Design for a Living World

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York City Until 4 January 2010

The sign beside the thick, soft, creamy wool rug says, “Please do not touch.” Naturally, I want to roll on the rug and wrap myself in it. Each of its 11 patterned hexagonal panels was knitted from the wool of a Panama sheep that had grazed on pasture untainted by pesticides at Lava Lake Ranch, Idaho. Made by Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma using extra-large needles, the certified-organic rug forms part of Design for a Living World, an exhibition now on show at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.

Second skin: Isaac Mizrahi used discs of salmon leather to adorn a dress. Credit: M. STROH

Organized with The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation group based in Arlington, Virginia, the exhibition aims to raise awareness of “the impact and promise of sustainable sourcing”. Ten prominent designers were invited to create an object — a chair, a dress, a necklace — using sustainably grown and harvested materials from some of the world's most beautiful and fragile places. The sale of such objects could help to provide a livelihood for local communities in these areas — many of which face threats from over-development and deforestation — and also emphasizes how designers influence what we buy.

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi created a dress covered in creamy-white, sequin-like leather paillettes made from the skin of wild-caught salmon from southwest Alaska. Jewellery designer Ted Muehling fashioned bracelets and delicate flowers out of 'vegetable ivory' extracted from the seeds of the ivory nut palm tree on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei in the western Pacific Ocean. And Maya Lin — famous for designing the powerful Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC — crafted a simple bench from a single red maple. The tree was harvested from woods certified by the Forest Stewardship Council around the Upper St John River in Maine.

Some items are both elegant and useful. Israeli designer Ezri Tarazi constructed “a bamboo forest inside your living room” — towering bamboo stems fitted with clothes hooks, compact-disc racks, wine-bottle holders and lights that glow through ping-pong balls slotted in holes in the stalk. The bamboo, harvested from China's Yunnan Province, can grow a metre a day and requires little water to flourish in its natural habitat; although, a caption warns, exploding demand threatens some established forests that are being cleared to make way for bamboo plantations.

Less functional are the odd objects shaped by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius out of chicle latex, extracted from the chicozapote tree in the Mayan rainforest on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Once the basis for chewing gum, the elastic, viscous goo refuses to lend itself to any obvious purpose. Jongerius refers to it affectionately as “an alien in the house”, and sticks strings or blobs of it around the necks of vases.

Jongerius's whimsical project raises questions as to the practical significance of the exhibits and whether they can translate into long-term, widespread and commercially viable uses for sustainable materials and practices. It is hard to imagine the average shopper investing in Lin's graceful bench. But Mizrahi believes that big opportunities await fashion designers who recognize that protecting the environment makes economic sense.

Salmon skin, for example, is normally discarded as a waste product, yet it is a valuable and resilient material that can be turned into shoes, belts and bikinis. It requires less-toxic chemicals for tanning than mammal hides because fish scales are easier to remove than hair. “People think of salmon skin as something you peel off your food; in fact it's this beautiful substance,” Mizrahi says in a video accompanying his exhibit. He adds, “The fashion business is crazily competitive. All of a sudden it's going to occur to these greedy people that they can make a lot of money if they conserve.”