Corteiz and Gabriel Moses have teased a collaboration built around a single graphic: the Columbia Pictures Torch Lady, historically a robed female figure inspired by the Statue of Liberty reimagined as a Black woman holding the flame, centred on a hooded windbreaker. Based on imagery teased on Moses’ Instagram, the construction is a standard lightweight windbreaker, keeping the focus entirely on the graphic. Moses shoots cinema. and with Clint 419 builds a philosophy around escaping constraint. Together they make a garment that is also a position, one of the most recognisable pieces of corporate cinema iconography in the world, revised in a single clean move.

No release date yet.

To promote The Drama, A24 opened a one-day wedding chapel in Las Vegas where couples could be married by cast members as officiants, with Alana Haim as DJ and Zendaya appearing as a surprise witness. A souvenir hoodie printed with the film's plot summary in garbled text was available on site. A24 never names the plot twist. Instead it drops prospective audiences into the emotional environment of the film the rituals, anxieties and absurdity of getting married and lets them work it out. A24sMarketing that builds an entire participatory experience around withheld information is rare. Most brand experience design doesn't get close to some of the craziness of an A24 event

See link
Inspiration by Mark

Opening 16 April, the latest addition is The Everythingists, a new commission by Es Devlin, a sculptural drawing conceived around the idea of ‘Everythingism,’ positioned in dialogue with the legacy of Natalia Goncharova and her contributions to painting, theatre design and the Russian avant-garde.

It runs until 18 October, part of V&A East’s six-monthly rotating commissions programme that also features Shahed Saleem and Lawrence Lek.

See link

The Fondation Alaïa‘s exhibition pairing Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior has been extended until 21 June, worth knowing if you’re passing through Paris before summer.

Curated by Olivier Saillard, the show puts around thirty Dior designs alongside a similar number of Alaïa’s own pieces, drawn from the 500 Dior garments Alaïa spent his life collecting. The shared obsessions are obvious once you see them side by side: accentuated waists, sculpted shoulders, all shades of black and grey. Alaïa worked at Dior for just a few days in 1956, but the impression clearly lasted a lifetime.

See link

The Prodigy and Hummel have produced a limited edition football shirt designed by the band black and off-white, raglan sleeves with piping, the Ant drip logo as the crest, band logo across the chest, and on the back, 91 in hand-drawn font by artist Tom Gordon, the year it all started

.See link

Zaha Hadid Architects' installation for Audi at Milan Design Week, The Origin, uses spatial compression and expansion to make visitors slow down, a titanium-coloured fibreglass portal over a reflecting pool in the Portrait Hotel courtyard. For a car brand, this is the inversion of everything a car brand usually asks design to do. Speed, efficiency, forward motion replaced by stillness and pause, sound like most interesting brief in Milan next week.

Milan design week (MDW) takes place from 20 to 26 April

See link

Salone del Mobile launched Salone Raritas this week, its first dedicated space for collectible design, limited editions and design antiques, designed by Formafantasma as what they call "an architectural lantern." Modular islands replace booths, connecting galleries including Nilufar, COLLECTIONAL and Salviati with architects, developers and hospitality buyers inside the fair for the first time. The blunt admission embedded in the initiative: collectible design has been growing for years, and the world's most important furniture fair has been watching from outside.

Better late than never, and at least the set is built to serve the objects rather than the other way around.

Milan design week (MDW) takes place from 20 to 26 April

See link

Nike and Phaidon have produced a 240-page hardcover charting 55 years of Nike football boot history from the all-black leather boot of the early 1970s, the first shoe to feature the Swoosh, through to the present day via four key silos: Tiempo, Mercurial, Total 90 and Phantom. Caleb Azumah Nelson contributes four essays drawing on personal nostalgia as a football fan from southeast London, while London College of Fashion historian Thomas Turner covers the materials, form and technology behind each design. Nearly 500 images drawn from the Nike archives span close-ups, prototypes, sketches and ground breaking ads.

We’ve been lucky enough to work on a few of these boot releases and football campaigns over the years, including the early 2000s era when Nike started sponsoring the Premier League ball, the Geo Merlin, and the Vapor was making its mark. Total 90 knuckle-ball chaos. Mercurial silhouettes that defined entire eras. Timed for the 2026 World Cup, this is the kind of book that works equally well as a cultural design reference and a straight-up nostalgia play.

See link

Coachella 2026 streams both weekends this weekend, 10 to 12 April and 17 to 19 April, across YouTube and the official app, with all seven stages available in 4K. The multiview feature lets you watch up to four stages simultaneously on your TV, toggling audio between feeds. The BBC has long demonstrated how well this works at Glastonbury; Coachella is finally catching up with the same ambition. This 1st weekend’s highlights include The xx, Sabrina Carpenter, Disclosure, Jack White, The Strokes, David Byrne, FKA twigs, Little Simz, Iggy Pop and Laufey.

See link

Dua Lipa has been announced as curator of the Southbank Centre’s 2026 London Literature Festival, running 21 October to 1 November, programming the opening weekend and additional events in partnership with her Service95 Book Club, a mix of established and emerging writers alongside free public programming.

“Reading has anchored me through every chapter of my life - from being the new kid at school in a new country to finding quiet refuge on tour.”

Service95 already has credibility in this space. The Southbank’s offer is to give it a building and 75 years of cultural institution behind it. A global pop star as the face of serious literary culture: given Service95’s numbers, the bet looks solid.

See link

The co-chair selection with Beyoncé, returning to the Met steps after a decade; Venus Williams, who has spent thirty years using dress as public statement in spaces that weren’t built with her in mind, making her a precise choice for a show about what clothes actually do to a body

See link

The Artemis II crew completed a successful lunar flyby this week, the farthest human spaceflight since Apollo 13, four astronauts travelling further from Earth than any human has ventured since 1972, including the first observation of the moon’s far side in decades. The first photos sent back were taken on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, a device carrying more computing power than the original NASA mission computers attracting millions of social media likes, the Earth and Moon from unusual angles, in high definition.

Hopefully a reminder that we are all, in fact, on our own spacecraft in space, and some welcome perspective right now. The mission will also stream 4K video via laser.

What the Apollo programme spent years developing in technology, consumer hardware now does routinely. Like those holiday FOMO pics, the distance between the cutting edge and the everyday is collapsing

See link

Shame I was in Amsterdam last week and would like ahve seen this. Enfin Levé, a techwear label, unveiled the world’s first T. rex leather handbag, a one-off teal piece currently on display at the Art Zoo Museum beside a life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex until 11 May, after which it goes to auction with a starting price north of €575,000.

The material, branded T-Rex Leather™, was developed with Created by VML, The Organoid Company and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd using AI modelling and fossilised collagen sequences to reconstruct the genetic data needed for production, because intact dinosaur DNA, as scientists will tell you, cannot be recovered in usable form. What they worked with instead were protein fragments preserved in fossils.

Inspiration by Mark
See link

Imogen Heap returns to London for her first headline show in six years at the Roundhouse on 17 April, performing alongside her AI alter ego ai.mogen, built entirely from her own vocal identity and musical footprint, described as a more lifelike Vocaloid, controlled entirely by Heap herself.

Loving the framing: not AI as threat, not AI as tool, but AI as extension , another voice in the same creative universe, answering to the same authorial hand. The question isn't whether ai.mogen is really Imogen. The question is what it means that she built it herself, in her own image.

See link

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a hand-made documentary from the Academy Award-winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once and Navalny, following a father-to-be trying to make sense of where AI is actually heading. The film lands between doomerism and optimism apocaloptimism, as they frame it and the argument centres less on the technology itself than the infrastructure around it, international coordination on the scale of atomic frameworks, corporate transparency, an independent regulatory body, legal liability for AI products, mandatory disclosure of generative AI use in media.

It has the potential to do what Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation did for social media, take the conversation into homes, workplaces, schools and government and shift the terms of debate. The Anxious Generation and conversations around it gave parents and policymakers a shared language. Maybe this film could do the same for AI.

For resources and to join the apocaloptimist community, visit theaidocgetinvolved.com.

Inspiration by Mark
See it on Apple TV or in Cinemas

The Versace x Onitsuka Tiger TAI-CHI Sakura dropped on last week, Versace's first-ever footwear collaboration with an external brand, made at the Onitsuka Tiger factory in Tottori, Japan using Italian materials, and designed under Dario Vitale, who showed one collection before being replaced by Pieter Mulier.

This is a shoe that sits at a hinge point in the house's history, carrying one creative director's vision into a new era. The seeding strategy is its own story, Myha'la from Industry, Paris Opera principal ballet dancer Guillaume Diop, French actor François Civil, and two major Chinese market names, spanning entertainment, performance culture and geography in a single pre-launch move.

See link

Women in Print at the William Morris Gallery is the first exhibition to properly credit the people who actually built Liberty's identity, tracing the contributions of designers like Althea McNish, Susan Collier, Sarah Campbell and Lucienne Day across over 100 works spanning garments, original designs, film and historic photographs. Liberty is one of those names that functions as cultural shorthand for a certain kind of considered British taste, and yet it's taken 150 years to do this show, that's both the context and the point.

Curated by Rowan Bain and Róisín Inglesby with exhibition design by Simon Milthorp, Lai Couto, Scarlet Winter and Liberty Design Studio, the show also carries a forward-facing question embedded in its programming: what does the future actually look like for women textile designers in the UK, backed by mentoring and training for local young people as part of the William Morris Gallery's own 75th anniversary year. An archive show that refuses to stay in the archive.

See link

The Patta x Nike Air Max 1 Waves "White/Hyper Crimson" dropped on Air Max Day, five years on from the original same silhouette, two new colourways, one addition that carries the whole story. Each pair came packaged with a custom bracelet featuring the Surinamese flag, a direct tribute to the heritage of Patta's founders.

See link

Tarek Atoui, a Beirut-born, Paris-based artist and composer known for treating sound as something physical, social and spatial, has been named the next Hyundai Commission artist at Tate Modern, with a site-specific work set to take over the Turbine Hall from October 2026 through to April 2027.

He builds environments rather than installations, populating them with custom-made instruments incorporating glass, ceramics and water, objects that sit somewhere between sculpture and tool, activated by touch, breath and vibration to generate layered sound from environmental recordings and digitally produced elements.

Catherine Wood, Interim Director of Tate Modern, said: “Tarek Atoui has captivated audiences internationally with his boundary-pushing approach to sound. Blending music, technology, sculpture and performance, he is a truly cross-disciplinary artist whose work references current social, historical and political realities. Architectural space plays an important role in Atoui’s ongoing investigation into sound and vibration, and we can’t wait to see how he engages with audiences within the public space of Tate Modern's iconic Turbine Hall."

Inspiration by Mark
See Link

John Maeda, one of my long-time favourites and someone who has been shaping how the tech industry thinks about design for the better part of three decades, presented the Design in Tech Report 2026 at SXSW this March, and the central argument is the most consequential the report has made in its decade-plus history: design has shifted from the gulf of execution to the gulf of evaluation. Agents can act on your behalf now, which means the design problem is no longer "how do I help someone do this?" but "how do I help someone know whether it was done well?"

He posted

- Taste is yours. AI cannot fake its way into having it.
- Start slow. Learn fast. Slope beats intercept every time.
- The pursuit of craft never dies. It migrates to what is new.
- Gulf of execution → Gulf of evaluation. Shift right, quickly.
- Interfaces now render at runtime. Design the system. Not the screen.
- Using a tool is upskilling. Reading about one is not.
- Tasks change faster than jobs. Think at the task level.
- Execution moved to machines. Responsibility stayed with you.

2026 trends report: https://lnkd.in/g3ADH7Aw
All past reports are at designintech.report

Inspiration by Mark