5th Prize – Call for Contemporary Creation 2015 "Aubusson Weaves Fashion"

Creation – Vincent Blouin, designer born in 1980, French, lives and works in France (Paris), and Julien Legras, designer, French, lives and works in France (Paris). Weaving – Manufacture Saint Jean, Aubusson Low-warp tapestry, cotton warp, wool weft

Vincent Blouin and Julien Legras are two designers associated in the collective Élément Commun. They share an interest in scientific and technical fields and work on the uses and characteristics of the environment. They specialize in product innovation and scenography, designed according to the properties of materials. The designers presented their project Henri Cap as a scenography: three caps with crown patterns rest simply on display pedestals, while behind them, three portraits of kings are virtually hung on the wall: Henri IV, Louis XIV, and Louis XV, each crowned with the aforementioned caps.

The designers here remind us of the importance of tapestry in history, an emblem of the most powerful. The cap, in contrast, is a common, modern, and popular object. The anachronism and the unusual combination of crown/cap humorously desacralizes royalty while idolizing the cap, enhancing its contemporary impact in an elegant and eccentric form.