OUROBOROS

In 1974, Enzo Mari published Autoprogettazione, a DIY handbook offering radical access to furniture design. Today, those very pieces appear in uptown showrooms and high street fashion retailers. Coveted objects, sold back to consumers at a premium by virtue of heritage and exclusivity. Designed to be democratic, self-assembling projects which critique an impenetrable code of luxury, they have now become its symbolic agents. What began as communist ideal turns into capitalist social cue. Up can become down. Right can become left. ‘What’s not’ can become ‘What’s hot’.

How we see things is not fixed. Associations as above, can, and often do, make an about face. A 180. Turned, twisted, co-opted and contorted by culture and commerce, often with design as agent. Conceived as its own contradiction, Lip Service is a research project come semiotic self-enquiry. A practical op-ed unfolding in real time. A product that pulls itself apart in public. A brand that performs its own construction and contradiction. A meditation on the medium and métier of design. One part consumer good, one part conceptual loop. It knows the codes, wears them like a skin, then pulls them inside out. A snake eating its own tail, gleefully. Akin to a collection by Yohji Yamamoto or Rei Kawakubo—the toile presented as purest form, the linings and stitching reversed and revealed. It’s about position and how you look at the very thing you’re holding. A perpetual paradoxical perspective.

A CONTRADICTION IN A CAN

Lip Service is also a wine spritz in a can. It’s a drink. An effervescent combination of wine with Australian botanicals. But, not really, like all brands, it is actually all that stands around it. A self-reflection, an inversion. An active oxymoron. A participant in the problem it parodies. A glossed-over glimpse of the world as seen through the warped chrome of an aluminum cylinder. It is a consumable consumer, actively imbibing and replicating its own conditions of appeal. Because it knows the world doesn’t need another wine spritz in a can. We’re fine. We’ll survive without it. We might even thrive. Aisles teem with replicated versions of an object screaming for attention and advertising ultimate satisfaction. But when it’s 3am at the creation party is anything new even possible? Or needed? A designer’s very vocation can often sit in this paradigm. Creation within saturation. More in a mass market running out of space, and sometimes ideas. The instinct that emerges is deconstructive, pulling it all apart to put it back together again. But not in the same order, not even with the same objective. Chaos becomes the perfect entry point for creation.

UNCOMMON SENSE

Like the Dadaists, sometimes the only way forward is through. Take it to the absurd and then step again. To present the problem, represent the problem and re-present the problem. 30 years before Mari, when Rrose Sélavy (née Marcel Duchamp) took a urinal and flipped its orientation—from receptacle to fountain—he spun the art paradigm. A snub. A tongue in cheek prophecy and an invitation to see things from an alternate angle. To step aside the torrent of conventional wisdom and see how little sense ‘the rules’ actually make. That more often than not, uncommon sense reads a lot more rationally, even if it requires a hot minute to familiarise.

‘The rules’ know no boundaries and jump from culture to commerce. The market may deify the disruptor but in reality self-harms with homogenization. Addicted to familiarity and the perceived security blanket of coded standards. Fueled by market data that defines us to a singularity. Handcuffed to visual norms that act as invisibility cloaks to new thinking, new audiences, new growth. If only one could zoom out and see the forest from the trees, they would recognise the category laws deemed unbreakable are localised fantasies that have fossilised progression through mindless repetition. What feels in design process like risky business, is actually sound commercial logic. The real risk is playing the same game as the rest of the competition rather than creating your own field.

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ‘EM, SUBVERT ‘EM.

Video killed the radio star. AI killed the designer? Well, if you can’t beat them, subvert them. Image generator becomes chat bot becomes sommelier satire. Wino tasting notes “fresh opened tennis balls, unripe apple”—the performance of ‘wine professionalism’ that reads more as subjective social skill—re-enacted, recited and reinterpreted by silicon chip. Your unripe apple is my rotting peach, and who are you to say it’s not. Likewise Midjourney, your image generating model is my copywriter. Images of ingredients uploaded and transcribed by AI imaging tech populate the website, a perpetual feed of silicon sommelier subjectivity. With Lip Service the computer tastes.

Elsewhere, in social feeds the ‘taste’ of the computer is questioned. Algorithms that churn content so temporal it disappears before it is consumed reimagined as printed page. Perpetual movement makes way for permanence. Published at an alternate rate, speed is slowed to a sequenced series of linked content. 20 images, 20 pages, 1 volume. Not understood in isolation, nor in a quick swipe or scroll, rather pondered en masse as an enquiry on a specific semiotic shift. Self-referential, here AI plays author and editor, the material never leaves the medium. A self-contained, self-generated imprint.

Issue 2. Trompe (French: Trick) where iconic imagery becomes the product. Pop culture packaging that transcends the contents. Think Coca-Cola silhouettes or 90’s Absolut campaigns. As Warhol recognised, image is everything. Or a trick of the eye. Instead, impossible combinations of virtual fruit stack in formal silhouettes. Packaging itself, rather than a focus on the packaging itself. Removing the deception of container and reintroducing another—are avatar apples a more authentic artifice?

Issue 3. Selon (Spanish: according to) re-reads the image and ponders perspectives. Anamorphisis, an image in an image, a concept immortalised by Hans Holbein the Younger in The Ambassadors (1533). Seen face on, a portrait of two young upstarts the world at their feet and a distorted smudge across the frame. Glanced from the side, the smudge reveals itself as a perfectly proportioned skull there in plain sight. Four centuries later Spanish liqueur Ponche Caballero has its stainless-steel vessel rotated in function by compatriot Salvador Dali. Paintings legible only in the reflection of the liquor bottle. The skull appears, or rather reappears. Academic magic eye for the optically lazy and thirsty. In Selon, mirror becomes portal and another re-reading presents. Aluminum can silhouettes refract renaissance paint, linking Holbein and Dali, whilst revealing the semiotic clay with which the product itself plays. What you read is how you see it, or where you view it from.

MARKETING AS MIRROR

Society speeds. Technology does too. The pace is blurring, and it fuses together strands once kept separate. The product is no longer just the thing you hold in your hand. It’s not even necessarily a product at all, but the idea that is attached to it. Idea as container and container as an idea. The campaign revolves around the concept of what a campaign even is. The notion of a billboard is obliterated, instead the product warps and wraps itself around the frame, extolling its own virtues and evolving to meet its audience. Nothing is in isolation.

What is Lip Service? Like parallax, the object stays the same, but your view keeps shifting depending on where you are standing. The can looks different from every angle. So does the story. It is not a fixed image but a moving target. It plays with semiotics, then paints over the signs. In doing so, it calls attention to the entire act of signing. Trompe l’oeil is French for “deceive the eye”. Lip Service goes a step further: it deceives the frame. Flattens reality into the image of itself, then re-projects it in high gloss. Borrowing from the visual language of legacy brands, cult collectives, industrial artefacts, academic publishing, and bootleg culture, it layers all of this strata like lacquer. Through this self-aware act of cultural consumption and cosplay, it engages in a knowing tête-à-tête with the very thing it is critiquing. The method is in the madness. Sitting in the fluorescent light of a bar fridge, dewy with condensation, none of it seems to matter. But it’s all there, within reach. Highlighting absurdity by taking it to extreme. Yet for all this, it is unable to escape the circus, by existing it participates. That’s the paradox. And the playpen. For Lip Service, but also for the contemporary designer. One can get despondent, or one can be double agent.

LANGUAGE OVER LABEL

The visual language exists in tension between visibility and mystery. A signal to those in the know, a cipher to those just arriving. In the vein of Margiela and T.I.S.M., anonymity isn’t absence—it’s an aesthetic, an ideology. A rejection of the cult of personality, but not of theatre. There are no founders front and centre, no celebrity chef mythologies (even though there could be). Just a product come project, moving through the world, performing its own contradictions. The design? It’s barely there. Or rather, it is there, but not how you expect. With the removal of ornamentation, comes a concentration of concept. The codes are soft, symbolic, abstracted. Gestures over logos and language over labelling. It builds recognition through repetition. Pattern. Form. Format. You begin to see it before you name it. Black over silver. A graphic fold. A slightly off-kilter sans serif. It’s a system of suggestion that builds its own logic.

LUXURY GOODS

Lip Service is a product, yes, but also a platform. A question dressed as a can. As in its website—where mouse movement is like tracing a finger through steam on a foggy shower window—definition eludes grasp. Just as you think you understand it, it shifts. What if sincerity and sarcasm could be held in the same hand? Its semiotics embodied. Social commentary and art movement in 250ml. And yet, it tastes good. That’s the license to experiment. Because for all the introspection and theatre, it trades in premium. Premium of ingredient and idea. Quality is the permission slip to pay lip service to luxury and still purvey Lip Service as a luxury good. It doesn’t forget that a wine spritz should be delicious. It doesn’t neglect formula and the quality of its components to focus purely on world building. It knows what it is: light, sharp, a little acidic. The taste of contradiction canned and served cold. Slurped or poured, it fizzes with a sense of self-satisfied mirth, the slant of a red lip over a monochromatic ensemble. It actively participates in luxury retail as much as it does in cultural critique. A hologram, but not a hollow projection. Aware of its own merit as a premium product on a crowded top-shelf that no one asked for. But like any good host it recedes quietly at the end of the night to ponder its own existential crisis, allowing the focus to rest on the lingering impression, and the party it facilitates.

Photography: Annika Kafcaloudis, Daniel Herrmann-Zoll.