Biography Highlights

 

Antoinette van den Berg — The Lady in Blu — was born in 1966 in Deventer and studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Man and Identity.

 

She started as a designer. A doorknob collection sold forty thousand pieces worldwide. A flock chair was acquired by Het Textielmuseum. She won the Emmy van Leersum Encouragement Prize.

 

Then she stopped, and went sailing. Three years on a yacht through Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Malta and Morocco, with her husband and two small children. Before that, she had restored an eleven-metre-high monumental ruin into a house. She has never lived a life in one place.

 

From 1991, she read the future for a living. Colour, materials, cosmetics — for BASF, Schwan-STABILO and Dow Corning, and through them for key players in the industry including YSL, Chanel, Dior and L’Oréal. She spoke on stages in Seoul, LA, Bangkok, Milan, Paris, Berlin and London. Always looking for what was coming next — before it became visible.

 

In between, she kept building things. A 3D-printed accessory label. RE LOVE Fashion, a foundation created to slow down the consumption of new clothing. Napolifoto, one of the first online city guides, launched in Naples in 2003. A podcast. The World After, a trend forecasting platform.

 

In 2023, she changed the place she was standing and started living a nomadic life.

 

She went to work on restaurant floors and terraces — in Lamu, Ibiza and Amsterdam. As a barista, a runner, a waitress. For minimum wage, six days a week in high season. She was fifty-seven when she started.

 

For decades, she had read the future in objects — colour, materials, fashion, design. On the floor, she began to read it in people.

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The floor became a lens on the world — where money, class, labour, status, desire, technology and behaviour meet, and where small shifts in human behaviour reveal what is coming long before it emerges as a cultural shift.

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Those observations became 'Notes from the Floor', her first book, and 'What the Floor Knows Before the Boardroom Does' the talk that grew from it.

 

She has spent her life going where she was not expected to be.

A ruin. A boat. A boardroom. A terrace in high season with a tray in her hands.

 

It is the reason she sees what she sees.

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