“I don’t think I exploded onto the scene. It’s definitely been hard work.” Christopher Esber is something of a rising star. While the expression appears a devastating, hopeless cliché, in Esber’s case it’s very much true – the 25-year-old designer grows more luminous with each collection. At just 23 he made his Mercedes Benz Australian [...]
Category Archives: Design
This is The End
April 19, 2013 – 11:21 am
Salt Lake City gets a bad rap. Weak beer, guns galore, Brigham Young and his many wives – you’ve heard the reports. Still, it’s a place that tends to produce some very interesting and talented people. I met Cody Comrie in the summer of 2008, and he introduced me to his brother Michael Comrie soon [...]
La Fábrica: Barcelona’s Architectural Gem
April 4, 2013 – 6:00 am
The legendary La Fábrica in Sant Just Desvern, Barcelona is an architectural “tour de force” to be reckoned with, and a definite must-see when visiting the Spanish city. Without a doubt, this cement factory conversion, authorized by well renowned architect Ricardo Bofill, is one of the most impressive examples of adaptive architectural reuse ever seen. [...]
American Pie
March 7, 2013 – 6:51 pm
This is such a weird, thoroughly American story. In 1962, modernist architect Richard Neutra designed a visitors’ center for the Gettysburg site, where the Civil War’s most infamous battle was fought – and many say the war was won. The entire area is a major tourist attraction, with hundreds of historical buildings, including a working [...]
Rock and A Hard Place
February 19, 2013 – 6:51 pm
American artist Trisha Baga’s contribution to MoMA PS1’s exhibition New Pictures of Common Objects can only be experienced by two viewers at a time — there are just two sets of anaglyph glasses. Without the glasses, the exhibit, titled Hard Rock, consisting of lo-fi video featuring khaki-clad hikers and penguins exploring an ambiguous stretch of desert land, [...]
Soul Food
February 13, 2013 – 6:00 am
Even from outside, you are thanked for your appearance at the new Los Angeles restaurant where “Thank You For Coming” is emblazoned across the front windows. Thank You For Coming is an experimental food and art space with a rotation of artists (and musicians) that participate in month-long residencies creating a collaborative space within the [...]
Born in The U.S.A
February 12, 2013 – 6:00 am
When most native New Yorkers leave New York City for a considerably smaller midwestern city, you think that either they will live a quiet, simple life planting gardens and such, or they will just move back. A few years ago, when Kat McMillan and her husband Mac (a Minnesota native) left their Soho apartment and [...]
Quilted/Comfort
January 15, 2013 – 9:07 pm
I first discovered Telfar Clemens, the 28 year old Liberian-raised, New York-bred fashion designer, online. Clemens launched his eponymously titled brand, Telfar, in 2005 as a progressive attempt to deconstruct traditionalism in fashion, specifically targeting commercialism and brand dissemination. Since then he has pushed out sixteen collections (two ironically under an American Apparel diffusion line, [...]
Daniel Askill In Conversation
January 5, 2013 – 6:00 am
Daniel Askill defies definition. Living between Sydney and New York, he belongs very much to both places and simultaneously to neither. Askill’s work can only be described as a collision of disciplines, in which the filmmaker and artist employs as many mediums as possible. This innate knack for a multifaceted approach has lent him more [...]
Post-Miami Musings
December 24, 2012 – 9:03 pm
The last, and likely only, time Miami received praise from the high-fashion establishment, it came from the late Gianni Versace, who declared in the 1980s, “Here in Miami, I finally found what I was looking: the center of my circle.” However, if our experience earlier this month at the 12th annual Art Basel Miami Beach [...]
