Duchess of York sets students stationery challenge

FOR the Duchess of York, the pen is mightier than the keyboard!

She always uses a fountain pen – even when authoring her novels and children’s stories – and is keen to revive the art of handwriting.  It is a passion that led to the latest design challenge she issued to students at the University of Huddersfield, and she was so impressed by the results that she decided to send one of the entries on a Transatlantic journey as part of a major fund-raising initiative.

The Duchess is a regular visitor to the University and has set a sequence of stimulating challenges for product design, textile and fashion students.  The 2019 brief was to produce designs for a high-end stationery collection, including a fountain pen and box.  Students were told to draw inspiration from one of three themes – oceans, forests and flowers.

Under the supervision of lecturer Dr Omar Huerta Cardoso, three inter-disciplinary teams of product design and textile students were formed and handed the Duchess’s brief.  After some preparatory work, they were given 48 hours to come up with designs, visualisation boards and artefacts.  They needed to display skills ranging from drawing and mastery of image editing software to the use of 3D printing technology to produce bespoke fountain pen prototypes.

The team of Emily Robinson, Rachel Carter and Holly Griffiths-Jones were inspired by the ocean and the seashore for their designs, titled Wave and Shell.

For their project Nature is Golden, Sophie Baxter, Joseph Hannam and Precious Ukaiwe worked from Sophie’s drawings of woodlands to produce designs that included wood-textured fountain pens adorned with leaf-shaped cutouts and entwined with silver, to mimic roots.

Gayathri Kopattil, Ben Higgins and Libby-Mae Fotheringham titled their collection Botanical Beauty.  It drew inspiration for its stationery and pen design from photographs of exotic flowers taken at Sheffield Botanical Gardens.  The team also used laser-cutting technology to produce a pen box adorned with a floral lattice design.

The Duchess was escorted by University of Huddersfield Vice-Chancellor Professor Bob Cryan and Dean of Art, Design and Architecture Professor Mike Kagioglou when she arrived to inspect the three displays.  Impressed by all of the responses to her design brief she told how much she values the art of handwriting – hence her decision to include a fountain pen and stationery in the challenge.

Eventually, she plumped for Botanical Beauty as her favourite and stated that she had recently visited the Canadian Botanical Gardens in Toronto and had pledged to aid fund-raising efforts so that it could acquire more land.  “They want to expand so more young people who don’t have the ability to see flowers or walk in the park can have a really good experience of colour and nature.”

Therefore, she decided that she would convey the presentation boards and designs made by the University of Huddersfield trio to Canada, in the hope they will play a part in the fund-raising drive and attract the interest of investors.

Also on display for the Duchess was a collection of evocative artefacts created by University of Huddersfield senior lecturer Charlotte Goldthorpe.  Titled Making Material Memories, it  features a wide range of items crafted from materials including vegetan leather that are intended to store bittersweet memories of passionate love affairs and sad bereavements.  It has been exhibited at art galleries, and now Charlotte was on hand to describe the project to the Duchess of York, who was especially intrigued by a leather suitcase and the story it encapsulated.

This led to the Duchess announcing, as she departed, that the 2020 challenge for University of Huddersfield students would be to design a gender fluid handbag, containing a range of special features such as space for an EpiPen, used to counter the effect of allergic reactions.