Gabrielle Szwarcenberg

To designer Gabrielle Szwarcenberg, paper is a daily accomplice. The ultimate prototyping medium, it captures ideas in notes, it hides secrets in envelopes, offers future guidance, and prompts reflection through dog-eared corners of books. Her collection delves into childhood pursuits as rites of passage, celebrating how we transform boredom into ingenious creativity, from cat’s cradles and marble games to paper aeroplanes. Inspired by renowned 1960s beatnik Harry Smith, who collected over 250 paper planes now hidden in museum archives, she revived these artefacts through the coupé technique and by working on fabric as if paper. Embracing an art-for-art’s-sake ethos, the ephemeral looks provide an inadvertent retrospective of 20th-century graphic anthropology.