15 May 2023
by Carson Wilaert

What do we mean when we talk about aesthetics? A set of principles that deal with beauty, taste, art. It’s about what constitutes the reasons for perceiving something as ugly, beautiful, tasteful, gauche.

Aesthetics of interconnectivity, of opulence, of conversation between high-spirited artistic temperaments, of the mingling of bodies, ideas and movements.

For Tatjana von Stein, the beauty lies in the finished pieces, yes, but as much again in the porous world of images, movements, sounds and conversations that are grasped and understood to be a part of the final form. Put simply, the cultural matrix is the collection.

What does it mean to unpick the melting pot of influences that go into the design process? It’s a revelation of a fundamental interconnectivity that criss-crosses from theatre to dance to music to spirituality to great artistic movements and icons of the past, present and future. It’s iconoclastic but reverential; it’s magnetic but the craftsmanship is deadly serious.

We range from surrealist photographers like the incomparable Gilbert Garcin, to the arch-modernist abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky  – whose work often referenced modern dance practice and lit a fire in the heart of the great Martha Graham who felt that there was someone who saw the world in the same way as she did from the perception of a single red line in his painting. Graham links us gracefully to the genius of American artist Isamu Noguchi and his stage work with her, bringing us full circle to furniture itself through Noguchi’s main practice as a sculptor and furniture designer. 

We feel the spirit of the collection in the lines of T. S. Eliot’s ‘At the still point’ from The Four Quartets:

The precision, the details, the wisdom, the craftsmanship, the beauty, the vitality. ‘There is only the dance’ – what a mantra to live by. It is this dance of the platonic, the ephemeral, the material, the bodily, even the kitsch that is at the very heart of the Mise En Scène collection. We step into this world when we are in the room with the sleek lines, the sensuous curvature, the material perfection, the downright zeal for human interaction that takes us through to the morning light. 

To tell the tale, one must understand that each reference point is in conversation with another, and another, and another. The collection bubbles with the intensity of creation in all its guises, and it speaks to us about the kaleidoscope of culture all at once, all the time.

Something of the soul of the brand exists between the Streamline Moderne eagle gargoyles of the Chrysler building and the abstract stage designs of Sergei Eisenstein (on a break from creating the groundbreaking Battleship Potemkin), between Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and the physical objects created by Art Deco designers such as Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann.

Sleekly primal, ritualistic even, carrying a whiff of the Jungian collective imagination. These are archetypal shapes and elemental forces. 

We can describe the looks of the collection: incorporating organic and biomimetic forms, inspired by the body and movement, evoking the contours of the human body and creating a sense of movement and flow.

But to really understand the world in which they exist we need to consider the broadest range of influences to be at play. This is a collection for a cast of dancers, actors, philosophers, artists, theorists, but only those with a glint in their eye, the ability to mix a good martini and spar in conversation with the scoundrel in the corner trying to woo their partner.

But it’s almost as if the pieces are only one manifestation of the brand’s world-building, and there could just as fittingly be a theatre performance in the studio, or a salon according to near-namesake Gertrude Stein. In Tatjana’s room, possibilities abound.