Lip Service

OUROBOROS

In 1974, Enzo Mari published Autoprogettazione , a DIY handbook offering radical access to furniture design. Today, those very pieces appear in uptown showrooms and high street fashion retailers. Coveted objects, sold back to consumers at a premium by virtue of heritage and exclusivity. Designed to be democratic, self-assembling projects which critique an impenetrable code of luxury, they have now become its symbolic agents. What began as communist ideal turns into capitalist social cue. Up can become down. Right can become left. ‘What’s not’ can become ‘What’s hot’.

How we see things is not fixed. Associations as above, can, and often do, make an about face. A 180. Turned, twisted, co-opted and contorted by culture and commerce, often with design as agent. Conceived as its own contradiction, Lip Service is a research project come semiotic self-enquiry. A practical op-ed unfolding in real time. A product that pulls itself apart in public. A brand that performs its own construction and contradiction. A meditation on the medium and métier of design. One part consumer good, one part conceptual loop. It knows the codes, wears them like a skin, then pulls them inside out. A snake eating its own tail, gleefully. Akin to a collection by Yohji Yamamoto or Rei Kawakubo—the toile presented as purest form, the linings and stitching reversed and revealed. It’s about position and how you look at the very thing you’re holding. A perpetual paradoxical perspective.