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The Art of Travel: Unexplored Territory



”The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he doesn't know how to stay quietly in his room.“ Pascale, 1670

English business people spend an average of 8½ years of their lives traveling. Fashion designer Lisa Stroux researched this statistic, which inspired her to explore this topic further. She is one member of an entire generation of designers and artists who have addressed the challenges of increasing mobility in their work. For example, product designer Claudine Brignot founded the design label urban speed as early as 1999 and designed business suits with functional advantages for the urban worker who rides a bike. Eight years later, the topic of mobile lifestyles is apparently still sufficiently unexplored territory to inspire the competition The Art of Travel announced by the Foundation of the German Clothing Industry.


Urban Speed  © Photo Shirin Ourmutchi   
© Claudine Brignot]

The question for design is how people can live a mobile but aesthetic lifestyle. Anyone who has checked into a mid-range hotel with a run-of-the-mill model backpack quickly gets a feeling for the inherent symbolism in such a travel accessory. The carrier is immediately pegged as lacking any fashion sense, and he or she is automatically relegated to that community of continental drifters & their ilk. The Dutch designer Jannita van den Haak took pity on this piece of inelegant backpacker gear and designed a backpack for women, in which stylish glamour and aimless global wandering are not an oxymoron. Her trick is transforming required functions into fashionable details: pleats on the sides make it possible to increase the volume of the bag from 50 to 75 liters, and the top flap pocket can be removed and used as a handbag.


A backpack for a woman of the world © Photo Bob van der
Have / Foundation of the German Clothing Industry

Less functional but much more aesthetic is Katrin Sergejew’s answer to the demands of a global lifestyle of commuting between Beijing and New York, meetings and workouts. She developed her clothes collections for London, Beijing and New York by using the plans of the streets and subways of each city to develop different designs and color schemes. The different lines are kept in red, grey and yellow and are printed with the large-format motif of the respective cities. As a combination of different cities, the outfits symbolize the prototypical cosmopolitan. This is someone who is always in-between cities and at home in several at once, knowing the transport networks of different urban centers like a second skin.


The patterns are based on the transportation networks
of different large cities © Photo Foundation of the
German Clothing Industry]

While spending those 8½ years on the road, one thing makes the mobile lives of English business people particularly hard: the cumbersome transport of belongings can disrupt the comfort of a trip. For this reason, Lisa Stroux designed a coat called Suitable with three integrated interior pockets for short business trips. When worn, it can hold up to 20 liters of travel baggage and still remain fitted and comfortable. And when not worn, it can be transformed into hand luggage, meeting airline hand luggage requirements. With her design, Lisa Stroux won over the jury of the Foundation of the German Clothing Industry, which awarded “Suitable” the first prize for travel luggage.


Suitable is both a coat and a travel bag in one. Wear
your baggage on your body or fold the coat up into a bag
© Foundation of the German Clothing Industry]

Links:
Foundation of the German Clothing Industry
www.stiftung-bekleidungsindustrie.de
 
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