An interview with the Design Museum's Women Fashion Power graphics creator
When the Design Museum planned its Women Fashion Power show, which opened last month, it was very much keen to take the “women” component seriously, appointing them to take care of both the exhibition design and graphics for the show. As such, it drafted perhaps one of the most famous women in design’s practices, Zaha Hadid Architects for the exhibition design; with Lucienne Roberts and her team (Dave Shaw and John McGill) at LucienneRoberts+ creating the graphics.
Design Museum head of curatorial, Donna Loveday, says: “This exhibition celebrates the achievement of women – and it ranges wide to do so – presenting women in politics, business, culture and fashion…it provides a platform for those women to express their views about fashion and how they use fashion in their professional roles. It seemed absolutely right to commission a woman to design the 3D and a woman to design the 2D elements of the exhibition also.”
The graphics looked to not only aid the navigation of the show and enhance the narrative it presents, but also to reinforce the idea of the convergence of the “women, fashion and power” of the show’s title, according to Donna. As such, Lucienne and her team created a clock-like device. Donna says: “Their clock-like title treatment emphasises the show’s multi-layered, historical and contemporary structure while the use of colour to denote different areas of the exhibition and highlight text, and the development of a navigational map to show visitors where they are at any point are particular successes.”
We chatted feminism, pink and Russian Constructivism with Lucienne to find out more about designing the graphics for such a powerful show.
How did you initially approach creating the designs for a fashion-based show?
I’d worked with the Design Museum but we’d never done a fashion-orientated show before. It threw me a bit as I’d count myself as a feminist, so it’s a strange relationship with fashion. The show has a strong historical component as well as contemporary things – it goes from the corset, which from a feminist perspective is a dreadful thing and works all the way through the flappers of 1920s to punk, so because it’s so wide ranging it was really interesting from a concept point of view.
How did you work with Zaha Hadid Architects in creating the graphics?
We’d never worked with a big architectural practice before, so it was sort of a gradual thing feeling our way together – it’s quite rare that they work with graphic designers. We very much tried to reflect what they were doing with their plan, and what it looked like from above, which is two explosions. We were keen the graphics were equally dynamic, so we took their plan and upended it on the wall in an abstract form and extended it to make it more dramatic. The clock means you can read “women”, “fashion” and “power” in any order to show how they relate to one another.
Tell us more about selecting the materials and colours for the show about powerful women…
We use a lot of perspex as it has that assuredness. It’s so manmade, and in a way that plays on the whole idea of clothing – it’s a false thing. We’d never used something organic like wood – it had to be shiny and brittle. We deliberately put the word “women” in blue – there’s no way we could have done it in pink!
How do the graphics aid the navigation of the show?
The 3D structures were conceived to hold a variety of content with a mix of walls, cases and plinths juxtaposed together. In a similar way the tabs and spurs on the graphic panels reflect the typography they contain, indicating its hierarchy and meaning as a way to aid understanding and navigation.
How did you go about researching the show?
We looked at what Donna wanted to show. She was really keen to have a reproduction of a painting of Eve at the beginning on a light box – it’s such a brilliant idea as you could say she was the first woman to be clothed, it rooted the show and made you think a bit. We looked at Zaha Hadid’s work, too, and Zaha had recently commented on Malevich’s influence on her work. Russian Constructivism was inspirational.
Women Fashion Power is at the Design Museum until 26 April 2015.
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About the Author
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Emily joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in the summer of 2014 after four years at Design Week. She is particularly interested in graphic design, branding and music. After working It's Nice That as both Online Editor and Deputy Editor, Emily left the company in 2016.