Sunnei and cc-tapis Just Dropped the Ultimate Fashion x Design Collab, Where Carpets Become Clothing and Vice Versa

In addition to their playfully chic sartorial offerings, Sunnei has been on our radar for years thanks to their periodic overlaps with the design world, from a thoughtful ongoing object collection to the collaboration they presented during Salone in 2022 with our friends at Bloc Studios. And yet I was still surprised and delighted when, after I emailed the brand's PR team asking for a press kit for the brand's FW24 fashion show, it turned out the striking striped knitwear pieces that I'd immediately been drawn to were actually a collaboration with one of our other favorite Milanese brands, rug-maker cc-tapis.
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This Melbourne Exhibition Signals a Return to Romanticism in Design

We've been dancing around naming it for a while — or we've been calling it other, less expansive, more niche things — but it's official: Romanticism is creeping back into design. Following a similar moment in fashion — which saw things like Alessandro Michele’s peacock-y looks for Gucci or, really, anything from Harris Reed’s eponymous line — we’ve slowly clocked the appearance of flowing skirts around simple stools and lamps, intricately patterned floral wallpapers, deep oxblood-colored furniture pieces, and dramatic gestures like tapestries hung on apartment walls — all hinting at design’s turn to embrace its romantic side. A counter to the simplified geometries and washed-out hues of the Millennial aesthetic? A reflection of society’s current highly emotive state? Whatever the reason for this shift, the recent work of trans-Pacific duo BMDO marks a significant step in that direction, and their self-professed “playful, dark, social, and emotional” work is currently on view through this weekend at Oigall Projects gallery in Melbourne.
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This Thanksgiving, Look Cute While Making a Statement in One of These Sight Unseen–Approved Aprons

Well, what do you know? Turns out all I needed to have fun on the internet again was to go shopping for aprons. What a strange pocket of online shopping — and historical discourse — aprons inhabit! They're somehow everywhere you'd least expect them to be and not at all in the places you'd think to look. I came away from this exercise understanding that the apron-buying public is vastly underserved; so much beige linen, not enough fun! Why isn't every cool restaurant across America selling aprons as merch? Regardless, the 37 aprons below are extremely solid, fashionable, sometimes surreal choices for when you're basting a turkey, glass of wine in hand, two weeks from today.
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This Campaign for a Sailboat-Inspired Sofa Transports You to a 100-Year-Old Sailing School in Venice

The Vela, designed for Saba Italia by Zanellato/Bortotto, is an interesting take on the puffy sofa: It's soft and cushy yet somehow still crisp, with arms that taper to a subtle point and striking diagonal tufting seams that gently reign in its voluminousness. That contrast is intentional, reflecting the inspiration for the sofa, which also lent it its name ("sail" in English): "We both love the sea and have always been fascinated by the unfurled sails blown by the wind near the Venice lagoon," says Daniele Bortotto. For its new campaign, Saba sent photographer Mattia Balsamini to photograph it at the Compagnia della Vela, a nautical school founded in 1911 on the island of San Giorgio.
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Raf Simons Kvadrat Shaker System

Raf Simons Just Dropped a 16-Piece Shaker-Inspired Accessory Collection for Kvadrat

Over the course of nine years, the ongoing collaboration between Raf Simons and Kvadrat has brought us bold textiles attuned to color, texture, and proportion. Their latest project, the Shaker System, is no exception, while also being a bit of a departure. It’s a storage and accessories collection that fuses a precise simplicity with the comfort and ease of home.
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The Best of the 2022 Salone del Mobile — Part VI

Remember when we said that it was impossible to actually see all of the good things that launched during this month's Milan Furniture Fair? Well, apparently it's equally impossible to actually capture all of those launches in digital form, because the hits just keep coming into our inbox. So today, we're devoting an extra post to some of our favorites from a week that already seems like a lifetime ago. (Please, take us back to risotto and martinis!)
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Gabrielle Teschner on Why Being an Artist Is a Job You Can’t Lose

Gabrielle Teschner’s signature “Sculptures-That-Are-Flat” are made of individually painted planes of muslin that are stitched together, then ironed. Their scale ranges from hand-held (called ‘Minutes’ and measuring around 7x10 inches) to environmental, monolithic (up to 16x14 feet). Employing the symbolic and physical language of architectural forms, spatial relationships, and, often, weather patterns, Teschner explores dichotomies, concepts of strength and softness, force and flow, and phenomena of perception, among other impulses and ‘attractions,’ as she calls them. All of these are a way of understanding and questioning what it is to be in the world.
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A Chat with Erwan Bouroullec About Textiles, Layering, and His Studio’s Newest Showroom for Kvadrat

French designers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec have such a long and creatively productive history with the celebrated textile producer Kvadrat that they’ve become something like family. So when the Danish company decided it wanted to establish a foothold in Los Angeles this fall, the Bouroullecs came up with a concept that’s a little less like a showroom and a little more like a home — literally. We spoke to Erwan about the project, as well as about how textiles change the way people behave, which design elements make a home, the importance of layering, and the power of stairs.
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Week of October 18, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an affordable(ish) amorphous plaster mirror, new chairs by Moroccan Renaissance woman LRNCE, lamps that are like little paintings, and a dreamy Kips Bay room by Michael Hilal (above).
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For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
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With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.
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The Designer Making Chairs From Discarded Puffy Coats

If you're like me — and by that I mean you spent a very cold, COVID-filled winter socializing outside — you might be ready to never see a padded puffy coat again. But I was thoroughly charmed by the work of South Korean designer Jinyeong Yeon, who uses padded goose down jackets, which remained unsold by fashion brands and manufacturers, as upholstery for his series of puffy chairs.
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