11.04.13

The Making of

Inside Mykita’s Berlin Headquarters

Just a few blocks from the three-story factory where Mykita eyeglasses are designed, prototyped, and assembled by hand by a team of skilled workers, there’s a world-renowned contemporary art museum currently showing works inspired by Joseph Beuys’s vision of the future. There’s a new bar where fancy hipsters go to sip $15 Moscow mules, and more than a few new “luxury” condo buildings, which have begun sprouting like weeds in the area in the past five years. That’s about when Mykita moved its headquarters to their current location in the middle of Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood, which is basically the New York equivalent of setting up shop in Soho. It doesn’t actually manufacture from scratch there the metal and acrylic frames that are its signature — the parts are sent up in flat batches from South Germany — but it does just about everything else that’s required to construct and ship out between 600 and 1,000 pairs of glasses per day to the likes of Colette and Opening Ceremony. “It’s a business philosophy for Mykita that everything is under one roof,” says Lisa Thamm, head of Mykita PR, who gave us a tour of the factory this past June. “It’s actually easier that way, especially when your graphics team, your designers, everybody is really into detail.”

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11.02.13

Saturday Selects

Week of October 28, 2013

In a perfect world, we’d all be spending our Saturdays sleeping in, making brunch, then reading the paper in our pajamas all afternoon. Our smartphones would be switched off, and we wouldn’t open our computers until we were forced to get back to work on Monday morning. But who are we kidding? Days like those come around once in a blue moon, and we’re not exactly Luddites over here anyway — we like spending time online, when it’s for our own enjoyment, anyway. Assuming there are those of you out there who agree — or are just helplessly addicted to your RSS — we’ve decided to start a weekly recap each Saturday in order to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and events from the past seven or so days. If you’re lucky enough to be reading this on Monday, we salute you. But for everyone else, we hope we can make it worth your while to consider spending a little bit of your downtime with us each weekend, pajamas or no.

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11.01.13

Sighted

Sebastian Herkner’s Pulpo Containers

You might not recognize it at first glance, but Sebastian Herkner's new ultra-shiny glass Containers for the German brand Pulpo have a serious high-low thing going on — and not just in one sense, but two. Not only are they inspired by the cheap plastic containers normally used to store things like distilled water and Cheez-Balls, they're also made using a technique that's gone from rags to riches in recent history. "Mercury glass was once used as a substitute for real silverware, which was too expensive for poor people to afford," says Herkner. "Nowadays, though, it's thought of as unique and rare; there's one company in Czech Republic which specializes in mercury glass, and Pulpo produces the Containers there." Like most of our favorite tastemakers, Herkner's appreciation of both the lowly and the luxurious extends to his personal style, too, which is why we thought it fitting that he should photograph his Containers for us amidst the landscape of his own home, just outside Frankfurt. He told us more about his process and his possessions below.

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10.31.13

Sight Unseen Presents

The Sight Unseen x Snarkitecture Pumpkin-Carving Contest

When we decided a few weeks ago to host a good old-fashioned pumpkin-carving contest with our friends at Snarkitecture — and to invite more than a dozen of our favorite architects and designers to compete — we figured there would be lots of intricate, hand-drawn patterns (there were, courtesy of Daniel Horowitz’s pumpkin in the form of a brain). We knew at least one group would employ meticulous typography (ditto, thanks to Benjamin Critton Art Dept.) What we didn’t guess — perhaps naively, in hindsight — was that the designers would come armed with such an array of power tools, Japanese machetes, kitchen electrics, Arduino-coded LEDs, drywall screws, and the like. As a result, what unfolded last night at Snarkitecture’s Greenpoint studios was nothing short of amazing. Here’s what went down.

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10.30.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Salone Satellite at La Rinascente

From now until Christmas, pieces by 11 standout stars from this year's Salone Satellite young designers' showcase in Milan will be on view and for sale at La Rinascente. Considering that the Milan-based department store is basically Italy's version of Barneys, this is kind of a Big Deal for those young designers on the verge of stardom. And if the pieces look like they could actually be part of the same collection, perhaps it's because they all tackle the same theme from last year's Satellite: “Design and Craftsmanship: Together for Industry," a typically Italian name that just means that the designers were tasked with figuring out how to retain traditional craftsmanship techniques and processes while still producing for a mass audience. It's also because many of the items draw from a similar materials palette: "This is a compendium of “poor” materials, ranging from wood to glass, to iron to terracotta, reinterpreted and worked in a surprising fusion of craftsmanship and industrial techniques." We've picked some of our favorites to share with you today.

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09.26.12

Fair Report

At the London Design Festival, Part IV

Less than a week after we left the London Design Festival, it already feels like a distant memory — mostly because as of yesterday, we've already shifted our focus to making plans for the next edition of our own design showcase, the 2013 Noho Design District. And yet to some degree, we're also already drawing on what we saw at the LDF for inspiration: While we may not have access, in the middle of downtown Manhattan, to the kind of stunning 150,000-sqft. former mail-sorting facility that Designjunction had the luxury of spreading out in last week (incorporating multiple cafes and a pop-up version of the new online shop FAO, pictured above), we do have a few new talents on our hit list, a few schemes cooked up over drinks with old friends, and a few programming strategies to mull over. Meanwhile, we're offering you one last chance to see what we saw at the festival, which though it was by no means everything, will hopefully give you something to mull over, too.

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10.28.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

AmDC x Outpost Journal: Hometown Homage

Last week, we introduced you to Outpost Journal, a magazine founded by Pete Oyler and Manya Rubinstein that investigates American creative scenes outside the likes of L.A. and New York, focusing on a different secondary city each year. This week, we're showing you the results of the magazine's recent collaboration with the American Design Club, which invited young designers to reflect on their own hometowns across the country, no matter how large or small. Exhibited earlier this month at the ever-changing New York boutique Story, as part of its Made in America showcase, the project — Hometown Homage — included a dozen or so objects intended to celebrate "the origins of our creative identities," as AmDC co-founder Kiel Mead put it in the call for entries. "As creative professionals, the environments from which we come – whether a farm, small town, or large metropolis – help to shape our worldview. The AmDC challenged designers to look retrospectively at their hometown experiences to design an object that reflects their heritage, paying homage to their past with skill sets honed in the present." The show itself closed on Friday, but Sight Unseen picked our favorite pieces to share with anyone who didn't have the pleasure of seeing them in person.

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10.24.13

Up and Coming

24-Year-Old Misha Kahn May End Up Being Our Biggest Discovery Yet

The first time we met Misha Kahn, he was slapping gold metallic wallpaper with long-lashed googly eyes onto the walls of a tiny room we’d afforded four RISD students at our 2011 Noho Design District showcase. We were never sure quite what to make of the wallpaper — was it technically even “furniture design,” or was it more a piece of Surrealist art? — but we knew from first sight that we loved it. Which is pretty much how we’ve felt about all of the work that’s followed from the Brooklyn-based, Duluth, Minnesota–born designer’s studio, whether it’s a pink bench made from layers of resin and trash, a series of tables that resemble Froebel blocks on acid, or sewn cement pieces that look like the work of a woozy Jeff Koons.

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10.24.13

Studio Visit

Heidi Norton, Artist

“Being a photographer and being an artist working with materials like resin, plants, and glass — those two worlds should not really mix,” says Heidi Norton. “You have the camera and you have film and you’re trying to keep things clean and archival, and then you have dirt and glass shards everywhere.” Such contradictions are at the core of Norton’s work, from the immaculate glow of her photography to the dirt-under-your-fingernails feel of her sculptural pieces, which typically feature houseplants in some form or another.

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10.23.13

Studio Visit

Stephen Eichhorn, Artist

As a four-year-old living in Lenoir, South Carolina, Stephen Eichhorn refused to learn how to read. While everyone else in his class was singing their ABCs, he’d stubbornly deemed it unnecessary — he already knew he was destined to be an artist, communicating through images rather than words.

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10.22.13

The Making of

Lena Corwin’s Made By Hand

The sense that anyone can attempt these 26 DIYs — which include tie-dying with Shabd Simon-Alexander, jewelry-making with Jennifer Sarkilahti of Odette, and marbling with Ilana Kohn — comes in part from the incredibly detailed, step-by-step photographs, which were taken during the course of a weeklong shoot last fall at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn by Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes, of the photography site 3191 Miles Apart, who also shot the film photographs documenting the day-by-day of the shoot, which we're sharing here today,

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10.17.13

Excerpt: Magazine

The Belger Collection in Outpost Journal #3

So many of the designers we've featured here on Sight Unseen grew up somewhere small, but left their hometowns behind for someplace big. Kiel Mead grew up in Buffalo but moved to Brooklyn. Max Lamb started out on the beach in Cornwall but headed inland to London. Sam Baron spent his childhood in the mountains of France, but is now so worldly he splits time between Paris and Lisbon. But what of the people who stay behind? Who are the artists and designers who make up the cultural fabric of, say, a Tucson or a Des Moines? That's what the three-year-old annual nonprofit magazine Outpost Journal purports to find out.

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10.16.13

Sight Unseen Presents

The Etienne Aigner Flagship Opening

In many ways, the story of Etienne Aigner is a personal one for us. As a kid growing up in the Midwest, I remember coveting my mother’s gold horseshoe–embossed heels, and then, as a teen, scouring the shoe racks at Marshall’s for a pair of my own. And Monica? I’m pretty sure when we first met she had a dozen pairs of the brand’s vintage loafers and Priscilla heels, and she happily passed that obsession — complete with eBay alerts and frantic Etsy searches — on to me. So we were more than thrilled earlier this year when Sight Unseen was approached by the 63-year-old heritage brand, now led by creative director Daniela Anastasio Bardazzi, to help conceive and curate the opening of their first-ever flagship in New York’s Soho.

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