A new exhibition celebrates ten years of Tsatsas
New exhibition celebrates ten years of Tsatsas’ innovative leather add-ons
On the tenth anniversary of the label, ‘Tsatsas. Past, Present, Future’ at Deutsches Ledermuseum in Offenbach, Germany tells the story driving Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas’ multidisciplinary method to leather goods
Established in 1917 in Offenbach, Germany, Deutsches Ledermuseum – the German Leather Museum – has since collected close to 30,000 artefacts, tracing the historical past of leathercraft for above 6 millennia (the oldest is an Egyptian receptacle dating from the fourth millennium BC). Setting up this month, however, a new exhibition explores an altogether additional modern just take on the ubiquitous content, celebrating the do the job of youthful German extras label Tsatsas on its tenth anniversary.
Titled ‘Tsatsas. Earlier, Existing, Future’, the exhibition claims a ‘retrospective watch of the previous which merges fluidly into the now’, collating items that define Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas’ progressive solution to style (the spouse-and-spouse duo have also curated the exhibition). Possessing established their label in 2012, the earlier ten years has found the designers hone a vision at at the time unconventional and timeless, knowledgeable by near-architectural precision. In truth, Tsatsas has collaborated with David Chipperfield Architects on a vacation suitcase (reportedly the only a single Chipperfield himself utilizes to travel) and industrial designer Dieter Rams on the brand’s ‘931’ purse, which gained a Wallpaper* Style and design Award for Finest Belated Bag. The designers themselves contact Tsatsas ‘the excellent balance concerning capabilities, aesthetics and execution’.
Within ‘Tsatsas. Previous, Present, Future’ at Deutsches Ledermuseum
The exhibition usually takes a individual technique, tracing the foundations of Tsatsas by way of ephemera that tells the story of the manufacturer, from leather-creating equipment, in-system samples and handbags deconstructed to their composite sections, to powering-the-scenes pictures and individual mementoes (one handwritten Article-It notice in the exhibition reads ‘context over dogma’). ‘Handcrafted’, ‘Question Everything’ and ‘Down to the Smallest Detail’ are the names of some of the many organising sections, the latter discovering Tsatsas’ engagement with sustainability, a theory deep-rooted inside of its philosophy. Here, this is celebrated in a demonstration of the brand’s many recycled products – from brass hardware to cardboard packaging – as nicely as highlighting the substantial-high-quality normal means which make up every of its add-ons, made to past for many years to arrive (guests are encouraged to get to out and contact a conceal of Scandinavian calfskin).
At the centre of the exhibition is a kinetic set up titled ‘Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear’, a very clear glass box in which a variety of Tsatsas equipment circulate close to a looping monitor. Intended to highlight the designers’ open-finished strategy – they insist the exhibition has no starting nor conclude – the several objects, produced involving 2012 and 2022, are not organized chronologically, nor with any individual hierarchy. ‘Staged purely intuitively, the 32 distinctive objects soften by means of their monochromatic presentation into a symbol of the Tsatsas’ visual conciseness,’ the exhibition’s notes explain.
Somewhere else, website visitors can look at a movie designed for the exhibition that gives a appear inside the regional spouse and children-owned leather-based workshop in which Tsatsas produces some of its components – in operation for over 40 many years – while a further section titled ‘1 + 1 = 3’ explores some of its lots of collaborations, together with the aforementioned tasks with Chipperfield and Rams, as well as Munich-based mostly jewellery designer Saskia Diez (these collaborations permit the designers to ‘think outside the house the box and leave their individual consolation zone’, as the notes describe). An accompanying ebook, released with bilingual German and English textual content, characteristics essays by Chipperfield and Rams, together with text by Wallpaper* China editor Yoko Choy, design theorist Markus Frenzl, and Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas by themselves – a collaborative tome that encapsulates Tsatsas’ multidisciplinary approach. §
