure the shoe and sole culture will change in the coming years.

Tags design

Design

Turning a dream into a Compasso d’Oro, the story of Vibram Furoshiki

1 · 4

2 · 4

3 · 4

4 · 4

Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North

Tommaso Berra · 5 days ago · Photography

Isabella Ståhl is a Swedish photographer who found herself rediscovering the landscapes of her childhood after traveling all over the world, starting from Stockholm to New York, Paris and Berlin. The North represents the cardinal point from which she initially moved, returning once she honed her artistic maturity, which allowed her to look at the rural, melancholy landscapes of her childhood in a new light.
In Isabella Ståhl’s photos, nature with its vast fields and wild, untamed animals shrouded in fog, which also hides everything else in the landscape like a white blanket, dominates. The extraordinary loneliness of the compositions and the melancholy that enters straight into the viewers’ eyes are two of the main characteristics of the work of Ståhl, an established photographer who has collaborated with some of the most important international brands and publishers during her artistic career. Her ability is not only to be able to build a story behind the moments she chooses to shoot, but also to return like physical sensations of warmth, coldness, and chills that make everyone who stops to look at the photographs a protagonist.

Isabella Ståhl was recently a guest artist in the group exhibition ImageNation in New York, March 10-12, 2023, curated by Martin Vegas.

Tags photography

Photography

Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North

1 · 15

2 · 15

3 · 15

4 · 15

5 · 15

6 · 15

7 · 15

8 · 15

9 · 15

10 · 15

11 · 15

12 · 15

13 · 15

14 · 15

15 · 15

Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

Tommaso Berra · 4 days ago · Photography

One only has to listen to the conversations that arise inside Cecilie Mengel‘s head to imagine how they might be represented photographically. The Danish artist and now resident in New York makes shots that are inner dialogues born from the stimuli she herself receives from her surroundings and the people with whom she experiences very everyday moments.
The result is an artistic production that is marked by a strong variety in subjects and settings, as well as in style, sometimes documentary, other times closer to a certain posed and theatrical photography. They range from shots stolen in the home during a conversation to details of a can of Heinz sauce found in the glove compartment of a cab, all reconstructing a common, everyday story.
Cecilie Mengel’s technique also reflects this same idea of variety. In fact, the artist combines digital and analog photography, in other cases post production adds graphic marks to the images. The lights are sometimes natural other times forcedly created with flash, creating a sense of the whole that is perhaps less homogeneous but rich in personal suggestions and recounts.

Cecilie Mengel was recently a guest artist in the group exhibition ImageNation in New York, March 10-12, 2023 curated by Martin Vegas.

Tags photography

Photography

Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

1 · 13

2 · 13

3 · 13

4 · 13

5 · 13

6 · 13

7 · 13

8 · 13

9 · 13

10 · 13

11 · 13

12 · 13

13 · 13

Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

Giorgia Massari · 4 days ago · Photography

A delicate, almost transparent and imperceptible veil floats before our eyes and filters reality, which becomes subjective and never absolute. The philosopher Schopenhauer called it “the veil of Maya,” that impediment that prohibits man from experiencing reality, that deludes us into thinking we know Truth. Photographer Diego Dominici places it between the viewer and his subjects, transforming it into the actual protagonist of the Atman and Red Clouds series. The figures – men and women – are trapped in the veil, struggling with it trying to escape, clinging tightly to it, trying to penetrate it; in other cases, instead, they welcome it, lying down and conforming to its persuading softness. The viewer is only allowed to catch a glimpse of the shapes of their naked bodies and their bones imprinted on the surface, in a dance of light and shadow that convey sensuality and loneliness at the same time.

Diego Dominici attempts to break the two-dimensionality of photography, creating two planes of depth: the one dictated by the fabric and its ripples and the one in which the subject is placed. The viewer’s eye is led to move continuously over the surface, trying to overcome it and thus reach the subject and its forms therefore, in other words, the Truth.
The analogy with human psychology is stated by the photographer who wants to “rip apart two-dimensionality to investigate the tangles of human interiority.” As in his shots, human beings can choose to be lulled by the veil of illusion, be caressed by a fictitious reality and stand firm on their point of view, or they can choose to break it, thus reaching the other side and look at reality from another perspective. The fabric, or rather the veil, becomes the emblem of relational barriers, those obstacles that come between us and others, which prevent us from understanding the motives of others and create unbridgeable distances. At the same time, the veil becomes part of us, a kind of wrapping that envelops and shapes us, preventing us from going beyond it. But, as Schopenhauer said, the veil of Maya must be torn down, ripped open like a Fountain’s canvas, human must shed the envelope like a snake changing its skin, in order to open up to the other. After all, what is love if not “the cancellation of the ego, the collapse of all conscious discrimination and the renunciation of all methodical choice?” said Salvador Dali in My Secret Life. Diego Dominici’s works thus invite deep intimate reflection but, thanks to his carefully curated aesthetics, they can also simply satisfy the eye and appear as sensual works, in which the veil becomes a prelude to intimate pleasure.

Tags photography

Photography

Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

1 · 8

2 · 8

3 · 8

4 · 8

5 · 8

6 · 8

7 · 8

8 · 8

6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith

Tommaso Berra · 1 day ago · Photography

He was first a great teacher, educator and essayist, then also a great photographer, who linked his career to portraiture and later to the world of fashion. Over the course of his career Rodney Smith (1947-2016) depicted meticulously constructed, humorous, paradoxical, romantic and funny scenes, which will now be collected in a volume entitled “Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith,” containing more than two hundred photographs – some previously unpublished – just acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The project and the Getty acquisition trace a creative trajectory that has made fantasy and elegance a true photographic strand. Viewers are invited to activate a comparison with the Surrealist René Magritte, the painter who comes closest to Rodney Smith in themes and subject matter, as Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau describes Smith: “…like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, his photographs lead us down the rabbit hole to a fantastical place that is just beyond our reach but one intended to inspire us to be better versions of ourselves.“

Collater.al has selected six of Rodney Smith’s most beautiful photographs, A Leap of Faith, the impression is that of frames from a fantasy film or scenes from a great costume musical, with the protagonists dancing and kissing over the roof of a yellow New York taxi cab.