on 16 May 2003Bound in creamy white high-gloss with the title embossed in the cheapest of gold foils, this could be mistaken for a particularly naff wedding album or the gay edition of the Guinness Book of Records. Inside, the endpapers are sumptuously blocked in magenta Day-Glo, but so is every single line of type, rendering it illegible except to fish.
This all has something to do with the thesis of this year’s guest editor, ‘sensual minimalist’ and Twenty/20 hero Karim Rashid, that designers have been freed by the death of ‘good taste’. Sadly, it undermines the point by being embarrassingly clumsy whether viewed as irony or not.
But Karim’s selection of products sweeps confidently from the commercial (Ikea plastic armchairs) through the conceptual (Stefano Giovannoni and Elisa Gargan’s Alessi cotton wool dispenser in the shape of a giant pill capsule, inexplicably disconcerting) to the kitsch (Meike can Schijndel’s urinal in the shape of a giant mouth, curiously accompanied by a semi-apologetic caption from Karim’s supervising editor).
The iPod and iMac are, of course, present and correct. Now that’s good taste.
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language