Designer brands have killed designers’

When Britain’s 1970s New Age band The Buggles unveiled “Video killed the radio star,” the song portrayed a social trend of the 1950s in which black-and-white TVs lured the audience away from radio. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the design industry, as fancy brand names have snatched customers away from quality designs. Gabriele Pezzini, a designer for Hermes, said so with bitterness as he began his interview with The Korea Herald. “Brands have killed creative designers,” he said, “I am a thinker before being a designer.” He teaches at France’s Saint Etienne’s Ecole de Beaux Arts, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and Milan Institute. On his business cards his title is thinker, not designer. He recently visited Korea to attend a forum, part of the Incheon International Design Fair, to speak about issues in the design industry. It was his second visit to Korea. As a tough challenge facing the industry, he first mentioned problems in education. According to him, design schools tend to instill pipe dreams into students by instilling in them that “producing design is something like a machine producing pop-out designs.” Students are also likely to have unrealistic dreams of getting glamorous designing jobs. “That will simply not happen with the inept designers that the schools have manufactured. Designing is not a piece of cake, it is tiring and requires a rational thinking process, but if schools do not breed ‘thinking designers,’ then there is no hope for future design.” “The schools have made designers an ‘object.’ The young people, at the end of the day, will end up with no work.” He also questioned curricula focused on luxury brands, which design schools have created in order to “keep up with the trend.” “Some schools have been teaching design just for luxury brands, I don’t understand why and how they teach such a thing in schools, but the essence of designing a luxury brand is really about attitude toward design,” he said. “Schools should teach a more well-padded thinking, rather than well-padded bags, or coats, or whatsoever.” He turned his criticism of overpowering brands to companies and customers, which form the two pillars of the market ― supply and demand.