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Systems

L’Oréal and T3 Systems Redefine Sustainable Event and Retail Design

by jummy84 November 5, 2025

written by jummy84

L’Oréal and T3 Systems are pioneering circular design in retail and events — delivering high-end, reusable activations that merge sustainability, creativity, and global scalability for world-leading beauty brands.

In a sector where one-off builds and single-use materials have long been the norm, a quiet revolution is taking place. Global beauty giant L’Oréal has partnered with T3 Systems to lead a new era of sustainable event and retail activations — proving that premium design and environmental responsibility can go hand in hand.

The partnership began with the introduction of The T3 System — a lightweight, modular framework that enables brands to achieve bespoke, premium finishes without waste. Every structure can be reconfigured, reused, and refreshed for future activations, eliminating the need for one-time-use builds while maintaining exceptional aesthetic quality.

Following early success, the collaboration has expanded to include two major UK events, each executed using the same T3 kit — reconfigured to create entirely new, visually striking experiences. This circular design approach allows L’Oréal to maintain design excellence while dramatically reducing carbon footprint, materials use, and build time.

L’oréal and t3 systems redefine sustainable event and retail design img 20251006 wa0015

“The beauty industry has always valued creativity and finish. What’s exciting now is proving that sustainability can enhance rather than limit that,” says Philippe van Ameyde, Managing Director at T3 Systems. “L’Oréal’s activations demonstrate that circular design and brand experience can coexist beautifully.”

The same T3 system has also been used by Coty Inc., home to brands including Rimmel, Hugo Boss, and Gucci Beauty. Across both L’Oréal and Coty activations, the kit has now been reused at seven different events, configured in unique ways to deliver fresh, high-impact results each time.

Each display system is built around T3’s modular aluminium framework, engineered for rapid, tool-free assembly and disassembly. The result is a solution that embodies circular design principles, providing brands with flexibility, sustainability, and stunning visual outcomes in equal measure.

With its global availability, T3 Systems supports clients worldwide through a central design and sales team in London, and production facilities in Essex and West Paris. This international network ensures seamless delivery and consistent quality — wherever clients choose to activate.

T3 Systems now works with an impressive portfolio of leading luxury and beauty brands including L’Oréal, Armani, Valentino, Prada, Rimmel, Hugo Boss, and Coty Inc. Together, they’re helping to shape a more responsible future for live and retail environments — one modular structure at a time. 🎥 Watch the full video case study here:

New European Headquarters

As part of its ongoing European expansion, T3 Systems has established a dedicated headquarters and production hub in Élancourt, West Paris. Operating under t3displaysystems.fr, the French team serves clients across mainland Europe with local design, stock, and project support — ensuring faster turnaround times and a lower carbon footprint for European activations.

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November 5, 2025 0 comments

Music

Soulwax Scare Us on ‘All Systems Are Lying’ » PopMatters

by jummy84 October 21, 2025

written by jummy84

In this post-truth, post-trust era, the assurance that all systems are lying can feel oddly comforting. Floating on flux rather than guided by facts, we can liberate ourselves from the institutions and verities that are no longer stable or credible. Rely on “my truth” instead and indulge self-gratifying private urges: “I wanna run free / With the music / A beautiful mistake / Try not to lose it / Faster all the time / Smoke and abuse it … / Play the wrong chord / Say something stupid.”

Those lines are from the new Soulwax release, All Systems Are Lying. It’s been eight years since their last one and arguably much longer than that: their previous album, From Deewee (2017), was recorded in one live take with a session band that included three drummers. (You have to go all the way back to 2004’s Any Minute Now to find a traditionally tracked Soulwax LP).

All Systems Are Lying has a creative conceit of its own: It’s a “rock album made without any electric guitars”, according to David and Stephen Dewaele, the Belgian brothers behind Soulwax, “built entirely from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, and processed vocals”. The record is billed as “a fractured mirror held up to modern society on the brink—where truth is distorted by filters, algorithms and noise”. Also see OK Computer and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, not to mention Spoon‘s Hot Thoughts (2017), which used a similar Oulipian approach, omitting acoustic guitars and relying primarily on synths, percussion, and studio craft for its construction. (It’s perhaps no surprise that All Systems Are Lying occasionally calls Spoon’s music to mind.)

In addition to maintaining Soulwax, the Dewaele brothers are accomplished DJs and remixers of some of the most beloved dance music of the last 20 years (e.g., tracks by Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem). They’ve long been experts in the advanced sciences of moving bodies on a dance floor, but All Systems Are Lying finds them contemplating the drawing board. “We’ve got to find a more efficient way / We’ve got to try to find another way”, muses the almost motionless “Constant Happiness Machine”, which has no drums as well as no guitars.

That song’s successor, the pitiless, march-like, not very danceable “Polaris”, keeps telling us: “You don’t seem to realize / You don’t seem to realize / It’s happening right in front of you.” Having put us on alert with that unsettling reminder, the Dewaeles turn the surveillance cam on us: “It’s happening all because of you.” We may be increasingly powerless drones, but we are nonetheless to blame for our own “modern society on the brink”, as when a nation elects to the seats of power precisely the officials who will abuse the systems they now control to increase their wealth and power, and our peril, poverty, and pain.

The unspoken word here is fascism, of course, and one of the canniest things about All Systems Are Lying is that it is both a critique and an example. “Have I told you how I feel? / Have I sold you what to feel?” asks the menacing narrator of the spooky “Meanwhile on the Continent”. Most of the album’s songs are delivered in the persona of an omniscient (if not omnipresent/omnipotent) Übermensch, perhaps a cyborg, or even a bodiless and sinister authoritarian AI: a “Constant Happiness Machine” that pitilessly delivers an “Engineered Fantasy” (the title of another song) to mere humans—a fantasy that is “just for you / Not for me”, promises a robotic voice who is “here for business, baby, not for fun” (later “business class”).

It might seem cheering to hear that we flesh-and-blood creatures are “Hot Like Sahara”, a song that rocks like Lenny Kravitz (if it had guitars) and also cooks; but that’s only because the whole earth is cooking, and “we never had a say in this” either, and “even the sea will be sold”. Yet, like everything else, it’s (y)our fault: “You danced around / Damage is done / Air conditioned rooms.”

In the end, we’re a civilization of “Idiots in Love”, which could also be a Lenny Kravitz song. Idiots in love with what, though? It’s hard to tell; certainly not with each other: “There is no afterlife / I’m going home alone tonight / Border walls are gonna fall.” It sounds like some terrifying cinematic Eurodystopia: either a picture of a frantic revolution or, more likely, the quashing of one.

What we idiots are really in love with is enumerated near the album’s end on the herky-jerky, LCD Soundsystem-like funk of “False Economy”, which smashes the idols of personal indulgence, decision, and projection, and refutes the voice of public officialdom: “Your melodies and tears … public safety brief … blackmail of ‘likes’… curated playlist … endless updates … potential matches … humblebrags … tiny Ziploc bags.” These are the factitious transactions of the false economy, and the reasons why “it’s happening all because of [us]”: We feed ourselves into the system, and the system metabolizes our substance into lies that are fed back.

“I always hated what you liked,” the song’s narrator coolly declaims. “I let the market decide,” but the Dewaeles know full well that the market is the most lying system of all, and that the music Soulwax creates (and we buy, or don’t) is part of that system. They’re selling you what to feel, or at least what to think, while you listen to this enjoyable, very efficient album that never plays the wrong chord or says something stupid, doesn’t need guitars to rock, and delivers its message in concentrated and relentless doses.

The more you listen to this record, the less comforting and more frightening it becomes. It all starts on the very first track, a spacey intro (with a strong resemblance to Spoon’s “The Ghost of You Lingers”) that repeats its title, “Pills and People Gone”, some 22 times. That’s how it reads on the lyric sheet, anyway. What your ears hear, thanks to those “processed vocals”, is “pills and people get along” and the more disturbing “guilty people get along”. It’s happening all because of you. Reach for your tiny Ziploc bag, smoke and abuse it, but you can’t run free with the music. All systems are lying—including this one?

October 21, 2025 0 comments

Music

Soulwax Rock, Sans Guitars, On ‘All Systems Are Lying’

by jummy84 October 18, 2025

written by jummy84

The intersection of rock and electronic music has been clusterfucked for years, and it takes extraordinary skills to stand out. Belgium’s Soulwax have been in that nexus for decades. The group’s creative core of David and Stephen Dewaele have gone from generating convincing facsimiles of grunge on their 1996 debut LP Leave the Story Untold to the leftfield-techno tracknology of 2018’s Essential.

For All Systems Are Lying (DEEWEE/Because Music), the Dewaeles said, “We wanted to capture the feeling of a band playing electronic instruments — live, loud and loose.” Using modular synths, live drums, tapes machines, and processed vocals, Soulwax claim to have made “a rock album … without any guitars.” One quibble: All Systems only occasionally rocks. And that’s okay.

Perversely, Soulwax open with “Pills And People Are Gone,” which sounds like an end-of-the-party lament that would make Radiohead weep. “Polaris” is a suspenseful pulse-pounder, like Philip Glass jamming with Justice. The methodically percolating techno-rock of “The False Economy” scans like a denigration of social-media strategies, sung in a sneering, Trent Reznor-like tone. “Engineered Fantasy” bears the woozy, oneiric vibe of Tobacco, but with clearer, more earnest singing.

Album highlight “Run Free” rides rugged, midtempo beats, rubbery bass synths and features the best singing on the record. Flush with yearning, it’s an escapist joint with an undercurrent of peril, buoyed by an acidic 303 solo, a massive swell of synths and a chunky breakbeat. Is it rock? No… it’s better than that.

The closest Soulwax come to rock, as most know it, is “New Earth Time,” in which disaffected vocals float over a beat-heavy attack with vibrant percussion timbres and warped synth zaps. The ominous title track recalls Visage, with its nervy, swerving synth fibrillations and sharp percussion slaps. Later, robust techno beats barge in, with metallic accents and chopped-up female vocals. It’s an exemplary manifestation of Soulwax’s thesis of society’s downward spiral triggered by technology’s most nefarious side effects. And you can dance to it.

October 18, 2025 0 comments