05.28.14

SU Projects

Creative Women at Work Series with Shinola, 2014

In 2014, Shinola looked to Sight Unseen to help increase the visibility of its New York flagship among women, leading Sight Unseen to conceive an editorial series profiling influential New York curators and designers called Creative Women at Work.

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05.20.14

The Essentials

Creative Women at Work: Jade Lai

A lot of creatives these days flaunt some sort of hyphenate job title, but Creatures of Comfort owner Jade Lai might just be the most epic multitasker we know. The Hong Kong–born, New York–based Lai runs Creatures outposts in both New York and Los Angeles; she designs her own in-house line of effortlessly cool women's clothes, shoes, and accessories; she sources the best menswear, womenswear, and housewares from other designers for her shops (everyone from Christian Wijnants to Jessica Hans); and she champions the greater art and design community through a series of pop-ups and exhibitions at both store locations. (Remember our Shape Shop?!) In the final installment of our Creative Women at Work series with Shinola, Lai shares the items and rituals that keep her continually inspired.

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05.19.14

The Essentials

Creative Women at Work: Kyle DeWoody

If there weren't already plenty of reasons for us to love Kyle DeWoody — her friendliness, her amazing taste, the fact that she's not afraid to rock a baseball cap — she's also a poster child for blurring disciplinary boundaries, something we've long championed as well. She even named her company after the idea: She explains Grey Area, the online gallery she founded with Manish Vora in 2011, as "the undefined space between art and design, where art is made functional and the functional is made art." Even her own background has defied any categorization: Before founding Grey Area, she moved from curating to art consulting to design to film production and journalism. (In fact, DeWoody hooked up with Vora when he was running the arts website Art Log, for whom she used to write.) Her wide-ranging interests are in part what make Grey Area so great — the gallery sells everything from plush, hand-stitched Sharpies to elegant leaning brass bar carts, from plaster iPhone pillows by Snarkitecture to cat-themed beach towels by Andrew Kuo. DeWoody is constantly scouting new talent from unexpected sources, so for our Creative Women at Work series with Shinola, we got in touch to find out exactly how she does it. Here are some of her workplace essentials.

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05.16.14

The Essentials

Creative Women at Work: Bec Brittain

It's amazing what a difference five years makes. When we first profiled New York lighting Bec Brittain in 2009, she was an artist and creative director at Lindsey Adelman's studio, but her own design portfolio was so slim we featured only one of her creations: a chandelier she'd made for her own home out of off-the-shelf parts from McMaster-Carr. Fast forward five years and Brittain, who left Adelman's studio to form a solo practice in 2011, is now one of the most exciting, in-demand lighting designers on the American design scene.

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08.19.19

Up and Coming

These Four Women Are Leading Milan’s Design Scene — Both Together and Apart

This July, a design show in a Parisian apartment harnessed the talents of what feels like at least half of Milan’s up-and-coming design scene. Called "You Are Welcome" by The Ladies' Room collective — a collaborative project made up of Agustina Bottoni, Ilaria Bianchi, Sara Ricciardi, and Astrid Luglio — the show took the form of an intimate, female-centered salon, where objects vibrated with their own peculiar presences. All brilliant designers in their own right, the four have been working together since 2016 when they met at the Turin-based design fair Operae.

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Reading seat by Paula Clavería_Photo Ampi Aristu_01

03.15.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

Think Women Are Underrepresented in the Creative Arts? This Exhibition Does Too

The design world hasn't yet grappled with the chronic underrepresentation of women by brands — the Instagram @showmealist was a good idea that seems to have sadly fizzled out — but female designers and curators are doing just fine supporting each other, thankyouverymuch. The latest is an exhibition at Ox Poblenou in Barcelona, inaugurated on International Women's Day and curated by Sanna Völker, a Swedish furniture designer and curator living in Spain.

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03.30.17

Up and Coming

These Uruguay-Born, Los Angeles–Based Women are Poised for Furniture Stardom

Four years ago, Emiliana Gonzalez and Jessie Young moved to Los Angeles from their hometown of Montevideo. Back in Uruguay, they'd known each other only peripherally, but as creatives in a new city, they were drawn to one another. Gonzalez had trained as an industrial designer, while Young was a conceptual artist and a new mother who didn't have the energy to navigate a new art scene. After designing a few houses together, they moved on to products — first geometric walnut planters, then furniture — and founded Estudio Persona.

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12.15.16

Studio Visit

Inside the Downtown Los Angeles Loft Where Five Creatives Collaborate

Somebody knew somebody. That’s the short answer, according to Claire Cottrell, to the question of how five creatives — Cottrell, Michael Felix, David Rager, Cheri Messerli, and Saul Germaine, each distinguished in their respective fields — found themselves working out of a shared studio in LA’s Arts District, and occupying its airy second floor. “There are two degrees of separation between all of us,” she says.

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06.09.21

Graphic Design

A ’70s-Inspired Sunscreen, and Other Graphic Design Picks for June

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: An identity for a Black- and women-owned L.A. bookstore, a quirky custom typeface for a London underwear brand, and colorful, '70s-inspired packaging for a sunscreen brand (above).

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05.21.21

Up and Coming

The Dutch Designer Making Colorful, Jewel-Like Cocktail Glasses

For years, de Beijer designed purely ornamental vessels made from synthetic and non-traditional materials like resin and pigmented polyurethane cast by hand. "People have frequently asked me why I didn't make these vessels in 'real' glass,” he said. And so he did. Designing out of his father’s studio and working in close collaboration with the renowned glassblowers at Van Tetterode Glass Studio in Amsterdam, de Beijer has created his first series of glassware made exclusively for Side Gallery.

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05.10.21

Q+A

Caroline Denervaud’s Paintings Are a Dialogue Between Art and Dance

It was French artist Yves Klein who, in 1960, first used women’s bodies as canvases, covering them in blue paint to study the impressions they made on paper, while an orchestra played on. Swiss-born multi-disciplinary artist Caroline Denervaud’s vibrant, abstract artworks recall Klein's pioneering performative work, and also comprise the emotionally raw, humanistic approach to movement as seen in the works of visionary German dance choreographer Pina Bausch. “She was the first person who inspired me,” recalls Denervaud.

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Raquel Allegra's house in Taos, New Mexico for the Wall Street Journal

04.22.21

Interiors

Heading to New Mexico? Rent the Vintage-Furnished Ranch of a Beloved LA Fashion Designer

If the headline of this story seems to assume that you might, in fact, be heading to New Mexico soon, it’s entirely intentional — the state is again becoming a haven for a new wave of creatives. One of them is the Los Angeles fashion designer Raquel Allegra, who went to New Mexico a year and a half ago in search of real estate for a healing commune she was planning with a group of friends, but ended up buying her own sprawling 8,000 square-foot vacation home in Taos that she rents out part-time on Airbnb.

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