Sight Unseen Presents 2017

With Sight Unseen Presents, We’re Helping Design Week Take Over New York

By all accounts, design week in New York has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years, thanks in large part to events like ours. But to us, it was still missing that all-encompassing, can't miss, cultural takeover feeling you get whenever Fashion Week happens in New York. And so this year — in addition to OFFSITE — we decided to launch the first annual Sight Unseen Presents, an event series meant to increase the visibility of New York Design Week by activating a dozen retail spaces and restaurants throughout the city with design content and programming.
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The Glass-Walled LA Loft of New Fashion Brand Everybody is Anything But Basic

As former creative leads at American Apparel, it’s no surprise that Iris Alonzo and Carolina Crespo have an idiosyncratic sense of what counts as basic. After all, these are the women who visually defined a generation by re-proportioning denim and T-shirts into high-waisted mom jeans and plunging V-necks. In leggings as pants and a rainbow array of unitards — and in a now-notorious series of advertisements — was the sense that wearing a uniform could be outré, as well as an embrace of ease that paved the way for the subsequent movements of athleisure and normcore. The duo's new line follows suit: EVERYBODY, a collection of unisex, seasonless basics ranging from a white cotton flightsuit to a perfect garment-dyed denim work coat. We recently visited them in their studio.
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Supreme Bon Ton Totem collection

A French Creative Studio Gives the Silk Scarf a Majorly Cool Upgrade

In the last few years, the silk scarf has seen a major upgrade from studios like Massif Central and A Peace Treaty, but one of our favorites on that short list of cool is Suprême Bon Ton, the French creative studio whose fourth collection is as playful and stunning as past iterations. “Totem” features a variety of blue, teal, and cream-colored organic shapes that appear to be stacked, wedged, and floating around the silk canvases, following the brand's longtime obsession with rocks and geology.
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Pink Travertine and Rusty Velvet in a Coolly Minimalist Cape Town Boutique

On a recent family trip to Cape Town, I determined to go to the best restaurant in the city, to revisit to my favorite beach hangout (Beta), and, thanks to a hot tip from a friend's Instagram, to pop in on a store that can only be described as #sosightunseen. The eponymous boutique of fashion designer Margot Molyneux, the shop opened at the end of last year, showcasing the brand's minimal-chic designs — in a color palette of peach, green, rust, white, and black — with a store design by Molyneux's husband to match.
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Faris Du Graf on What It Took to Create Seattle’s Newest Fashion Mecca

As if helming their own fashion brands wasn't enough, Faris Du Graf of the jewelry line Faris and Deborah Roberts of the clothing line Silvae banded together this fall to open RIZOM, a huge, airy retail destination in Seattle where they sell not only their own work, but the work of other independent designers. We spoke with Du Graf about the challenges and the joys of her newest endeavor, and the business advice she'd give other budding design or fashion entrepreneurs.
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LRNCE modern marrakech textiles

A Belgian Textile and Fashion Designer By Way of Marrakech

With an aesthetic that's part Proenza, part Aelfie, LRNCE is the textiles and accessories label you get when a trained Belgian fashion designer moves to Marrakech. Founded in 2013 by Laurence Leenaert and inspired by tribal rituals, the line includes super modern, thickly embroidered rugs; sandals that mix materials like raffia, rope, and suede; graphic-printed kimonos; plus bags, ceramics, and other objects. In other words, traditional Moroccan handcrafts as distilled through the lens of contemporary graphics and design.
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Kathleen Whitaker Just Took Her Simple, Geometric Jewelry Up a Notch

Nearly a year ago, we profiled the Los Angeles jewelry designer Kathleen Whitaker, known for starting the whole staple and dot stud earring trend that went viral a couple years back, and previewed the limited-edition project she was starting in parallel to her base collection — one that would elevate those designs into more rarefied territory by adding semiprecious stones to their simple, minimalist geometries. Earlier this spring, she officially debuted the results in the form of the Stone Collection, and we are coveting every. single. piece.
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Week of April 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best in totally affordable and totally unaffordable fashion and design, two illustrations and a Toronto house we wish we could move into immediately, and a few more Milan fair stragglers, including the playful room divider above by Ana Arana.
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Sincerely, Tommy Is An Oasis of Chic in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Kai Avent-deLeon's Brookyn boutique pairs avant-garde clothing from little-known emerging fashion lines with a rotating cast of objects and accessories she finds at markets on her travels, plus things like art she sources from Etsy and from her friends, vintage housewares from the Seattle shop Mono-Ha, and chairs she designed after going down a Donald Judd rabbit hole on Pinterest a few years back. It's impossible not to get sucked in.
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Moving Mountains jewelry

Be the First to Snag New Jewelry by Moving Mountains

Today is a happy day for anyone obsessed with the furniture of Moving Mountains's Syrette Lew — she's just debuted a new jewelry line that's infinitely more accessible, and we made sure we were the very first ones to carry it, in the Sight Unseen Shop. Not only is almost everything in the collection under $250, it shares the same inspirations as her ultra-popular Palmyra lamp.
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architecture-inspired jewelry by Agmes

The Jewelry Line Every Design Lover Should Be Wearing Now

Plenty of jewelry lines are inspired by architecture, but rarely does one transcend a mere aesthetic exercise into the realm of the truly, truly chic. AGMES, the brand new line by New York designer Morgan Solomon, is a pretty exciting exception — not only does Solomon name-check the likes of Cini Boeri and Bertrand Goldman when talking about her inspirations, but her pieces have such a strong, sculptural presence that you could picture passing them on to your children someday.
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