Welcome to Noticed, The Goods’ design trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.
What it is: Abundant, large-scale floral and plant installations — sometimes manicured, but often wild — used as brand marketing, store decor, and scenery at red-carpet events. Crafted from all kinds of flora (rainbow roses, local wildflowers, mosses, and grass), these arrangements have an overwhelming, enveloping effect.
Where it is: Inside Glossier’s Seattle pop-up store this summer, bedecking phone booths around the UK (sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin) in the spring, draped over the entrances of Le Pain Quotidien restaurants, covering the walls of the terrace of the Dream Hotel in Manhattan, and, last May, surging around the doors of St. George’s Chapel at Meghan Markle’s wedding, among other places.
Why it’s everywhere: Days before Kylie Jenner’s birthday in August, Travis Scott kicked off the festivities by covering the floor of his girlfriend’s house in a thick layer of rose petals, like plush wall-to-wall carpeting. As she does, Jenner uploaded a video of the scene to Instagram, expressing her delight with hearts and crying-face emojis. Off in a corner, the couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Stormi, waved fistfuls of flowers. Like many of the photos on Jenner’s Instagram feed that chronicle her young family’s luxurious life, it was simultaneously a sweet moment and an unapologetic flex.
Red roses are a classic romantic gesture. But this one also reflected the popularity of over-the-top plant and floral installations created for major events and branding purposes. (Don’t tell me that Kylie Jenner’s birthday, also the occasion for a new cosmetics collection from the beauty entrepreneur, isn’t either of those things.) The current generation of floral creations aren’t just grandiose but also physically engulfing, as though the space is being swallowed up by nature. They overwhelm the senses, in the way that wildflower “super blooms” have overtaken California’s landscape and all of Instagram in recent years.
At red-carpet events, it’s increasingly common to see celebrities photographed against a textured wall of flowers, rather than a branded, plasticky backdrop. Consider the Tony Awards ever since Vogue editor Anna Wintour revamped them in 2015: Arriving attendees now pose in front of greenery dotted with white roses, roses of many pink hues, or rainbow bands of roses. (The Met Gala, Wintour’s main event, separates red-carpet reporters from the oncoming flow of celebrities with makeshift hedges and typically features a colossal floral sculpture inside the museum.) The most spectacular use of a flower wall maybe ever came from designer Raf Simons at his debut runway show for Christian Dior in 2012. Inspired by Jeff Koons’s “Puppy” sculpture, he hired workers to cover the walls of a house in Paris in flowers. Five rooms total, each in its own exhilarating color.
The presence of flower walls at events that are over in a matter of hours, like runway shows and awards galas, underlines the main limitation of floral installations: They don’t last long. This explains why retailers have been incorporating them into shopping environments lately. As brands have shifted their store strategies away from long leases and toward short-term pop-up formats — a move that’s coincided with coverage of millennials’ obsession with houseplants — plant-based features have suddenly become a viable and smart decorating option.
“Everyone loves flowers and plants, and it’s something you can do for a short period of time without worrying about maintaining it, which is so difficult,” says Robert Storey, a London-based spatial designer.
In 2016, Storey designed a “shoe park” pop-up for Everlane, drawing on the look of French and English gardens to give life to an otherwise sparse, industrial space. He describes the geometric, plant-filled shop as an “urban oasis,” meant to have a transportive effect on shoppers. This speaks to another major shift in the retail world that has enabled the popularity of plant-based installations: the rise of “experiential retail.” Because shopping online is so easy, people now need a reason to go into stores, and creating a unique, Instagrammable environment is one way to lure them in. A wild plant display can do the trick.
In 2018, the beauty brand Glossier built a selfie-ready chamber in its Los Angeles store that recreated the sloping, striated curves of Antelope Canyon in Arizona, itself a natural wonder that’s become an Instagram magnet. For six weeks this summer, Glossier operated a Seattle pop-up that mimicked the city’s landscape with tall, rolling hills of live moss, purple flowers, and shrubs. Like Simons’s flower walls, the concept came from the art world: Kendall Latham, Glossier’s senior experiential designer, cites the Norwegian artist Per Kristian Nygård’s work “Not Red But Green” — an undulating field of grass spilling out of a white-walled gallery — as the project’s reference point. (It also draws to mind the heaping mound of delphiniums that Simons constructed for Dior’s spring 2016 runway show.)
Lush and surprising, Glossier’s Seattle pop-up is undeniably beautiful. I wish I’d experienced it in person. It’s hard to ignore the soothing effect of plant life, even when it’s being used to sell you a product. Even when it’s intended to encourage you to perform unpaid social media marketing for a brand. On top of that, plants do the work of telegraphing corporate virtue.
“A lot of customers, especially Gen Z, want to feel like a brand has authenticity and honesty, and there’s something so honest about nature,” says Storey. “When you enter a space that has plants and greenery, it makes the space feel clean and healthy and abundant.”
Despite the enlivening aura of floral arrangements, the environmental impact of cut flowers and plant-based installations varies: The carbon footprint of roses, for instance, balloons in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, when literal tons of flowers are flown to the US from Colombia and Ecuador and distributed via refrigerated trucks. (In response to the widespread importation of flowers throughout the year, the organization Slow Flowers is among those in the industry advocating for locally sourced blooms, as well as the elimination of pesticides.)
To reduce their landfill contribution, some floral designers have moved away from the non-biodegradable foam bricks that are traditionally used to construct their displays. And instead of sending its flowers to the dumpster at the end of its pop-up, Glossier worked with Repeat Roses, an organization that repurposes floral arrangements, to have its installation plants relocated to Seattle parks and community centers.
Lily Kwong, the landscape designer who created Glossier’s Seattle store, has also installed mossy knolls in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station and a snaking mass of flowers in a Taipei market on behalf of EVA Air. In an email, Kwong writes that her studio’s mission is to “reconnect urban people to nature,” and with their enormous scale and delicate construction, these pieces couldn’t fail to grab pedestrians’ attention.
“In major cities, most people are pretty landscape-blind,” Kwong explains. “They’re rushing from A to B and miss the beauty of the gingko tree in front of their office, a flower pushing through cement, or the humble window boxes of an urban gardener. I want to overwhelm people with the magnificence of the natural world — whether it’s Nordic topography, hanging gardens, or wildflower super blooms — so they feel something and associate that strong reaction with organic life.”
When I wrote to Kwong, I told her that large-scale floral installations grabbed my heart in a surprising way. I wasn’t sure whether it was their inherent beauty — whether, as someone who grew up in a wooded area and now lives in New York, I just missed nature terribly — or if the growing threat of global warming has activated in me a new protectiveness toward the natural world. She replied her hope is indeed to “plant a seed of appreciation for nature in visitors, which may one day blossom into stewardship or environmental activism.”
If we have to be inundated with brand experiences — solicited to take photos for Instagram and maybe buy something on the way out — that’s as good an outcome as any.