Anyone who thinks the furniture industry is a man’s world is mistaken: young female designers are conquering the market with innovative designs. Armed with excellent training, ambition and creativity, this emerging generation spots and develops trends, and is setting new standards in interior design.
The imm cologne Pure Talents Contest offers up-and-coming talent the opportunity to present their prototypes to an interested audience and is seen as a career springboard for young creatives.
Elisa Strozyk took part in the Pure Talents Contest in 2010 with her Wooden Carpet and achieved what many young (female) designers, dream of: she found a producer for her design. Böwer, a north German company with a long tradition, manufactures her Wooden Carpets, made from a material as unusual as it is pleasant. Their unique feature is their flexible construction: they can be rolled up and shaped into objects in which they take on a sculptural appearance. Strozyk studied at some of the best design schools. Her portfolio lists Paris, Berlin and London, where she gained her master’s in Future Textile Design from the prestigious Central Saint Martins.
Carina Deuschl works in the fields of product, interior and furniture design, and caused a sensation when she appeared in this year’s Pure Talents Contest. She reimagined the bathtub as a static object by developing a portable construction – and redefined bathing. XTEND is made of carbon fibre, weighs just 7 kg and folds away to save space. Filled with water, the soft-padded, machine-washable fabric inlay provides more than just a new bathing experience – it is a model of skilled craftsmanship. No wonder, then, that Deuschl has received several awards for it.
Like Strozyk and Deuschl, the French designer Aurelie Hoegy featured among the participants in the Pure Talents Contest. In 2016, she presented her striking, prize-winning design Dancers, a kind of hybrid between seating furniture and sculpture that questions whether design always has to be functional. Hoegy transcends the paradigmatic statement “Form follows function” and demonstrates that design can be combined with other disciplines, such as art. The static and the mobile, stability and fragility merge in a single object in Dancers. Far removed from conventional objects for the home, Dancers challenges perceptions and prompts us to think about how we see furniture.
Very much the opposite of Hoegy’s work, Anna Badur’s products appear delicate and restrained. Often an unusual idea is hidden behind an attractive design, as is the case in Drawn by Nature: here wind is used to paint textiles. It blows blue pigments over the wet material, producing unforeseeable effects. Badur works with serendipity, playing with unconventional methods, and achieves results that are as aesthetically exquisite as they are unexpected.
Rendering the unusual and the unseen visible and tangible, uniting design with other disciplines, reinterpreting it, understanding it and putting it into practice – this is no easy task but all the more exciting for it. And it is one that this generation of young female designers has courageously and successfully accepted.
Article and images courtesy imm cologne.
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