Jean-Paul Gaultier Appointed Creative Director of Diet Coke

As if we needed another reason to guzzle Diet Coke (pay no attention to that 4-MEI in the caramel color!), fashion designer and oldest living enfant terrible Jean-Paul Gaultier has been appointed creative director of the brand. Unfortunately, his position is limited to Europe, land of “Coca Light,” where he’ll design a selection of cans and bottles (limited-edition, bien sur) as well as add his signature flair to online content, retail concepts, and ad campaigns. “The bottles have the shape of a woman’s body, so it was great fun to ‘dress’ them,” said Gaultier in a statement issued by the Coca-Cola company announcing the collaboration. “The Diet Coke motif is so beautiful I had to design around this. The finishing touch was to apply my logo to the bottle, like applying a fragile stamp—making it something special you want to touch.” The “Night and Day”-themed bottles debut in stores across the pond next month, but Diet Coke has already debuted a trio of videos chronicling Gaultier’s adventures as “The Serial Designer” (we suspect something was lost in translation with that title). Modish marionettes and tiny cans of Diet Coke are involved. Voila:

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Awesomeville

Chandelier Creative farms branded honey at their Montauk surf retreat

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Ideas tend to be fleeting but, as the only food source with no known shelf life, honey quite literally lasts a lifetime. Aiming to combine the two and, in doing so, live up to its name, NYC-based agency Chandelier Creative set up a Montauk retreat to farm fresh honey, and give employees a place to go for rest, relaxation and inspiration. Presenting a new kind of bohemian enclave, Chandelier’s beautifully appointed, multipurpose Surf Shack fosters morale from within, while productively churning out an actual product for a whole new way of marketing itself.

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As the son of Australian honey farmers, Chandelier founder Richard Christiansen outfitted his digs with the proper authority, hand-selecting a range of coastal flowers native to Montauk to ensure his bees would produce a special kind of honey. For the Surf Shack he chose an array of black-eyed Susans, honeysuckle and echinacea and, much like he did with the Shack’s carefully decorated interior, Christiansen built and painted a custom hive to befit the Chandelier bees. “Making honey is a true labor of love” he explains. “My family has always said that happy bees make sexy honey. And the same is true for creatives.”

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With a keen eye and trained tongue, Christiansen describes the honey as slightly lighter in color than most, due to the native Montauk nectar, with a taste that’s “very soft and gentle,” but “a little salty, too.” Packaged by members of the Chandelier Creative team, the honey is gifted to every weekend visitor, be it boyfriend, girlfriend, client or friend as a sweet reminder to keep creating with the dedication and vigor of a honey bee.

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Throughout the 2011 summer the unique blend of flora led the Chandelier bees to produce an end-of-season surplus of 300 jars, of which some 75 are still available. The remaining jars can be purchased exclusively through the Chandelier Creative online shop, along with a rotation of “special collaborations with our favorite people.” Chandelier Creative aims to re-open the Surf Shack in May with the addition of chickens and vegetables, likely to help continue the expansion of the Chandelier brand from the ground up.


Matt Singer and Rivendell Mountain Works

A limited-edition backpack benefiting the Million Trees NYC initiative

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With a solid repertoire of collaborations and accessories under his belt, designer Matt Singer is now using his creativity for good. For his latest venture, he has teamed up with the recently revived Rivendell Mountain Works on a limited-edition backpack benefitting the Million Trees NYC initiative.

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Handmade at the foothills of the Washington Cascades, the durable Cordura nylon bag sports a custom Million Trees patch, and thoughtful features like an adjustable sternum strap and padded shoulder straps help it withstand any number of daily outings.

As an urban dweller, Singer was motivated by the impact of nature on the quality of a city’s atmosphere, and plans to donate a portion of the bag’s proceeds to support the non-profit organization’s citywide mission to plant and care for one million trees in all five boroughs. The backpack is now available in limited numbers exclusively through Matt Singer’s online shop for $225.


London Olympic Festival Will Unite Fashion Designers, Artists for ‘Britain Creates’ Collaborations

The countdown to the London Olympics is on, and even if you can’t get on board with the Jem and the Holograms-flavored logo or those aerodynamic cyclops mascots, you’re bound to find something of interest in the city’s ever-growing slate of cultural happenings. More than 1,000 performances and events are planned for the London 2012 Festival, which runs from June 21 through September 9, including a floating opera co-created by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, pop-up Shakespeare performances, and new public artworks as part of Frieze Projects East. But we think the big news is “Britain Creates 2012,” which is matching up British fashion designers with top contemporary artists to create one-off works that will be exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in July (planning is underway for additional “physical and virtual events” that will showcase the commissions).

Backed by the British Fashion Council/Bazaar Fashion Arts Foundation in partnership with the Mayor of London, the project has just announced the dynamic duos: Hussein Chalayan is working with Gavin Turk, Jonathan Saunders with Jess Flood-Paddock, Mary Katrantzou with Mark Titchner, and Paul Smith with Charming Baker. Meanwhile, Giles Deacon has been matched with Jeremy Deller, who is also at work on “Sacrilege,” a major new public artwork that will be situated in a variety of outdoor spaces in London this summer. “I am going to make a festive sacrilegious sculpture for the public’s delectation!” promises the Turner Prize winner.

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Les Poupées and Vader

Popular and historic references in a duo of creations by Luca Nichetto
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Les Poupées marks the first collaboration between Italian designer Luca Nichetto and French gallerist Pascale Cottard Olsson in Stockholm. Combining a ceramic candle holder with a glass vase, each object blends cultural references from the pure lines of Finnish artist and designer Timo Sarpaneva and the colors of Italian maestro Ettore Sottsass to the silhouette of Japanese kokeshi wooden dolls.

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Another new project by Nichetto for David Design, presented at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, is Vader, a lamp that experiments with the possibilities of traditional ceramic production, pushing craftsmanship to the limit in order to create a modern design piece. The range of colors has been chosen with Scandinavian culture in mind, but at the same time reflects the designer’s Venetian origins.

We talked to Nichetto about these and some forthcoming projects.

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With Les Poupées, you have been able to merge Scandinavian, Japanese and Italian design. Were you interested in highlighting the differences or the similarities between these three design cultures?

I was mainly focused on understanding how, in a global world, the classic cultures of such different countries could be able to give me some elements, to let me create a functional puzzle and generate objects to be sold. When you buy Les Poupées, you hold a piece of my personal point of view on Scandinavian, Japanese and Italian history.

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The Vader lamp is tied to a different, more pop inspiration. Was the reference to Star Wars a starting point or just fortuitous?

This is not meant to be a pop project since the allusion to Star Wars is pure coincidence. The initial intuition was a minimal gesture, just two cuts into ceramics. As a result, a functional light object for the space is capable of underlining the quality of the material itself, a quality which relies also on manufacturing.

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Can you give us a preview of the projects you are working on?

I’ll unveil several projects during the Milan Design Week, including new collaborations for Cassina and De Padova. I’m still continuing my research process with Established & Sons, Foscarini, Casamania and Emmegi, but I’ll also be present at Salone del Mobile with small projects for the French editors Petit Friture and La Chance.

Les Poupées are on display at the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm until 4 March 2012 and sell from Gallery Pascale.


VSTR and Partners & Spade

The Nomadic Pack stashes a hideaway hammock and detachable messenger bag
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In surfing, as in traveling, the feeling of setting out into the unknown makes the adventure worth the risk. Run by 11-time world surf champion Kelly Slater and backed by Quicksilver, the recently launched surf lifestyle brand VSTR takes this pioneering spirit as inspiration. As an artistically driven company, VSTR—pronounced visitor—was drawn to collaborate with NYC’s Partners & Spade, enlisting the creative collective to help in the ideation and design of their first piece of luggage. The result is the Nomadic Pack—an adventure-ready carryall designed to withstand the rigors of extended travel by the “coastal nomad“.

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Big enough to hold weeks’ worth of gear, the expansive bag accommodates this intrepid way of life with a stowable lightweight hammock—the stuffsack-style bed-in-a-bag packs away into a small bottom compartment—and a heavy-duty detachable messenger bag that zips off from the outer layer. In fact, the bag is designed to conveniently fit the entire VSTR clothing line,so one is theoretically always fully outfitted while on the road.

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The collaboration waxed canvas carryall is part of VSTR’s first line of softgoods and will be available 25 June 2012 exclusively through Partners & Spade and VSTR online for $395.


Inside David Stark’s Pop-Up Wood Shop


(Photos: UnBeige and Courtesy David Stark Design)

David Stark has applied his artist’s eye and bricoleur’s ingenuity to the retail scene with Wood Shop, a temporary takeover of fellow RISD alum Nina Freudenberger‘s Haus Interior in New York. As you may recall from our recent interview with the event designer, his “surprise ambush” has filled the cozy homegoods emporium with limited-edition goodies inspired by a woodworker’s studio, from hand-crocheted saw pillows and rugged Carhartt-brown canvas placemats to a tool box worth of delicate gold pendants and hand-turned poplar vases that suggest a collaboration between Giorgio Morandi and Bob Vila. The woodstravaganza lasts through Monday, February 27.

The idea for Wood Shop stemmed from a previous project for which Stark and his team created an entire house out of SmartPly, which provided a cheeky backdrop for showcasing the client company’s new collection of homegoods. “Some of the things that we made for that were so fun that we thought, wow, these could be great products,” said Stark the other day, as he guided us through Wood Shop and ended up in front of a delicious-looking dessert, made entirely of SmartPly. “The cake really came out of that kind of thing. I have a weird sense of humor, so if I walked into a store, that would be the first thing I would be drawn toward.”


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When Crowd Sourced Design Competitions Go Wrong

If you aren’t living in Chicago at the moment, there’s a good chance you might have missed the city’s first major design scandal of the year. First, the City Clerk’s office announced a winner for the annual contest, open only to students, to design the next year’s city sticker (a “city sticker,” for those outside of Chicago, is a sticker you have to buy every year for $75, on top of your registration, that allows you to park on city streets, even at meters, without getting a ticket). The 2012-2013 sticker seemed like those before it: an innocuous, hand-drawn, rough-around-the-edges affair. However, worries started circulating that maybe there were hidden gang signs being flashed therein. So the City Clerk, Susana Mendoza, decided to pull the win away from the 15-year-old who designed it, promising to
“>pay the $1000 bond prize money herself
to lessen the blow, and bumped the runner-up to first place. Then, of course, the runner-up decided she didn’t want to win like that, and asked that her illustration not be used. So here we are today, with the City Clerk’s office announcing that it “has decided to design the 2012-2013 vehicle registration sticker in house.” All of that explained, it seems to us that this perfect storm is why crowd sourced, open invitation design competitions, no matter how adorable and child-enlightening they might seem, have the potential of backfiring in a very public way. And how much of the city’s money could have been spared if they’d just gone in-house or hired-out in the first place? Of course, the whole thing could have been worse, like in Vermont.

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Kate Spade Debuts Florence Broadhurst Homegoods

New York Fashion Week is in full swing, and on Friday morning, Kate Spade presented a Paris-infused fall 2012 collection dappled with polka dots and painterly prints, all smartly styled by Brad “Pop of Color” Goreski. “I’m kind of the Kate Spade girl but a boy,” he says. “I connect very well with the clothes and the aesthetic.” Meanwhile, Deborah Lloyd‘s ever-sharper, retro-chic brand is also busy rolling out cheeky spring offerings, a tribute to Australian textile designer Florence Broadhurst (1899-1977; we like to imagine her palling around with a young Edna Everage and going by the nickname “FloBro”), with the help of a boldly patterned bus-cum-pop-up shop. The collection is part of a larger collaboration with Helen and David Lennie‘s Signature Prints, which controls the Broadhurst design library. In addition to handbags, shift dresses, and Tretorn sneakers in her mod-nouveau Japanese Floral pattern, Kate Spade has debuted homegoods awash in graphic FloBro patterns. Now on offer at the brand’s just-launched Florence Broadhurst Decor Shop are eye-catching cushion covers, old-school luggage, china, and, of course, wallpaper. Bedding and other items incorporating Broadhurst prints will be added in the months ahead.

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Colette + Cobrasnake + Vans

A delicious collaboration between French fashion purveyor and an American nightlife photographer
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Crossing cultures in one stride, French arbiter of relevant style Colette has teamed up with American photographer Mark Hunter—A.K.A. the Cobrasnake—to create a one-of-a-kind shoe with Vans. The collaboration shoe was inspired by the care-free Californian lifestyle and the state’s iconic burger joints that have fed generations of tastemakers. While the brand created a cheeseburger-inspired slip-on a few seasons back, the Vans Era has gone high fashion to become a hamburger for the first time.

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The shoe’s premium canvas upper is emblazoned with a variety of tasty toppings stuffed between two whole wheat buns, while Collete blue laces and a Vans tag offer up the perfect amount of Parisian flair. The unique collaboration breeds a playful sense of style with Colette’s uncanny taste and Cobrasnake’s cavalier brand of nightlife photography that captures the very essence of a sought-after youth culture.

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Set to launch 1 March 2012 during Paris Fashion Week, the Colette and Cobrasnake collaboration Vans will be be sold exclusively through Colette.