Mushroom & Monkey

This time last year I was swanning around New York, celebrating a birthday in a style to which I could become accustomed. Fabulously contrived shops on every street corner and backdropped, at least in parts, by amazing architecture. It looks just as it ought, New York.

In amongst a long list of shops to visit (from Kid Robot and Apple to the first Kiehl's shop) was Kate Spade - wrapping a corner of SoHo with WASP clothing and objects of taste and social acceptability. Not a beat missed in that shop.

Whilst there I was bought a charming book, Mushroom & Monkey, for a birthday gift, it was illustrated by Paulina Reyes, who has worked for the company rather a lot. Illustration rides high in the Spade brand, on bags, clothing, notepaper… and it seems Mr Spade (under his brand Jack Spade) has a yearning to run his own imprint and has started commissioning simple books, heavy on the pictures. The shop also sells various hand-picked antique books, from Salinger to Cecil Beaton. First edition dust-jackets intact, of course.

The Jack Spade label is about tucked-in gingham, chinos and canvas man-bags. All in counterpoint to the Kate Spade peony flourishes, jewel satins and tidy leather bags. Both looks never quite translate comfortably outside of America.

But in that corner shop, they looked ‘just so.’

Knit it in Jaeger

Chilly days and the knitting needles are twitching. Or rather, for me, the accoutrements of knitting come out onto the shelf. The design of this lovely card of darning wool is such a happy combination of type, shape and colour. Humorous too. The Jaeger typeface is a mystery (Ashley Havinden?) but nevertheless it’s a joyous bit of card.

Dr Gustav Jaeger was famous for championing sanitary wool for clothing. It was, he said, cool in the summer, warm in the winter and would ‘assist the evaporations of the emanations coming from the body.’ Hmm.

Jaeger called his first shop Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System. Opened in 1884 it sold clothes - mainly underwear - and camel hair blankets. By the early decades of the 20th Century the name Jaeger, bought by Englishman LRS Tomalin, had become a fashionable and classic brand name. Coveted by the smart set, it was worn by Scott on his way to the Arctic and Cary Grant on his way off set.

It has to be said that today knitting hasn’t quite the cachet it may have had when this card was produced, probably in the early 1950s. It is also hard to buy such a small amount of anything useful, as haberdashers have all but died out. And pretty much nobody would think to lavish such attention to the design of such a small and inconsequential item today.

Typographic fireworks

The past weekend of bonfire night celebrations made me think of a simple piece of work by John Maeda that I first saw years ago but is still in my mind. He made his Typographic Fireworks in 1997, as part of a larger body of work commissioned by the Japanese cosmetics firm Shiseido. The calendar series of Java animations, designed ‘to waste time instead of save time’ includes a delicate flower and other treats. I think these animations still stand up. The simplicity of idea, execution and neat navigation that runs throughout Maeda’s work was all there.

Nothing more to say, really, just have a play.