Back when plastic was having its day, its aesthetic, that was born from its ability to morph and be colored, defined an age. It both reflected popular culture and influenced it. The Italian avant-gard movements of the 1950’s & 60’s played with new forms, surfaces, pattern, transparency and gloss levels that expressed and celebrated the aesthetic of plastic and marked its evolution away from the dark Bakelite of its early incarnation. Since then plastic has gone from a well-rounded, glossy and bright colored character into a personality that is still trying to find it’s place in the future.
In an interview with Petra Cullmann director of the K Show the biggest plastic show in earth that will be posted later in this series, she explained that a solution to our problems lie not with reducing plastic but using more of it to reduce weight in cars for example, while we all want our materials to support stories of sustainability in our products it is difficult to know how to visualise post-consumer waste, light-weighting or how its appearance can be adapted and given a higher value to take on the ‘real’ materials that are so dominant like glass and metals that would perhaps encourage us to keep our products a little longer. So what is the aesthetic of plastics and what are the trends that capture the CMF that is in constant motion?