i’m sure everyone is pretty tired of hearing me ramble on about the power of colab this and curate that. these words have become so nebulous in meaning and can apply to anything from equestrian show jumping to quantity surveying. it’s a bit like the ‘fusion’ craze of the nineties, but hey if the shoe fits… what i’m generally interested in is bridging that treacherous business-art gap, it’s a bit like being a inter-galactic-double-agent of sorts.
in truth, the refined relationship one seeks from a business point of view is not unlike the the artist’s passion for his work although their worlds may spin around different suns. sure, we all see the art which surrounds us, but like w. somerset maugham i also believe that art for art’s sake makes no more sense than gin for gin’s sake. the point is that there is a certain dynamic in artist commissions and commercial applications that do not necessarily exist within the more conservative business strategies. the purpose is to decipher and exploit those synergies and often their success is quite surprising to both parties.
the bespoke house of berluti is such a case in point. steeped in tradition and heritage and what not, they are the last one would expect to marry with design creative maarten baas‘s amorphous clay creations. but this is exactly the kind of dynamic i’m talking about; the unexpected can be a great business strategy for such an established brand that needs to maintain active interest season after season. the key lies not in a compromise but in a mutual respect of difference which is exactly why the interpretation of a of a male dressing tradition was so successfully expressed in the furnishings created by baas.