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    Now reading: the products we would like to see walter van beirendonck design for ikea

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    the products we would like to see walter van beirendonck design for ikea

    The Antwerp Six designer has been tapped up by the Swedish furniture giant for a collection that will launch next year.

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    Flat pack furniture and leading avant garde designers do not usually get in bed together, but IKEA have created an intriguing exception to that never-previously-considered rule. The affordable furniture giant has teamed up with Belgian design rebel Walter Van Beirendonck for a collection set to launch in June 2016.

    Commissioning a designer famous for his place in the radical design cohort the Antwerp Six was never going to illicit a straightforwar rehashing of fabrics from past catwalk collection though; Van Beirendonck has created an entire world filled with fantastical characters.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=BFMKBn9UD44

    “I really wanted to tell a story,” the designer explains in a video released by IKEA, “I came up with a story about characters living in the clouds and the sun and the moon, [who] are very sad because there’s so much going wrong in the world and they’re crying and big tears are falling down and the clouds get big holes … and the cloud people really started to panic, “What’s going on? Our clouds are broken!”

    Van Beirendonck also used his autumn/winter 15 collection to muse on the things going wrong in the world, like terrorism and the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Politics is obviously on his mind, but what does it have to do with flat-pack furniture? Coming back down to earth for a second, Van Beirendonck related his magical tale of cloud people to the collection: “Every character has a very specific pattern, a specific look and I used this to create and identify different ranges of prints and fabrics,” he said.

    No descriptions or images of the collection have yet been released, so we dreamt up our top three fantasy products:

    “Warning explicit beauty” shower curtain
    For when you want to take naked selfies a la Kim K, but don’t want to fall foul of Instagram’s no nip-pics policy.

    Swooping eagle butt plug door bell
    Welcome visitors to your home in stately fashion with a majestic eagle… that is dangling a butt plug from its claws, so that they know you’re up on your art and were a fan of Paul McCarthy’s Paris sculpture.

    Trippy mop
    Chores are a bore, but not with this psychedelic mop creation from Walter’s autumn/winter 11 collection.

    Credits


    Catwalk photography Mitchell Sams

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