300,000 emails and the Bauhaus
In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was hand-made. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual, or convince people that a piece of mass-manufactured nylon and plastic is unique?