Part of my recent trip to Paris with Hermes involved a visit to the new(ish) flagship store. Situated in a former 1930s swimming pool, it felt tres strange to be standing on the floor of the pool surrounded by original tiles! The store is vast and includes a cafe, a florist, a bookshop and lots of home wares. (more…)
I unearthed this old vintage Vivienne Westwood Swatch from my archive (AKA a dusty trunk in the bedroom) yesterday to photograph it for a project. When I mentioned it on Twitter it created quite the buzz, possibly because I discovered people are now listing ir for £300+ on Ebay. My watch probably cost about £50 twenty years ago which I guess was still a lot of money ‘in them days’. But I would never sell it. In my eyes, this is a design classic – functional, beautiful and statement-making. I just need a new battery…
I don’t like to blog about competitions because there are just so many and once you do one, you open the floodgates. But I’m making an exception for this one because it’s a bit unusual. The One watch contest is a design competition open to anyone who thinks they can create an eyecatching timepiece. I love a statementy watch (am currently eyeing this Jeremy Scott for Swatch fellow on Vestiare Collective) and the examples The One sent me show the brand is not afraid of bold innovation when it comes to design.
So the gist is, you submit your design, all the entries can be viewed on a website (hmmm, maybe an open invitation for copyists though?), the public chooses the top ten finalists and the winner gets €1000 and the watch put into production. Deadline is May 15th.
Lovely 3-D murals by illustrator Noma Bar for Wallpaper magazine. As you know, I’m a huge illustration fan and it’s so rare for illustration to be used on a mainstream magazine cover. How clever for Wallpaper*/Bar to come up with a concept that marries 2-D and 3-D with such great graphic impact for the Global Design issue of the mag (8 different cover designs in total)… (more…)