Androgyny
& Design
“Talking about art is like dancing about architecture.�
Much has been said about the legendary David Bowie.
Strangely enough, he acquired his famous eyes by being punched in the face, over a spat about a girl. The injury paralysed the muscles in his left iris, giving off the illusion of different coloured irises.
The androgynous entity that is David Bowie came to the fore in 1970 when he wore a flowing dress on the cover of his third album, The Man Who Sold the World. His sexual identity has always been central to his career as a musician, the ambiguity around it worn as a proud badge. Bowie was a futurist, using the musical culture machine to broadcast many of his ideas on space travel, alienation, cosmic dread and occultism. We’re slowly catching up.
Le smoking Suit, Yves St Laurent
Androgyny amongst humans occurs from the earliest histories, and across the breadth of our culture. From ancient Greek myths and medieval Europe, to the more recent fashion directions explored by Coco Chanel around the First World War, the blurring of traditional gender roles has been always a parallel current to the mainstream. Yves Saint Laurent introduced the Le Smoking suit in 1966, and the eroticised androgynous photographs of it made Le Smoking iconic. With the entry of David Bowie and his iconic sexual ambiguity, the 1970s saw Androgyny enter mainstream consciousness.
Interestingly enough, our current pluralistic view to gender, amongst the more progressive societies at least, creates an interesting environment to inhabit. The workplace is no longer the bastion of gender stereotyping, with both the sexes taking on exactly the same challenging, sometimes dangerous and physically exhausting roles. Through economy and commerce, home-making and child rearing, in wartime roles and in peace, there is little to choose from as far as gender is concerned. While these trends play out in the world in general, remarkably little of this percolates into the home environment. The idea of the ‘Gender-agnostic home’ will be a recurring theme for homes in the near future.
Design processes a generation ago had a very different approach. The testosterone driven Modernist style shaped the design of the workplace, with men traditionally occupying offices of power, and the women mostly resigned to ancillary roles. This hard-edged masculine bias percolates into mindsets in the home as well. Traditional gender roles allocated the structure and design of the hearth or kitchen to the women, with stereotypes like the Study or Den following cliches of masculine luxury.
The soft and the hard, the cigar stained leather couch versus the soft blues and hues of the curtains.
Zones in the home were expressed subtly underlining these same gender roles, with an almost no-entry policy for members of the opposite sex. Gender stereotypes play out through materials and process, providing a framework for future hardline approaches to grow, through the constant reinforcing of these visual cues.
The quintessential image of the man in a suit, lounging back on his leather Eames chair, a cigar dangling nonchalantly, and a large steel dome lamp lighting up his leather-bound tomes is a study in gender stereotypes through material, process and form. Likewise the flowery, pastel hued dresses and soft light filtering in through the lace curtains evoke a completely different stereotype.
The deep-seatedness of these stereotypes play out across the country, massaging mid-life crises, and sub-dividing home spaces in the most boring ways possible.
As always, David Bowie comes to the rescue.
“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but
I promise it won’t be boring.”
I believe Androgyny is a liberating frame of thinking. It sets us free from conventional choices of materials, and opens up a whole new way of looking at the environments we design. By cleaning the slate off all preconceived notions, we are now forced to think of more meaningful pursuits.
How things work become more important than how things look. We can now draw inspiration from a much wider, more inclusive palette.
There are clues to this more nuanced understanding of gender in the works of designers like Doshi-Levien. Nipa Doshi grew up in India, and the exuberance of her cultural identity and the motifs she is inspired by find centrepiece in the work of the studio. Working in a mixed gender environment creates a most interesting dialogue in their work, with influences coming in from Jonathan’s background in fine cabinetry and Industrial design.
The pluralistic, inclusive nature of their work plays out in beautiful ways. To me, their design of the Almora chair is a beautiful example of gender-neutral design, where the influences for the design come from abstract ideas of the snow-capped Himalayas, and the feeling of being ‘wrapped in a soft, hand-woven cashmere blanket.’
By being true to a more abstract, artistic influence, the chair finds in place firmly outside the realm of gender stereotypes, crafting something beautiful from an area that is over-run by cliche.
The Almora Chair, Doshi Levien
Closer to home, Sandeep Sangaru’s work in Bamboo crafts has been a source of continued inspiration. While gender neutrality is not a central pursuit in his work, his calling has been the designer-asactivist role, where through his body of work, he draws attention to a single material resource, and the cultures that grow, process and produce craft from it.
Truss Me Elephant, Sandeep Sangaru
The resultant expressions are joyfully genderneutral, simply because gender was never a prerequisite in his thought process to begin with.
His sensitive handling of material, and the industrial processes required to build his visions, both speak of a nuanced design process, one that is more concerned with emancipation of crafts communities than a shallow gender-style based inquiry.
Truss Me Bookshelf, Sandeep Sangaru
In our own work, more recently, as a response to a most interesting brief of “Make Mistakes”, we designed a home environment in Pune. Our clients, who share all of the responsibilities of running a successful business and hands-on parents, wanted to reflect their lives in a fun, inspiring home environment. In what came to be called “The Folly House”, we tried to create fun, playful responses to the detailed activities that we mapped out in the different parts of the home.
The Living & Study Follies, The Busride Design Studio
Gender was never a point of discussion, and the same thinking that went into creating the objects that came to be defined as the “Living Folly” and the “Study Folly” also went into creating the “Kitchen Folly” and every other aspect of the house.
The simple fact of both clients using all parts of the home, became a connecting thread to our work, and allowed us to toss out any gender-specific design that could potentially stereotype roles.
The Kitchen Folly, The Busride Design Studio
The larger point is to look for inspiration outside of gender, in the styling and creating of environments and artefacts, more in sync with current trends in poly-gender cultural manifestations.
David Bowie, with his outsider’s view on sexuality, and the absurdities of life on Earth, wonders about where we’re going.
“Sailors
Fighting in the dance hall.
Oh man!�
“Look at those cavemen go.
It's the freakiest show.
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy.
Oh man!”
Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show.
Is there life on Mars?�