Hasta La Ideas

Dec 08

Areaware Stop Shop Holiday Pop-Up

Posted in: Uncategorized

by Anna Carnick

Set in the heart of NYC’s tourism district, Areaware‘s latest pop-up shop at Port Authority Bus Terminal is one of the more unusual and interesting of the spate of NYC pop-up-shops to open recently. “Stop Shop”—a follow-up to last August’s “Design to Go” pop-up—sets itself apart from the pack with an impossible-to-ignore Christmastime theme dubbed “a delirious technicolor holiday midnight dream.”

Featuring a well selected treasure chest of offerings, Stop Shop is filled with objets d’art, fashion, home furnishings, furniture and accessories by local and international artists and designers.

The team behind the Stop Shop design includes International Lampoon Item Idem, Ltd. (the moniker for Japan-born, NY- and Paris-based conceptual artist Cyril Duval and partner Kalena Yiaueki), photographer Keetja Allard in collaboration with creative director and retail consultancy Philip Attar Creative.

Items range from $13 for handmade ornaments by Harmony Ball to a $3500 table by City Foundry. Designer products by the likes of Kid Robot, Areaware and 2X4 are set side by side with fashions by threeASFOUR, VPL, LM.affair, Kenzo Minami and more.

Standouts include a collection of folding Strida bikes, chandeliers by Lite Brite Neon, City Foundry robots, complementary paintings, graphic tees and sweatshirts by Lincoln Mayne & LM.affair, rubber Honesty stamps with unconvincingly apologetic lines like “I swear on my mother’s grave I’ll never do that again” and “But I’ve changed!” by Dominic Wilcox/Thorsten Van Elten, and, of course, Duval’s signature touches—a whimsical mash-up of Technicolor neon lights, holiday lawn ornaments, dark flowers and more—that offer his interpretation of American pop culture gimmicks, international holiday symbolism and touristy paraphernalia in a dreamy but rebellious setting.

Stop Shop is Duval’s first retail work in the U.S., following successful ventures in Russia, Japan and France with the likes of Colette and Louis Vuitton. Duval explains that his “main source of curiosity and focus was its physical location and its Christmas timing—Port Authority Bus Terminal is such an interesting place, a port of departure & arrival, somehow the essence of the real New York, based on immigrants as cultural providers. I felt within my own situation, as a Franco-Japanese currently settling in NYC, embodied by this notion of migration, and tried to keep it active at the core of my design process. Thereby the use of multiple sources of references, popular and pop culture gimmicks, international holidays symbolic, touristic imagery. I tried to identify and represent the missing link between those migrations fluxes as emotional catalysts of the New York American dream, and the design-savvy ideal crowd target of my client that is Areaware.”

Areaware founder Noel Wiggins concurs. “We wanted to get in touch with the feel of old school New York. Timesquare is one of the last old school neighborhoods that hasn’t been totally changed, and it’s truly a crossroads location. For an insta-shop that’s only around for 30 days, it really has an amazing exposure level for all walks of life.”