The stab-proof vest designed by Banksy for Stormzy’s headline show at Glastonbury is in the running for a design of the year award.
The vest featuring a Union flag by the notoriously secretive street artist is one of 74 nominees for the annual exhibition and awards celebrating the best in cutting-edge design.
It faces competition from innovations including a self-sanitising door handle and a memorial for a glacier melted by climate change.
Banksy said the vest, made from police equipment, was his take on the traditional John Bull waistcoat which emerged in the 1700s as a symbol of patriotism and has been the target of satirists ever since.
It was described by the anonymous artist as being “capable of stopping bullets up to .45 calibre and is fully stab proof, yet not machine washable”. It was worn by Stormzy when he headlined the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury last year.
The awards, known as the Beazley Designs of the Year, are hosted by the Design Museum in Kensington. The museum’s director, Tim Marlow, said: “This year’s exhibition explores key moments in design from January 2019 to the moment global attention shifted in late January 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic took hold — the selected projects respond to urgent questions of inequality and censorship, health and sanitisation, and the ongoing possibilities of design and technology.”
The current crisis is reflected in the nominees with a nod for a door handle coated in titanium to break down germs, which lights up after it has been used so it can be cleaned. There is also a nomination for a 3D rendering of the virus which was commissioned by the US health organisation Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to raise public awareness of the pandemic. It shows the virus as it appears when viewed through a microscope: a speckled grey sphere with bright red spikes.
The film industry also features, with nominations for the hi-tech process used to transform stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino into younger versions of their characters in Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman.
The overall winner will be announced on November 26. The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until March 28.
