Chunky Cups and Oyster Placemats: The 2022 Gift Guide, Part II

If you asked us what our absolute top gift recommendation would be for 2022, you probably already know by now what we'd answer: our new book, How to Live With Objects. But in case you need a few other ideas, don't worry, we've also compiled 100 best-gift-of-2022 runners-up: Today, it's Jill's 50 picks, including brutish bar carts and vases, chunky cutting boards and cups, and her favorite CBD gummies — which just happen to look great, too — for dealing with publishing-a-book–related insomnia.

11.10.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

For One Night Only at Superhouse, We Paired Works and Personal Mementoes by 16 Designers

To celebrate the upcoming launch of our book, How to Live With Objects, we put on a one-night-only exhibition last week at Superhouse Gallery in Chinatown with a *very* fun concept. To showcase How to Live With Objects' new approach to interiors — simply surrounding yourself with objects you love — we invited 16 designers, eight from our book, and eight from our exhibition partner, Areaware, to display two objects each: one they had made, and one that was meaningful to them. Each pair was displayed on a Duo Object Stand, a new, two-object pedestal designed by Sight Unseen and produced by Bestcase.

07.08.22

Shopping

From Ceramic Hair to Luncheon Meats to Sleek, Simple Porcelain, Tissue Box Covers Are Having a Renaissance

In a world where nearly every product has been upgraded and rendered hip through new, Gen-Z-approved packaging — from toilet paper to tampons to breakfast cereal — you'd think there would no further need for a throwback like the tissue box cover, which is meant to cloak your drugstore eyesores in a mantle better suited to your decor. And yet at the moment, in part because tissue boxes haven't really been redesigned and in part because they're usually kept out very much in public view, the tissue box cover seems to be having a tiny renaissance.

12.05.19

Gift Guides

Croissant Lamps and Bauhaus Blankets: The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

For today's gift guide, we turned the tables, asking some of our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gifts for giving and receiving. The results were kiiiinda great — who wouldn't want a croissant-shaped lamp (that's Ellen Van Dusen's pick), a portable jacuzzi (chef Angela Dimayuga), or a shiny pink purse adorned with fruit salad (interior designer Sally Breer)? Plus, over on Instagram, you’ll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from this guide.

03.14.16

Sighted

Dusen Dusen x Highlow Jewelry = Instant Outfit Magic

It might not seem, at first, that Brooklyn-based textile designer Ellen Van Dusen and LA jewelry designer Sonya Gallardo of Highlow would be kindred spirits. Dusen Dusen is best known for its endlessly colorful collection of cheerful graphic prints while Highlow's best-known project is a peach polymer clay and silk cord necklace that been marked, painted, and sculpted into different, neutral-palette iterations. But when the two are paired together, something magical happens:

03.02.15

Sighted

Dusen Dusen Home

The past few years have proven that — every once in a while — a fashion label can make a successful, mostly non-embarrassing crossover into furniture and housewares. Margiela, Hermès, and Rick Owens all come to mind, but who better than a textile designer to make the leap? At last week's Capsule show, Ellen Van Dusen of the Brooklyn-based clothing brand Dusen Dusen launched a brand new line of soft goods for the home that feature her signature geometric patterns — sheets, blankets, rugs, towels, pillows, and a pouf — and the extension feels totally natural, like it was meant to be. Today she's giving Sight Unseen a first peek at the line's lookbook photos, which were shot by SU contributor Brian Ferry and feature cameos by both SNL comedian Aidy Bryant and Van Dusen's official canine mascot, Snips.

12.08.14

Sight Unseen Presents

SU x PAOM for The Standard Shop

Last week in Miami, you could go home with art in just about any form — not just on a canvas (Art Basel) but in the form of a vase or a table (Design Miami), a pool toy (Grey Area x FriendsWithYou), a champagne bottle (Ruinart x Georgia Russel), or, if you happened by the shop at The Standard Spa, beach gear courtesy of yours truly. For this year's Miami fair, Sight Unseen teamed up with Print All Over Me to curate a line of warm-weather clothing and accessories sold exclusively at the Standard, featuring prints by Paul Wackers, Ellen Van Dusen of Dusen Dusen, Peter Judson, Rachel Domm, Caitlin Foster, Marta Veludo, Eunice Luk, Branden Collins, and Rafael de Cardenas (who designed the shop's interior a few years back).

08.07.14

From the Library Of

Ellen Van Dusen

If there's anyone who knows a little something about calibrating the perfect pattern, it's Ellen Van Dusen. The D.C.-born fashion designer is Brooklyn's reigning queen of prints, with nine seasons under her belt as Dusen Dusen, the line for which she creates flattering basics marked by colorful fruits, stripes, curves, dots, geometrics, and the like. So it made sense when we recently learned two things about Van Dusen: one, that she studied in college the psychology of design and the brain's reaction to visual stimuli; and two, that she has a pretty incredible resource library to back that major up. On a recent visit to her Williamsburg studio, we perused her stacks, which included the massive, Todd Oldham–designed Alexander Girard monograph from a few years back and some amazing old Esprit books that we already had planned to excerpt in the coming weeks. But it was this book on Yaacov Agam, an Israeli sculptor and experimental artist known for his optical and kinetic work, that seemed to best represent Van Dusen's joyful spirit. "As a textile designer, this is a huge source of inspiration," Van Dusen admits. "I have named more than one print after Agam!" Here she tells the story of how she discovered Agam's body of work and the long-lasting effect it has had on her own.