For nine days in September, when the London Design Festival’s distinctive red signage appears at scores of event locations, the remarkable breadth of the U.K.’s design industry is made visible. The 14th edition, held September 17 to 25, was a sprawling affair: hundreds of designers and manufacturers hosted events across the city, while five separate trade fairs ran concurrently.
Commissioned projects gave a sense of order to the dizzying array of pop-ups and partnerships, lectures and launches. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the festival’s official hub, temporary large-scale exhibits were installed among the permanent displays. The Green Room, by London-based product designers Glithero, featured a cylindrical curtain of 160 brightly hued cords that dropped down through a six-story stairwell; individual strands gently rose and fell over the course of a minute, inviting viewers to reconsider what a clock could be. In the Tapestry Room on an upper floor, Benjamin Hubert’s wavelike Foil—an animated ribbon of 50,000 stainless-steel mirrors—scattered light across the walls like a giant disco ball.
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