New Designers witness moments of memory loss

Well, New Designers is over for another year. But there are just a couple of moments to be relived.

The first is from the opening speech of Week One by Business Design Centre host and managing director Andrew Morris. The bit about how if New Designers was dreamt up now (having never happened) it would never happen. Why not? Because, Morris says: “Our revered design bodies are more bothered about image and rhetoric.”

Image and rhetoric? Hmm.

The second is also from the same speech. Morris talks about how he and Peter York dreamed up the New Designers concept over a bottle ten years ago.

Er, didn’t Peta Levi set up the first New Designers back in 1984, years before the BDC got involved? What was that rhetoric about image?

Peta, charming and charitable as ever, declines to retort. She has a better and more generous memory, recalling the New Designers’ debt to the BDC for giving the show a home when the corporate sponsorship largesse of the 1980s dried up.