Designs take a turn for the whimsical

“Apparently Harper is allowed to scribble on daddy”, read David Beckham’s Instagram last week, with the former footballer showcasing a figurine doodle by his four-year-old daughter on the palm of his hand. But this being the Beckhams, it was no messy “daub in felt tip affair”; he had Harper’s masterpiece rendered in ink to add to his swelling roster of tattoos. Perhaps, he was inspired by Victoria’s friend Marc Jacobs, who has long had a Spongebob Squarepants tattoo on his bicep?

Or, perhaps, he visited the Carsten Holler exhibition at the Southbank Centre this summer and took a merry zip down the giant dual slides that turned the Hayward Gallery’s brutalist architecture into a veritable playground for adults? Whatever his reasoning, Beckham’s latest tattoo taps into a growing trend towards a sense of child-like naivety across design, fashion and technology, with aesthetes and tastemakers everywhere taking up the Crayolas to indulge their inner five year-old.

“It was about looking at intergenerational style”, said Stefano Gabbana backstage at the Dolce & Gabbana Autumn/Winter 15 menswear show, which focused on the iconography of La Famiglia, imposing portraiture of parents and children on T-shirts and sweaters and, in a selection of tops and accessories, employing kindergarten-quirky cartoons inspired by drawings done by their staff’s children, rendered in leather and applied at apparently random angles in some cases across fabric.

At historic Paris house Carven, designer Guillaume Henry eschewed its inherent French sophistication and soignée by creating sweaters embroidered with nonsensical squiggles and dashes, like a toddler let loose on the nursery Farrow & Ball and designs with touch-and-feel baby book style fuzzy felt paws. And at Prada for Spring/Summer 16, Miuccia Prada indulged every boy’s racing driver fantasy with simplistic vroom-vroom race cars speeding across sweaters, rocket ships woven in intarsia and bunny rabbits
hopping merrily across shirting.

Perhaps, it was a trip to her own Bar Luce, a café designed by Wes Anderson
inside her Fondazione Prada in Milan, that inspired her, with its glass jars of bonbons, jellybeans, gobstoppers and ice creams, providing respite for the kid in candy shop who’s come of age, a stark contrast to the highbrow conceptual art work. Perhaps Stefano put his best when he summed up back stage of his deliberately infantile
designs; “Why not? It’s fun, no?”

Back to basics

That adolescent sense of gleeful abandon is also infusing the interiors world, with a host of homeware brands turning to the unaffected charm of prints and pop-bright hues that recall the primary school art class. British-born, New York-based artist Jon Burgerman, who has carved a niche for his “Doodle” artwork, has recently teamed up with emerging furniture and textile brand Kirkby Design on a range of pieces that look as if the Nickelodeon channel has broken out of the TV set and  sprung to life all over the home.

Entitled things like “Rainbow Scrawl”, “Wobblepotamus” and “MallowLand”, like characters and locations from a particularly fantastical Roald Dahl book, the designer has emblazoned looping scrawls, splashes and cartoon scribbles in paintbox-primary shades to a range of textiles, sofas and chairs.

Of the Wobblepotumas collection, he says, “I imagined a giant, lumbering Wobblepotamus slinking down into a delta to loll about, sploshing daubs of colourful mud all over the place”. Of another, a series of busy little Gremlin-like creatures darting across an imaginary landscape, he says, “I wanted to make some friendly monsters which had playful, child-like innocence. The characters were made in ink with a brush to give a potato print quality”.

Jon is not alone in turning a childlike, naive aesthetic into sale-able homewares; the London-based product designer Donna Wilson takes inspiration from her childhood growing up in the Scottish countryside. Characterised by its playful nature and bright palette, her work ranges from colourful knitted blankets to curvy upholstered furniture and crockery bearing cartoon-like motifs.

Donna set up her company in 2003 after making odd knitted creatures — now a signature product — for her final show at the Royal College of Art that sold out of design shops faster than she could make them.

The child in us
But why this emphasis on pieces that recall our formative years? “I think it’s driven by a desire for escapism from our increasingly digital world. People want to reconnect with a sense of the human touch”, says Hannah Robinson of trend forecasting specialists LS:N Global. “Across art, design and fashion, creatives are embracing naive methods and non-digital techniques, which are more expressive and awash with vibrant colour.”

According to Hannah, this is due to our increasingly frenetic, plugged-in lifestyle where the simplicity of childhood is but a memory. “To resonate with consumers, we’ve seen a lot of brands working to evoke a sense of wonder through playing with scale of object and installations. The results are often baffling, wondrous experiences and designs. It’s a dynamic way to engage people and it conjures up the spirit of a child’s imagination”.

What’s striking is that this verve towards all things playful and naïve is as infections as giggles during double Latin, infusing even the most masculine and unapologetically luxurious of arenas. MB&F, a Swiss design house founded by entrepreneur Maximillian Busser (which stands for “Max Busser & Friends”, a happily innocent sounding moniker for a pioneering global empire), brings a sense of wit and youthful enthusiasm to the most weighty and magisterial of industries: the watch and technology sectors.

And while others in that particular firmament treat their subject matter with the solemnity of a judge, Maximillian has garnered awards for his lightness of touch and sense of playfulness. Not for nothing the company’s motto as it enters its tenth anniversary is “a creative adult is a child who survived”. In summer this year he unveiled his Musicmachine 3, the latest in a series of audio speakers inspired by the intergalactic crafts of Star Wars, which takes the form of the film franchise’s TIE-Fighters (Maximillianis an unashamed sci-fi fan). This is no trinket for the playroom however, but a serious piece of boy’s-toy kit; it retails at £12,000.

His latest, and perhaps sweetest, unveiling this autumn as part of the Only Watch auction in Geneva is Melchior, billed as “the robot buddy a child would love to have as his best friend, a hymn to childhood dreams”. The freestanding robotic fellow — which first sprang to life in spring this year and is relaunched for this one-off charity auction — is actually a clock with mechanisms to allow vents and discs to rotate to give the appearance that his eyes are blinking and his chest is beating.

“Melchior is the friend I would have loved to have as a child. He is reassuring (lots of guns to protect us) and at the same time playful and whimsical,” says Melchior. This is no mere horological Buzz Lightyear however; Melchior is rendered in palladium-plated brass and steel and retailed at around £22,000. Proof that sophistication, intelligent design and exceptional technical expertise needn’t be at the expense of child-like wonderment.

For young adventurers who never grew up, Selfridges this Christmas are set to
unveil the Star Wars Battle Pod, a fully immersive virtual reality structure where gamers can swirl through George Lucas’ famous landscapes and do battle; an urbane (and high net worth) take on Pac Man arcade hijinks at £27,000. A reminder that you’re never too old to return to the novelties of the nursery once in a while.