Week of August 1, 2022

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new French studio founded by Fabrizio Casiraghi and Pierre Yovanovitch alums, works in stone and wood on view at Radford Gallery in London, and a new vanity set meant to encourage the commercial liberation of independent designers.
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2020 sight unseen gift guide

Checkered Aprons and Natural Wines: The 2020 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

On the one hand, to publish a gift guide in 2020 seems like an immense act of magical thinking. After all, what do we really want? We want the vaccine, we want to visit our parents, we want to see live music, we want to run outside without a mask, we want to flip the Senate, we want to travel with abandon, we want to sit inside a restaurant, drinking by candlelight, shoulder to shoulder with our best friends. On the other hand, one of the small, analog joys we have found in this period of sequestering and uncertainty is the act of sending a gift by mail.
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DS & Durga Set Themselves Apart By Appealing to More Than Just Our Sense of Smell

"Perfume is armchair travel." This year, as we find ourselves collectively and forcibly grounded, DS & Durga’s tagline has taken on a new significance: Fragrance’s transporting ability, whether it be to carry us back in time to a familiar place or offer a portal to a destination we’ve never experienced, is more powerful and desirable than ever.
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2018 Sight Unseen gift guide

Iridescent Earrings and Ombré Bath Mats: The 2018 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

Welcome to the annual Sight Unseen gift guide! Today and tomorrow, we’ll be sharing our most covetable home, fashion, and beauty finds from around the web, from iridescent straws to ombré bath mats to the coziest shearling handbag we could find (it's like carrying a tiny Muppet). First up is Jill, who’s got you covered on last-minute gifts, from horsehair mirrors to Hawaiian-inspired fragrances.
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design gift guide 2016

The Best Gifts for Design Lovers Under $50

For as long as we've been publishing holiday gift guides — and this is our fourth annual one! — we've been dividing them up by editor, which eventually became predictable even to us. Want something monochrome? Go to Monica's gift guide. In the mood for something colorful? Jill's got you covered. Need something ever-so-slightly less girly? Our junior editors are invariably men. This year, we decided to do our readers a service, and lay things out according to the cold hard cash you'll have to put down.
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Wary Meyers’ Candles

If you want to put too fine a point on it, you could say that John and Linda Meyers specialize professionally in obscurity. The couple run a brand and webshop called Wary Meyers, where they sell flea-market ephemera that often have a delightful but abstruse narrative attached, and their own goods like Gonks, which are handmade creatures for kids based on an old World War I British archetype. They also made themselves scarce a few years ago when John, a former visual merchandiser at Anthropologie, and Linda, an art director, picked up and left Manhattan for a quieter life in Portland, Maine. But as a young couple with a very young child, they felt increasingly that they ought to be investing their time in something that might one day become ubiquitous: “The thing with our company is we’ve always done a lot of one-offs and prototypes — things where we’ll make one item and then it’s like, ‘Well, how do we produce them somewhat cheaply and not in China?’” says Linda. “And everything we did before seemed slightly esoteric. We had a book where we did 50 DIY projects and people loved the products and were like, ‘Do you want to sell them?’ And it was kind of like, ‘Well, do you want to pay $1500 for a dresser?’” Which is why last week, the couple released their first — “dare I say mainstream?” jokes Linda — product: A line of scented candles with iconic-seeming packaging and incredibly inviting-sounding scents.
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Sissel Tolaas, Scent Expert

“I’m a professional provocateur,” Sissel Tolaas says between sniffles, her Norwegian accent blunted by one of the colds the artist and world-renowned scent expert often gets after maxxing out her mucous membranes. Visit her at-home laboratory in Berlin, where she concocts conceptual fragrance studies for museums and for megabrands like Coty, and the provocations begin almost immediately.
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