DESIGN DISPATCH

Erewhon Gets Into the Clothing Game, and Other News

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Erewhon Gets Into the Clothing Game

Erewhon may be every Angeleno’s go-to purveyor of macrobiotic goodies and $24 smoothies, but lately the Southern California health food mainstay has been pivoting from organic groceries to organic clothing. Earlier this week, the brand announced a limited-edition collection of hoodies and sweatpants made from locally sourced organic French terry in three muted colors. “In creating this collection, we thought about what Erewhon represents,” Alec Antoci, co-designer of the collection and son to owners Josephine and Tony Antoci, told GQ. “It’s more than a market providing the highest quality ingredients to our customers—it’s a lifestyle that people embody and live. This collection is an extension of that belief.” 

It’s not the first time Erewhon has experimented with clothing. When the marketing firm Pizzaslime introduced counterfeit Erewhon merch that quickly went viral in 2018 after being spotted on celebrities like Jonah Hill, Antoci dropped a one-off collection that, as expected, also sold out quickly. And stay tuned for more: he plans to continue releasing small-batch seasonal drops and capsule collections throughout the year with “mission-aligned partners.”

A Paris Hotel with an Artist Studio Aesthetic

Situated on the Left Bank, Hotel des Académies et des Arts channels the spirit of the Belle Époque when the building housed the studios of influential artists Modigliani and Fujita. The nascent Parisian studio Lizée-Hugot imbued every corner of the property with an artistic energy. The 20 restrained rooms nod to Van Gogh’s famous depiction of his humble sleeping quarters, The Bedroom, with cream-colored walls, troweled plaster, early-1900s–style checkerboard bathrooms, and custom furniture pieces such as knotty oak headboards and stained bed benches. 

Half of the rooms and the lobby ceiling are adorned in Franck Lebraly’s pastel frescoes, a tribute to Cubism and Surrealism, accentuated by the black and bronze greens of the salon’s velvet sofa. A ground-floor workshop takes the artist studio design language and bestows it with purpose. There, guests and students from the Academy of Arts across the street playfully paint, take in screenings, and mix up cocktails from the honesty bar.

The UK’s first digital art gallery will open with a NASA-inspired piece by Refik Anadol.

After making waves during Miami Art Week with Machine Hallucinations—Coral Dreams (2021) projected on the beachfront thanks to NFT platform Aorist, Refik Anadol is bringing this popular immersive art to the UK. The Turkish artist teamed up with NASA to create Machine Memoirs: Space, which uses artificial intelligence to reimagine two million publicly available images of space taken by satellites, telescopes, and the International Space Station. When it opens in April, the experience will inaugurate the Reel Store, a new gallery in Coventry that’s slated to become the first permanent space in the UK dedicated to interactive digital art. 

The Armory Show’s 2022 edition will focus primarily on Latinx and Latin American art.

For the New York art fair’s forthcoming edition in the fall, its organizers are planning special programming around Latinx and Latin American art overseen by three leading curators. Mari Carmen Ramírez, a director at MFA Houston, will organize the annual Curatorial Leadership Summit; Ostrander, adjunct curator for Latin American art at Tate, will oversee the Platform section; Acevedo Yates, curator at MOCA Chicago, is planning the fair’s Focus section on individual presentations. “As New York’s fair, we have the responsibility to offer presentations that reflect the city that we live in and those that make up the city,” Nicole Berry, the fair’s executive director, told ArtNews. “We want to directly engage with the diverse landscape of the city and acknowledge, in this year in particular, the vast accomplishments of Latin American and Latinx artists, whether in New York or elsewhere.” 

Beauty giant Glossier opens its London flagship in Covent Garden’s oldest building.

On the heels of brick-and-mortar openings in Seattle and L.A., DTC beauty brand Glossier has jumped across the pond to open its first international flagship store in London. Occupying the bones of the Covent Garden neighborhood’s oldest townhouse, the interiors balance the historic 17th-century structures original details with the brand’s modern design language, including a  round bubblegum-pink bench, a silvered-hued “G” emblem scrawled in calligraphy, and a beauty space done up in sugary pink and brown tones.   

Chanel names former Unilever HR lead Leena Nair as the French label’s global CEO.

Though she may be a fashion outsider, Leena Nair has been named the new global chief executive officer of Chanel after spending three decades at Unilever focusing on culture and human resources. Her appointment follows a multitude of changes to the French maison’s leadership following Karl Lagerfeld’s death, in 2019, and perhaps signals a new chapter for the label as it attempts to modernize its corporate culture. According to executive search specialist Anne Raphaël, bringing responsible values to employee management is “a huge concern for all luxury groups today. It’s not enough today to be a desirable brand; it’s what’s behind the brand—the people, the values—that also matters.”

Major transit projects are moving ahead in New York thanks to the infrastructure bill.

On Monday, elected officials announced plans to finish an overhaul of John F. Kennedy Airport and to improve commuter train service with new stations and tunnel repairs. The projects had been planned for years but were disrupted by the pandemic and lack of funding. Thanks to the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed last month by President Biden, these projects are finally back on track. They include expanding Metro-North access to Penn Station in Manhattan and repairing tunnels under the East River damaged nearly a decade ago by Hurricane Sandy. Though the repairs are expected to take several years, Amtrak and the transportation authority aim to make as much progress as possible before ridership fully rebounds and more workers start returning to the office.  

A $300,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT accidentally sold for $3,000 after a small typo. 

An owner of a very valuable Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT made a big oopsy poopsy. Max, username maxnaut, fell victim to a fat finger error when he mistakenly listed his Bored Ape for 0.75 ether instead of 75 ether (around $300,000), which is one hundredth the intended price. For the uninitiated, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each depicting an ape with different traits and visual attributes, whose collectors include famous names like Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry, and Post Malone. “How’d it happen? A lapse of concentration I guess,” he told CNET. “I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly.”

For the first time, every costume in HBO’s Insecure was designed by a Black woman.

Fans of HBO’s Emmy-winning show Insecure, a series that celebrates Black womanhood, are applauding a milestone in episode seven: every element of every costume was designed by a Black woman. The plot of the episode, in which best friends Issa, Molly, Kelly, and Tiffany spend a day and night bonding, made it the perfect moment, say costume designer Shiona Turini and executive producer and writer Amy Aniobi. “I thought it could be really interesting to devote one episode that was so focused on this friendship to celebrate Black women and make it a really intentional experience,” Turini said in a joint Zoom call with Aniobi.

Today’s attractive distractions:

This two-wheeled robot that ascends stairs may be the wheelchair of the future.

Users mistook Spotify Wrapped’s distorted genre graphics this year as a glitch.

Dan Roosegaarde and UNESCO turned off a Dutch city’s lights to see the stars.

Arca’s latest avant-garde album visuals channel futurism and ancient symbolism.

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