Partying Designer Style: New York Design Week, Part I
Katherine Sharpe
Well, it's Tuesday morning and I'm sitting here amid a pile of brochures, business cards, postcards and booklets that hide the surface of my desk. I'm picking through them as 389 photographs download from my camera into the computer.
Clearly, sharing all of our favorite things about New York Design Week and the ICFF is going to take a day or two. Better dive in.
Beginning Friday evening, I began to get my initiation into a Design Week tradition: the parties!
While the main event is in midtown at the Javits Convention Center, during the ICFF the showrooms, mostly clustered in Soho, throw open their doors (or install sharp-dressed greeter/bouncers armed with lists in front of their doors, depending on their feelings about exclusivity) for a series of receptions. Designers and other design-world types troll up and down Greene Street, popping in and out of parties, checking out what's on display at the venues, greeting each other, knocking back cucumber-tinis, relaxing after a day on the floor and generally taking it all in.
On Friday evening I went over to the Harry Allen party. Harry Allen's showroom is away from the Soho cluster, on Avenue A between 12th and 13th Streets. This was a good warm-up party because the space isn't too huge.
Clearly, I need to become a better event photographer, but here's an idea.
And here are a couple of design shots. The firefly lights are made on a 3D printer. (3D printing, or rapid prototyping, was a noticeable theme at the fair—it's fun to see designers playing around with the new technology.) Mike Boylan, who works at Harry Allen, told me that the lights are replicas of a real firefly that Allen caught in his back yard.
Someone with a good eye once said to me, "If you want something to look fantastic, paint it white." Glib, but there may be a bit of truth in it. I was taken by this line of objects made from everyday items, whitewashed: fruit and nut bowls made from cast fruit and peanuts, hangers from human hands, and a ghostly twist on the old Chianti-bottle candleholder.
Finally, I thought this Harry Allen lamp looked awfully ReadyMade. Another Harry Allen-ite told me it's made from real tin cans. There's a wall-mounted organization unit also made of cans in the same series.
On Saturday, a small bunch of us went to check out some of the parties in Soho. We started by talking our way (barely! Not carrying business cards this week is no laughing matter, as Grace Bonney from Design*Sponge warned us) into a party for a line of modular furniture at USM. The furniture was put together on a framework made of metal rods and highly polished, ball bearing-like connectors. There was a whole bank of them laid out as a display, which looked pretty impressive. On our way out, the hosts gave everyone a connector threaded onto a keychain. Which means that between the four of us, we were only four connectors away from a modular cube.
The Droog Design party took place in their only U.S. showroom on Greene Street, which opened this year. (The show "Secret Natures" is up there through June 30.)
The party was packed: a sweaty, well-dressed crowd quaffing cucumber-tinis downstairs (they were good!), and a slightly sparser crowd milling around the displays upstairs.
While we drank our drinks (no beverages allowed above deck), we started speculating about who all the other guests were. ReadyMade editor Andrew Wagner said something that I'm still mulling over. He said that designing or making something is comparable to being in a band, for a few different reasons. For one, it's an activity one can be involved at on any level, from high to low. Some people aspire to make careers out of design, while others are content to share their work with a small network or just to experience the pleasure of creating. Similarities continue; you can take it on and on. I liked this metaphor, and I imagined that it made me a little better able to understand the panoply of people I was seeing there in the Droog basement.
Droog is known for designs that are fun and not necessarily practical or marketable. Upstairs, they'd decked the showroom out in deconstructed house-like structures made of blue foam packing material. Tejo Remy's strapped-together 'Chest of Drawers' was on display, as was this chair made of bundled cloth and black packing straps.
From there, it was on to the Blu Dot party. There was a very welcoming, Midwestern feel in the air—possibly traceable to the Blu Dot design trio's Minnesota roots? A thick crowd lounged on the display couches and beds, drinking beverages made from blue berry vodka, with blueberries at the bottom of the glass (blue dots, get it?). Crowd-pleasing, familiar music playing on the stereo and a sizable spill-over crowd outside the showroom, somehow managing to drink on the sidewalk unmolested.
And we still wanted more! We ended the evening at Kiosk, pressing through a big glut of people in the street outside and up the staircase to the shop. The front room with the merchandise was pretty mellow and I think I recall tweeting something about how the back room was like a sweaty disco sauna.
And then we started losing track of each other in the crowd, sections of our party falling off like rocket boosters. I'm sure that plenty of the people we left at Kiosk kept going into the wee hours. On our way out the door, I heard one guest say to another—presumably talking about plans for later that night—"I want to go to the one that you have to sneak through a restaurant to get to!"
But not us. We had wontons to eat. We had a fair to rest up for. We packed it in and started getting ready for more.
Clearly, sharing all of our favorite things about New York Design Week and the ICFF is going to take a day or two. Better dive in.
Beginning Friday evening, I began to get my initiation into a Design Week tradition: the parties!
While the main event is in midtown at the Javits Convention Center, during the ICFF the showrooms, mostly clustered in Soho, throw open their doors (or install sharp-dressed greeter/bouncers armed with lists in front of their doors, depending on their feelings about exclusivity) for a series of receptions. Designers and other design-world types troll up and down Greene Street, popping in and out of parties, checking out what's on display at the venues, greeting each other, knocking back cucumber-tinis, relaxing after a day on the floor and generally taking it all in.
On Friday evening I went over to the Harry Allen party. Harry Allen's showroom is away from the Soho cluster, on Avenue A between 12th and 13th Streets. This was a good warm-up party because the space isn't too huge.
Clearly, I need to become a better event photographer, but here's an idea.
And here are a couple of design shots. The firefly lights are made on a 3D printer. (3D printing, or rapid prototyping, was a noticeable theme at the fair—it's fun to see designers playing around with the new technology.) Mike Boylan, who works at Harry Allen, told me that the lights are replicas of a real firefly that Allen caught in his back yard.
Someone with a good eye once said to me, "If you want something to look fantastic, paint it white." Glib, but there may be a bit of truth in it. I was taken by this line of objects made from everyday items, whitewashed: fruit and nut bowls made from cast fruit and peanuts, hangers from human hands, and a ghostly twist on the old Chianti-bottle candleholder.
Finally, I thought this Harry Allen lamp looked awfully ReadyMade. Another Harry Allen-ite told me it's made from real tin cans. There's a wall-mounted organization unit also made of cans in the same series.
On Saturday, a small bunch of us went to check out some of the parties in Soho. We started by talking our way (barely! Not carrying business cards this week is no laughing matter, as Grace Bonney from Design*Sponge warned us) into a party for a line of modular furniture at USM. The furniture was put together on a framework made of metal rods and highly polished, ball bearing-like connectors. There was a whole bank of them laid out as a display, which looked pretty impressive. On our way out, the hosts gave everyone a connector threaded onto a keychain. Which means that between the four of us, we were only four connectors away from a modular cube.
The Droog Design party took place in their only U.S. showroom on Greene Street, which opened this year. (The show "Secret Natures" is up there through June 30.)
The party was packed: a sweaty, well-dressed crowd quaffing cucumber-tinis downstairs (they were good!), and a slightly sparser crowd milling around the displays upstairs.
While we drank our drinks (no beverages allowed above deck), we started speculating about who all the other guests were. ReadyMade editor Andrew Wagner said something that I'm still mulling over. He said that designing or making something is comparable to being in a band, for a few different reasons. For one, it's an activity one can be involved at on any level, from high to low. Some people aspire to make careers out of design, while others are content to share their work with a small network or just to experience the pleasure of creating. Similarities continue; you can take it on and on. I liked this metaphor, and I imagined that it made me a little better able to understand the panoply of people I was seeing there in the Droog basement.
Droog is known for designs that are fun and not necessarily practical or marketable. Upstairs, they'd decked the showroom out in deconstructed house-like structures made of blue foam packing material. Tejo Remy's strapped-together 'Chest of Drawers' was on display, as was this chair made of bundled cloth and black packing straps.
From there, it was on to the Blu Dot party. There was a very welcoming, Midwestern feel in the air—possibly traceable to the Blu Dot design trio's Minnesota roots? A thick crowd lounged on the display couches and beds, drinking beverages made from blue berry vodka, with blueberries at the bottom of the glass (blue dots, get it?). Crowd-pleasing, familiar music playing on the stereo and a sizable spill-over crowd outside the showroom, somehow managing to drink on the sidewalk unmolested.
And we still wanted more! We ended the evening at Kiosk, pressing through a big glut of people in the street outside and up the staircase to the shop. The front room with the merchandise was pretty mellow and I think I recall tweeting something about how the back room was like a sweaty disco sauna.
And then we started losing track of each other in the crowd, sections of our party falling off like rocket boosters. I'm sure that plenty of the people we left at Kiosk kept going into the wee hours. On our way out the door, I heard one guest say to another—presumably talking about plans for later that night—"I want to go to the one that you have to sneak through a restaurant to get to!"
But not us. We had wontons to eat. We had a fair to rest up for. We packed it in and started getting ready for more.
