White orchids, purple violets, orange, pink and pink roses, bright green hydrangeas - thousands of flowers, from the floor to the high ceilings: the designer wanted to make his debut at Dior, founded by a man who loved flowers as much as women Raf Simons have something very special. So he commissioned the Belgian flower artist Mark Colle to flood the five salons of a Parisian city palace with a sea of ​​flowers. Each room received its own flower carpet. The pictures went around the world - task overreaching.

Colle, the man behind the booth magic, managed to make flowers become a major attraction in many places from the summer of 2012 onwards. Florists suddenly became floral designers working worldwide for fashion shows, super-rich weddings, and the luxury hotel industry. The art book publisher Phaidon has now assembled 89 particularly capable heads of this guild in one volume.

"Blooms. Contemporary Floral Design" devotes 272 pages to floral art, most of which goes for pictures, of course. On the other pages the creators and their work are presented. Remarkably often, the portrayed artists and studios do not have a classic florist background. Some are more on the go as an all-round creative, others work as chief editors or perfumers. One switched from the IT industry to the floral business. Others are stylists and designers in personal union, such as Joshua Werber, known for his ephemeral floral fashion.

photo gallery


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Photo Gallery: Flower power

Blooms, that's his strength, gathers established figures like Mark Colle along with art school graduates, who no one knows if they've already swapped their flower studio for another studio in two years.

Also in terms of flower compositions, the book gives a good cross section: from huge bouquets and hedonistic arrangements to the minimalist creations of Girl and Garden, which often consist of a single, but all the larger palm leaf (Yucca or Coccoloba, for example).

Regardless of wholesale

New design approaches also bring new production conditions with them: particularly delicate flowers, which otherwise rarely find their way into containers and arrangements, because they do not last long, are pulled in the garden behind the store and picked shortly before tying.

Similarly, the Scottish floraldesigners of Pyrus, who wanted to be independent from the Dutch flower wholesale. The answer was local plants. Her work proves that "grow local" does not mean abandonment.

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Phaedo Press
Blooms: Contemporary Floral Design

Publishing company:

Phaedo Press

Pages:

272

Price:

EUR 21.36

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The Guerrilla Gardening by Lewis Miller Design from New York is also fascinating. The team beautifies the Big Apple with luxury bouquets that unexpectedly stick out of garbage cans and subway shafts into their city. In doing so, they profit twice as much from the hype around their industry: the urban arrangements are to consist exclusively of flowers and flowers, which have been mass-disposed by other florists.

Above-ground floral greetings

For the sake of fairness, it must be said that not everything is necessarily new, just because the names are different now. Much of what today is called floral design, florists have done so or similar decades ago. This also applies to the flower plugs of the Japanese Ikebana schools. But the variety and at the same time quality, in which so many different positions of floral design stand side by side today, is definitely remarkable.

Of course, the ultimate master of floral decadence should not be missed: The Japanese Azuma Makoto catapulted floral art to unprecedented heights in 2014 when he launched a 50-year-old bonsai with lilies, orchids and irises into the stratosphere. In the black nothing, hovering as a background in front of the shining earth, flower greetings were created that are in the truest sense of the word one: supernaturally beautiful.