Hi the MLE,

Well, well, well, look what I found in my brother’s basement this summer:  the MOTHandRUST catalogue!  Can you believe that it was well over ten years ago now that we designed this?

A lot of people ask me how we came up with the name for our studio.  So I tell them the story…  We met at design school in Vancouver and became friends right away.  We learned that we work well together so we teamed up to do our grad project, an intense project that takes the entire final year to complete. We chose to study how graphic design, considered to be mostly disposable, may age with time. We chose to brand a fictional clothing label to explore our subject.

The end result included hangtags made with seed paper, that when planted, would grow wild flowers…

A billboard, that when stained with the elements, would reveal the logo…

A window display with a sweater with a light inside, that clothes moths could eat, revealing an interesting t-shirt at the end…

Etc etc…

Remember we had to contact the biology department of Simon Fraser University and convince them to hatch the moths for us?

We also created a fashion catalogue using a light sensitive paper, that with time, would slowly turn completely black.  And I must say, it has worked - the catalogue only contains ghostlike images, and the pages have beautiful stains as well.  I’m pleased to see the tin box has rusted rather nicely too (image above).

Anyway, we were flipping through thesauruses and dictionaries in the studio one afternoon, going over dozens of names to call our clothing label, when you said, “Moth and Rust!”  Then later, we did a brainstorming of names to call our studio, and you said, “Moth and Rust?” It just made sense.

Suzan xx