This Singapore Design Week, Orchard Road has a new look. From the umbrellas and balloons atop the roof of Design Orchard, to the chunky seats placed at its intersection with Cairnhill Road, it’s been taken over by the Re-Route Festival’s signature punchy shade of cobalt blue.
Created by Mervin Tan and Cheryl Sim of interdisciplinary design studio PLUS Collaboratives, Re-Route, which runs till 6 October, is a “placemaking festival” aimed at transforming how we move through and think about familiar spaces. Following a well-received first edition spotlighting Little India in 2022, Re-Route: Orchard (RR:OR) takes on the past, present, and future of Singapore’s most iconic shopping street.
While Orchard Road may be best known for its swanky luxury stores, RR:OR casts it in a different light. Through over 30 design exhibitions, collaborations, and programmes, the festival celebrates Orchard Road’s independent businesses and past lives as everything from a nutmeg plantation in the 1830s to a grungy youth hangout in the 1990s.
Here are five ways to make the most of the festival on its closing weekend:
1. Look to the future with local design
Festival director Mervin Tan recommends starting your Re-Route journey at Design Orchard, the go-to spot to shop homegrown design. Within the retail space, you’ll find Re-think, an enticing showcase of local brands like EYEYAH! and Black Crow Taxidermy.
From wine bottles turned into drinking glasses to home decor made from real fungi, the products here convey the festival’s interest in “adaptive reuse” — a concept borrowed from the field of architecture that involves reworking old spaces for new purposes. Whether we’re talking buildings or bottles, design doesn’t mean abandoning what came before, but rather seeing how we can take it into the future.
But for some really futuristic visions, look no further than Design Orchard’s display windows. They’re currently home to runway-ready outfits dreamt up by students from the Raffles Design Institute, under the expert guidance of acclaimed fashion director Daniel Boey.
Inspired by past, present, and future — the historical canal at Orchard Road, and the already-palpable effects of climate change — the students’ designs are crafted with wet weather in mind. Featuring unusual materials like towels, waterproof flysheets, and heat-reactive, colour-changing fabric, the showcase imagines new sartorial possibilities for future denizens of the stylish street.
2. Peek through the photographer’s lens
Daniel Boey makes another appearance on the third floor of Design Orchard, in a photo exhibition at Nowafter Cafe. Dressed in a white suit and hat, he slouches insouciantly against the counter of Far East Plaza’s Clancy Boutique, where sisters Cindy and Wendy have been altering clothes for style mavens and punk rockers alike for over twenty years.
Time-Honoured Backdrops is a photo series by Singapore-based photographer Nikko Pascua, which meshes high-fashion styling with old-school backdrops — think platinum hair and funky bucket hats with ice cream carts and kopitiams. In one photo, Mervin, Cheryl, and their daughter, decked out in sunnies and Commes Des Garçons, chow down at a famous Lucky Plaza chicken rice store.
Straight out of an indie film or glossy fashion magazine, the images capture the fruitful coexistence of old and new.
3. Reimagine everyday objects
Nestled in the basement of the Cineleisure shopping mall is Adaptations: Design in Motion, a showcase where over ten local and regional designers have put new spins on waste materials and familiar objects like brooms and seesaws. We were especially taken with the work of Trigger Design Studio, who has transformed pieces of waste acrylic (provided by local organisation Offcut Factory) into graceful objets d’art inspired by Orchard Road landmarks.
Meanwhile, at The Centrepoint, you’ll find an exhibition remixing the humble plastic stool. These bright red, stackable stools are usually mass-produced to all look exactly the same. But, as PLUS Collaboratives notes, they end up reflecting idiosyncratic human behaviour — whether arranged haphazardly by children at play, or overturned and topped with plastic bags to serve as makeshift trash cans at parties. The bizarre chair configurations in Chairs Reimagined embody this experimental spirit, one which lies at the heart of good design.
4. Discover diverse histories
Like any site, Orchard Road has worn many different faces over the years. For the festival, five illustrated posters outside Mandarin Gallery recount some of these histories. Subjects include the very first Cold Storage supermarket, represented in a faux newspaper style by Nicole Fun, and the thriving fashion and busking subcultures of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
During our conversation, Mervin recalls the youth culture of Far East Plaza with special fondness, naming the brands — 77th Street, DEPRESSION, Project Shop Blood Brothers, and more — coveted by the fashion-forward “Far East Kids.” Even if they couldn’t afford luxury goods, they could express themselves through alternative streetwear.
These youthful experiences of creativity and identity-building stay with us well into adulthood. “You find your way into the fashion world, into the creative world,” Mervin explains. “That’s [part of] why I became who I became.”
Now, time has mellowed the Far East Kids into grown-ups with children of their own — which is why, for RR:OR, PLUS Collaboratives has turned the mall’s atrium into a colourful playground, a place to build new memories across generations.
5. Track down hidden gems
Last but not least, RR:OR also features a programme taking you through Orchard Road’s lesser-known food and retail offerings, beyond the usual chain stores. Inspired by Japanese “stamp rallies,” the “Hidden Gems” trail includes stops like The Corner Shop, which stocks quirky fashion items, and Shashlik Restaurant, serving Russian cuisine with a surprising Hainanese flair. Collect all the stamps to get a keychain featuring Charrdo, the festival’s lovable mascot.
During our tour, we stopped by “The Stand” — the takeaway branch of Kurasu, a popular cafe brewing Kyoto specialty coffee. Just for the festival, Kurasu has created a contemporary twist on ice lemon tea, starring housemade lemon syrup and cascara (the dried skin and pulp of coffee cherries, left over from harvesting the beans). Sweet, sour, and ever-so-slightly bitter, the drink is not only a novel way to use a coffee byproduct, but also the perfect accompaniment to your Re-Route day.
Creative investigation
Conceptually, the Re-Route Festival falls back on three key principles: (a) a sense of place, (b) movement and discovery, and (c) creative investigation. The word “investigation” perhaps conjures up somewhat clinical imagery: the creative, holed up in his studio or lab, working systematically to arrive at the most optimal design.
But Mervin and Cheryl make it clear that this is only part of the picture. Design isn’t just about coming up with a concept ex nihilo and then applying it, top-down, to a place or its people. “We deal with the people first,” Mervin says. “We deal with the heart, the softer approach of design.”
To this, Cheryl adds, “I think we used the word investigation because we wanted the context to inform what we do.”
In other words, a festival like Re-Route — or, indeed, any creative intervention in a space — is at its best when informed by sustained investigation into its histories, functions, inhabitants, and their needs.
___________________________________
Part of Singapore Design Week, Re-Route: Orchard runs till 6 October 2024. Find out more at reroutefest.com.
Header image: Pocket Park near the intersection of Orchard Road and Cairnhill Road. Image courtesy of PLUS Collaboratives.
