Hasta La Ideas

Since 1995 ThirtyTwo has continually produced the lightest and some of the best-selling snowboard boots in the industry. Since 2012 Crab Grab has produced little pieces of foam that you stick on your board to improve foot and hand traction. While the two seem worlds apart the connection lies…

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The 2013 Sundance Film Festival gets underway next Thursday in Utah, and festivalgoers have Todd Oldham to thank for taking this year’s merchandise in a fresh new direction. The designer not only developed a line of ‘Todd Oldham for the Sundance Film Festival’ gear, including bags and wallets made from recycled festival banners, but also acted as curator for Sundance Film Festival Editions. For the new initiative, he invited Sundance alums such as Morgan Spurlock, Amy Sedaris, and Parker Posey to design a product–a button, a t-shirt, a tote. “It wasn’t hard to get them on board,” said Oldham in an interview with the Sundance Institute. “I did curate, but the art was really in asking the right person for the right task. And they are so talented–Mike White is a great graphic designer as well as filmmaker, Stacey Peralta is an artist, so I knew I had good, wildly creative people.” John Waters whipped up a subversive t-shirt (pictured).

In addition to whimsical apparel and recycled accessories, Oldham also brought his editorial expertise to the festival with a new book, Sundance Film Festival A to Z. He invited 26 illustrious illustrators–including Caitlin Heimerl, Chris Silas Neal, Michele Romero, and Yuko Shimizu–to have their way with one letter, with each letter representing festival films and artists (yup, “R” is for Redford). “We got very sophisticated, learned efforts. Some don’t tell the story at first glance. It’s super fun to try and decipher what the artist saw,” noted Oldham. “Illustrators have vivid imaginations and are usually forced into linear systems with tasked briefs. But we just let people do whatever they wanted and they were delighted to be unedited!” And if you detect a hint of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in the cover art, that’s because it’s the work of Wayne White.

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Say what you will about St. Barts–we think Iceland is the place to ring in the new year. According to local lore, tonight is the night that cows talk, seals take on human form, the dead rise from their graves, and elves move houses. Residents celebrate with family dinners, bonfires, and fireworks, lots of them. The pyrotechnics spectacular is made possible by the country’s lack of restrictions on fireworks, and the entire population of Reykjavik–approximately 200,000 people–gets into the act. This year, those of us in less permissive nations can watch the massive fireworks display online: click here to watch the live broadcast at 7:00 p.m. Eastern / 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Continue the explosive Icelandic fun with a New Year’s Eve screening of Bjӧrk‘s new music video, “Mutual Core” (below), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. “[MOCA director] Jeffrey Deitch contacted me a while ago, and he suggested that we collaborate on this, and it sounded like a good idea,” said the Reykjavik native in a recent interview with Paper magazine. “Because I’m an old punk, I’ve never done commercials or sponsoring or anything like this–I’ve been really strict with it–but with this, [Jeffrey] seemed to be helping us to make a music video. That sort of makes sense to me. It doesn’t feel like sponsoring.”
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Fashion designer Christian Lacroix made a name for himself with his fearless, multicultural mixing of bold prints, riotous colors, and luxe textiles. His eye for striking combinations is evident in the pages of a distinctively bound black book that he filled with collages (see below video) for Moleskine’s Detour Project, a group show of notable notebooks curated by Raffaella Guidobono.

Having traveled the globe–from New York and London to Shanghai and Tokyo (next stop: Sao Paulo)–the project’s latest detour is into meta-bookdom. Stocking stuffer alert: The Detour Book offers a glimpse into notebooks that have been decorated, hacked, and sketched by designers Yves Béhar and Paula Scher, artist Tom Sachs, writer Dave Eggers, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and many other creative types. Texts by the likes of ubercurator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein help to contextualize the reproduced Moleskine pages that are divided into five sections: visionaries, semantics, virtuosos, romantics, and ironists. Vive la différence!
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“Lost Time” by Glithero for Perrier-Jouet at Design Miami 2012. (Photo: Petr Krejci)

Chairs, glorious chairs, are everywhere at Design Miami, but no one sits for long. Collectors, dealers, journalists, and the odd celebrity (who knew Will Ferrell was a design buff?) stream through the fair at different speeds and with varying agendas: see Maarten de Ceulaer’s latest “mutations,” close the sale on the Nakashima bench, locate a friend and a chocolate dulce de leche pie ($7 at the catering stand), nab a seat for Stefano Tonchi’s on-stage chat with Diane von Furstenberg, load up on free magazines. A welcome pause from this year’s frenzy was offered by Glithero, the design duo of Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren.

The London-based studio was commissioned by Perrier-Jouët to create an installation that honored the champagne house’s Art Nouveau heritage (that famous flowered bottle was the result of a 1902 collaboration with artist Emile Gallé). “We sought to work with a designer that has the Art Nouveau dimension in his or her DNA,” Axelle de Buffevent, brand style director for Martell Mumm-Perrier-Jouët, told us in Miami. “With Glithero, you immediately see that their work is very inspired by nature, by the processes of nature.”

Long fascinated by processes ranging from artisanal craftsmanship to industrial production methods, Simpson and van Gameren responded to Perrier-Jouët’s commission by creating “Lost Time” (pictured), a darkened chamber strung with skeins of shot beads that dripped from the ceiling like glamorous ghosts of stalactites—or champagne flutes. The swooping volumes, inspired in part by Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, were reflected in a shallow pool of water, an infusion of moisture that heightened the cave-like atmosphere (and winked at the humidity that awaited on the other side of the air-conditioned tent).
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