“There is anew aesthetic forming”

Few contemporary figures embody the continent-hopping post-globalization design gadfly more fully — or flamboyantly — than Karim Rashid. Before Sebastian Herkner and Philippe Malouin, Benjamin Hubert and Oki Sato, there was the Egypt-born, Canada-raised New Yorker who roared onto the world stage with his products for Umbra in the 1990s and went on to design everything from kitchenware and consumer packaging to wristwatches, hotels and even an Italian metro station. Only original provocateur Philippe Starck might claim to have undertaken more disparate commissions (or earned more frequent-flyer mileage).

But if Rashid is synonymous with a certain punchy turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic heavy on the use of plastics (Time famously called him the Prince of Plastic, long before the material’s growing disrepute as a far-from-sustainable design tool), he is still a hot commodity. The designer’s colourful interiors for the European hotel chain Prizeotel are being rolled out at a rapid clip, while recent product designs — including his Goby