
There is a branch of the French store Galeries Lafayette here (this is Peking, China!), quite close to my home. And during the last days/weeks they were advertising a new campaign…, named something like Funorama, if I remember well… (Even Lafayette has succumbed to the GreatFunlandic wave’!)
Yesterday evening I passed along, and the shop-windows were opened again, exhibiting the new collections. And by the main entrance there was a huge luminous advertisement with a very long text. In passing-by, my eyes only catched a glimpse, which said something like this: ‘in Galeries Lafayette there is only one rule: have fun!’.
Bollocks!
Mawkish cutesy you pedestrian consumerist little thingy…
To be sure, I am also an hedonist, I also prefer wellbeing over pain.
(sickeningly inane overarching diorama floating over us all today…)
But Craft Humanitas is no about how fun handicrafts are or about the pleasure of making things, all of which I will not deny. I simply prefer to focus on another aspect: that things as knitting or hand-lettering are important:

…these women were able to overcome their fears and loneliness, and connect themselves to each other and to the world at large.
Pauline Brown, ‘Places that speak for themselves’, in Cooper & Gorfer 2014 The Weather Diaries. A book in celebration of the Nordic Fashion Biennale 2014, The Nordic House, Iceland & SEEK AB, Sweden, p. 15.