How ‘A Black Issue’ of Italian Vogue Won a Brit Insurance Designs Award
How exactly did Italian Vogue‘s “A Black Issue”—published to wide acclaim and stellar sales last July, it featured only black models—best the likes of Miuccia Prada, Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz, Maison Martin Margiela, and the Barbican’s stunning Viktor & Rolf exhibition to win the Design Museum‘s 2009 Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award for fashion? On the occasion of tonight’s award ceremony in London, Sarah Mower explains. “What swung the award for [Italian Vogue editor-in-chief Franca] Sozzani is the way she used the power of Vogue to reach beyond the boundaries of fashion,” writes Mower in today’s Telegraph. “I know this, because I sat on the panel, chaired by Alan Yentob, that scrutinized each entry for some kind of point beyond mere prettiness, cerebral content or even originality.” Mower, who joined MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, architect Peter Cook, designer Karen Blincoe, and last year’s big winner Yves Behar on the judging panel, goes on to explain:
The Black Issue stood up as work that didn’t have to be explained to anyone. In one way, it was the wild card, because as a design artefact it looks exactly the way Vogue Italia has always looked under Sozzani. Yet the content was judged to have done something socially to the good. That vindicates the potential of fashion’s energy, and it feels correct that Sozzani should be recognised alongside her peers. Each has done something to give the arcane micro-worlds of special-interest design and designers a much-need makeover—something the public, not just insider-geeks, will respect.
Why does she look at us when she says “insider-geeks”?
Previously on UnBeige:
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Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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