Justin Morin’s Silk Draperies Reference Pop Culture and Natural Phenomena in Equal Measure

Justin Morin’s printed silk installations take many forms — some unfurl dramatically against an expansive gallery wall; others are cinched and pleated like couture; still others are knotted, tied, looped, bunched, gathered, or, simply hang listlessly like a flag. Morin’s specific visual vocabulary, developed over the course of a decade since he created his first printed silk work in 2011, proposes that anything and everything in our information-dense and visually overwrought world can be unraveled and represented in sensual, gradient silk.
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10 Low-Slung Floor Chairs That Epitomize Our Current Obsession With Coziness

When it comes to seating — in the realm of Instagram influencers, at least — 2020 was the year of the Togo, the iconic beanbag-y modular sofa designed in the '70s by Michel Ducaroy for Ligne Roset. But it wasn't the only comfy floor seat we found ourselves drawn to last year; we'd been tracking the typology since before COVID hit, and this week, as winter (and the maelstrom on the news) keeps us more supine than ever, we thought it was as good a time as ever to share our picks with you.
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Rediscovering Pucci De Rossi, the Founding Father of Ugly Furniture

Among the army of designers from the 1980s and '90s plucked from the archive in recent years — Ettore Sottsass, Nathalie du Pasquier, and their Memphis cohort, to name a few — there are still many that remain ripe for rediscovery. Our latest find is Pucci de Rossi, the Italian-born artist and designer who intrigued and confused the Parisian design world with his Brutti Mobili (Ugly Furniture). A clear predecessor to a whole cohort of artist-designers working today — think Misha Kahn’s mixed media chimeras — Pucci de Rossi didn’t invent the concept of functional art, but his work from the 1970s to 1990s certainly laid some groundwork.
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All the Vintage Furniture Reissues Happening Right Now

Have you ever seen a piece of vintage furniture in a magazine — or in the Instagram Stories of a particularly stylish friend or influencer— and thought: “HOLY SHIT, I HAVE TO HAVE THAT NOW”? Of course you have. We all have. It’s no wonder that furniture companies have been furiously plumbing their own archives for the next (old) big thing.
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Scandinavian Art Mirrors Are Having a Moment — Here’s Our Latest Favorite

If you are one of the 36,000 people who follow 26-year-old Simone Noa Hedal on Instagram, you probably know her as a very specific kind of Danish influencer who posts photos of herself — wearing clothes that are often the color of cotton candy or peach sorbet — interspersed with art and design inspirations working within a similar palette: Wang & Soderström, Helle Mardahl, Roger Muhl, Justin Morin, and the Seoul bakery Banana Haruki, among others. But last year, Hedal began posting in earnest pieces she had made herself that fit snugly into her already-established aesthetic — a series of mirrors painted with swoops of pastel acrylic paint.
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Think Face Pottery Is a Millennial Thing? Meet the Artist Who’s Been Doing It Since the ’70s

When Jill and I posted pictures of our favorite books on Instagram last week, mine featured one of my favorite objects in my living room, shown above: A pot, used by me as a planter, that features two hand-painted, color-blocked pastel faces. I bought it on eBay for $10 a year and a half ago. I don't remember how I found it. I had no idea, at the time, who the maker was, only that her name was Victoria Crowell and I assumed she was an obscure local artisan who made the pot in the '80s. I was mostly correct.
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Get Ready to See This Classic Pattern Everywhere

We first realized a checkerboard trend was happening last fall, and have since amassed a folder full of images that grows bigger by the week, as we see the pattern flying by on the Instagram accounts of fashion brands, interior designers, and shops. Today we've prepared a roundup of our favorite examples of the trend, but prepare yourself for a lot more — despite faint echoes of bad '80s interiors and ska bands, trust us, it's coming.
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Eny Lee Parker Designed a Tiny, Perfect Room in Oven-Bake Clay During Last Week’s Quarantine

“Tedious tasks are my love language,” reads the caption in one of Eny Lee Parker’s process videos, shared with candor last week on Instagram Stories. With design weeks canceled around the world and all of us confined to our homes, the Brooklyn-based designer is making the best of things with "Clay Play," an initiative she created that challenges her followers to design their own ideal room in oven-bake clay.
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Wright’s Upcoming Glass Auction is a Good Way to Stay Inspired From Your Couch

Among the other, more pressing, concerns this virus has wrought — Will production partners close? Will businesses go under? How the heck do you keep your kids out of the frame on a video conference call? — there is the more simple concern of how to stay inspired and engaged when there are no studio or site visits, no travel, no visiting with friends or other makers, and even a walk in nature has new rules. One of our most reliable sources of inspiration, though, has always been auction catalogs, and Wright has a doozy of one coming up in early April.
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