Each end of the year sees its “best of” of the best products of the year, its “top” of personalities in an ATP ranking of creators. We finally take the time to focus on what excited us; we “digest” what we have seen in showrooms, exhibitions, fairs, Design Weeks, in Paris, Milan and elsewhere. Particularly in 2021, we wanted to celebrate the dynamism displayed by the sector, as well as the pleasure of reunions: a desire to highlight 100 favorites as the translation of our effervescence!
Then the requirement of choice brought its share of questions.
We wanted to let the object speak for itself. By questioning our preferences, we understood that the selected projects had appealed to us because we were betting on their duration, that they could, for the most part, have aesthetically joined previous references or that they would still be there in a long time. We have named them our “Timeless 2021-2022”, to underline how these new products are each part, with their history, in the long term. Like breaths to savor, these Timeless punctuate this augmented magazine: an associated QR code allows you to discover all of them in a virtual notebook to leaf through like a picture book.
What if time was the regulating factor of our time, this much-heralded paradigm shift?
For some, the world after so much fantasized is none other than the world before accelerated. In a bulimic madness, the appointments are linked, all the projects are accepted just “in case” in the face of the risk of yet another wave, as threatening as that of Hokusai.
For others, the world lives in an elastic time, with stock shortages, shortages of materials, overpriced transport, extended deadlines, which constantly change schedules and budget projections. And confront the order in two clicks on the web with the reality of the delivery which is counted in weeks, even in months.
We are experiencing headwinds, struck by the urgency of omnipresence and the desire to give meaning to action. To take the time to do, as the Slow Made – which is soon celebrating its 10th anniversary – invited us to do. And as environmental issues encourage us to do so.
Respect life cycles, gestures, resources. To fix. Sublimate. Out of oblivion. Transmit too, without neglecting to innovate. Imagine the future to be better in the present. You will find all these reflections implicitly in this issue. It is so difficult to apprehend time, as Saint Augustine writes in Les Confessions: “What is time? Who could give a short and easy explanation? Who could say a word of what he would have understood? And yet what is more familiar than time? We understand it when we talk about it, and we also understand it when we hear another tell us about it. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If someone asks me and I want to explain it, I no longer know. »
Wishing you happy holidays, and the best for 2022.
Nathalie Degardin
Editor in Chief
