Geometry, shapes, ceramics, iridescence — these are a few of our favorite things, so it’s no wonder they’re all over our spring shop update! We’ve been stockpiling the amazingness for weeks, including our first men’s ring (and first piece by Jonathan Nesci) and our lowest-priced item ever: mix-and-match ceramic stud earrings by Jujumade that are a steal at only $18 each. The rest of the names you’ll recognize, like Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, WWAKE, Object & Totem, Katy Krantz, Gemma Holt, and Iacoli & McAllister, the latter of whom have reprised their Sight Unseen–exclusive Necklace No. Ultra for a third time in hammertone, a crackled enamel finish that will play a starring role in their new furniture launch this month. Check out all the new jewelry offerings after the jump, then stay tuned for a second round of exciting spring additions next week — housewares!
When we first started writing about design nearly a decade ago, almost all young furniture talents had the same starry eyed aim: to get a piece produced by a big European company like Cappellini, then sit back and watch the 3% royalties trickle in. My how things have changed. These days emerging designers are just as likely to produce their own work and sell it online, cutting out the middle man and relying on press, exhibitions, and social media to get the word out. And for those who would rather operate somewhere in the middle, now there’s also BYCO, a new micro-financing site for fashion and housewares designers who are motivated enough to promote their own ideas but wouldn’t mind having someone else deal with the logistics of production. Founded by Jesse Finkelstein of JF & Son and his sister Meredith, the site lets you submit a design, then promote it to potential funders to cover the costs of making a prototype. If you’re successful, your design is sold on the site for a month, with BYCO handling production and fulfillment and your funders getting a nice little discount to the shop. As a designer, you receive 20% of sales and one of your pieces for free (or 30% if you cover the sampling cost). Starting today, Sight Unseen has teamed up with BYCO to sweeten the pot even further — submit your own design to the site by Monday, June 3, and we’ll pick the best three submissions to bypass the funding stage and go straight into production on the site. Just follow the directions below to get started! Just follow the directions after the jump to get started!
When we first began hearing rumblings a few years back about Terrain, the garden center/home store/plant nirvana/farm-to-table café/dreamy wedding venue located 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia, we had no idea that the place was founded and operated by Urban Outfitters. Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, to do a profile one day on the sweet couple who must own the place? But don’t laugh at our cluelessness just yet. Though its flagship campus is huge — nearly a dozen buildings spread out over five acres — Terrain has the intimate vibe and the quirkily curated stock of a much smaller operation. Credit for projecting that cozy vibe, despite being part of one of the biggest retail conglomerates in the country, goes in large part to Terrain’s visual team — the buyers, merchandisers, and creatives who stock the place with mason jars, ticking stripe aprons, vintage planters, sea salt soaps, bocce ball sets, and terrariums.
Designers Anna Bario and Page Neal may have gone to school together, but their a-ha moment didn’t come until several years later: Not only did they realize they’d both been designing jewelry since graduation, they also found they shared a defining interest in exactly how and where their pieces were made. After moving to Philadelphia and doing extensive research into ethical gem sourcing and low-impact practices, the pair set up shop as Bario Neal in 2007, and they’ve been making environmentally and socially conscious jewelry together ever since. Their ready-to-wear rings and necklaces, custom engagement rings, and heirloom pieces are extremely responsible — with many of them made from recycled metals and all of them fabricated by local artisans in Bario Neal’s workshop and on Philly’s historic Jeweler’s Row — but they’re also extremely cool, too, which is why Sight Unseen is psyched to offer you the chance to win your favorite pieces. Just follow the directions after the jump to enter, and you could walk away with a $200 Bario Neal gift certificate good for (almost) anything in the studio’s online shop!
Joel Evey owes his career to Pixar, believe it or not. He made a name for himself as part of the team that was bringing edgy, high-brow graphics to Urban Outfitters back in 2010 — with a style some like to call the “new ugly” — but at age 15, it was Toy Story that changed his life. “I saw it for the first time and was like, wow, that’s crazy! You can do that with a computer?” recalls Evey, who at the time was already about to head off to college early to study computer science. Instead of hard coding, he decided to pursue animation and 3-D graphics instead. “But animations took so long to render that I started to think, ‘Well, what happens when I take this image and just render one of them?’ Then, ‘What if I put type on it? What would that look like?’” The rest, as they say, is history.
Before the show Alley-Oop opens at L.A.’s Poketo store this coming Saturday, you should take a moment to thoroughly examine the portfolios of its two Portland-based collaborators, illustrator Will Bryant and furniture designer Eric Trine. Because think about it: How easy is it to picture the results of a collaboration spanning the two disciplines? Especially when Bryant’s work is so crazy vibrant — full of squiggles and anthropomorphized hot dogs wearing neon sunglasses — and Trine’s is so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix. Alley-Oop is like one of those software programs that lets you crudely merge the faces of two people to find out what their child might look like at age 5, though perhaps a better metaphor would be that it’s like what would happen if you pumped two designers full of methamphetamine and locked them in a room together for 48 hours with nothing but some spray paint and a welding gun. Actually, that’s not too far off from how Bryant and Trine describe it themselves. See our interview with the pair after the jump, along with the first preview images of their collaborative work — which hopefully won’t be the last.
Here at Sight Unseen, we’re a bit like a college application — fixated on versatility, and in awe of anyone who’s proven themselves equally gifted across a spectrum of interests and activities. So it’s no wonder we became fast friends with someone like Kelly Rakowski, who studied graphics, worked as a book designer for Todd Oldham for five years, started a blog revolving around her obsession with archival textiles, and now makes weavings, housewares, and jewelry as one half of the label New Friends. She’s an artist, a designer, and a stylist, and when we asked her to art-direct a special editorial featuring Max Lamb’s Prism Bangle — commissioned by us for the Sight Unseen Shop — it was no surprise that she understood our vision immediately. Max’s bangle, after all, is way more than just a bangle; it began life as a sculptural object and was adapted for us to wearable proportions, but it still feels just as at home on a desk as it does around your wrist or hanging from your neck. For this slideshow, Rakowski imagined several creative uses for the Prism’s four discrete parts, from spaghetti dosing to cookie-cutting, then photographed her ideas in action.
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
If there was ever a time when artists and designers could remain shrouded, Wizard of Oz-like, behind a curtain of mystery and intrigue, that time — partly thanks to sites like ours — is almost certainly past. Granted most artists still don’t have their own websites, and most of their galleries are pitiful at conveying background info, but this being the information age, some blogger or curator never fails to come along and connect the dots. In the case of Matt Paweski, it may very well end up being Sight Unseen that gets to do the honors. While the Los Angeles–based artist is showing an exciting new body of work called “The Fancy World” at South Willard at the moment, so far there’s very little to be gleaned about him anywhere online. We fell so in love with the new pieces, which are furniture-like in form if not entirely in function, that we set the wheels in motion for a more in-depth studio visit with Paweski in the spring. You’ll get to know him better at that point, but for now, the Michigan-born talent was kind enough to tell us more about “The Fancy World,” whose pieces are pictured in this post: “The fine line between something working or not is a place my work constantly returns to,” he says.
Tourists emerging from the Broadway/Lafayette subway station in New York’s Soho were in for a shock this fall: Perched atop an old garage behind the BP gas station were two life-sized mannequins, clad in knitted wool and engaged in a rather un-family friendly act. (New Yorkers, used to such things, weren’t particularly fazed.) The artwork was part of the Lana Sutra series by Fabrica artist-in-residence Erik Ravelo, and it was commissioned for a Benetton pop-up shop that opened in the space this past September and closes at the end of this month. But once you stepped inside the 2,200-square-foot garage, you realized that though the knit sculptures were the attention-grabbers, the space was actually full to the brim with ingenious objects that offered clever takes on color and wool, created by the young talents at Fabrica — Benetton’s Treviso, Italy–based designer-in-residence program — under the creative direction of Fabrica’s design head Sam Baron and Benetton’s brand-new creative director You Nguyen. “The concept was to adapt Benetton’s DNA to a more modern vision,” says Baron.
When Jill Wenger opened the first incarnation of the Seattle store Totokaelo in 2003, she had a few goals: showcasing the work of local designers, improving choices for all-weather gear. But as she grew to be the most fashion-forward resource in the city, she took on the more important mandate of helping to raise Seattle’s style profile in general, banishing annoying sartorial habits like square-toed shoes, embroidery, and pleather handbags. While there’s still work to be done in that arena, this year — with the opening of her massive new store and its “Art—Object” component — Wenger expanded her tastemaking activities beyond the body and into the home. Her stable contains more than a few of our favorite players, from Philip Low to Seattle’s hometown heroes Iacoli & McAllister, but months ago, it was Morgan Peck who really caught our eye. Not only was the ceramicist suddenly showing up on shelves at Iko Iko and Mociun, among others, there was almost no information about her on the web. And so we invited Wenger to take a stab at interviewing the Los Angeles–based talent for our Peer Review column.
Table of Contents is a concept shop that sells clothing and objects from a storefront just inside the gates of Portland’s Chinatown, opened in September by two local designers. So when one of them, Joseph Magliaro, told us that “the goal of TOC is to produce an expanded notion of what a publication can be,” well, you can’t blame us if we were a smidge confused. But it turns out that Magliaro and his other half, Shu Hung, prefer to look at their store as a kind of magazine come to life — a place where the things we’re all reading about now, or should be, are actually there to have and to hold, and where every fashion season brings a new “editorial” theme.
It’s holiday season again! Isn’t that crazy? We feel like it was just yesterday that we were at the beach, burying our toes in the sand. Granted, we’ll be at the beach again next week, when Sight Unseen takes Design Miami, but that doesn’t change how nuts it is that 2013 is already upon us. We didn’t want to leave all you gift-givers hanging, so we commissioned four new necklaces for the Sight Unseen Shop that we think you’ll definitely want stuffed in your stocking: two by designers we’ve worked with before (Tanya Aguiñiga and Iacoli & McAllister) and two by exciting new talents (LA’s Sonya Gallardo and Julianne Ahn of Object & Totem). May your New Year’s resolution be to collect them all.
Over the past two years, there’s been an explosion of design weeks popping up on this side of the pond, in smaller, more far-flung American metropolises like Portland, St. Louis, and Baltimore. But Europe’s had a hold on this whole second-city-hosts-a-worldwide-design-event for years now. Take Lodz, the third-largest city in Poland, whose design festival is already six years strong. The Lodz Design Festival plays host to homegrown talents like Tomek Rygalik, as well as designers from abroad — both of which were a draw to our newest correspondent and dear friend Thorsten Van Elten, the London-based producer and retailer who reported on the event for us last week. But the real attraction, says Van Elten, was the city of Lodz itself. “At the beginning of this year I went to Transylvania, and I decided that I really need to travel to more places I’ve never been to. Poland was high on the list so when I saw a link on Facebook about the Łódź Design Festival, I checked for flights and hotel and managed to find two nights for just over £100. There really was no excuse not to go!”
Is it every blogger’s secret wish to go into retail? This year alone, we’ve seen Sight Unseen’s own Shape Shop, Rhiannon Gilmore’s Dream Shop at the Walker, and as of this Saturday, Su Wu of I’m Revolting’s pop-up at Creatures of Comfort LA, entitled We’re Revolting. Perhaps it’s inevitable that we would all want to touch and feel and hold the objects we covet from afar, and to make tangible the narrative we create every day. But maybe it’s just as simple as this: “It’s kind of lonely being a blogger,” Wu says. “And this was a reason to get to know people. It’s kind of a scary thing: You think, ok, I admire their work, but will I actually get along with them? But in fact, I’m still kind of basking in it.”
In 1960, there was a noisemaker that said “Click with Dick,” endorsing Richard Nixon for President. In 1964, a canned novelty beverage promoted Barry Goldwater’s candidacy (“Gold Water: The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste”). But these days, with Shepard Fairey’s once-inescapable “Hope” poster on the wane, you’d be hard-pressed to find an election souvenir of note beyond the usual bumper stickers, commemorative mugs, and buttons. Enter Kiosk, New York’s go-to retailer for quirky housewares and objects from around the world. This week, Kiosk owners Alisa Grifo and Marco ter haar Romeny released a collection of five pro-Obama souvenirs, which sport cheekily retrograde slogans and riff on American-made objects the shop already had in stock.
If you have a particularly sprawling design-book library, or if you religiously follow things like Mondo Blogo or Herman Miller editorial director Sam Grawe’s Instagram feed, you may be relatively familiar with the heaps of amazingly designed archival ephemera that original modern furniture brands tend to generate over the decades. But the rest of us still get giddy when we come upon a gem like Vitsoe’s brand-new Tumblr, which the 53-year-old German stalwart launched last month to show off rarely seen bits and bobs pulled from its company files. Every couple of days, staffers dig up old invitations, promo items, photographs, and catalogs and post them alongside a snippet of information about their origins; with Dieter Rams as Vitsoe’s lead designer and Wolfgang Schmidt behind its graphic identity, there’s been no shortage of eye candy on the site so far. A few of our favorite examples are shown here, but we advise you to bookmark the site and visit it often — we have a feeling the Vitsoe folks are just getting started, and there’s no telling what they might turn up once they really dig in.
When we first began following the inspiration blog mysteriously known as I’m Revolting, we knew we’d found a kindred spirit, at least aesthetically. (If you’re even the slightest fan of our Pinterest, you should know that many of our posts originate with I’m Revolting’s boards, or result from tumbling down the internet rabbit hole after reading one of her posts.) But it was only when we asked the Los Angeles–based blogger — whose real name is Su Wu — to pen one of our Peer Review columns that we truly knew we’d stumbled upon one of our own: A former journalist who threw the contents of her interior world online after the publication for which she was writing folded, Wu is an image collector, a thinker, and a fantastic writer to boot. Today for Sight Unseen she interviews Brent Pearson, the artist behind a heavy, handmade pair of kaleidoscopic glasses known as Future Eyes.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve quietly been making some changes around here, like un-sticking the left column of our homepage so it’s scrollable, letting you sort that column by story tags or what’s popular, enlarging our slideshow images, and letting you use arrows instead of numbers to navigate them. As of this weekend, we’ve also made a small but notable update to our shop: Replacing our own photos of Fort Standard’s stone trivets and candleholders with the gorgeous, professionally shot images you see here (Pinterest lovers, this is your cue!), and dropping the price on those candlesticks from $85 each to a mere $70.
At the Armory Show this past November, Cristina Grajales had an original Jean Royère Polar Bear sofa in her booth, which sold for “half a million in minutes,” she recalls. Grajales has had plenty of experience dealing in 20th-century masterpieces like these — both in her decade-long stint directing 1950 for Delorenzo and at the helm of her 12-year-old eponymous gallery in Soho — and yet her own most cherished piece isn’t some icon of modernism at all. It’s not even a design object, but a 19th-century Naga warrior costume she bought at the Tribal Art Fair, and as a mainstay of the large office and presentation room she keeps behind her gallery, only her clients and artists ever get to see it. Of course it’s they, if any, who understand Grajales’s working methods best; they come to her precisely because she looks at objects “as sculptures, for what they are,” and says she’s “not afraid to put together, say, an 18th-century Portuguese table with a contemporary silver tray.” Which is why we figured a privileged peek inside her back room, captured earlier this year by our trusty photographer Mike Vorrasi, might be the ideal way for our readers to get to know her, too.
Anyone who was in New York for our annual Noho Design District event this spring should be familiar with the Irish online homegoods brand Makers & Brothers; they would have been the ones making a beautiful mess on the floor of the Standard East Village hotel, as their woodworker James Wicklow carved stools made from Catskills-grade green ash by hand over the course of four days. But most of what namesake brothers Jonathan and Mark Legge do to showcase their particular brand of native handcrafted goods takes place a bit closer to home — which in their case is a shed located on the same property as their parents’ home and architectural practice in Dublin. Since founding their online retail venture less than a year ago, the two have made a point of visiting and documenting the workspaces of the people who create products for them — the basketweaver who grows her own willow on the banks of the River Boyne, the Irish RCA grad who knits stool covers from a warehouse in East London, and, most recently, a family of glassblowers in Kilkenny whose Jerpoint brand drinking vessels the brothers grew up with. When we wrote Jonathan to ask if we could reprint some of their text and photos on Sight Unseen, he confessed he hopes to collaborate soon with Jerpoint — so perhaps a follow-up story will be in the offing for fall. Until then, if you’re in Dublin, you can pop by the brothers’ shed this weekend for a summer opening. If not, live the Makers & Brothers life vicariously through our excerpt after the jump.
When we first got wind of the new Scandances by Prince Ruth textile collection for Urban Outfitters, we had two questions: Who is Prince Ruth? And what the heck is a scandance? The latter question, we found, was easy to answer: It’s that jittery, seismograph-through-the-lens-of-an-acid-trip effect you get when you manipulate an image while it’s in the process of being scanned. As for the former, we assumed — this being Urban, who has an additional collaboration out this month with Sight Unseen favorite Caitlin Mociun, and who’s previously worked with friends like Rich Brilliant Willing — that Prince Ruth was some under-the-radar designer we somehow weren’t cool enough to have noticed. And in a way, that’s exactly what it is: Prince Ruth is the name of a Brooklyn-based surface design studio run by Zoe Latta, a 24-year-old textile artist and RISD grad whose work is more famous than her pseudonym would suggest.
From the start, the young Weimar students behind My Bauhaus Is Better Than Yours gave themselves a crushingly large reputation to live up to. Not their alma mater’s creative legacy, mind you, but those tote bags, given away when the collective-turned-production company launched in 2009. Bearing its name in a thin block print, the bags made for the perfect product even before you saw the group’s actual work, and for awhile you couldn’t turn a single corner at a design event without running into someone wearing one. But to the credit of the now Berlin-based company’s founders — graphic designers Manuel Goller and Daniel Burchard — each furniture collection continues to hit the proverbial nail on the head, combining appealingly graphic shapes with just the right dose of functionality. Earlier this week, My Bauhaus re-launched its webshop with a new design, lower prices, and new products, some of which debuted earlier this year in Milan. We asked three of the designers behind those works to send us a list of five things that inspired their piece, from Bret Easton Ellis to solitaire.
Today, we introduced a selection of housewares to the Sight Unseen Shop, including Shin Okuda’s whimsical plywood and steel Shaped Bookends. We thought this was the perfect opportunity to introduce you to the Los Angeles designer’s inspirations and work, which we originally showcased in Paper View, Sight Unseen’s first-ever printed edition. Though the book has a limited run, copies are still for sale in our online shop. Get yours here before it’s too late, and read on to find out more about one of our favorite up and coming designers.
Our Shape Shop pop-up at Creatures of Comfort last month was a success by any measure, but even before it ended, we were hearing from non-New Yorkers, wondering when and how they could get their hands on the merch. We’d long wished our shop could branch into housewares anyway, so it seemed the perfect time to test the waters: This week, we’re introducing some of our best-sellers from the Shape Shop online for a limited time, as well as an update to one of our previous jewelry offerings. What does this mean for you? A veritable bounty of exclusive items by some of your favorite designers: Gorgeous stoneware kitchen accessories by Fort Standard, pillows made from the discontinued textiles of Caitlin Mociun’s clothing line, scrap lamps by Jonah Takagi, geometric bottle openers by Bec Brittain, painted leather pouches by Baggu, and more — all for $200 or less. Check out the goods here, then head over to the shop to place your order!
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