The Design Museum 2018 exhibition programme

Major exhibition on fashion legend Azzedine Alaïa to take place in May 2018. The exhibition has been in development for the past year and will go ahead as planned following the designer’s untimely passing in November 2017.

Landmark exhibition on the changing nature of the home featuring newly commissioned installations to open in November 2018. 

Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008 - 2018 Dates: 28.03.18 – 12.08.18 Media preview: 27.03.18 

This has been a politically volatile decade. The global financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath have shaken people’s confidence in the prevailing order. The political landscape is increasingly polarised between left- and right-wing agendas, with the reaction against the establishment culminating in the surprise results of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election. Other areas of the world have witnessed similar upheavals, with events such as the Arab Spring and the refugee crisis having far-reaching political implications.

Fuelling these events has been an extraordinary proliferation of graphic messages, from political posters and protest placards to internet memes. People are more politically engaged than they have been for years, and the rise of social media has meant that they can disseminate political iconography as never before. Type and image are being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages, both reinforcing and undermining authority across the globe. Hope to Nope will explore the diverse methods that have been used to construct and communicate political messages over the past ten years. As traditional media rubs shoulders with the hash-tag and the meme, never has graphic design been more critical in giving everyone a political voice.

Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier Dates: 10.05.18 – 07.10.18 Media preview: 09.05.18 

Azzedine Alaïa was recognised throughout his life as a master couturier who expressed the timeless beauty of the female form in the most refined degree of haute couture. For the past year, the Design Museum has been working closely with Azzedine Alaïa in planning an exhibition that explores his career and creative process. Following his untimely passing on 18 November 2017, the Design Museum will now present this unique exhibition planned by Alaia himself exploring his passion and energy for fashion as he himself intended it to be seen. Celebrated for his mastery of cut, fit, tailoring, of innovative forms and materials, Alaïa designed by draping and sculpting directly on the human frame. He also meticulously cut all his own patterns, which was virtually without equivalent in the increasingly depersonalised world of fashion houses.

Azzedine Alaïa, a notorious perfectionist, would work on a single outfit for many years if necessary before releasing it to the public. His body of work will remain a statement for exacting craftsmanship. He employed traditional techniques whilst embracing the latest technological advancements to further develop clothes that had never been made before. The exhibition will present more than 60 outstanding examples of Alaïa’s craft from the past thirty-five years, selected personally by Monsieur Alaïa and guest curator Mark Wilson (Chief Curator of the Groninger Museum, NL).

The exhibition will also integrate specially commissioned architectural elements by leading artists and designers with whom the couturier entertained a long-term creative dialogue, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin Grcic, Marc Newson, Kris Ruhs, and Tatiana Trouvé.

Beazley Designs of the Year Dates: 12.09.18 – 06.01.19 Media preview: 11.09.18 

Now in its eleventh year, Beazley Designs of the Year is the Design Museum annual celebration of the most original and exciting products, concepts and designers in the world today. This international awards programme showcases design projects from the previous 12 months, across six categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Product, Graphics, and Transport. Design experts, practitioners and academics from across the world are asked by the Design Museum to nominate potential projects, from which the museum selects over 70 designs for its major annual exhibition. A specially selected jury chooses a winner for each category and an overall winner.

HOME Dates: 07.11.18 – 10.03.19 Media preview: 06.11.18 

This is an exhibition about the idea of home. Home is where people engage design in the most fundamental aspects of their lives, and yet it is clear that 'home' is not quite what it used to be. The concept of home is being reshaped by economic and technological forces. Unaffordable prices, the spread of connected devices and the sharing economy are creating a new domesticity – one that is more nomadic, more productive, less private.

The exhibition asks: what is the future of the home? How is our idea of domestic life changing? From furniture to robotics, from the sharing economy to nomadic lifestyles, the exhibition explores new forms of domestic behaviour and the designs that facilitate them. It combines seminal design pieces with commissioned installations that speculate about new ways of living. From London to Hong Kong, home life emerges as adaptable, mechanized and occasionally uncanny.

Free displays at the Design Museum 

Design Ventura February 2018 

Design Ventura challenges students in years 9, 10 and 11 to design a new product for the Design Museum shop. Design Ventura, the Design Museum’s flagship learning project, is an opportunity for students to develop design thinking, creative and business capabilities and employability skills. The project was launched in 2010 in partnership with Deutsche Bank, as part of the bank’s youth engagement programme, Born to Be, and has seen over 47,000 students in 700 schools participate.

Designers in Residence March 2018 – February 2019 

Designers in Residence is the Design Museum’s annual programme which provides a platform to celebrate new and emerging designers at an early stage in their career. The Designers in Residence programme provides young designers with time and space to research and consider new ways of developing their work. Each year four designers are selected from an open call to take part; recent alumni include Giles Miller, Asif Khan, Bethan Laura Wood and Adam Nathaniel Furman. Each designer will work in the dedicated Designers in Residence studio on the top floor of the Design Museum and display their work to the public. The theme for 2018 will be DWELLING.

LOEWE Craft Prize 2018 4 May – 17 June 
 
In 2016, the LOEWE FOUNDATION launched the international annual LOEWE Craft Prize to showcase and celebrate newness, excellence and artistic merit in modern craftsmanship. Aiming to acknowledge the importance of craft in today’s culture and recognise artisans whose talent, vision and will to innovate will set a standard for the future; LOEWE Creative Director Jonathan Anderson conceived the initiative inspired by LOEWE’s beginnings as a craft cooperative in 1846. Featuring the nominees of the 2018 edition, this exhibition seeks to reflect the merits of modern craftsmanship. The imagination, diversity, and techniques on display will attest to the crucial role artisans have in the ongoing construction of cultural heritage.

Designer Maker User Permanent 

The Design Museum has the UK's only collection devoted exclusively to contemporary design and architecture. Designer Maker User features almost 1000 items of twentieth and twenty-first century design viewed through the angles of the designer, manufacturer and user, including a crowdsourced wall. The free-to-visit permanent display combines architecture, product design, technology, transport and fashion in an exhibition that investigates the form, function and meaning of the world around us. Designer Maker User in partnership with Jaguar Land Rover Ends.

PRESS ENQUIRIES: Jordan Lewis, Design Museum Press and PR Manager E: Jordan.Lewis@designmuseum.org T: +44 (0)20 3862 5914

Notes to editors: The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design, its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects including Paul Smith, Zaha Hadid, Jonathan Ive, Miuccia Prada, Frank Gehry, Eileen Gray and Dieter Rams. On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, west London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.

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