Hasta La Ideas

Adjacent to Anthropologie King’s Road is a little companion gallery. The current exhibition features the elegant “taxidermy” dogs of Donya Coward. 

We received this video from Etsy last week. It is about Aysegul & Sebahat Cetinkaya, a mother/daughter team from Bolu, Turkey who run an Etsy store (irregularexpressions.etsy.com) and make accessories with a  crochet hook, needle, some thread, and beads.

Their work is breathtaking and is now on my covet list. But, the video is about more than their craft; it’s about the relationship between a mother and daughter, one that is both singularly unique, and yet somehow also universal in nature.

I come from a family of women who have created a stunning handwork legacy. My Grandmother could walk through a department store and recreate a coat she saw. My Aunt and I are linked through the creation of handmade Teddy bears. My Mother is a prolific knitter and has blessed us with many handknits. One recent Christmas morning, Mom and I each presented the other with a handknit cowl.

I am humbled by the talents of the women in my family and blessed to be able to pass these skills to my children. For us, handwork and creativity really are the ties that bind.

Founder Patrizio Miceli on the recipe to his Parisian agency’s success

If “al dente” is synonymous with perfectly cooked Italian pasta, then Patrizio Miceli has chosen the right name for the communications agency he launched in 2004. Al dente has built some of the most creatively compelling advertising campaigns of recent, for luxury brands like Dior, Juliette Has a Gun, Thierry Mugler, Costume National and Hudson Jeans.

Part hedonist, part refined connoisseur, Miceli is known as a true Italian who cooks pasta for prestigious clients and throws lavish parties like the recent 500-guest carnival for Colette. Curious about the secrets behind the success of his Parisian agency, we sat down with Miceli to learn more.

Your campaigns are all so visually gripping. Yet the website has no interactivity, no links, just plain text&#8212is that part of the Al Dente mystique?

A website is not where things happen! We don’t believe that institutional, dedicated main websites are the places to be anymore. We advise our clients not to focus on this. The proper places to be for advertising is to fish were the fish are: on the Web, on Facebook, on blogs, on YouTube. You must use networks and let the messages circulate. An institutional website must be the relay station of the expression of a brand through a wide range of various media. The whole has to be inter-connected.

As for our website, we are at the service of our clients, and as such, we have to be able to understand and promote their identity, and therefore our own identity must be sober and transparent. Our motto is: be on time at the right place with the right message to the right target. This know-how is our signature. Another way to communicate about ourselves is to organize pasta parties. We are thinking of making a special sauce from the house!

We can also show what we are capable of, such as what we did in 2009, when the economic crisis hit all of us in the field of advertising and communication. We launched a call for a motto making fun of the crisis. The authors of the best motto earned €100 rewards and we printed them on T-shirts. This campaign “Aldentelacrise” was met with great success. We sold about 20,000 pieces within six months at places like Colette in Paris.

Tell us more about the agency, the team and methods.

We work on positioning, branding and innovative campaigns. We provide global campaigns for our clients by telling stories through various media, written or digital, and by taking advantage of the wide range of technologies we now have at hand. We try to reset long-established brands in their tendencies. Our goal is to catch currents and trends. We provide a monthly report on digital and social trends to our clients, but this comes along with a deep comprehension of the identity of the brands we are in charge of. We spend a long time researching the history of the brands.

A good illustration of our creative process and methods is the pinball we invented for Dior‘s “Mise en Dior” necklace. The brief was to conceive a campaign illustrating the spirit of Dior’s jewelry through this particular semi-precious necklace. We were trying hard to find the twist that would make it. Someone in the agency was singing this song “Comme une boule de flipper” (like a bullet in a pinball). That was it! Then we embedded and quoted all the codes of Dior, like the medallion chair which is the starting point of the game. The music, a re-mix of classical Mozart, is part of the color of the atmosphere we have tried to put in it. It was so unusual and audacious, when you think of it, for a brand like Dior to campaign under the song of a pinball! At the end, it got the highest congratulations from top executives and Bernard Arnault himself, and we’ve counted more than 110,000 views on YouTube since it launched on the site in October 2011.

The Dior pinball, Thierry Mugler’s “Dream Machine”, among others—these campaigns consist of interactive games. Is participation the key to identification with a brand or a product? What does the playful dimension add to this involvement?

This is part of our crowd-sourcing strategy. We believe that one of the best mediums to carry and diffuse information is people. It is much more efficient than anything else. Mainly because you trust the opinion of your friends and network more than any journalist’s or expert’s advice not to mention ads and brands themselves! Besides, this buzz has the advantage of being much more cost effective than traditional advertising.

So the main challenge for us is to conceive appealing campaigns able to catch the attention and interest of opinion leaders, with respect to the brand identity. We believe that playing is one of the best ways to participate and feel involved, because the pleasure is in the game.

Are there technical challenges involved with that level of interactivity?

For the “Dream Machine” we created for Thierry Mugler’s Angel fragrance, we imagined the first multi-media application available on Facebook, iPhone and iPad. To create this app, allowing visitors to compose their own dream with sound and images out of the selection of five keywords, we had to go through an impressive process. We first conducted a poll among 50 people to analyze the words they would use to describe their dreams. Then we had to translate these words into images and create an algorithm able to deal with the five selected words and produce a film (the dream of each visitor) by digging through 250 video sequences and assembling the selection. More than 50 million combinations were possible. The voice was added through text-to-speech technology that allowed us to offer a personalized message along with the dream to every user. Launched in September 2011, the campaign drew more than 100,000 users.

Is that what you call “chic buzz”? What is the connection with luxury? And what is the role of art in your creations?

To be efficient, the buzz has to start like a whispered secret. The more the message seems to be out of reach, hard to get, rare, the more precious it is. The buzz also must reach the right people, hit the right network.

Being chic is telling a story as disconnected as possible from the product you’re trying to promote and sell. In order to create a “chic buzz” we often resort to art, which enables us to be really subversive, off-beat and unconventional with elegance and style.

For example, the campaign we made in September 2011 for the new Costume National fragrance “Pop Collection” pays tribute to Andy Warhol’s famous screen tests with ten contemporary artists and personalities that we shot with a Super-8 camera. The quotation is obvious, allowing us to introduce self-derision and humor, but the result remains very stylish.

But I think the most cutting-edge campaign we have ever made is for CNC SS 2012 campaign. It is called “Disrupted Generation” and uses cuts from Tumblr, data-bending, recycled pictures and distortions.

What’s next for Al Dente?

Aside from the campaigns for new fragrances by Chloé Parfums and Nina Ricci, we’re preparing the next campaign for Hudson jeans starring Georgia Jagger. We also keep going on with CNC. For their new campaign we will play on the self-portrait, with people invited to make their own from their cell phones. And…we are to open a branch in New York!

The satellite fair returns for its second iteration

When we attended Wanted Design‘s inaugural debut during NYC Design Week 2011, we knew that the fledgling venture was a force to be reckoned with. While ICFF remains the main attraction, Wanted Design drew our attention for bringing American and New York-centered design into conversation with the dominance of the Milan and Stockholm Design Week crowd. Spearheaded by French founders Claire Pijoulat and Odile Hainaut, the satellite fair has grown from meager origins to include 50 exhibitors alongside a multitude of talks, workshops, presentations and social spaces.

This year’s Wanted Design will be returning to take over 22,000 square feet of the Terminal Warehouse (former home of the historic nightclub “Tunnel“) as designers both domestic and foreign gather to show their wares and spread ideas. Focused on the city’s creative community, the response from last year’s event bodes well for the four days of design celebration to come this May.

Pijoulat and Hainaut created Wanted Design in part to combat the major shortcomings of design fairs—namely, the lack of interaction between creatives. With this in mind, the 2012 event will feature a conversation series as well as a stream of workshops with eminent designers and craftsmen. Manhattan Neon—a decades-old vendor of neon works—will be hosting a neon-centric workshop. An exhibition entitled “New Finnish Design” celebrates Helsinki as the 2012 World Design Capital, and 3M Architectural Markets will be presenting an experimental installation called “Lighfalls” in partnership with Todd Bracher.

Also on tap is the “Design Students Challenge“, which calls on students from six design schools in the U.S. and France to build a lighting prototype in the span of three days. Using one material, one concept tool and one fabrication tool, the students’ creations will then be judged by the public and a panel of design professionals. Focusing on the Americas, highlights from the fair include a group exhibition of Brazilian design curated by Objeto Brasil as well “America Made Me”, an exhibition that bridges fashion, art and design curated by Bernhardt Design.

As with last year, the 2012 exhibition will feature a pop-up shop curated by iGet.it with domestic furniture, accessories and objects for sale in-store and online. Cafe Intramuros, sponsored by Intramuros Magazine, will be serving La Colombe Coffee and is one of a few spaces offering creatives a chance to sit, meet and discuss ideas.

There will of course be some stellar design objects premiering and showing at the fair. While many of the specifics remain to be seen, major events include a book launch from Rizzoli, a showcase of next-generation designers hosted by Dwell and DWR as well as numerous new products and prototypes.

Wanted Design

18-21 May 2012

Terminal Warehouse

11 Avenue between 27th and 28th

Documenting designs of the bookshelf revolution

Since 2007, Alex Johnson has kept a daily record of the closely followed world of bookshelf design with his blog simply titled “Bookshelf”. Faced with the e-book revolution and the downsizing of physical storage, the furniture staple remains a beloved component of the home, evolving from floor piles and mundane shelves to be embraced as a design object reflecting the spirit of the collector as well as the books themselves. Johnson’s new book, also called “Bookshelf“, curates the contemporary state of the household item as both a design and storage piece.

Admitting that e-books are certainly here to stay, Johnson points out that there exists a difference between book readers and book owners. While the former is content to consume the information and move on, the latter enjoys the experience of possessing, displaying and ultimately sharing tomes.

As affordable furnishing and democratic design bring creative solutions into homes everywhere, the demand for elegant bookshelves continues to rise. Minimalist or cluttered, asymmetrical or linear, the design of the bookshelf dictates the feel of the room it inhabits. Designers build from this premise, creating pieces that reflect the practical, spacial and aesthetic needs of book owners.

Johnson’s selections are accompanied by short biographies and web addresses to find and purchase each of the pieces. His work provides examples of the evolution of the single shelf, the incorporation of bookshelves into furniture and the departure from traditional box storage, among other trends. The more elegant examples include “Bike Shelf“, a minimalist, dual-purpose option for bookworm cyclists, as well as “Between Lines“, an amalgamation of intersecting letters made of steel and rubber that houses creative arrangements of books.

“Bookshelf” is available for purchase from Thames & Hudson and on Amazon. See more images of the book in our slideshow.