DESIGN PARADE: A creative crowd flocked to the Boon showroom in the Marais district of Paris on Wednesday to visit Eyes on Talents’ pop-up, in collaboration with Frame magazine.
To coincide with the 16th edition of the Paris design festival D’Days, the online platform for connecting brands with top international design talents handpicked a flurry of award-winning product designers, including Pierre Charrié; Max Frommeld and Arno Mathies; Teresa van Dongen; Philipp Weber; Matthias Scherzinger; Alexis Turron; Lizan Freijsen; Tijmen Smeulders and Matt Pike, creative director and founder of the Universal Everything collective.
Guests including jeweler Lorenz Bäumer; David Caméo, general director of Les Arts Décoratifs museum in Paris, and Cire Trudon’s managing director Julien Pruvost toured the exhibition, called “The Noble and the Humble,” while sipping vitamin-packed juices by Maisie Café and watching the life-size video artworks created by Universal Everything with Benjamin Millepied and the L.A. Dance Project.
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Charrié collaborated with Cire Trudon and feather-maker Maison Julien Vermeulen on a scent diffuser resembling dancing reeds. Frommeld and Mathies created a striking cardboard table and bench whose legs are “as strong as bricks,” explained Frommeld.
“You can jump on it,” said Paris-based consulting and executive search specialist Floriane de Saint Pierre, who launched Eyes on Talents with Guillaume de Piédoüe in 2013.
“We know that one of the challenges for the designers is to be exposed,” de Saint Pierre explained, also noting that creations are actually for sale at the pop-up. Eyes on Talents counts around 3,5oo talents across disciplines ranging from fashion and textiles to accessories, jewelry, architecture and graphic design.
“We want to be phy-gital, which means to be digital with physical moments, such as the Parsons annual benefit and the exhibition during D’Days,” she explained.
Eyes on Talents awarded its inaugural Innovation prize at Parsons’ annual benefit on May 23. The award, which came with a $5,000 grant and a dedicated digital communications support, went to Angela Luna, who also scooped the Women’s Wear Designer the Year award.
Coming up next, Eyes on Talents is to award a special mention to one of the designers at the Design Parade festival in Hyères, scheduled from July 1 to 3, having recently become a yearlong partner of the Villa Noailles.
The display, which also includes a graphic design exhibition of students’ projects from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, will be on show until Sunday.