Reclaiming the Mood Board
With Maise Lutzhoft and Nicoline Dalgaard of Liniere Lingerie
There is a whiff of a negative connotation around “mood board brands” whose identity relies on curating and creating imagery around a certain aesthetic — the preppy East, the Western countryside, and everything in between. Partially because as social tech advanced, digital visual curation on the internet has lost its value and aesthetic-based microtrends became overwhelming, and partially because every social-first brand has made photos of physical mood boards an obligatory part of their product campaigns. Although effective, those mood boars often look like they were printed straight off Pinterest just for the IG post rather than actually used in the process of creating whatever it is they are selling you — another glossy lip balm, a pocket blush, or a new aesthetic. Somewhere along the way of romanticizing the theatrics of creative work, these images reduced one of its most essential parts to a pretty visual rather than a functional tool.
That’s not the case at Liniere Lingerie — a Copenhagen based lingerie brand that launched this Friday. Its founders, Maise Lutzhoft and Nicoline Dalgaard have left Saks Potts last year to create an intimates line that combines technical expertise and playful design, and have been documenting their journey by posting fabric samples, vintage references, and objects that inspired their creative direction and designs. Poking around their grid felt like flipping through the Design Research textbook I bought last summer and haven’t opened until now. I could trace the swirl lace back to Pierre Sala’s Spiral Chairs and a British Vogue issue from 1946 and the reoccurring imagery of cotton bedding back to certain fabric and color choices. “What started out as a natural process of sharing the work we do, has now become part of our strategy,” Maise and Nicoline told me. “Real connection comes from this openness, allowing us to create lingerie that resonates beyond the visual appeal.”
It’s fashion month, and something I keep hearing over and over again are conversations about how this season’s luxury fashion collections represent their respective house’s ideal women. Apparently, the Chloe woman knows exactly who she is while the YSL woman leads a double life — moving through the world in bulkier, masculine suiting not to draw unwelcome attention from strangers during the day and revealing her sexier, seductive self in her chosen company at night. I felt strangely moved by that. It reminded me of Rachel Tashjian’s piece from last year where she claimed that the intimate act of really seeing women and creating something that reflects that deeper understanding of the way they think and live is the grandest idea you can have right now: “Most designers don’t want consumers to have that relationship to what they do, or maybe they just can’t cultivate it.”
Nicoline posted a picture of a couple of Liniere Lingerie pieces with the caption “underwear for the girls who are eager to laugh,” so naturally, I asked her and Maise to tell me more about who the Liniere Lingerie girl is. “The Liniere Lingerie woman,” they said, “is unaplogetically herself. She’s bold, she’s playful, and confident, but in an effortless way. She is multifaceted — elegant one day, playful the next — but always rooted in a sense of authenticity. The Copenhagen woman is someone who inspires us a lot.” I wondered if the difference between being a girl and a woman is understanding yourself, and if by extension, creating something for a woman means putting in the effort to really see her and give her something to connect with on a personal level. “The beautiful thing about lingerie is that it might be only you who knows that you are wearing a French swirl lace bra under the grey merino wool sweater,” Maise and Nicoline told me. “And that’s worth a smile in a boring business meeting.”
I also wondered if the reason why I have trouble connecting with most brands and products out there can be traced back to the pinteresty-looking images on their mood boards. It often feels like whatever they are selling was created for the borderline fictional characters they printed out from the internet rather than real, three-dimensional people because instead of trying to capture real feelings and contemporary experiences, they opted out for recreating pretty, nostalgic images. What you get is a ready-to-replicate vision board of how their products can help you communicate something to the world rather than an invitation to look inwards and connect with their products personally.
A real mood board is supposed to document the intimate process of discovery, learning, and self-expression and visualize your inner world and creative vision. That’s why opening something like that up to people, the way Maise and Nicoline did, was so effective at pulling me in. It gave me a peek into their creative brains, and even though I don’t know them personally, I could see that we’ve been thinking about the same things — how exhilarating it is to care deeply about something, how important it is to create joyful private moments to break up the mundane, and how nice it feels to be comfortable in your own skin. Reaching real people requires putting in the effort to understand them and offering a real, unfiltered piece of yourself, and when they notice it, a special kind of intimacy is created. Everything else is just an empty tease.
IN THE MARGINS:
A whole lot of additions to Busy Corner this week:
Three new shops in the Independent Retail list
Five more agencies in the Agency Rolodex
And a bunch of new references in the Reference Bank, including a vintage book collector, a cool shoe brand from Ukraine, and a bar in Thailand with some of the most compelling product shots I’ve ever seen.
That’s why I love following J Crew’s CD Olympia Gayot. I feel like I’m in her brain, and it’s so much more of the inspiration and art.
What is the specific Design Research textbook you're referring to? TIA