The Design Crack Guide to Leather
Hogan Men’s Shoes 2007
Hogan Shoes are one of the few shoe designs that seem to have bridged the gap between sporty walking shoe and semi-formalish work shoe. OK, maybe they fall a bit more on the sporty tip, but if you must, drop a line to your boss that your Hogans probably cost as much as his stuffy [...]
Brand Crack: Louis Vuitton Caviar Box in Taiga Leather
And now for something completely opulent. I’ve never featured anything from Louis Vuitton until recently when I made light of the $42,000 patchwork handbag. After that product, I decided to thumb through LV’s website to really get a full picture of everything they produce… or at least put their brand on. After I sifted through [...]
Matrix LED Watch by Element Design
Element Design, a Vienna Based Duo established in 2002, has created one of the only watches I’ve really desired in years. The watch is called the Matrix and it’s designed for Zeon, the top manufacturer of retro styled LED watches. I’m attracted to the Matrix LED watch for its simplicity. It’s just a leather band [...]
Puma: The Mongolian Shoe BBQ
Have you ever felt like you wanted to be Dr. Frankenstein? That is, have you ever wanted to concoct your own personal version of something you care about only to have to turn into a horrible monster? Well that’s kind of what it feels like when I recently visited Puma’s incredible Mongolian Shoe BBQ website [...]
Home Theater in a Trunk by Pinel and Pinel
Fred Pinel has only been creating his gorgeous leather trunks for the past 5 years or so, but the trunks have this old world richness to them which made me think that Pinel & Pinel had been around as long as Paris fashion had been big. Turns out Fred Pinel is about my age, and [...]
Bags by Marielle Wichards
The bags by Marielle Wichards are perfect in their simplicity. The essence of the design is a it’s flatness. It is made of two to three strips of leather dyed to an intense color and sewn in a simple pattern which keeps the bag fairly flat. Each bag has two punched holes about three quarters [...]
Stiletto by Alexander McQueen
This shoe from Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2007 collection is the most graceful interpretations of where sneaker meets stiletto that I have seen. I can’t even really trace when or where the trend started happening, but none of that matters anymore since this shoe became available. The shoe is even more of an amalgamation of sneaker [...]
Summer 2007 Shoe Collection Pierre Hardy
Pssst. Hey Shoe Fetishists. Here’s another shoe for the collection. Quite honestly, this is probably the most conservative shoe of Pierre Hardy’s 2007 collection. When I look at this shoe, my mind wanders into a stylized Jane Austin movie where there are lots of scenes of petticoats and steam trains, but for some reason the [...]
A New Shoe Paradigm: Skins Footwear
Skins Footwear is a novel concept: separate the skin of the shoe from the structure of the shoe. This separation allows for a couple of really innovative advantages to the consumer. First, it creates a more economical way to mix and match your shoes by moving the structure from one skin to the next. As [...]
DollyPop by Dirk Wynants
I haven’t figured out why Extremis has decided to name their sheepskin koozie “Dolly Pop” . Duh! It’s sheepskin. Who’s the most famous sheep in the world? Dolly, the cloned sheep, of course. (God, sometimes I could kick myself for being so dense.) So, if you were ever wondering what happened to the most famous [...]
ID 40 2006: The Edge Chair by Justin Pocano of Minus
Over the next week or two, I will include some of my favorite designers from ID Magazine’s “ID 40″ list of top designers of 2006. It’s a pretty amazing list, so I urge you to pick up a copy of this magazine.
Minus Studios is YADC (or Yet Another Design Collective). I guess I never really [...]
2007 Collection by Bruno Frisoni
Bruno Frisoni brings to mind: extreme high heels. Now, I live in San Francisco. In the Mission District to be exact. And if any of you know the Mission, especially around the area of the New College, you would know that a woman would probably get scoffed at for wearing such a shoe as a [...]
Fardos by Ricardo Fasanello
Alright, alright. This ain’t new, but the chair I’ve included by Ricardo Fasanello made me sit up and take notice. Sometimes I forget that every town, every city, in every country has a culture of design in some manner. Since there are several billion people on this planet, that is a lot of design for [...]
Brand Crack: Lady Dior Cannage by Dior
I have always been a huge fan of Dior, so don’t be shocked if I include a Dior piece every month or two. This bag in particular is exemplary Dior. It’s everything you would expect: fantastic construction, beautiful design, and on and on. What separates this bag from, say, a Gucci or Louis Vuitton is [...]
Mollis Easy Chair by Artur & Jonas
The Mollis Easy Chair by Vujj is a new take on an old standard: the butterfly lounge chair. This chair is so much more, though. First, the frame is much sturdier, and the paint job is also much more striking. Even the form of the frame is more appealing and dynamic to me. And most [...]
