Li’s Forecast #4

The Book Maker: From Homo Sapiens to Homo Luminous

Column

September 2025

is one of the world’s most beloved and influential forecasters. Each month, she writes a column for See All This titled The Future is Handmade, where she shares her views on a handmade future and spotlights unique handmade objects. For Edelkoort, these objects are more than just beautiful — they represent a quiet form of resistance against an increasingly artificial future. Today: radical books that transcend the page.

Column

September 2025

This story lives where art and insight meet.
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She doesn’t leave things to chance; her intuition guides her choices in life. Birgitta de Vos has a sharp radar for future cultures, which she has used to create distinctive companies and idiosyncratic books.

Our friendship goes back to the late seventies, when Birgitta became my assistant at the French trend forecasting company where I honed my skills. Two Dutch girls in Paris – it was as romantic as it sounds. We shared work, drinks, and weekends wandering the flea markets of Porte de Vanves. Our paths have crossed many times since, with forecasting the future always at the root of our friendship.

Her creative talent made her an entrepreneurial innovator, inventing brands as others invent recipes. Seemingly effortless concepts became contemporary companies that conquered the market one after another. This very success, however, led to Birgitta’s aversion to marketing. Over fifteen years she created five brands, always impatient for a new way of doing business, as if on the run from consolidation.

Until one day she stopped. She changed her life, stepping out of the system to travel and journal her way back to her senses – as if experiencing existence for the first time. The sabbatical profoundly transformed her, shifting her from high-powered prominence to a quiet, deliberate discretion. She found herself in natural, minimal clothing, her long grey braid her only adornment. From this journey came Dressing the Soul/Ageless Beauty, a book that celebrates the aesthetics of aging and the freedom to choose life, love, and wherever the wind might carry her. And the wind did.

An intensive textile journey through India and Africa culminated in Out of Fashion/The New Fashion, perhaps the most beautiful book in my library. The human hand, rural workshops and astounding fabrics ascend from its pages, opening the mind to other ways of consuming, bewildered by passion and enduring aesthetics. This first limited-edition book, sold online, gathered a devoted following and led to lectures and book signings in New York and Japan. Discretion became her revelation.

Lidewij Edelkoort

‘The human hand, rural workshops and astounding fabrics ascend from its pages, opening the mind to other ways of consuming, bewildered by passion and enduring aesthetics’