Watching the bags go by

How nice to find paper bags exciting press coverage. Michael Bierut has designed a packaging overhaul for Saks Fifth Avenue. It has been lovingly documented on Pentagram’s blog and in the US style press.

The really beautiful thing they have done is break up the logo into a tiled pattern, whilst still retaining a recognisable graphic identity. Deceptively simple, clever clever stuff.

I have to admit whilst in New York last December I spent a lot of time watching paper bags. Nice foil blocked GAP Christmas bags. Small and perky, navy and red Kiehls bags. Snappy, crisp, fresh green Kate Spade bags.

Glimpsing their colours on the crowded winter streets was a joy.

Poor lambkin

Mid-April and the weather is still making its mind up. This time of year feels quintessentially English to me. The colours, light and skies always send me to the work of the English artists Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. I waver between which of them I like best. Ravilious is the aesthete, measured and sure of line. Bawden is less delicate, more bucolic.

This image is a chapter header for April from the book Good Food by Ambrose Heath, decorated by Edward Bawden, published by Faber & Faber in 1932. Bawden was at his best in the 1930s and his collaborations with Heath on a series of cookery books are classics.

Bawden’s illustrations suit April; they are blustery, budding, humorous and full of vigour. But although this illustration is suitably idyllic, the carnivorous text soon dispels any comfortable feeling:

‘We are still on the threshold of Spring. The jolly lambkin, whose younger brothers leapt so artlessly to our table in March, now gambols a hint more sedately, but his flesh is nearly as delicious. Grass will give him a new flavour, and nowhere in the world is better grass lamb to be found than in England.’

Through a glass

Who needs an art gallery when you have shopping streets to wander down on a crisp spring day? As some people like to catch the latest blockbuster exhibition, I like to catch changing shop windows.

Hermes is the must-see. They do proper window display. A good window display should be knowing, witty, well crafted and more about the display than the product. This style of art-referenced, narrative yet minimalist window display was perfected in the fashionable small boutiques of Paris and London in 1930s. In part as a revolt against the ‘massed display’ where everything was piled high in the shop window, with no thought of ‘art’, it had appeal for a vendor keen to separate his offerings out from the ordinary. Such displays have once again become the province of the high-end boutique that can afford to indulge itself with a display budget, and wishes to be associated with craft values. Hermes does it so well and its variegated and - with the exception of the scarves - understated product lines lend themselves as tasteful props.

The latest display in the Sloane Street shop is a case in point. A garden in their window - delightful cardboard birds, milk bottles, insects and patterns printed onto piles of newspapers, dotted about with Hermes ceramic plates, fruit-shaped wallets and not much else.

The fleeting life of the window display and its commercial intent make it all the juicer to me. We’re back on to that old ephemerality theme here. Blink and you miss it.