Maarten Baas has been setting the design world on fire – quite literally. For his graduation show, Baas bought second-hand, Baroque-style furniture from Internet auctions. He covered the pieces in petrol, charred them with a blowtorch, and sealed the porous remains with layers of transparent epoxy. As you can see, the imagery is both striking and thought-provoking.

Baas explained his work as an exploration of the meaning of beauty. “I was thinking about why we want things to stay the same,” he said. “Why do we buy things and don’t touch them? Why do we think symmetry and smoothness are beautiful? And what would happen if we do the opposite of what we ought to do with furniture – if we burnt it?”

In a similar way, Gothic Lolita subverts existing notions of beauty. Morbid clothes and makeup can be lovely; destruction and violence can create something unexpectedly moving, such as the blood-splattered Gurololi featured in the previous post.

Baas is mildly defensive about his designs: “Sometimes people say it’s depressive. I don’t mean that at all. I really think they are nice.”