What do a Fitbit, Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies and a robot lawnmower have in common? Well, apart from being the shittest Christmas Day ever, they’re all featured in a brand new gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington.
‘Design 1900-Now’ is a brilliant-looking aggregation of stuff from more than a century of innovation: new materials, new technologies, new obsessions, new memes, new threats, new everything. Some of the objects are in themselves new – recent acquisitions by the V&A – while others are drawn from the museum’s enormous existing collection.
Famous pieces of design on display include Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s iconic British road signage system, Nike’s Nigeria football shirt for the 2018 World Cup, and some Spanx undies for men. The gallery is divided into six themed areas: Automation and Labour, Housing and Living, Crisis and Conflict, Consumption and Identity, Sustainability and Subversion, and Data and Communication.
The gallery is also a living and evolving testament to the V&’s Rapid Response Collecting, which the museum founded in 2014 with the aim of acquiring objects as they appear, rather than sourcing them retrospectively. Hence the Fitbit. A series of new Rapid Response Collecting objects will look at the last turbulent year: from 3D-printed door openers to limit the spread of Covid, to the ‘I Believe in Our City’ bus shelter posters highlighting Anti-Asian bias, to British Vogue front covers portraying key workers, to a repurposed snorkel mask.
‘Design 1900-Now’ promises to be a fascinating and morphing portrait of a world that spins ever-faster, but one that sometimes gets stopped dead in its tracks. Spanx, anyone? Only worn once.
‘Design 1900-Now’ opens Jun 19. Visit www.v&a.com for more information.
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