Grand Prix Design 2024 for the creative head of Jil Sander
Published: Thursday, Feb 29th 2024, 11:10
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Fashion designer Lucie Meier, photographer and film producer Luciano Rigolini and designer Paola De Martin will be awarded the Grand Prix Design 2024. This was announced by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC) on Thursday.
Lucie Meier and her husband have been the creative management team at fashion house Jil Sander since 2017. The BAK described her as an "exceptional phenomenon". Lucie Meier achieved her position at one of the world's biggest fashion houses after working at Louis Vuitton, where she began her career as a fashion designer, at Balenciaga, where she designed the show collection, and then at Dior. There she rose to become head designer of the summer team, and has been interim co-head of the fashion house.
However, the BAK not only praised this stellar career as such, but also the attitude with which Meier designs fashion. She has found a sustainable creative path "unimpressed by the hectic fashion world", wrote the BAK. In the jury's statement, it said that she "sets new aesthetic and ethical standards in the fashion industry with her intuitive designs and her attitude". Lucie Meier was born in 1982 in Zermatt VS; she lives in Milan and Paris.
Beauty in photography and film
The jury praised Luciano Rigolini from Ticino for constantly exploring "new languages and technologies in the photographic and cinematographic field". Rigolini has been working exclusively with so-called "vernacular photography" since 2002. This means that he develops new perspectives on amateur photographs or industrial documents using digital and machine learning technologies. As a photographer, he is a seeker "of the details that turn a picture into art", according to the jury,
Rigolini also teaches at several universities, for example at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana) in Lugano TI, at the Geneva School of Art and Design (Head), but also in the USA in Houston and Los Angeles.
Rigolini made a name for himself back in the early 1990s with his photographic work "Landscapes". He then worked as a cameraman and documentary filmmaker for Swiss television. From 1995, he was responsible for the creative development of auteur films at the European culture channel Arte. He has also produced films by filmmakers and artists such as Laurie Anderson and Naomi Kawase. Rigolini was born in Ticino in 1950; today he lives in Lugano and Paris.
Social justice in culture
Paola De Martin's professional background is as a textile designer, historian and lecturer. She expands the "profile of a design educator into a multifaceted and influential personality", said the jury in justifying the award. De Martin researches forms of discrimination in culture. Her work is a critique "of the existing structures that reflexively exclude members of marginalized groups, while others are automatically preferred and promoted", according to the BAK. This makes her a trailblazer for design research.
Due to her origins in a migrant working-class family, her dissertation already focused on belonging and non-belonging in the Zurich design scene. As a textile student in the 1990s and later as co-founder of the fashion label Beige, she was active in the Zurich design scene. De Martin was born in Zurich and still lives there today. She works as a lecturer at design colleges and as a postdoc at ETH Zurich. "The themes of De Martin's transdisciplinary work are forward-looking and compelling in today's world," praised the jury.
The Grand Prix Design is endowed with CHF 40,000 each. It is awarded on the recommendation of the Federal Design Commission and honors designers of national and international significance. The Grand Prix Design 2024 will be presented as part of the "Swiss Design Awards" exhibition (June 11-16) in Basel.
©Keystone/SDA
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