At National Design Awards, Ross Lovegrove Gets Political

Fresh from seeing his UFO hung from the rafters of France’s Gare de Lille-Flandres, Ross Lovegrove beamed himself over to New York for the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Awards gala. The London-based designer, dressed in a horn-buttoned wool ensemble that gave him the dapper and vaguely menacing bearing of an Austrian nobleman (and even the Thom Browne-clad audience members a run for their sartorial money), was on hand last Wednesday evening to present the “Design Mind” award to Janine Benyus, but couldn’t resist presaging his praise for the biomimicry pioneer with a not-so-stealth political endorsement.