Droog co-founder Renny Ramakers looks back at how the influential design platform shook up the industry in the 1990s in the latest talk in our ongoing collaboration with Friedman Benda for VDF.
Droog launched at Milan design week in 1993 with an exhibition of work by young Dutch designers selected by Ramakers, a writer and curator, and Gijs Bakker, a designer.
In sharp contrast to most other Milan exhibitions at the time, the objects presented were rough and unrefined, made from repurposed materials and found objects.
The exhibition caused a storm and established Droog as one of the world’s leading platforms for cutting-edge design. It would go on to launch the careers of a generation of Dutch designers, and some of the biggest names in the world of design, including Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerius, Piet Hein Eek, Tejo Remy, Richard Hutten and Jurgen Bey.
“It just it happened; there was no plan,” Ramakers told curator Glenn Adamson in the latest of New York gallery Friedman Benda’s Design in Dialogue interviews that we are publishing as part of Virtual Design Festival.
“At a certain moment, I became bored. I thought: ‘I’m not interested anymore in what I do’. And then suddenly I saw very young designers coming up with something totally different.”
“They looked at the design world in a totally different way,” she continued. “They were not interested in styling, in refined products. They made things from scrap food, from used materials. They didn’t do decoration or whatever. And and the products were so beautiful. I found a new kind of aesthetic.”
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