Judith Seng. I shrank the closet

by Odoardo Fioravanti

Hide & Show are two wardrobes that partially conceal the clothes they contain, with a colorful, mutable image that becomes an integral part of the interior design.

We are all a bit designers, though perhaps unconsciously. We are designers because we have the capacity to transform the things around us, perhaps by chance. Everyone has had the experience of shrinking a garment by washing it the wrong way. It’s a situation that gets you involved in a typical design process: the altering of proportions. To imagine a story behind the prototypes Hide & Show by Judith Seng, we could try this one. In order to give a new form to the wardrobe, the German designer seems to have washed a couple of them on a heavy-duty cycle, making them fuzzy and smaller. When they dried, the walls and doors no longer closed to hide the contents, and became too short to cover them completely. People usually put clothes away in closets. Their beauty, which prompted us to choose them carefully and buy them, winds up being hidden, in the name of order and minimalist discipline, that recommends that homes hide all traces of life. Seng challenges all this with two projects that erase the timid concealment of our clothes behind the scenes, putting them right out on stage. In one of the two proposed containers the form of the parallelepiped is shortened, making like a house on stilts: the hems of dresses peek out from below, like a frothy textile explosion. In the second wardrobe the doors separate, leaving glimpses of the natural pattern formed by the contents: the traditional decorative and chromatic finish is replaced by a view of this sort of ‘inner beauty’. The clothes and their containers form a system of mutual enhancement. Rather like a bookcase that doesn’t bother to protect books from dust, preferring to show them off and keep them in easy reach, displaying at least their colors and forms, as well as indications of their cultural contents. In a historical moment when design seems often the require a verbal accompaniment, a caption that explains what can’t be seen, we have an understandable desire for clear, self-evident works like these. Beauty is still the most revolutionary message.