誰是“老佛爺”拉格斐 ？他是一眾奢侈品牌的領銜設計師，也是幽默風趣的紳士。作為時尚界辨識度最高的傳奇人物，他卻只想消失在貓身後。這裡是拉格斐在2015年與時報的一次對談 。
卡爾·拉格斐，攝於2017年。當大多數同齡人都已退休去遊艇或鄉村莊園享樂時，80多歲的他平均每年設計14個新系列。 Patrick Kovarik/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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•有“老佛爺”之稱的時尚界傳奇人物卡爾·拉格斐(Karl Lagerfeld)去世 ，享年85歲。拉格斐是香奈兒和芬迪長期以來的創意總監，並擁有自己的獨立品牌。他是20世紀和21世紀中最多產的設計師，堪稱全球奢侈時尚行業的締造者。
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Karl Lagerfeld ließ sich nie vom Modezirkus verrückt machen. Seine Worte waren nicht immer nett, aber auf unnachahmliche Art ehrlich.
讓Google翻譯成英文：Karl Lagerfeld never let the fashion circus drive him crazy. His words were not always nice, but honest in an inimitable way.
翻成中文： Karl Lagerfeld從不讓時尚馬戲團讓他瘋狂。 他的話並不總是很好，但以無法模仿的方式誠實。
2011年3月，拉格斐在巴黎，為香奈兒展示秋冬系列女裝。 Benoit Tessier/Reuters
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商業與經濟
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• “老佛爺”之後，香奈兒、芬迪的下一步往何處去 ？幾十年來，這位設計師一直主導著時尚界兩大知名品牌的創意領域。如今，在全球奢侈品市場日益動蕩之際，他們必鬚麵對後拉格斐時代的未來。
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Jonathan Barnbrook: ‘My work became a crusade against everything that was functional’
British graphic designer and typographer best known for his work with David Bowie and Damien Hirst
The Bauhaus has always dominated my design thinking. Initially, I was absolutely against everything it stood for. As you do when you’re young, my work became a crusade against everything that was “functional”. I immersed myself in postmodernist theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard and playful design groups such as Memphis, creating layouts that were intentionally illegible and full of decoration for the sake of it.
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Karl Otto Lagerfeld was a German creative director, artist, photographer, and caricaturist living in Paris. He was known as the creative director of the French luxury fashion house Chanel, as well as creative director of the Italian fur and leather goods fashion house Fendi and his own eponymous fashion label. Wikipedia
JUST IN: Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director of CHANEL 香奈兒 and Fendi has died.
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Memphis Group
The Memphis Group was an influential Italian design and architecture movement of the 1980s.
The group was founded by Ettore Sottsass on 11 December 1980 , and resolved to meet again with their designs in February 1981. The result was a highly-acclaimed debut at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair. The group disbanded in 1988.
Named after the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the movement was a reaction against the post- Bauhaus "black box" designs of the 1970s and had a sense of humour that was lacking at the time in design. Prepared to mix 20th century styles, colours and materials, it positioned itself as a fashion rather than an academic movement, and hoped to erase the International Style where post-modernism had failed.
While designers such as Philippe Starck were influenced by Memphis, the continuing rise of minimalism in the 1990s saw a return to seriousness.
The group was founded by Ettore Sottsass on 11 December 1980 , and resolved to meet again with their designs in February 1981. The result was a highly-acclaimed debut at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair. The group disbanded in 1988.
Named after the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the movement was a reaction against the post- Bauhaus "black box" designs of the 1970s and had a sense of humour that was lacking at the time in design. Prepared to mix 20th century styles, colours and materials, it positioned itself as a fashion rather than an academic movement, and hoped to erase the International Style where post-modernism had failed.
While designers such as Philippe Starck were influenced by Memphis, the continuing rise of minimalism in the 1990s saw a return to seriousness.
References
- Article about the Memphis Group (http://www.design-
technology.org/memphis1.htm) - Guardian article about the impact of Memphis (http://www.guardian.
co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0, 1169,671778,00.html ) Love it or loathe it?The Memphis group changed the face of modern design. But was it for the better, asks Jonathan Glancey
Thursday September 6, 2001
The GuardianFor young designers at the beginning of the 1980s, Memphis was a revelation. Now in their 40s, these same designers speak of this wilfully provocative and short-lived design group with a mixture of reverence and repulsion. Founded by the Milanese designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, it incited designers of everyday objects - from office chairs to buildings via wallpaper and vases - to break away from clean-cut mainstream modern European design. Nathalie du Pasquier, one of the Memphis team, describes it as "a way of life, of transferring into the world of the western home the culture of rock music, travel and a certain excess". However ephemeral, Memphis certainly had an effect. Introduced to the world at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair, where it stole the show, Memphis was the major influence on Philippe Starck, today the world's best known and most imitated designer. Those wacky hotel lobbies for Ian Schrager in Miami, New York and Hong Kong, and that best-selling lemon-squeezer, have more than a bit of Memphis about them.Yet if you visit the new Memphis show at the Design Museum in London, you may be disappointed by what you see. Lots of brightly coloured, neo-1950s plastic laminates covering everything from crazy sideboards to bonkers beds. Was this gimcrack stuff really so influential? Had the brown-and-orange 1970s been so boring that product design had to descend into these cartoon capers?
Many designers, though, still talk of Memphis in the way that rock musicians of the same age speak of the Clash and Blondie. Jasper Morrison, a cool minimalist and one of Britain's most respected product designers, was at Kingston Polytechnic at the time. He went to the first Memphis show in 1981. "It was the weirdest feeling - you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, but also freed by this sort of total rule-breaking. I came back to college and immediately did my one and only Memphis piece, which hopefully has now disappeared forever."
Colin Burn was studying industrial design: "It rocked my world. Seeing the Memphis work had the same effect on my perception of design that listening to the Ramones a few years earlier had on my thinking about music. But it looks dated now and it's remarkably hard to remember how shocking it all was back then."
Far more enthusiastic are collectors such as Karl Lagerfeld, the Paris-based fashion designer. "It was love at first sight. I'd just got an apartment in Monte Carlo and I could only imagine it in Memphis. Now it seems very 1980s, but the mood will come back. The pretensions of minimalism made it difficult for Memphis in the 1990s, but I think Sottsass is one of the design geniuses of the 20th century."
On the face of it, Memphis's philosophy was more than a little airy. "Memphis," said Sottsass, "exists in a gelatinous, rarefied area whose very nature precludes set models and definitions." On a more substantial level, it was a pent-up reaction against the slick "black box" design favoured by makers of nearly everything in late-1970s Europe, from typewriters and cameras to office furniture, cars and buildings themselves.
This was the era of the shiny, black glass office block - which, in the hands of most architects, was ineffably banal. In the US, it was also the heyday of postmodern architecture and design. Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown were strutting the architectural catwalk with slapstick-style buildings that were a big and blowsy two-fingers up to the stern values of the Bauhaus and what Johnson had labelled the International Style when he was modernism's most ardent American advocate in the early 1930s.
Sottsass called Memphis design the New International Style and plunged the sophisticated and influential Milan design world into a labyrinth of visual irony, puns and provocations. In effect, he was injecting a dose of postmodernism into mainstream European design. This was design as cultural criticism, rather than as a functional tool or statement of modernist intent.
Sottsass himself is a complex figure. The son of an architect, he was born in Innsbruck in 1917. The family later moved to Turin, where Ettore graduated from the polytechnic in 1939, in time to serve with the Italian army. After the war, he designed furniture and interiors for mass housing projects. His particular talent was moving dexterously between extravagant and even absurd design to logical architecture and cool industrial styling.
Perhaps this is what growing up in Turin did for him. The city is home to some of the most adventurous of all baroque and modern architecture. Think of the eye-boggling Chapel of the Holy Shroud by Guarino Guarini, and of Fiat, the car giant with its ultra-modern factory with a race-track on its roof. Here, sensuous architecture and rational product design have long been combined in an inspirational mix.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Sottsass travelled to the US and India and became influenced by both Pop and tantric art. What could product design and architecture learn from these? Humour, sensuousness and multi-layered meanings, perhaps.
For an older generation of designers, although not as old as Sottsass himself, the Memphis movement seemed plain silly. Terence Conran, 69, although a friend, thought it "funny, peculiar and rather like the emperor's new clothes. It was not to be taken seriously."
Has Memphis design influenced Conran in any way? "No."
Memphis could at least be relied upon to get a reaction. James Irvine, another industrial design graduate from Kingston, went to work with Sottsass in 1984. "I worked closely with Ettore for 13 years, at Olivetti until 1992 and as his partner until 1997. I always worked with him as an industrial designer and I think, luckily for me, Memphis wasn't part of the discussion. Looking back now, the influence on me was to avoid it. It was already over and, as such, was to be steered clear of."
Paola Antonelli, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, thought Memphis was "atrocious" when studying in Milan in 1981. "With few exceptions - Sottsass's Carlton sideboard being one and Shiro Kuramata's pieces another - I still find the original Memphis collection very hard to swallow. It wasn't the first postmodern reaction to the status quo, but it certainly has been the first - and maybe the only one - to have an influence in the wider world. It was about turning the design world upside down just for the time of a few collections, yet the recipe was very easy to follow. Hence the innumerable bad copies we've seen all over the world."
There is, it must be said, a fine line to be drawn between Memphis and the sort of stuff you create with an MFI flatpack and rolls of coloured plastic. After gawping at yet another cabinet made from MDF and covered in Sottsass's comic-book Bacterio plastic laminate, it was hard not to sigh for the strictures and certainties of the Bauhaus.
The whole point of Memphis was to demonstrate that design could mutate like bacteria, that it was as open to change as Pop art. And yet Sottsass continued to design sophisticated electronic computer kit for Olivetti, the Italian corporation that had given him his first big break as a designer in 1958. He later began to concentrate on architecture.
Whatever Memphis was intended to achieve, it was ultimately a safety valve for designers who were bored styling yet another tasteful office chair, chic desking system or banal computer terminal.
Memphis, though, is also a reminder that all design movements need to be questioned to keep them at the edge. The great design project of the 20th century, modernism, was clearly in need of a kick by the 1980s. This is what American postmodernism also tried to do, but it had all the cultural sophistication of Beavis and Butthead. Memphis was at least a clever clown.
• Memphis Remembered is at the Design Museum, London SE1 (020-7940 8790), from tomorrow until November 4.
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