Vitra Design Museum · Vitra Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein
18 May 2024 – 10 May 2026
Twenty-one works from Latent Couture by Mikey Woodbridge were exhibited in Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse at the Vitra Schaudepot for two years from May 2024 through May 2026. The exhibition set over 100 objects from the museum’s collection within a futuristic display, tracing the exchange between science fiction and design from the early twentieth century through the Space Age to work made for virtual worlds. Latent Couture appeared among the contemporary futurisms closing the show, alongside Andrés Reisinger’s The Shipping and Hortensia Chair, ZYVA Studio and Charlotte Taylor’s Neo-Chemosphere, and Francis Bitonti’s Molecule Shoes.
Reisinger described the display as evoking “multiple realities and timelines intertwining” within the present. Writing for the Deutscher Designer Club, Thomas Wagner noted that the show turns, briefly but precisely, toward present-day futurisms — NFT-based art in digital space and Afrofuturism, traced from Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place (1974) onward. That is the register Latent Couture was shown in: not the Space Age lineage of Aarnio, Colombo and Panton that fills most of the exhibition, but the closing argument about who imagines the future now.
Mikey Woodbridge, Latent Couture, AI fashion, 2023. © Mikey Woodbridge. Writing in Aesthetica, Emma Jacob described the series as 555 looks generated from photographs of the artist’s years as performer, painter and designer — a digital synthesis of lived experience. Woodbridge has called generative AI fashion “the opposite of the deepfake”.