Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be homeless and sleep in the cool night air under a cardboard box? No? I never have, but if you have a weird sense of humor and a yearning to get closer to your grungy roots, or you feel like you need to practice sleeping under the stars because your 401K is worth 15 cents, then you might want to look into the Snurkengoed Bedding.

Bloesem: Snurkengoed

I’ve been meaning to write about this small Finnish company for quite some time. You need a fabric for your design that incorporates a kind of 80s collage DIY aesthetic? This might very well be the designers to look at. Their fabric work suggests industrial wastelands, flowers juxtaposed with grainy penwork of enlarged Maurice Sendak children’s books, and gritty abstract lines.

Within this past year several people I know including my wife had a baby. And for some strange reason 2 of the babies that I saw born this year (including my boy Lawrence) were photographed at one point in a tote bag. So it was some sort of fate that I was sent an email to this product which is a tote bag made for carrying a baby. The product is called Do Baby and it’s designed by Gabriele Pezzini. The reason we put our kid in a tote bag is because we thought it was cute. Do Baby, on the other hand feels somewhat different. The baby feels a bit more like a commodity as if you were able to pick one up at any grocery store. Still, it’s nice to have a carrier such as this available to give another option for carrying a baby. As any parent knows, carrying a child is never easy, and a variety of positions with which to hold the baby makes life just a little simpler.

Mixko, as their namesake indicates, is a  company that mixes multiple unlike things together to come up with completely new meanings. They look at an object like a whistle, for instance, and say, “Hey, if the scale of that whistle were multiplied in size by, like four hundred times, then that whistle would make a mighty comfortable lounge chair.” Of course, their mixing does not stop there.  They mix cartoon bubbles with plates, candles with joysticks, and my personal favorite: dog shit with jewelry. The one item informs the other in such refreshing and revealing ways. But the thing that makes Mixko extra special is that they are so young yet so prolific as to beg the question: what will Mixko be in thirty years when the design mashup matures? My answer is that Mixko may rule the earth at that point.

I’m one of those guys who wishes that Paul Smith was my best friend. Paul and I would hang out walking the streets of London looking for affected youth to star in his advertising campaigns. Every once in a while I would look over at Paul and say, ” Hey Paul, would it be possible for you to make a collection for middle aged fat men at a price that could allow the pieces to be sold in Wal-Mart?” (this request would satiate the intense thirst of my socio-economic situation). Paul would look over at me and utter “Shite!”. End of conversation.

We can all dream… Speaking of dreams. Am I dreaming, or is Paul Smith somehow related to the movies of Wes Anderson? The suits featured on the actors in the Darjeeling Limited are impeccably crafted.

I’ve made it a point to cover big, chunky fantastically fashionable brands over the next few weeks, and today is one of my favorites: Armani Casa. Armani Casa is like the stage set for a highly stylized 1940s noir film with a good budget. Each piece evokes one of two feelings in me. Armani Casa is the ultimate in off the shelf luxury hotel dressings, or Armani Casa makes me want to wear expensive suits and lose 40 pounds so I can have my picture take with this furniture in a respectable manner.

I’ve included three pieces by Armani Casa that I love: the Omega Bed, the Essen Vase, and the Talvin 1 Desk Set. Each piece has it’s own individual character, but together exude extreme brand clarity and synchronicity. All three pieces, as the hundreds of others, just seem to work well with each other. Each piece also has this modernist yet hand hewn historicist quality creating one of the most consistent collections of products I know of. Job well done.