Apparel
Florian Tripoteau is a French creative and graphic designer operating from Spaceship Earth.
He designs mostly visuals for apparel, posters, album covers, sounds and some other stuff.
He is currently supporting the development of a graphic language at Puma.
You can reach out to him at hello⟳floriantripoteau.fr.
Researcher at Curieux Catalogue.
For Florian Tripoteau, garments, and especially t-shirts, are a way to share 🤲 and distribute ideas 🧠 and knowledge 📖. The printed surface of the t-shirt works as a space to (re)connect 🌐 with some elements of our histories and cultures. It is about opening up new horizons and a space for conversation.
Florian Tripoteau’s practice mainly consist in digging ⛏️, collecting 📚 and arranging 🗂️ things. He is led by a will to (re)activate 🧬, (re)purpose ♻️ and combine 🔗 images, texts and signs, in order to question 💭 the contemporary and our future, through an assemblage of heterogeneous material, and eventually, the things we wear.
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"In geometry, operating a translation is « the process of moving something from one place to another ».
As graphic designers, we spend most of our time translating ideas into visuals, arranging and combining elements. We are litteraly moving things around.
From art to bootleg culture, translation and reappropriation has been at the core of our lives.
Being a graphic designer is being an arranger, a combiner.
Being a graphic designer is about digging and finding.
Being a graphic designer is being a translator.
Our past, filled with images, text and signs, should be cherished. As these objects are not just inert things. They are a direct link to a culture, a language and a perception of the world."
Extract from a talk given at Puma HQ, Herzogenaurach, 2024 -
“For some artists, the exploration of intergalactic imagery, cosmic graphics and motifs is a form of defiance in itself. Designer Florian Tripoteau includes these themes in his work to experiment with a rhetoric of rebellion. Citing La conquête de l’espace as one of his major cultural influences, Florian Tripoteau postulates that ‘visual pollution and the conquest of public space by advertising devices is already happening on Earth. For me, over-using space-related imagery in my designs is a way to question it all and say I am aware of this conquest.’ Like Carlings and The Fabricant, Florian Tripoteau is sceptical of the dominance of powerful, third-party companies over our domestic spaces, whether that be through the clothes we wear, or through everyday offline and online media saturation. Similarly to Marine Serre, Florian’s intrigue with the future is rooted in the sociopolitical. For designers like these, there is an awareness that they are creating products for consumption, yet they are questioning the very fundamentals and processes of unconscious consumerism. When the medium becomes the message, this self-awareness is integral to the process of creating futurist fashion.”
Interview by Morna Fraser for Everpress, October 2019
Read more -
"For Florian, the biggest difference between designing posters or books and designing T-shirts is that, as people will be wearing your T-shirts, they want to feel a personal connection to them. This links to a wider point, that part of creating an ongoing series of tees is in really understanding your audience, and creating a visual identity that they can keep relating to. “I find the biggest thing I have to keep in mind is that T-shirts are all about expressing a personality – you’re building a community, it’s like being part of a club or a gang,” Florian says. “That’s why when I’m designing a T-shirt, the first thing I ask myself is: what am I sharing and with who?"
Interview for Everpress, 2019
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