Bloom Book

By Li Edelkoort and Lisa White

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This book is a condensed version of the trend magazine, "Bloom", concocted by the trend designer Li Edelkoort. Her combination of plants and textiles has a stimulating effect.

Review

"The more immaterial we become, the more naturally we will want to live. Computer technology and information access will enable us to live a near-archaic style of life; with a flexible work ethic will come the circle of family and friends, together living much closer to the earth."
The trend guru, Li Edelkoort offers these thoughts in the last chapter of her Bloom Book. Both morbid and beautiful, the publication appeals and repulses at the same time. It is repulsive because magnificent photographs of flower and plant motifs are used to create the pretence of an ideal world, although when examined closely the photos appear rather decadent, reflecting the bright lights of a ruined world - orchids on a morass.
A trend researcher obviously need not be an intellectual genius or act as the world's moral conscience. His or her main job is to have an early sense of the new Art Nouveau in colours and forms that will next be idolised by mainstream taste …
The present book constitutes a condensed version of the trend magazine, "Bloom", the third glossy magazine concocted by Li Edelkoort after "View on Design" and "View on Colour", and is edited by the magazine's editor, Lisa White. Whenever an issue of the magazine is dedicated to a specific theme, the book devotes a chapter to the same theme, for example Back to the Roots; The Heart of the Matter; The New Art Nouveau. Each of these chapters begins with several of the famous "We are..." sentences penned by the trend guru herself; in every case, a not very enlightening text by Lisa White then follows - always accompanied by flowers, plants, people, fashion, fabrics, drawings and morbid arrangements.
I have long pondered whether I should recommend this book since I regard its contents as misleading and, in a certain sense, hypocritical. Nevertheless I enjoy looking at the pictures, as I enjoy looking at paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe or the plants in my garden. Where plant motifs and textiles converge, textile artists and designers can find much inspiration. After all, trend setters are seismographs for our emotions, and emotions are the basic material for creative work, colours, textures and contrasts that artists use to express sensibilities.

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