Building Bridges

摘要

As the first speaker in a series of seminars to provide stimulating new perspectives for industry, fashion designer Wayne Hemingway proved quite a challenge for the Ceramic Industry Forum. His wake-up call, presented last November, carried no sympathy for cheap imports or the strong pound. As delegates from the major companies shuffled uneasily in their seats, upper management and designers alike were vilified for a lack of insight and overall market awareness. Having scoured London stores for British tableware, Hemingway concluded the products were stale and unattractive, or relying too heavily on designer names. What he portrayed, however, was not just an industry low in self-esteem, but the entrepreneurial opportunity of the situation. 'When you are as uncool as you can get', he said, 'you are in the perfect position to be in fashion'.An avid collector, he took us back to the 1950s and 60s, to extol the virtues of home-grown originality over the pursuit of a highly reactive fashion market. His slides included pieces made at a time before CAD, when successful new design frequently evolved through the factory-floor practice of craft-based innovation: Denby's 'Chevron', utilising the roulette technique and various patterns exploiting the qualities of the early silk-screen process; his favourite bull plates and Ridgeway's famous Homemaker.