Introducing Our New Sight Unseen T-Shirt — and What Inspired the Illustrator Who Designed It

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we asked one of our favorite designers, Berlin-based illustrator and art director Jonathan Niclaus, to re-interpret what a Sight Unseen T-shirt should look like in 2019. We chose the name "Seeing Things," Niclaus channeled the idea into a hand-drawn composition incorporating some of our signature colors, and the result launches for sale today in the Sight Unseen Shop. Get to know the design — and the designer — a bit better after the jump.
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Charlotte Taylor Fictive Objects Wave Vase

This Sculptural, 3D-Printed Vase is Now Available in the Sight Unseen Shop

London-based designer Charlotte Taylor briefly considered becoming an architect before studying in the fine arts department at Chelsea College of Art, and her fascination with the built interior shows in almost everything she does. Her first object design, which we're stocking in the Sight Unseen Shop as of this week, is a series of vases called Fictive Objects — in other words vases that have been designed to inhabit the imagined spaces portrayed in Taylor's drawings but that would look just as good styling a shelfie.
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We’ve Added a Dozen Items to Our Newly Revamped Shop!

Maybe it's the seven-year itch, but after a long period of subtle changes, this summer we decided to go all-out in revamping the online shop we've been running since 2010, adding almost a dozen new items by some of our favorite housewares and jewelry designers — with a dozen more on the way between now and fall.
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Moving Mountains jewelry

Be the First to Snag New Jewelry by Moving Mountains

Today is a happy day for anyone obsessed with the furniture of Moving Mountains's Syrette Lew — she's just debuted a new jewelry line that's infinitely more accessible, and we made sure we were the very first ones to carry it, in the Sight Unseen Shop. Not only is almost everything in the collection under $250, it shares the same inspirations as her ultra-popular Palmyra lamp.
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Think Big! Our First LA Pop-up, at Space 15 Twenty

If you've been following our Instagram, you know that we've been spending an awful lot of time in Los Angeles lately. Last Thursday, we finally revealed why (aside from an obvious need to escape New York's subzero temps and un-meltable snowdrifts). Our latest pop-up — and our first-ever venture in LA — opened last Thursday at Space 15 Twenty, the Los Angeles Urban Outfitters concept shop and sister store to Brooklyn's Space Ninety 8, where we hosted a similar event last fall. Called Think Big!, the pop-up is inspired by a 1980s-era Soho store of the same name, which featured scaled-up versions of everyday objects.
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Ian Anderson, ceramicist

If you find it at all impressive that Philadelphia-based ceramicist Ian Anderson is releasing the debut collection we’re presenting here at the tender age of just 23, consider this: Anderson has been developing the collection’s asymmetrical, highly sophisticated forms in his head ever since he was a high-school student back in Mission Viejo, California. He just never had the studio set-up to realize them until now.
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Workaday Handmade

Like many creatives we’ve interviewed before, Forrest Lewinger began his Workaday Handmade ceramics label while in the employ of someone else. Having studied ceramics in college and promptly dropped it to focus on more video-based, site-specific work, the Virginia-born designer found himself a year or so ago back behind the potter’s wheel, working as a studio assistant to a ceramicist in New York City. “A lot of times, artists think of their day job as an obstructive force,” laughs Lewinger. “I started to think of it as something more generative.”
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50 Gifts We’re Coveting

Introducing the first annual Sight Unseen holiday gift guide! We've been scouring our favorite shops, both here and abroad, and over the next two days we’ll be featuring 25 items per editor. Today's picks come from Jill, whose taste runs more towards all things pretty, colorful, and mid-century.
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Kelly Rakowski’s “Life With Max Lamb Prism”

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.
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Gemma Holt, designer

Gemma Holt is one of those designers who seems to be both everywhere and nowhere at once. If you’re organizing a group exhibition heavy on young designers or putting together a collection of talents for an expertly curated new shop, chances are she's on your list: The RCA-trained, London-based designer’s work often has conceptually rigorous thinking behind it, but her forms are usually quite simple and her jewelry pieces are the sort of elegantly crafted bits that tend to fly off the shelves. If you’re the average Pinterest-happy design-lover, however, you might not know a whit about her, considering there’s maddeningly little written about Holt on the web. It’s possible she keeps a purposefully low profile; after all, she’s worked for years for one of the biggest names in furniture design (Martino Gamper). But today the secret’s out: We’re taking it upon ourselves to introduce you both to Holt herself and to three of her incredible pieces, which we’ve recently launched in the shop. (Above: O&D bangles, $380)
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Fredericks & Mae’s 2012 collection video

If Luis Buñuel had somehow detoured into a life making promotional lookbooks, they might have ended up something like the stop-motion video filmmaking duo Grave of Seagulls recently put together for our friends at Fredericks & Mae. The video was conceived to celebrate Fredericks & Mae’s 2012 collection, which is based loosely on the Mayan idea that 2012 marks the end of the world, and includes things like worry beads, backgammon and dominoes sets (with which to bide your time waiting for the apocalypse?), and a special edition of their signature arrows, featuring black feathers on dyed-black dowels. Says Lauryn Siegel of Grave of Seagulls: “I randomly saw their work over a year ago and immediately knew it would be great on film. It's an amazing video no matter how it's seen — as a commercial, as a documentation of work and process, as a stop-motion, or as a piece of design.” We recently spoke to the filmmakers and to Fredericks & Mae to get the scoop on the film, which debuts today on Sight Unseen.
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