Nouveautés!
The fine lace known as »Plauener Spitze« was born in the 1880s in Germany’s Vogtland region. In the fashionable French of the day, novel designs were called »noveautés«. Plauen’s innovative new lace patterns were designed from scratch by students at the art school there and then adopted by the local embroidery and lacemaking industry.
Kunstgewerbemuseum Dresden & Vogtlandmuseum Plauen
Nouveautés!
2020–21
An interesting aspect of the evolution of manufacturing technology in the Vogtland was the conflict between the handicrafts practiced at the art school in Plauen and the increasing industrialization of the textile business in the 19th century. That tension was the subject of an exhibition organized by the Vogtlandmuseum in Plauen and the the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, featuring original artifacts produced between 1877 and 1945 as well as fashion photographs and design portfolios from the art school’s archives.
In cooperation with both institutions, we developed the graphic design concept, the wayfinding system for the exhibition and the catalog, which was published by Dresden’s Sandstein Verlag. For the key visual, we chose a pairing of two fonts, Everett and Traulha, in combination with a deep blue tone that appears throughout both the exhibition and the catalog.
The exhibition launched on October 11, 2020 at the Vogtlandmuseum and then traveled to Dresden, where it opened on May 1, 2021 at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Schloss Pillnitz. The Dresden exhibition ran until November 2021 and also included contemporary works by fashion students, which were exhibited in the Wasserpalais alongside the historical artifacts.
