The exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum explores the fashion show as a cultural ritual and a total artistic experience. It features iconic shows by Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Helmut Lang, Maison Martin Margiela, Issey Miyake, Prada, Viktor & Rolf, and Louis Vuitton. The accompanying catalogue brings together historical sources, contemporary image series, and essays by leading voices in the fashion world. Model Malgosia Bela recounts the highlights and challenges of international runways. Legendary sound supervisor Michel Gaubert reveals how sound shapes moods and dramaturgy. Visionary buyer and curator Andreas Murkudis offers insights into the selection of key fashion collections. Fashion historian Caroline Evans analyses the social roles of the fashion show, Cathy Horyn reflects on its influence on contemporary fashion, and Valerie Steele, Director of The Museum at FIT in New York, situates it within the global cultural context. Catwalk is both an opulent visual archive and a definitive reference work, presenting the phenomenon of the fashion show in all its facets – well-founded, multi-voiced, and close to the action.

Plastic has shaped our daily lives like no other material. Originally associated with convenience, progress, even revolution, today plastic seems to have lost its utopian appeal. Plastic is everywhere, yet most conspicuous as waste and as a key factor in the global environmental crisis. This book examines the success story of plastic in the twentieth century and at the same time presents the different discourses on how we should manage the waste the material produces and also find solutions that take into account its entire life cycle in the future. Mark Miodownik, Susan Freinkel, and Nanjala Nyabola each contribute an essay that sheds light on the history of plastics from 1850 to today. A material-rich visual chronology illustrates how consumers' perception of plastics has changed over the decades. Brief descriptions of a selection of 50 objects examine the importance of plastics for material culture. Reprints of fundamental texts about the history of plastics-for example by Alexander Parkes and Roland Barthes-provide a context from the history of ideas. The book reflects the current discourse and state of research on plastic with numerous individual interviews and panel discussions that were held with designers, representatives from industry, researchers, and environmental activists. Underpinning these conversations are comprehensive data visualizations on plastic production and consumption, recycling.

In 2019, the Vitra Design Museum will publish the Atlas of Furniture Design, the definitive, encyclopedic overview of the history of modern furniture design. Featuring over 1700 objects by more than 500 designers and 121 manufacturers, it includes approximately 2800 images ranging from detailed object photographs to historical images documenting interiors, patents, brochures, and related works of art and architecture. The basis for the Atlas of Furniture Design is the collection held by the Vitra Design Museum, one of the largest of its kind with more than 7000 works. The book presents selected pieces by the most important designers of the last 230 years and documents key periods in design history, including early nineteenth-century industrial furniture in bentwood and metal, Art Nouveau and Secessionist pieces and works by protagonists of classical modernism and postwar design, as well as postmodern and contemporary pieces. The Atlas of Furniture Design employed a team of more than 70 experts and features over 550 detailed texts about key objects. In-depth essays provide sociocultural and design-historical context to four historical epochs of furniture design and the pieces highlighted here, enriched by a detailed annex containing designer biographies, glossaries, and elaborate information graphics. The Atlas of Furniture Design is an indispensable resource for collectors, scholars and experts, as well as a beautifully designed object that speaks to design enthusiasts.

This new publication is dedicated to the Baranger Motion Displays of the R. F. Collection housed at the Vitra Design Museum. Motion Displays were conceived as eye-catching and novel moving objects, which - primarily in the US - were used in jewellers' shop-window displays to attract customers. The Baranger Motion Displays were produced by Baranger Studios in Pasadena, CA between 1937 and 1957 and were lent to thousands of jewellers' shops over the years. Primarily during the 1990s, Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra Chairman Emeritus and founder of the Vitra Design Museum, worked to assemble a carefully selected a comprehensive collection of these objects in Weil am Rhein. With large-scale illustrations of the different Motion Displays and an atmospheric photo essay featuring black-and-white details of the objects, the book provides an unprecedented and in-depth view into this collection. In an accompanying essay, Bill Shaffer traces the success story of the displays and sheds light on the significance of the red cases in which they were delivered to the jewellers. Along with Robots 1:1 and Space Fantasies 1:1, Baranger Motion Displays is the third publication to focus on the R. F. Collection. Visitors can view the collection of Motion Displays at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein as part of the "Wunderkammer" (cabinet of curiosities), which also presents other parts of Rolf Fehlbaum's wide-ranging collection. In order for readers to be able to experience the wonders of these moving objects for themselves, each Motion Display has been given a QR Code in the book which links to an entertaining video clip of the display in action.

A history of the nightclub from the 1960s to the present day. Nightclubs and discotheques are hotbeds of contemporary culture. Throughout the 20th century, they have been centres of the avant-garde that question the established codes of social life and experiment with different realities, merging interior and furniture design, graphics and art with sound, light, fashion and special effects to create a modern Gesamtkunstwerk. Night Fever: A Design History of Club Culture examines the history of the nightclub, with examples ranging from Italian nightclubs of the 1960s that were created by members of the Radical Design group to the legendary Studio 54 in New York, Philippe Starck's Les Bains Douches in Paris and the more recent Double Club in London, conceived by German artist Carsten Hoeller for the Prada Foundation. Featuring films and vintage photographs, posters and fashion, Night Fever takes the reader on a fascinating journey through a world of glamour, subculture and the search for the night that never ends.