Color-Blocked Wetsuits and Ceramic Stash Boxes: The 2020 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

On the one hand, to publish a gift guide in 2020 seems like an immense act of magical thinking. After all, what do we really want? We want the vaccine, we want to visit our parents, we want to see live music, we want to run outside without a mask, we want to flip the Senate, we want to travel with abandon, we want to sit inside a restaurant, drinking by candlelight, shoulder to shoulder with our best friends. On the other hand, one of the small, analog joys we have found in this period of sequestering and uncertainty is the act of sending a gift by mail.

So, as we work to achieve those things, may we interest you in a gloopy borosilicate coffee pourer? How about a checkerboard body pillow? A donabe — to cook all that rice you’ve been hoarding — and a surfboard, if you’re lucky enough to live in a temperate climate, seem like perfect quarantine gifts. Those items and more were chosen for today’s gift guide by a selection of Sight Unseen’s far-flung contributing editors and writers: Los Angeles–based Dana Covit and Jennifer S. Li, Milan-based Laura May Todd, Cape Town– based Alix-Rose Cowie, and New York–based Shoko Wanger, Natalie Shukur, and Drew Zeiba. A special thank you to them for these beautiful picks!

*A note about our opening images this year: Since we couldn’t easily do a photo shoot, we opted for renderings at the top of each gift guide. Inspired by a recent collaboration between designer Oscar Piccolo and 3-D artist Riccardo Fornoni of Cream Atelier, which resembled a classical painting, we asked Fornoni to turn our gift guide picks into painterly still lifes, too. Each image evokes a different work of art, today’s being Still Life With Fruit by Emilie Preyer.