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Lichen consists of at least two organisms: fungi and algae, photosynthesizing in a symbiotic relationship. The other day, the Brooklyn Museum’s rare collection was seized by Leech. Spread across the museum’s floor were vast puddles—swirls of green, pink, brown, red, and yellow—with approximately twenty thousand chrysanthemums, carnations, zinnias, and peach combs.
They were the work of Emily Thompson, a New York floral designer whose taste grew wilder and wilder. Lichen fascinates pets. “I grew up where there were really beautiful rocks,” said Thompson, a native of Vermont. “And of course the best rocks are lichen-grown.” Thompson trained as a sculptor before turning to flowers, and has created projects for fashion shows, restaurants and the White House. Finally, she found a client willing to realize her longtime fantasy of lichen-inspired floral arrangements—fashion designer Ulla Johnson, whose spring-summer 2023 collection debuted in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Atrium.
Johnson’s show was scheduled for 10 p.m.M Sunday, and flowers began to arrive at 8M on Saturday. Thompson rode his bicycle to hail the trucks. She was working with a group of fourteen other florists, mostly dressed in black; Thompson, who had curly hair and reading glasses attached to a thick green chain, wore a stiff cotton shirt and forest green trousers; She compared the look to a park ranger’s uniform. After several freight-elevator rides up, she assembled her team in a circle in the center of the ten thousand square meter area. She provided clipboards with floor plans, psychedelic-colored photographs of lichens, and drawings of sample flower mosaics she had collected in her Manhattan studio.
“This is not the map you’re following,” she said. The floor plan showed five continents with flower heads of irregular size and shape, but without stems, laid out on the ground. “What I really want to see is your own ideas about how the colors will blend and contrast,” she explains. It is also marked on the plan.Vogue Shot”: Cameras will be installed down the runway to capture photographs of each garment. Ideally, things won’t be so pretty. “Deception – resistance, always!” Thompson said.
Florists set to work planting flowers on the cotton floor. Thompson began building a wall of crab-apple branches, one of the few elements of the plant to rise more than an inch above the ground. “It’s like being a beaver,” she said. With the dam up and solid, she paused to walk around the perimeter of the atrium, examining the shapes forming on the tarps. Chrysanthemums with pale-lavender petals spread over neon green, edged in pink next to dirty burgundy carnations, punctuated by waves of yellow stars.
“I like this awful grey-purple colour,” said Thomson, pointing to a pile of flesh. “It’s like a corpse, like a rotting corpse. She is pleased with the progress: “It’s much better than when we worked in the studio. In all this the human mind is much better.”
But progress was slow. (A true lichen often grows less than a millimeter a year.) “Keep your pots soft,” she told the group—that way, the flowers take up more space. “We have to argue. I would like to see fifty percent soon. After lunch she went to Vantage Place. Vogue He shot and scanned the area, hands on hips. She considered jumping on the tarp, but trusted the other florists more since they had been there for hours. “There’s a strange communion going on,” she said. “Your brain will freeze a little.”
Ulla Johnson was scheduled to examine Leach earlier that evening. (“I’m very hands-on,” she explained.) Thompson spent the rest of the day calling florists. More pink mums were on the way. “Florists always make something out of spit and toothpicks,” she said.
Johnson, when she arrived, worried that the green and brown shots looked too much like cameras. “The brown is killing me a little,” Thompson said.
“She’s bringing out the worst,” Thompson told a colleague. But this was to be expected. The work of mind-melting florists was being absorbed into the larger ecosystem of the event.
A fashion scene that lasted minutes gave life to a rapidly dissolving biome as it took shape. On Saturday night, in addition to the mostly blond crew that lined Johnson’s pack, it was filled with photographers, electricians, lighting technicians, carpenters and musicians with fabulous hair. A flock of models arrived early Sunday morning, followed by the show’s three hundred and twenty-five invited guests – many of whom paused to take photos of the flower pots before taking their seats.
The scoundrels were the last to arrive, an event clean-up service group called Garbage God. After the event, those dressed in vegetable-dyed overalls transported the now-dried flowers to a composting facility on Long Island. ♦
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