Primary colors

104 years ago, Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg established their creative dominance with the De Stijl artistic movement, which will never leave creation, fashion, art, architecture or design. Exclusively dictated by straight lines and ‘pure’ colors, the neoplasticist aesthetic is rigorous and academic.

Despite the rigidity of the movement, the play of colors and lines show playful and candid compositions that resonate with the rustle of the playground, or carry on the benches of the former presbytery transformed into a primary school at Vřesovice.

Inspired by this modernist era, our La Consigne bottle collection takes its panache from the optimistic precepts established by these masters of color. A double offbeat tribute, both to the current, and to the traditional consignments retwisted with brilliant colors.

If the prescribers are Mondrian and Van Doesburg, followed by the Bauhaus school in the 1920s, two French names stand out in this utopian quest for color: Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier (founders of the Union des artistes modernes). Regularly commissioned to make spaces functional and adapted to modern life, they used primary polychromy to compartmentalize and brighten up.

The decade was also marked by the advent of tubular design, which is still being reinvented by new designers. Begun by Marcel Breuer in the 1930s as part of his research at the Bauhaus, the tubular steel revolution continues to gain ground, true to the colorful and primary language of the German school.

On the fashion side, it is Benetton that announces the color. To breathe new life into the house, Luciano Benetton and his new artistic director Jean-Charles de Castelbajac – nicknamed the « rainbow machines » – distil their industrial DNA on the Milanese catwalks, without half measures, with primary colors that stand out.

A colorful approach that is repeated at Prada. For the Autumn-Winter 2021 men’s collection, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have co-designed an experimental show based on tactility, with a technicolor language as the spatial delimitation.

The striking legacy of modernism is more than ever celebrated by young designers, especially those from the East influenced by the Russian Suprematism. Both the Ukrainian Daria Zinovatnaya and the Polish Pani Jurek fragment spaces like nobody else, transforming color into a vector for energizing spaces.

The libraries play with primary colors, abstraction, horizontality and balance, and are inspired by the radical and geometric art of Miró, Mondrian, or Charlotte Perriand to become real living canvases, bringing art into homes.

An aesthetic also adopted in the modern kitchens of designers Dries Otten, Hybschmann or Muller Van Severen who democratize a new way of delimiting spaces through chromatic experimentation.