Vikram Sagar
Projects
A product designer’s job is equal parts scientist, engineer, archivist—their work, the result of years of research and tinkering, may start as one thing and turn into something completely different. No one knows this better than designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, who put in years of combined research into the way people sit. Their most well-known joint production is the Aeron Chair, an ergonomic revolution when it first hit the market in 1994, and now the gold standard for office seating today. But Aeron wasn’t invented out of thin air—Chadwick and Stumpf worked on a number of predecessors that assayed their ideas of elemental chair design.
The Aeron Chair, designed by Stumpf and Chadwick, launched in 1994 and swiftly revolutionized the office furniture industry. It proved pioneering in both ergonomics and material innovation, thanks to its proprietary breathable textile known as Pellicle. This material could flex in multiple directions and was visually elegant enough that it could stay exposed with no additional upholstery, like the standard foam, fabric, or leather found in most office chairs at the time.
Aeron quickly became the new gold standard for work chairs, landing in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Inspired by the Brutalist architecture movement of the mid-20th century, the Brutus collection comprises a dining chair, a lounge chair, a stool and a coffee table cast in lightweight fiber concrete creating a unique surface texture increasing mobility. Each piece is hand painted to create a textured, unique surface. I personally love brutalist design and the use of texture as a key driving force behind what makes a product truly unique.
Lost In The Greens is a residential building designed by award-winning architects, Shibanee and Kamal Sagar. Located in Bangalore, India - Lost in The Greens brings nature into the homes and creates a living environment in which one truly feels "At home".
Inspired by the idea of repurposing materials I had at my disposal, I created a lightfitting using empty perfume bottles to create a warm, colorful glow.
As a continuation of my exploration in upcycling, I put together a lightfitting using hand fans with the idea of trying to create a complex shadow on the wall behind it.
Using waste limestone from construction sites, I glued stone together and then cut them into the shape of "distorted eggs" to create a coffee table for my living room.
Created by young designer, Andrew, from Hong Kong - the Airpods Max frames are an innovative approach to creating something unique that really stands out.
Maison Martin Margiela autumn—winter 1994—95.
Margiela may be an avant-gardist par excellence, but he finds inspiration in the past, reusing old clothes, as well as doing traditional couture work.
Margiela is fascinated not only by the structure of the garments, but also by their history. His extensive use of ‘recovered’ items in his collections has earned him the ‘grunge’ label. Recovery challenges the authenticity of the creation. His ‘flea-market style’ is, in fact, a sophisticated study of traditional tailoring. The difference between Margiela and grunge is that he does not take up old clothes indiscriminately, but does something with them: he recycles them. Margiela restructures the form of the pieces with cut-outs or darts, and dyes them to change colours and patterns. He gives the old, rejected and condemned clothes a new life. Old clothes have an emotional meaning for him, they are witnesses of the past, of life itself. The fact that the ‘new’ old clothes are not always finished (an unsewn hem or a frayed seam) is intentional, because what is unfinished can continue to evolve. The effect is extremely powerful. ‘Recovered’ clothes have an intrinsic value. The garments are unique items — pièces uniques — works of art. That is reflected in the melancholic, untraditional fabrics and the subtle harmony between the materials, colours and light. ‘Pièces uniques’ belong in haute couture and in that sense Martin Margiela comes (very) close to haute couture, even though his is a ‘dissident’ approach.
His passion for old clothes is so extreme that he creates replicas. He observes the exact proportions, sometimes even disproportions of old, hand-made and made-to-measure garments. In that way the deceased wearers of the clothes live on to some extent. He calls replicas ‘reproductions of a series of old garments’. Martin Margiela sees the replicas as ‘original’ pieces, not as designer reinterpretations, as is the case with recycled clothing. As a fashion joke for his Winter collection for 1994-95, he made replicas of Barbie clothes, but enlarged 5.2 times, to human proportions. He adhered to the same sleeve details, finish and relative size of the press studs. The result was a somewhat disconcerting silhouette.
This article (davedye.com/2022/03/29/rem…) talks about Porsche advertisements from the time in great detail and explains why it has become so popular over the years.