Mimetic protection: hide behind a vending machine costume to blend into the urbanscape and remain unnoticed by criminals and dangerous pursuers roaming the streets. Japanese fashion designer Aya Tsukioka has created a skirt that unfolds into a vending machine. Is this object a mechanism of defense? Is it a sophisticated critique to oversaturated Japanese public space? Is it performance art? There is a charming naïveté in the direct simplicity of this object; it is clear to me, just by looking at the unfolding sequence of images, that a drawing of the same sequence would be significantly more effective at conveying the idea of the thing than the photographs of the prototype. Drawings are expected to communicate, not necessarily to explain how something really works. I believe that the idea of this object is much stronger than its presence, which manages to reduce it to something banal and superfluous. The prototype of the object works against the idea of the object because the idea is sophisticated and the prototype is hopelessly crude. My favorite comic character, Mortadelo, is a master of camouflage: he has the ability to instantly disguising himself as any animate or inanimate thing to avoid being caught or to escape a dangerous situation. Mortadelo is a funny character and his ability to camouflage was always meant to make the reader laugh. But there is nothing funny about walking the streets with a contraption designed to turn you into an urban sketch.
