Thom Browne, fashion designer, rejigged Sotheby’s New York interior to reflect his take on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip phone for New York Fashion Week.
The brutalist interior boasted two, large concrete columns, in close proximity, lining the centre of its vast ground floor.
A red, blue and white stripe that Thom Browne is infamously renowned for lined the centre of the room, both racing up its walls and along the floor.
The New York launch party for Samsung saw 32 mini-office desks, sleek-black double pedestal tanker desks, Jo Hammerborg mid century president table lamps, and Olivetti Letters typewriters sprawl out in uniform rows.
Each desk had a model in a suit typing on a typewriter, to which would then switch to them flipping their Samsung phones whilst an audible narrator repeated ‘I’m not ready yet’, to ‘I’m ready now’, where they would pick up their briefcases and leave the room.
“The story was really taking something from the past and designing it in such a timeless way that you could bring it forward into the future,” says Thom Browne, according to WWD.
“Everyone was hearing from the future, saying that they weren’t ready yet. And once they really got familiar with the phone, then they realised it was time for them to go and they were ready for the future.”
Design elements of the phone tap into the idea of melding the old with the new, with an analogue ringtone, typewriter sound effects and app icons, which appear in the Thom Browne font and aesthetic, according to WWD.
“It was taking a device that people knew and really making it relevant for today, and technologically more advanced than any phone out there,” Browne adds.
