Fashion meets Function

One of the 'other lifetime' careers I might have had (other than astronaut, architect or palaeo-linguist) is industrial designer. It frustrates me that everyday objects are often so very ugly and poorly designed - often you can't even say 'function over form' because sometimes their functionality is questionable, too! So you can imagine my astonishment when I came across an Issey Miyake vacuum cleaner in a store yesterday. It was apparently created as part of a 'collaboration' between Dyson and Miyake. The process is documented on a section of Dyson's website devoted to the project, and includes some concept sketches by Miyake's creative director Dai Fujiwara. They're oddly functional drawings, with little artsiness about them. There are no fashion sketches displayed; rather a series of calico garment prototypes, so I wonder if the designers are working directly with fabric, sketching three-dimensionally as it were, or if they've just chosen not to show their sketches. To be quite honest I'm not sure that fashion and function were particularly well served by this strange union, but at least it's a change from designer perfumes and racing-car computers. I wonder if Beatrix Ong would make me a nice blue wheelbarrow?