Flowers everywhere
In spring 2025, the Trends & Identity subject area invited the public to the Flowers conference in Zurich’s Maison Shift. Whether the focus was on their religious, political or magical significance, economic factors, their role in art and design, or biology: for one day, everything revolved around the universal and sometimes contradictory popularity of flowers. A review for all those who could not attend.
She placed lush bouquets of large-petalled green orchids and “weeds” such as hops, blackberry stems and clematis in the display windows and caused a furore. The English florist, Constance Spry (1886–1960) broke all the rules of contemporary floral arrangement at the end of the 1920s. At the peak of her career, she was commissioned to decorate the processional route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey with flowers for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. Her floral design is still influential today; just as notable is her role in the lesbian or homosocial community of the 1930s, in which she also inspired other artists with her work. Anna-Brigitte Schlittler traced the florist’s path in her contribution “Doing the Flowers”.
More than just decorations
As a symbol of the cycle of blossoming and withering, flowers play a significant role in death settings and rituals related to finiteness. They are more than just decorations: they materialize individual spirituality, provide comfort and connect people in a common experience. Rituals with flowers—from bouquets next to a person’s sick bed through to altar formations—create space for transcendence and dignity. Based on intensive ethnographic design research into death settings, Bitten Setters’s contribution “Florale Normen: Ästhetik des Übergangs von Leben zu Tod” (Floral Norms: the Aesthetic of the Transition from Life to Death) showed that flowers can be used as a hybrid object for life and transience in the dying process.
Design and poetry rarely have much in common. Designers think strictly, objectively and systematically, while poets defy the functional exchange of signs. The rules of pragmatism do not interest them, but flowers do. Since ancient times, they have been the subject of poetry, extolled on their own or in posies, and stand for friendship and love, faithfulness, transience, comfort and hope. Anemones, Michaelmas daisies, hollyhock, daisies, violets and forget-me-nots: everything that blossoms lends itself to poetry. Franziska Nyffenegger reflected in her contribution “Rose Rose Reseda: Ein Poesiealbum für Blumenfreund:innen” (Rose Rose Reseda: a Poetry Album for Lovers of Flowers) on what design and design theory could also learn from poetry, and then browsed through poems, with the attendees, from an album she had composed for this event.
A desire for opulence or escapism
Eclectic flower installations, fair-trade bouquets of meadow flowers or pale-yellow mimosa shrubs. Draped in exquisite ceramic vases, a new sense of floral design is developing – in classy apartments of the urban bourgeoisie, fashionable pop-up restaurants or during the opening of the flagship store. David Jäggi’s contribution titled “Von Tankstellenshop bis Grandhotel—eine fotografische Spurensuche” (From the Service Station Shop to the Grand Hotel—a Photographic Search for Traces) asked: is this an expression of a new desire for ornamentation and opulence? A sign of an unsatisfied yearning for natural images? Or a symptom of fatal escapism in times of crisis? Ethnographically equipped with a camera, a notepad and an eye for decoration techniques and atmospherical management, Jäggi set off on a cross-country journey. As part of his research, he asked questions about tasteful situatedness, social localization and class: which flowers are considered old-fashioned, what combination is avant-garde, and what is seen as “good” design?
