JEAN-PAUL LESPAGNARD / THE RAMUNE VASE

Object / Design & production / Client : Belgian Embassy Tokyo

“A modular vase of Ramune bottles in macramé transforms childhood nostalgia into a diplomatic gesture of connection.”

I created a modular vase using repurposed Japanese Ramune bottles held within a hand-knotted macramé structure. Placed on a diplomatic table, this modest object makes a quiet statement. It carries memory, intimacy, and craft into a formal space. It softens authority and opens a channel for connection.

Ramune belongs to summer festivals: yakisoba, fireworks, folding fans. It is popular, iconic, both nostalgic and surreal. Drinking it means pushing down the glass marble, a playful and ritualistic gesture that lives in collective memory, resurfacing in anime and kawaii culture. By giving these bottles a new life, I capture Ramune’s sensory magic: its sound, its touch, its emotion.

The cords recall kumihimo, a Japanese braiding technique. They add cultural texture and graphic rhythm. The DIY macramé harness makes the piece adaptable: I can swap in dark bottles, shift colors, alter the mood. Each bottle works as a soliflore, and together they form a constellation, light and generous. Whether standing alone or arranged in threes, fives, or sevens, the ensemble keeps its tactile balance.

Within my project The Table as a Diplomatic Gesture, the vase becomes more than a container for flowers. It turns into a conversation starter, a fragment of shared experience where the everyday is elevated to the extraordinary.

And here’s a fun detail: I’ve been collecting soda bottles from around the world and using them as soliflores for quite some time. That’s where the seed of this idea was planted.