London Design Festival 2024 Medal Winners
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Each year, London Design Festival recognises the contribution made by leading design figures and emerging talents to London and the industry with four London Design Medal awarded.
The London Design Medal: Pat McGrath DBE
The highest accolade bestowed upon an individual who has distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.
Design Innovation Medal: Natsai Audrey Chieza
Celebrates entrepreneurship in all its forms, both locally and internationally. It honours an individual for whom design lies at the core of their development and success.
Emerging Design Medal: Harry Blakiston Houston
Recognises an individual or practice that has made a recent impact on the design scene and has an emerging practice showing design promise.
Lifetime Achievement Medal: Rei Kawakubo
Honours a significant and fundamental contribution to the design industry over the course of a career.
The London Design Medal: Pat McGrath DBE
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Pat McGrath is the world’s most influential and in-demand makeup artist. For over 25 years, McGrath’s creative vision has made her a tour de force who has transformed both beauty and fashion on a global scale. Throughout her illustrious career, she has been recognised with honours and accolades: she was the first makeup artist selected for the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America Founder’s Award) in 2017; was placed in Time magazine’s 2019 ‘100 Most Influential People’ list as a “titan” of the fashion industry; and was awarded the DBE for services to the fashion and beauty industry, and diversity, in the Queen’s 2021 Honours List. Since launching Pat McGrath Labs in 2015, she has become the biggest selling beauty brand in Selfridges’ history, and has launched groundbreaking international collaborations with brands such as Marc Jacobs, Prada, Comme des Garçons and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Design is at the core of everything I do as a makeup artist, so to have my dedication to design recognised and celebrated with the London Design Medal – and in the city where I got my start, no less – is a complete full-circle moment for me.” - Path McGrath DBE
Design Innovation Medal: Natsai Audrey Chieza
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Natsai Audrey Chieza is a visionary designer and thought leader. She is the founder and CEO of Faber Futures: launched in 2018 to bridge the gap between scientific advancements and real-world applications, fostering a resilient bioeconomy through collaborations with biotechnology and creative industries, and working with partners including the World Economic Forum, Ginkgo Bioworks. and the Design Museum.
In 2023, she cofounded Normal Phenomena of Life, making tangible how biotechnology can generate new materials that can be beautifully designed to support climate goals.
As a member of the WEF!s Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology, Chieza advocates for the integration of design and culture in policy development for bioeconomies powered by biotechnology.
Natsai sits on Fondation USM's Future Lab advisory panel, and is a member of the WEF's Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology, advocating for the integration of design and culture in policy development for bioeconomies powered by biotechnology.
She is a TED speaker and has taught at Central Saint Martins and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She received the INDEX award in 2019, among other progressive 'one to watch' accolades.
"In a rapidly evolving world interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for making positive change. It demands us to push beyond traditional models, boundaries and expectations. That’s why it’s particularly meaningful to see the work we do at Faber Futures—where design, biotechnology and society converge—acknowledged for its role in shaping the possibilities of tomorrow. I am honoured to share this recognition with my dedicated team, collaborators, partners, and clients, whose collective efforts bring these visions to life.” - Natsai Audrey Chieza
Emerging Design Medal: Harry Blakiston Houston
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Harry Blakiston Houston grew up in Northern Ireland!s Sperrin Mountains, before studying engineering mathematics at the University of Bristol, and beginning a PhD in biotechnology at Cambridge University.
In 2023, Blakiston Houston founded Insulate Ukraine, an initiative conceived to install low-cost, triple-glazed temporary polyethylene windows in bomb-damaged homes in the war-torn country – to an innovative design tough enough to survive nearby explosions but built from readily available materials and tools. Insulate Ukraine has liaised with local governments and charities across Ukraine to install several thousand of its windows in homes, schools and orphanages, while setting up window replacement hubs and training local people to run them. It!s a humanitarian initiative as simple as it is essential, and a startling example of Houston!s brilliant initiative in applying intuitive engineering to the most fundamental of real-world issues.
"I see myself as an inventor who uses systems to solve problems. When I was told I would be awarded the Emerging Design Medal, I asked if it could go to the people on the ground in Ukraine, the civilians who stayed to help their community. They are putting their lives on the line every single day. I didn't win this award. They did.”- Harry Blakiston Houston
Lifetime Achievement Medal: Rei Kawakubo
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Rei Kawakubo has defied convention to redefine fashion for nearly five decades. Since founding Comme des Garçons in 1969, Kawakubo!s iconoclastic vision has made her one of the most influential garment designers of the 20th century; subverting shape and function, reframing ideas of beauty, and proposing a new relationship between body anddress.
Kawakubo was the first Japanese designer to bring their brand to the Paris Fashion Week schedule and, 40 years in, she continues to set international trends. In 2004, Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in London's Mayfair district – conceived to sell new, conceptual and trendsetting brands, and which later expanded to Ginza, New York, Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles and Paris.
In 2017, she was the focus of a major retrospective at the New York Met, #Art of the In-Between’ – the first living designer to be honoured as such since Yves Saint Laurent in 1983.
“One of the extraordinary things about Rei Kawakubo is how she uses her practice and the brand to allow her to experiment with anything that seems to interest her. Every aspect of her work reflects her own sensibility, and also our perceptions of her. Other designers have done this in the past but none of them have done it quite as compellingly and critically, as audaciously, as Kawakubo.” - Alice Rawsthorn OBE, design critic and author, and London Design Medal jury member
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