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8 Ways to Create a Romantic Homeon February 14, 2020 at 11:00 am

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments
8 Ways to Create a Romantic Home

Lonny

1. Bring home flowers

Stop in a grocery store or florist for some pretty flowers to create a few small bouquets in the bedroom and bathroom. I find affordable flowers at Costco and Trader Joes!

2. Tidy up the bedroom & bathroom

If the laundry piled up on the bed during the day, or the kids flung their pull-ups or undies across the floor, or if your cereal bowl is still on the bathroom counter, take just a few moments to freshen things up. Seeing unsightly reminders of your long day will kill the romantic ambience pretty quickly.

3. Set a pretty table

Are you eating dinner on plastic or otherwise ugly plates? Or, heaven forbid, eating in front of the TV every night? Bring out the pretty dishes and set the table! No need for fancy china. I collect lots of plates from discount stores like HomeGoods and TJ Maxx. Setting the table is a simple thing to do but it sets the tone for a more romantic home.

4. End the day earlier

If you tend to be tired in the evenings, do as your grandparents probably did and try having “supper” instead of dinner. Meaning, eat earlier if you can! The earlier you can eat and clean up, the more time you have in the evening to enjoy relaxation. And adjust the kids bedtime if you can pull that off! It is nice to have a couple of child-free hours in the evenings.

Another tip my husband and I used to use when our kids were young was to feed the kids separately once in awhile. Then we’d put them to bed and have our own dinner together, just like having a dinner date at home!

5. Freshen up the scent

If your house smells like leftover fish tacos after dinner, air things out! Clean the sink, use a diffuser with romantic scents, or bake something yummy for dessert!

6. Soften the mood

As the daylight starts to fade, turn down the bright lights in the house, too. Use lamps instead of overhead lighting. Once the kids have gone to bed, light candles or use battery-operated candles to lend a pretty glow to end tables. Find our favorite battery-operated candles here!

If you have a fireplace, use it! We have a gas fireplace so it is easy to flip on a switch for instant warmth and ambience. If building a fire is impractical or you have a nonworking fireplace or no fireplace at all, set up a bunch of candles to give off light and sparkle. Instead of flipping on the TV every evening to fill the silence, play some romantic background music instead.

I made a Happy Homebody Playlist recently, if you need some new tunes you can check it out here!

7. Get creative

Are you turning into an old married couple with a predictable evening routine? Gulp. If you usually clean up after dinner, put the kids to bed and then watch TV the rest of the night, try mixing up the routine by doing a puzzle or playing a board game next to the fireplace. Try reading out loud to each other curled up on the couch. Or, get really romantic and re-read your love letters or re-live your memories of your early dating days. At first you might think it sounds corny or forced, or you might think your old routine is pretty comfortable, but routines can get a little dull! And dull is not very romantic.

8. Decorate with romantic-inspired furniture and decor

Find a round-up of decor inspiration and sources below!

Speaking of romantic vibes, did you see the free Anthropologie-Inspired Diffuser I’m giving away this week? Check it out here!

8 Ways to Create a Romantic Home
Click here for details!
8 Ways to Create a Romantic Home

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Pink Rooms & Blogging

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Spring Doormats That Will Greet You With A Smileon February 20, 2020 at 11:00 am

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

Hey friends, who is ready for spring? RAISES HAND SO HIGH! The sun was out in Seattle today and it felt so good. I couldn’t help but feel a little more inspired for spring :). I’m looking forward to a quick makeover of our front porch this year (I am thinking of painting the tired concrete and maybe even repainting the gray front door! EEK! What color will I choose? I’ll post some of my inspiration photos soon!).

I hope these cute doormats will bring a little sunshine and spring your way today.

Spring Doormats That Will Greet You With A Smile

Related Posts:

Simple Ways to Decorate Your Porch for Spring

How to Find Joy at Home: A Simple Guide

Listen to My Happy Homebody Music Playlist

The Inspired Room Shop (Shop My House & Latest Decor Finds!)

Have a question? Check out my new FAQ page!

the latest in the shop

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Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturdayon February 17, 2020 at 4:45 am

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

by | Feb 16, 2020 | Decorating Inspiration | 0 comments

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

Hey friends! I wanted to share four fun new posts you might have missed! I just discovered there was another technical difficulty in my emailed posts. GAH! If you are an email subscriber you may have received several emails in a row with a repeatedly incorrect subject line (Organizing + Home Style Saturdays!). It is a glitch with the email service I use. I’m so sorry for that confusion! They assure me they are working to resolve it. SIGH!

Here are the most recent posts plus a brand new Home Style Saturday post!

8 Ways to Create a Romantic Home

6 Simple Secrets for a Less Cluttered Home

Cozy & Inviting Coastal Living Room: Get the Look

Scroll down for a brand new Home Style Saturday post!

How was your weekend? 🙂

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

On Sutton Place | Refrigerator Organization Ideas

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

Shabbyfufu | Edible Flowers – 23 Gorgeous Recipes

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

Southern Hospitality | A Winter Mantel

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

StoneGable | 8 Reasons to Wear an Apron

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

The Inspired Room | How to Find Joy At Home: A Simple Guide

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

Designthusiasm | Simple Ways to Organize Your Under Sink Cabinet

Posts You Might Have Missed + Home Style Saturday

the latest in the shop

let’s stay connected!

Follow for daily
Home Inspiration:

get my free decorating guide

home decor inspiration, free downloads,
and more, straight to your inbox

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Women Are Dieting Less But Eating More Healthy Foods According To New Better Homes & Gardens Food Factor Studyon January 24, 2017 at 3:00 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

Women Are Dieting Less But Eating More Healthy Foods According To New Better Homes & Gardens Food Factor Study

DES MOINES, Iowa, Jan. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Better Homes & Gardens, Meredith Corporation’s flagship lifestyle, home and food brand, today announced findings from Food Factor: The Evolution of Eats, a nationwide survey conducted among U.S. women. The study took a comprehensive look at women’s motivations, attitudes and behaviors relating to food including cooking, shopping, and eating.

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Overall, the study found that women are moving away from specific diets, trends and tactics to more permanent, healthy lifestyle changes. In fact, while two-thirds of women polled say they and their households are eating healthier in the last two years, just over half say they do not follow a specific diet but have recently made significant modifications in what and how they eat.

“While women continue to be health-conscious, their approach to their diet has changed,” says Nancy Hopkins, Senior Food Editor of Better Homes & Gardens, “These women no longer want short term solutions from diet fads and tricks; they want to make meaningful changes that will last them over the course of their lives.”

This new approach has led to big changes in dieting in the last two years:

  • 63 percent of women are now focusing on eating healthier foods in general – compared to only 50 percent in 2014
  • Only 27 percent of women say they or any household member has followed a special diet in the last year – down 20 percentage points from 2014
  • 64 percent are paying more attention to nutrition than they did two years ago – compared to only 53 percent in 2014
  • 53 percent say they are working to make small, permanent changes in their eating, including:
    • 71 percent of women are eating more vegetables – up 14 percentage points from 2014, while 66 percent of women are eating more fruits – up 19 percentage points from 2014.
    • Half of women are now adding more salad to their diets, and 3 in 5 even grow their own fruits and vegetables.
    • While fruit and vegetable consumption is up, women are eating 33 percent less meat than before, with about 1 in 3 women having occasional vegetarian meals/days.
    • 85 percent say they consider the healthfulness of a recipe before selecting it, and 50 percent have changed recipes so that they’re healthier.

Food Factor: The Evolution of Eats was fielded in July 2016 and, in total, more than 2,000 responses were collected from respondents, U.S. women ages 18+. The 126-question survey was divided into 11 sections, with each respondent completing one to three sections, depending on the number of questions per section. Margin of error at 95 percent confidence level for 400 respondent base per question is +/- 4.9 percent, for total respondent base of 2K it’s +/- 2.2 percent.

This study is the fifth wave of the modern trending research that continues the 20+ year tradition of the Better Homes & Gardens Food Trend Study, providing insights into America’s food shopping, cooking and serving habits.

ABOUT BETTER HOMES & GARDENS

Better Homes & Gardens serves, connects and inspires readers who infuse color and creativity into each aspect of their lives. Reaching 40 million readers a month via the most trusted print magazine, the brand also extends across a robust website, multiple social platforms, tablet editions, mobile apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. Better Homes & Gardens fuels our readers’ passions to live a more colorful life through stunning visuals, a balance of substance and surface, and a blend of expert and reader ideas. Better Homes & Gardens is published 12 times a year with a rate base of 7.6 million.

Additional information may be found at www.bhg.com | Facebook: facebook.com/mybhg | Twitter: twitter.com/bhg | Pinterest: pinterest.com/bhg | Instagram: instagram.com/betterhomesandgardens.

ABOUT MEREDITH CORPORATION

Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP; www.meredith.com) has been committed to service journalism for 115 years. Today, Meredith uses multiple distribution platforms – including broadcast television, print, digital, mobile and video – to provide consumers with content they desire and to deliver the messages of its advertising and marketing partners.

Meredith’s National Media Group reaches more than 100 million unduplicated women every month, including nearly 75 percent of U.S. Millennial women. Meredith is the leader in creating and distributing content across platforms in key consumer interest areas such as food, home, parenthood and health through well-known brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, Allrecipes, Parents, Shape and EatingWell. Meredith also features robust brand licensing activities, including more than 3,000 SKUs of branded products at 4,000 Walmart stores across the U.S. and at walmart.com. Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is an award-winning, strategic and creative agency that provides fully integrated marketing solutions for many of the world’s top brands, including Kraft, TGIFriday’s and NBC Universal.

Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 owned or operated television stations reaching 11 percent of U.S. households. Meredith’s portfolio is concentrated in large, fast-growing markets, with seven stations in the nation’s Top 25 – including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland – and 13 in Top 50 markets. Meredith’s stations produce 700 hours of local news and entertainment content each week, and operate leading local digital destinations.

SOURCE Meredith Corporation; Better Homes & Gardens

For further information: Patrick Taylor, 212/551.6984, [email protected], or Rebecca Zisholtz, 212/551.7087, [email protected]

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Better Homes & Gardens Reveals 2017 Editors’ Choice Awardson January 3, 2017 at 3:00 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

DES MOINES, Iowa, Jan. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Better Homes & Gardens, the leading lifestyle brand reaching 40 million readers a month, has revealed its third annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Chosen by Better Homes & Gardens editors, and technology and digital media expert Shelly Palmer, the Editors’ Choice Awards highlight the best of new and existing home and personal technology.

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“Smart technology is now a part of every aspect our homes – from our kitchens and bathrooms to outdoor living spaces and laundry rooms – almost every new appliance is or will be connected,” says Better Homes & Gardens Editor-in-Chief Stephen Orr. “We put an emphasis on products that we believe will help the modern homeowner keep up with the latest developments.”

The 2017 winners combine style and smarts and are proven to make the homes and lives of consumers easier and more efficient.

“It has once again been a great experience working with the Better Homes & Gardens team on this project,” says Palmer. “Together we were able to pick products with benefits that will really help consumers on a daily basis.”

Among this year’s picks are:

  • Google Chromecast Ultra ($79; google.com) – Stream up to 4K Ultra HD & HDR picture quality with Chromecast Ultra, a streaming device that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port. Mirror your phone, tablet, or laptop to your TV, or stream live sporting events, movies, or music. Don’t have a 4K TV yet? The Chromecast Ultra will automatically optimize its content for your TV’s best resolution.
  • Whirlpool Smart French Door Pantry Refrigerator with Infinity Shelves ($3,799; whirlpool.com) – Say good-bye to a dysfunctional fridge and hello to pantry-style organization with Whirlpool’s Smart French Door refrigerator. Its Infinity Shelves retract in the center to make room for tall items (wine bottles) while leaving half-shelves around the perimeter (no more lost yogurts) clearly visible. You’ll also get grab-a-snack sections, a produce drawer that fits a lettuce tub, and freezer dividers that hold frozen foods upright. An app alerts you to power outages and servicing needs.
  • Savant Remote + Host ($499; savant.com) – Savant Remote + Host is a media-centric home-control system. It controls over 380,000 entertainment devices (streaming, speakers, gaming consoles, DVD players, cable, satellite, and more), plus a super simple set of lamp controllers so you can set the mood for watching TV or listening to music.
  • Amazon Echo Dot ($49; amazon.com) The Amazon Echo Dot does everything the Amazon Echo does plus a bit more. The main difference is the smaller speaker. But – and this is important – the Echo Dot has a 3.5-mm audio output jack so you can attach an external speaker. This gives the Dot the ability to send its output to any audio system you have. It also can transmit sound wirelessly over Bluetooth.
  • Sony Playstation VR ($399; playstation.com) – The PlayStation VR takes gaming to the next level by putting you in the middle of all the action. It turns amazing games into virtual reality creating incredibly immersive experiences.
  • Lutron Caseta Wireless ($99; Lutron.com) – Caseta from Lutron is a lighting-centric control system that will work perfectly with your existing lights. There are both physical and app-based controls, which means you can operate your lights even if you left your smartphone in another room. That also means guests won’t be left in the dark.
  • Samsung Trio ($99 Gear VR; $349.99 Gear 360; Samsung.com) – Samsung’s Gear 360 camera, virtual reality headset and Galaxy smartphone work together in an innovative 3-D system. The phone and VR headset bring to life what you capture on the camera.
  • Canary ($200; canary.com) – When it detects motion, the Canary records HD video and sends an alert to your phone. It’s a great way to know (and see) when your child comes home. But if there’s an intruder, you can sound a siren and call local police. With a 147-degree camera span and night vision, you can always take a peek at what’s going on at home, day or night. It also monitors temperature and humidity.
  • Garmin Forerunner 235 ($269.99; garmin.com) – Serious runners need more than just a fitness tracker. With 24/7 wrist-based heart-rate monitoring, GPS, built-in activity tracking, and connected features, Garmin’s Forerunner 235 is a device built with athletes in mind. Track your distance, pace, time, heart rate, and more, and view all the data in real time. Download workouts and training plans that work best for you, track your progress with the Garmin Connect network, then compare and share with friends and family. It’s everything you need in a convenient watch-size package.
  • Sony 55-inch X930D / X940D 4K HDR with Android TV ($1,499.99; sony.com) – The biggest trend in TVs is 4K HDR (high-dynamic range). These new ultra-high-definition sets – such as this 55-inch Android TV by Sony – give you whiter whites and blacker blacks, they also offer 10-bit color, which displays almost infinite color space.
  • Ford Fusion ($22,120 Starting MSRP, $139 / Mo Lease; ford.com) – You don’t have to buy an expensive sports sedan to get state-of-the-art semiautonomous features. The Ford Fusion will practically drive itself in stop-and-go traffic, and it has adaptive cruise control, pre-collision assist, and pedestrian detection.

Additional winners from the 2017 Editors’ Choice Awards include: IT Bed by Sleep Number; Dropbox; LG Signature TWINWash/Washer-Dryer Hybrid; All-Clad 5-Quart Slow Cooker with In-Pot Browning; Apple Music; Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 EX7000; Blue Apron; Uber; Virtru

Full descriptions of the winning products can be found online at BHG.com.

ABOUT BETTER HOMES & GARDENS

Better Homes & Gardens serves, connects and inspires readers who infuse color and creativity into each aspect of their lives. Reaching 40 million readers a month via the most trusted print magazine, the brand also extends across a robust website, multiple social platforms, tablet editions, mobile apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. Better Homes & Gardens fuels our readers’ passions to live a more colorful life through stunning visuals, a balance of substance and surface, and a blend of expert and reader ideas. Better Homes & Gardens is published 12 times a year by Meredith Corporation, with a rate base of 7.6 million.

Additional information may be found at www.bhg.com | Facebook: facebook.com/mybhg | Twitter: twitter.com/bhg | Pinterest: pinterest.com/bhg | Instagram: instagram.com/betterhomesandgardens.

ABOUT MEREDITH CORPORATION

Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP; www.meredith.com) has been committed to service journalism for 115 years. Today, Meredith uses multiple distribution platforms – including broadcast television, print, digital, mobile and video – to provide consumers with content they desire and to deliver the messages of its advertising and marketing partners.

Meredith’s National Media Group reaches more than 100 million unduplicated women every month, including nearly 75 percent of U.S. Millennial women. Meredith is the leader in creating and distributing content across platforms in key consumer interest areas such as food, home, parenthood and health through well-known brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, Allrecipes, Parents, Shape and EatingWell. Meredith also features robust brand licensing activities, including more than 3,000 SKUs of branded products at 4,000 Walmart stores across the U.S. and at walmart.com. Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is an award-winning, strategic and creative agency that provides fully integrated marketing solutions for many of the world’s top brands, including Kraft, TGIFriday’s and NBC Universal.

Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 owned or operated television stations reaching 11 percent of U.S. households. Meredith’s portfolio is concentrated in large, fast-growing markets, with seven stations in the nation’s Top 25 – including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland – and 13 in Top 50 markets. Meredith’s stations produce nearly 700 hours of local news and entertainment content each week, and operate leading local digital destinations.

ABOUT SHELLY PALMER

Shelly Palmer is Managing Partner at Palmer Advanced Media, a technology-focused strategic advisory practice that helps Fortune 500 companies and growth-stage companies with digital strategy, data science, marketing, branding, and business development. He is FOX 5 New York’s on-air tech and digital media expert and a regular commentator on CNBC and CNN. Follow him at @shellypalmer or visit www.shellypalmer.com.

SOURCE Meredith Corporation; Better Homes and Gardens

For further information: Rebecca Zisholtz: 212/551.7087; [email protected]

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Better Homes & Gardens Magazine Unveils Seventh Annual September Stylemaker Issueon August 15, 2017 at 2:00 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

Better Homes & Gardens Magazine Unveils Seventh Annual September Stylemaker Issue

Annual Issue Features Influencers Including Joy the Baker, Lili Diallo and Barri Leiner Grant

DES MOINES, Iowa, Aug. 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Better Homes & Gardens (BH&G), the leading lifestyle brand reaching 40 million consumers a month published by Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP, www.meredith.com), today released its seventh annual Stylemaker issue, highlighting creative forces and tastemakers who influence the worlds of beauty, food, home design, and entertaining. The issue is available on newsstands today.

Better Homes & Gardens' seventh annual September Stylemaker issue

The cover features interiors stylist and author, Lili Diallo. Diallo joins 39 other Stylemakers from all ages and walks of life who shape the way we decorate, cook, garden, organize, dress, and celebrate.

“The Stylemakers featured in this issue embody the Better Homes & Gardens brand,” says Stephen Orr, Editor-in-Chief of Better Homes & Gardens. “Just as we do with our own content, these influencers were chosen for their ability to reach, engage with and inspire our readers in various aspects of their daily lives.”

The 2017 BH&G Stylemakers include:

  • Joy Wilson: Food writer and photographer known as Joy the Baker. Her blog attracts over 600,000 unique visitors a month.
  • Helen Norman: Fashion and lifestyle photographer and owner of Star Bright Farm in Maryland.
  • Lior Lev Sercarz: Owner of spice shop La Boite in New York and author of The Spice Companion.
  • Jean Brownhill: CEO of Sweeten, a company founded to help homeowners planning a renovation find the right contractor and navigate trouble spots.
  • Gregg Renfrew: Founder of Beautycounter, a nontoxic beauty brand that aims to get safer products in the hands of everyone.
  • Dallas Shaw: Fashion illustrator, style expert, and author of The Way She Wears It.
  • Kim Ficaro: Prop and interiors stylist who recently launched her own home collection with an e-commerce store, Totem Home, for which she collaborates with artisans in Mexico and Morocco on a range of designs.

To celebrate the issue, Better Homes & Gardens is hosting its sixth annual Stylemaker event at the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge on September 28th. Over 80 top influencers and tastemakers are expected to join for a day of classes, workshops, and panels.

“Stylemaker is an annual event that brings to life the pages of Better Homes & Gardens with a day of thoughtfully curated panels and activities,” says Stephen Bohlinger, Group Publisher. “We pride ourselves on our ability to reach a wide audience who trust us for guidance on everything from decorating, gardening and food to health, beauty and fashion. Stylemaker is a way for us to showcase our strengths across all those verticals.”

Sponsors of the event include Bertolli, Gymboree and Torani.

For more information about Better Homes & Gardens Stylemaker go to: www.bhg.com/stylemaker

ABOUT BETTER HOMES & GARDENS

Better Homes & Gardens serves, connects and inspires readers who infuse color and creativity into each aspect of their lives. Reaching 40 million readers a month via the most trusted print magazine, the brand also extends across a robust website, multiple social platforms, tablet editions, mobile apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. Better Homes & Gardens fuels our readers’ passions to live a more colorful life through stunning visuals, a balance of substance and surface, and a blend of expert and reader ideas. Better Homes & Gardens is published 12 times a year by Meredith Corporation, with a rate base of 7.6 million.

Additional information may be found at www.bhg.com | Facebook: facebook.com/mybhg | Twitter: twitter.com/bhg | Pinterest: pinterest.com/bhg | Instagram: instagram.com/betterhomesandgardens.

ABOUT MEREDITH CORPORATION

Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP; www.meredith.com) has been committed to service journalism for 115 years. Today, Meredith uses multiple distribution platforms – including broadcast television, print, digital, mobile and video – to provide consumers with content they desire and to deliver the messages of its advertising and marketing partners.

Meredith’s National Media Group reaches 110 million unduplicated women every month, including 70 percent of U.S. Millennial women. Meredith is the leader in creating and distributing content across platforms in key consumer interest areas such as food, home, parenting and health through well-known brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, Allrecipes, Parents and SHAPE. Meredith also features robust brand licensing activities, including more than 3,000 SKUs of branded products at 5,000 Walmart stores across the U.S. Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is an award-winning, strategic and creative agency that provides fully integrated marketing solutions for many of the world’s top brands, including The Kraft Heinz Co., Benjamin Moore, Allergan, TGIFriday’s and WebMD.

Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 television stations reaching 11 percent of U.S. households. Meredith’s portfolio is concentrated in large, fast-growing markets, with seven stations in the nation’s Top 25 – including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and Portland – and 13 in Top 50 markets. Meredith’s stations produce 700 hours of local news and entertainment content each week, and operate leading local digital destinations.

Meredith introduces an updated market positioning and logo that reflect the strength of Meredith's national and local consumer media brands as well as its expanded portfolio of marketing solutions. (PRNewsFoto/Meredith Corporation)

SOURCE Meredith Corporation; Better Homes & Gardens

For further information: Rebecca Zisholtz, Senior Publicist, 212-551-7087, [email protected]

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Better Homes & Gardens Unveils Eighth Annual September Stylemaker Issueon August 21, 2018 at 2:00 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

Annual Issue Features Influencers Including Ayesha Curry, Barrie Benson, Lauren Goodman and More

DES MOINES, Iowa, Aug. 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Better Homes & Gardens (BHG), the leading lifestyle magazine reaching 40 million consumers a month, today released its eighth annual Stylemaker issue, highlighting creative forces and tastemakers who influence the worlds of beauty, food, home design, and entertaining. The issue is available on newsstands today.

The cover features cookbook author and television personality, Ayesha Curry. In the issue, Curry talks about balancing her roles of wife, mom, and businesswoman – all while finding time to put nutritious, high-flavor meals on the table for her family.

Curry joins seven other Stylemakers from all ages and walks of life who shape the way we decorate, cook, garden, organize, dress, and celebrate.

“Stylemaker is our favorite issue of the year because we get to take our readers into the lives of the trendsetters we are fascinated by on social media and see how they cook, garden and decorate in real life,” explained Stephen Orr, Editor in Chief of Better Homes & Gardens.

The 2018 BHG Stylemakers include:

  • Ayesha Curry – Author, New York Times best-selling cookbook The Seasoned Life and host and executive producer of ABC’s upcoming Family Food Fight
  • David Lebovitz – Cookbook author and former pastry chef
  • Barrie Benson – Charlotte-based interior designer
  • Lauren Goodman – Fashion stylist
  • Paloma Contreras – Award-winning interior decorator, tastemaker, and design blogger
  • Nick Olsen – Designer
  • Grant K. Gibson – Interior designer

To celebrate the issue, Better Homes & Gardens is hosting its annual Stylemaker event in New York City on September 27th. Over 80 top influencers and tastemakers are expected to join for a day of classes, workshops, and panels.

“Stylemaker is an event that we look forward to every year,” said Stephen Bohlinger, VP/Group Publisher of Better Homes & Gardens. “It is such a unique experience that manages to bring the best in home design, gardening, and food together with Better Homes & Gardens, the most respected authority in those areas.”

Sponsors of the event include: Garnet Hill; Maybelline New York; Royal(R) Basmati Rice; Tito’s Handmade Vodka.

For more information about Better Homes & Gardens Stylemaker go to: BHG.com/Stylemakers

ABOUT BETTER HOMES & GARDENS

Better Homes & Gardens serves, connects and inspires readers who infuse color and creativity into each aspect of their lives. Reaching 40 million readers a month via the most trusted print magazine, the brand also extends across a robust website, multiple social platforms, tablet editions, mobile apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. Better Homes & Gardens fuels our readers’ passions to live a more colorful life through stunning visuals, a balance of substance and surface, and a blend of expert and reader ideas. Better Homes & Gardens is published 12 times a year with a rate base of 7.6 million.

Additional information may be found at www.bhg.com | Facebook: facebook.com/mybhg | Twitter: twitter.com/bhg | Pinterest: pinterest.com/bhg/ | Instagram: instagram.com/betterhomesandgardens.

ABOUT MEREDITH CORPORATION

Meredith Corporation (NYSE:MDP; www.meredith.com) has been committed to service journalism for more than 115 years. Today, Meredith uses multiple distribution platforms — including broadcast television, print, digital, mobile and video — to provide consumers with content they desire and to deliver the messages of its advertising and marketing partners. Meredith’s National Media Group reaches 175 million unduplicated American consumers every month, including 80 percent of U.S. Millennial women. Meredith’s Local Media Group includes 17 television stations reaching more than 11 percent of U.S. households.

SOURCE Better Homes and Gardens

For further information: Rebecca Zisholtz, 212/551.7087, [email protected]

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A Sculptor of the Female Gazeon February 13, 2020 at 9:54 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments

CONSIDER THE ROOSTER. The cockerel — vigilant herald of sunrise, barnyard strutter — has a long iconographic history, appearing on things like weather vanes and churches (as an emblem of St. Peter) and French soccer jerseys (as le coq gaulois, the unofficial national mascot). In the Chinese zodiac, the rooster symbolizes honesty, fidelity and protection. In art history’s vast bestiary, the rooster appears most famously in Pablo Picasso’s 1938 “Le Coq,” its rainbow-colored strokes of pastel expressing the chicken’s movements, its irascibility and (fittingly, for the artist) its virility.

Katharina Fritsch’s rooster is above all that. Over 14 feet high, with luxuriant plumage a shade of ultramarine blue Yves Klein might have envied, the polyester-and-fiberglass sculpture could be found in London’s Trafalgar Square, perched high on the square’s fourth plinth for the nearly two years it was there (it is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), piquant company for the traditional statues of self-serious heroes of history — King George IV, Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Havelock and Gen. Sir Charles James Napier, who occupy the other three. (A second rooster is in the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; a third will be shown this month at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles, accompanied by two other sculptures.) When the Trafalgar Square rooster was unveiled in 2013, then mayor Boris Johnson noted the irony that an unofficial emblem of France had taken roost in a place commemorating a British victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Fritsch’s cock, however, knows no nation. “The French think it’s their rooster; the Minnesotans think it’s their rooster. It’s everyone’s rooster,” she says with equanimity. Detached from its expected scale, context or hue — here is a chicken, it is blue — the animal seems to have flown in through a rift in the cosmic fabric, evidence of a sprightlier, less pedantic universe.

The dream life of things — animals of all kinds, but also lanterns and shells, strawberries and umbrellas, figures of saints and the Madonna — are what preoccupy Fritsch, a German sculptor famous for her eerily smooth, outsize polyester-and-fiberglass sculptures in bright, matte, addictive colors. All of us bring a set of private associations to our surroundings, and Fritsch’s work operates upon and expands this relationship, revising reality just enough to unsettle us and make the subliminal feel real and graspable and even weirdly covetable. The initial visual startle of her work quickly becomes subcutaneous in feeling: the realm of fantasy and superstition. Much of her work plays with recognizable imagery — especially that of Catholicism and the Brothers Grimm — but presents it as if pulled from some half-remembered illusion. Some of her early work is more overtly about subconscious fear, such as her 1993 sculpture “Rattenkönig (Rat‑King),” a circle of 16 rats over nine feet tall with a knot of entangled tails, which enlarges a spooky motif to its symbolic proportions.

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More unfinished sculptures in Fritsch’s studio, including one of her signature roosters. She works in polyester and fiberglass with acrylic paint or industrial lacquer.Credit…Bernhard Fuchs

What does it mean to see our fears and dreams take up physical space? Fritsch’s major 1988 work, “Tischgesellschaft (Company at Table),” features 32 blankly impassive, seated men, a nightmare vision of “identity dissolving in an infinite space,” as the artist described it in 2001, or what it might look like if all of my exes were invited to the same dinner party. As one draws closer, the men turn out to be all the same man: her boyfriend at the time, Frank Fenstermacher, of the German new wave band Der Plan. Since then, Fritsch’s oeuvre has expanded to increasingly ambiguous tableaus. In the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden in 2011, she placed a set of stylized figures, including a 5-foot-7 cadmium yellow Madonna; a trio of saints in cobalt violet, green and black; and a giant gray primeval man with a club. A black snake slithers in front of them. The piece is indicative of Fritsch’s larger role as an artist: This is sculpture not just as allegory but as performance, almost a kind of postmodern stand-up — and a potent exercise in what Susan Sontag called “radical juxtaposition,” surrounded, as it is, by works from the more famous men of sculpture, such as Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin and Picasso.

It can be difficult to locate what it is Fritsch’s sculptures are trying to say, exactly — but this isn’t a criticism. They seem familiar — the rats and succulent-looking fruit plucked from a long-lost fairy tale, the fluorescent Madonna and skulls pulled from an obscure passage of the New Testament — and yet the pieces refuse to supply an identifiable critique of or statement about the tropes we are so used to seeing contemporary art address: consumerism, gender and racial identity. (They certainly spark a certain desire to have them or to be near them that seems intentional — the weird, product-like quality a strawberry might attain when enlarged, cushily recumbent and colored blue.) But in their unknowability, in making us search for answers again and again to no avail, Fritsch has created a remarkable and unique body of work. It provokes sensations of nameless dread or desire rather than a clear reaction, a kind of working lexicon not of the things that haunt us but rather of what it is like to feel haunted.

IN THE DAYS before I met Fritsch in her studio in Düsseldorf, Germany, last fall, as the artist was preparing for her show at Matthew Marks Gallery, one of her animals in particular troubled me: the poodle. Popularized in part by Albrecht Dürer and Francisco Goya, who featured them in their paintings, the breed became the dog of choice for early 19th-century French prostitutes and later a fad among teenage girls of the 1950s, who put poodle appliqués on their circle skirts. When I lived in Berlin in 2010, standard poodles had become ironic pets among a certain arty crowd, disturbing in the way that only a living creature employed as a fashion accessory can be. In 1996, Fritsch completed “Kind Mit Pudeln (Child With Poodles),” in which four concentric circles of dogs surround a Christlike infant. The absurdity of the animal itself, with its kitschy pompoms, contrasts neatly with their menacing arrangement, which calls to mind the orgy scene from “Eyes Wide Shut,” with a hint of the final moment in “Rosemary’s Baby,” when the coven converges on the cradle.

“I hate poodles, I must say,” Fritsch says over breakfast at her studio, a vast skylit space not far from a large park that was once home to Düsseldorf’s zoo, which was bombed in 1943. Her upstairs atelier overlooks the rail yards. Fritsch is 64 but looks a decade younger; she has a wonderfully mordant, expressive face and a brainy gameness, and is wearing a beautiful shirt of creamy chamois yellow corduroy that once belonged to her father, an architect. Two assistants, young men, say hello; when I turn to greet a third, bent over a worktable, he turns out to be a sculpture. “Ideas emerge from my subconscious all the time,” she explains, sometimes when she’s in transit, in a car or on a train; others originate in her sleep. “I think everything can be a sculpture for me. From the beginning, I wanted to create a kind of middle world that took you behind the object again by yourself, a world that really surprises people like they haven’t seen the object before.”

Achieving this effect depends entirely on perfection of form. In the two-and-a-half-year-long process of creating the rooster, Fritsch moved the tail three times; the chest was especially difficult to get right, as she didn’t want it to resemble the proud chest of Germany’s imperial eagles, nor did she want “a weak chicken.” Since 2006, Fritsch has used a computer at different stages in the development of her prototypes — scanning an object, making a plaster cast she then painstakingly reshapes and remodels, then rescanning and reworking several times to get the shape and detailing precise. To rely simply on a scan, she says, results in work that is “completely flat. I don’t want to be sentimental about this, but to me it has an effect. You lose this third dimension and the sensuality of the materials, the smell and everything. You need that.” When I ask her how casting in polyester works, she opens a can of the viscous stuff and shows it to me, inhaling. “The smell is amazing,” she says.

In trying to pin her down on the various sources of her iconography, I soon feel uncomfortably like a Jungian analyst. One of my favorite of Fritsch’s sculptures, “Oktopus (Octopus)” (2010), which features a small deep-sea diver clutched in one of the creature’s long orange arms, has its origins in childhood fever dreams and Jules Verne, she tells me. When Fritsch was a child, her father liked to tease her by whipping open an antique encyclopedia to the page with a terrifyingly detailed octopus illustration, but now she greatly admires and even identifies with the intelligent animal. “They are like artists, because they can change their skin within seconds to reflect their environment. I think this is so incredible,” she says, explaining that when she embarks on an animal sculpture, she first learns everything she can about it from books and documentaries and even natural history experts. But creating an octopus prototype proved to be a major design challenge. “First, I tried to make a scan of a real one — we bought it from the fish shop — but you can’t scan flesh because it’s always moving. And so I had to be the octopus. I was the octopus. I was really feeling the movement, and I knew it had to be like this,” and here she imitates the ungainly cephalopod’s sideways slump, the extended arm, and all at once, I catch a glimpse of how Fritsch transmits an abstract idea into form.

Fritsch mixes her own pigments; downstairs, there’s an entire room for spray-painting. She’s secretive about exactly how she creates her colors, which are brought to a paint factory to make an industrial lacquer, but the color selection process is entirely intuitive — “I visualize it immediately,” she says. For decades now, she has worked within a recognizable palette, one that might feel ironic in the hands of another artist but here, applied to her identifiable yet enigmatic imagery, feels more sinister: In addition to her iconic celestial blue and a black so dense it seems to suck color from its surroundings, she often uses cobalt violet, calamine pink, cadmium yellow and a particular unearthly blue-green — a color scheme reminiscent of Prada ads from the mid-aughts. How completely a simple change of hue shifts our perception, I realize as we flip through one of her catalogs together.

Part of Fritsch’s genius is how her work seems to beg for interpretation. Is her octopus a self-portrait, an earnest re-creation of her girlhood nightmares or an attempt at taming those fears by making the creature tenderly comic? The sculpture is sensual enough that I can’t help but identify with it; at the same time, I begin to imagine what it might feel like to have one of those chubby arms hold me in its grasp. This kind of ambivalence, the search for deeper meaning and its almost inevitable unraveling through the sheer literalness of Fritsch’s creations — her “Rattenkönig” really is just 16 rats in a circle — is part of the experience of viewing her work, which is confounding, frustrating, funny and ultimately moving because of the search itself, the matte porelessness that resists, refuses, interpretation. And yet they are far too fine in their detail — and too affecting — to be anything close to kitsch.

Her sculpture of a pale pink cowrie shell, for instance, over nine feet tall and sweetly creepy, resembles a colossal vagina dentata, I unoriginally point out. “You can see it like this. I see it as a shell,” she replies.

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Fritsch’s “Hahn (Cock)” (2013), in London’s Trafalgar Square.Credit…Fiberglass, polyester resin, paint and stainless steel © Katharina Fritsch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Ivo Faber
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One of Fritsch’s most famous works, “Tischgesellschaft (Company at Table)” (1988), which features 32 seated men.Credit…Polyester, wood, cotton and paint © Katharina Fritsch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Nic Tenwiggenhorn

“AT 5, IT WAS clear to me that I would be an artist,” Fritsch tells me over lunch at an Italian place in Oberkassel, a bourgeois neighborhood on the other side of the Rhine where the experimental artist Joseph Beuys lived before his death in 1986. Fritsch’s maternal grandfather was a salesperson for Faber‑Castell, and his garage was filled, tantalizingly, with art supplies. “It was a paradise,” she recalls. “I was always fascinated by the pencils with all the colors.” Growing up in Langenberg in the 1950s and in Münster in the ’60s, both near working-class Essen, in the heart of the Ruhr valley, Germany’s heavy industry heartland, art wasn’t an obvious career path. “Maybe my parents were secretly afraid of my never making any money, but they really encouraged me to do that, to paint and to draw,” she says. “My childhood was very sensual. It was a very artistic atmosphere.” And a little gothic: Fritsch kept her religious maternal grandmother company on her many tours of German churches, including the famous 13th-century crypts at Bamberg cathedral. “It’s very impressive when you go as a child into the Catholic churches and you see these figures, and there’s something that’s very cruel about what you see, and I was completely attracted by that,” she says. “Bodies dangling from crosses and skeletons in glass tombs?” I ask. “Yes,” she laughs. “You have nightmares, but it’s so impressive, so strong.” At the same time, American culture, its music and tacky consumer products, was conquering West Germany. “I was a big fan of Mickey Mouse and Barbie,” she says. “Some parents would never allow their children to have that, but my parents or my grandparents, they were not so afraid of things like that. We — my friends and I — all wanted to be more American.” After her application to the Münster Academy of Art was rejected, she instead studied history and art history at the University of Münster. “Art history was terrible for me. It was dusty and lifeless. Art should be alive,” she says. The people at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the famous art school whose students had included Beuys, as well as Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, “seemed to be much cooler,” she adds.

One night in 1978, Fritsch went to Düsseldorf to see a performance by Beuys and the video art pioneer Nam June Paik, who, like Beuys, was teaching at the Kunstakademie at the time. The occasion was a memorial tribute to George Maciunas, a leading figure of Fluxus, the multidisciplinary art movement that fostered experimentation — initially in the form of radical performance — while also stressing the value of art’s role in everyday life. “It was something,” she recalls. “We went there in a little car with six people and the area around the Kunstakademie was pretty crowded. It was this new wave and punk thing that was going on there.” Carmen Knoebel, who was married to the artist Imi Knoebel, ran Stone im Ratinger Hof, a music venue that, much like New York’s Mudd Club of the same era, attracted the art crowd; there, the likes of Sigmar Polke and Beuys listened to Krautrock bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk. Fritsch applied to the city’s Kunstakademie, Germany’s best art school, and got in.

Thanks in part to Beuys’s legacy, Düsseldorf in the ’60s and ’70s represented a place of radical liberation, becoming an essential force in contemporary art. (Beuys was dismissed from teaching in 1972 after he admitted 50 students to his class who had been rejected by the academy.) His influence lived on at the school in its notable painters, like Kiefer and Richter, but also touched Fritsch’s generation of students, among them the photographers Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, the latter a good friend and frequent collaborator of Fritsch’s. Beuys believed that everyone not only could be but already was an artist. But this everything-goes attitude was as much about the tumult of postwar West Germany as it was a reflection of Beuys’s own philosophy. This was a generation of artists born into a chastened, broken Germany in the aftermath of World War II, yet who came of age during the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, in which the industrial Ruhr area played a central role. The country’s re-emergence as a modern industrial superpower with an uneasy relationship to its recent past defines the art of this period, which didn’t so much address this identity crisis as simply embody it, resulting in one of the most thrillingly innovative periods in contemporary art. As Beuys, whose most famous work includes planting 7,000 oak trees around the industrial West German city of Kassel in 1982, once wrote: “Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline [sic].” All German artists of Fritsch’s generation, in one form or another, have long been preoccupied with the question of what art should be and who gets to decide, and their work reflects profound ambivalence about the human-made world and consumer culture.

In straddling a line between the symbolic and literal, living things and objects, Fritsch’s art is itself an ambivalent comment about the elevation of the everyday to a higher realm and the fruitless search for identity and truth in a rapidly changing world. But her very particular aesthetic has always felt larger in scope than the postwar milieu that fostered her, and her work seems to suggest references of all kinds, from René Magritte to Kazimir Malevich — and, of course, a certain essentially punk desire to provoke. When she first entered the Kunstakademie in the late 1970s, painting still dominated, and Fritsch found freedom in the sculpture department, as well as a mentor in the artist Fritz Schwegler (who had been a colleague of Beuys’s) and many friends whom she credits as inspiration, including the Minsk, Belarus-born sculptor Alexej Koschkarow, with whom she’s exhibited work on several occasions. She attributes her initial interest in multiples and industrial processes to her grandfather back in Langenberg, not Andy Warhol. At first, she experimented with ready-mades, spray-painting flowers and toy cars with automobile paint. It was in 1987 that she made her breakthrough work, the life-size cadmium yellow Madonna, which became one of her first public works when the Catholic city of Münster installed it in a town square that year (the sculpture subsequently had its nose broken and body graffitied a few times). “When I first painted the Madonna yellow, it was really something,” she says. “Now everyone is doing things like that, but at the time, it was really a kind of invention.” Fritsch, who recently retired as a professor of sculpture at the academy, where she taught for nine years, laments the loss of that kind of low-stakes improvisation and openness to new ideas, new forms and new names. The Germany she lives in now more or less stands alone as the leader of a fraying democratic Europe, which only enhances some of the mysterious drama of Fritsch’s sculptures. What does a Christian symbol mean at a time when much of the developed world is turning away refugees and imprisoning asylum seekers? What is a fairy tale if not a desperate search for home? Fritsch’s art raises these questions but refuses to answer them. In the same way that her work defies interpretation, the artist herself doesn’t read too much into her formative years, which she sums up as lean and filled with exhilarating, if toxic and rash-inducing, material experiments. “Back then, everybody lived in very bad circumstances and the market wasn’t so strong,” she says. “We didn’t care so much; nobody had any money. It was an innocent time. We were innocent creatures.”

DEPENDING ON ONE’S mood, the odd sense of dislocation that Fritsch’s work evokes might strike you as irreverent, cleverly transgressive or something more insidious. But the longer I’m in its presence, the more I sense a kind of moral intelligence in her objects, which distance us from our well-worn perceptions and feelings. Then there’s the implicit feminism in a female sculptor looking at men — still, oddly, something of a rarity in contemporary art. Fritsch’s men — which have included, over the years, a monk, a doctor and a be-toqued chef — call to mind, respectively, Caspar David Friedrich, Faust and an employee of a Bavarian beer hall. They are not in any way erotic. She uses friends as models, men with a certain kind of vanity, she says; the newest work she’s preparing for the upcoming show includes two male figures holding mobile phones. The models were the art historian Robert Fleck and the artist Matthias Lahme, and the piece is a reflection of Fritsch’s increasing concern about the disconnections and false promises of a digital age — our total absorption into unreal realms and the particular seductiveness of this form of consumption. We peruse the internet for things that we probably shouldn’t: homes, partners, employment, an unnamed and impossible fulfillment. The oblivious blue men clutching their phones are unsettling not because they look so different from us but because they are exactly the people who surround us, who perhaps are us.

“I must say that this generation of mine, we were the power women of the 1980s, and we wanted to be strong and straightforward. But then the generation afterward wanted to be feminine, to look nice and to have children, and they also wanted to have a big career. It’s such a pressure,” she says, referring to the ongoing debate about gender roles in Germany, where women occupy powerful positions in politics but are far less prominent in art and business. While Fritsch is single and has neither children nor poodles — she spends much of her days happily occupied with running her large studio — she’s surrounded by a circle of artist friends and is very close with her mother and sister. Sculpture, in particular at this kind of scale, demands very hard physical labor, and casting her molds also involves contracting with industrial workshops staffed exclusively by men: “You get more and more conscious of that, how they treat you and how they often don’t listen to you.” The fabricators, she explains, will often speak to her male assistants instead of to her. “And then I say, ‘Look, please, at me and talk to me. I’m giving the order, I’m paying you.’ Only then, you are in the stupid position — then you are the old bitch.”

In the market, her work does not sell in the same league as Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, whose careers have, at times, seemed to parallel hers: Fritsch made the Madonna in 1987; that same year, also in Münster, Koons installed a statue of the traditional German figure of the Kiepenkerl, a traveling merchant; she completed “Tischgesellschaft,” the large-scale work featuring Fenstermacher, in 1988; Koons debuted his series of sculptures and paintings featuring himself with his lover, the porn star Cicciolina, “Made in Heaven,” in 1989. Fritsch weathered the art world’s rapaciousness in the 1980s, refusing to churn out work too fast or under pressure: As such, she never turned cynical. She rarely speaks to the press. But she is understandably disappointed that she isn’t spoken of in the same breath as some of her male counterparts nor widely credited for her influence on turn-of-the-century sculpture. At the same time, her unwillingness to please has, she believes, protected her from a factory mentality she sees in male celebrity artists, from a “heaviness” that isn’t just about literal weight.

With this in mind, I ask her if she thinks her work has shifted in meaning through the years, as the art world has changed, not to mention the larger world around her, drowning, as we are, in images of things, from memes and emojis to styles that quickly disseminate and dissipate. It hasn’t, she tells me. “The first picture I have in my mind is still the one that is important.”

I think of this a week later, back home in Chicago, touring future kindergartens for my 4-year-old, when I observe a classroom of young children Magic Markering identical photocopies of a rooster. As they carefully fill in the cartoonishly thick black outline of its body — this is the kind of school at which staying in the lines is encouraged — I wonder if this will become the prototypical notion of “rooster” that sticks, the picture that springs to mind when they hear its name. (Few of these urban preschoolers are likely to have spent much time around live chickens.) What could this picture possibly mean to them? The coloring-book rooster is merely an echo of an echo, a signifier absurdly distant from the hectic, strident reality of the animal itself, so incidental, in this context, to its own representation. Once upon a time, our forebears gathered around a fire to tell stories; they painted the bison that sustained them, lining cave walls with animals and hunting scenes filled with tenderness and meaning. In doing this, they created what was, for them, a resonant collective iconography; now, of course, these prehistoric paintings are touching in a different way. This, I think, is why Fritsch’s work continues to unsettle: Its distance from reality feels unnervingly reflective of the way we live today, increasingly remote from our own animal instincts, our original fears, hungers and joys — the sacral coding that helped remind us, before we made art or commerce of identity, of who we were.

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6 Emerging Designers to Know This Fashion Monthon February 12, 2020 at 5:03 pm

Posted on February 20, 2020 By In Uncategorized With disabled comments
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Credit…Portrait by BFA/Zach Whitford. Photo by Hatnim Lee.

Kenneth Nicholson, 37

Kenneth Nicholson debuted his namesake brand in January 2016, with an offering of subtle, nontraditional men’s wear: sand-colored linen tunics, wide-cut white linen trousers and billowy cotton button-downs in soothing earth tones. This week, he showed his first women’s pieces with a joyful mixed-gender runway show in New York. “From the beginning, women have bought some of my men’s pieces,” he says, “So it was a natural evolution.” Nicholson, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in Houston, Texas, and knew from a young age that he wanted to be a fashion designer — although he arrived at this goal by an unusual path. After studying at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, he joined the U.S. Navy in 2004 and worked on a military base in Afghanistan for a year; he later spent a brief spell in Phuket, Thailand, where he worked as an interior design consultant. These travels have deeply influenced his men’s wear, which has become known for its loose silhouettes, soft hues and fluid interpretation of masculinity. Nicholson’s new women’s pieces, which demonstrate his taste for unusual textiles, include a draped one-shouldered top made from soft-pink terry cloth patterned with white stars, a flared knee-length khaki skirt finished with a fringe of wooden beads and a matching white mesh top and skirt trimmed with a shaggy high-pile fabric that resembles upholstery fabric. The collection, which explored notions of home and heritage, was appropriately titled “From Grandma’s Couch.”


Wei Ge, 26, and Aoyu Zhang, 35

The idea for KEH was born in 2017 when friends Wei Ge and Aoyu Zhang were waiting in line at the opening of the Dover Street Market boutique in Singapore. The long queue gave the duo, both designers, a chance to discuss the next steps in their respective careers — and their shared ambition to start their own label. They’d met five years before at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University in Beijing. Ge went on to become an assistant designer at the popular Chinese label Zuczug while Zhang earned a master’s degree in business from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. After two years of development, the pair launched their own brand — choosing the name KEH simply for its pleasing sound — in New York in March 2019. From the beginning, they wanted to create gender-fluid clothing that represented what they and their friends wanted to wear. As Ge says, “KEH deconstructs and mixes elements from both men’s wear and women’s wear.” The brand’s fall 2020 collection, which the designers showed in New York this season, was inspired by the photographer Nick Knight’s surreal images of roses and includes tailored garments made from environmentally friendly cotton as well as a cape constructed from pieces of mottled gray wool arranged to resemble the petals of a flower.


Claire McKinney, 26, and Sophie Andes-Gascon, 27

Claire McKinney and Sophie Andes-Gascon both moved to New York in 2011 to study fashion design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. McKinney grew up in Portland, Oregon, where, as a child, she would make costumes using pillowcases and blankets borrowed from the family’s linen closet. Andes-Gascon was born in Manaus, Brazil, but later moved to Maryland, where her father taught her how to sew and knit. For a time, the two classmates shared an apartment, and in 2015 they both landed jobs as design consultants for the brand Maryam Nassir Zadeh, where they still work. They each continued to create their own clothes on the side and eventually formed a partnership; in 2019, they launched SC103, which specializes in custom dyes and handcrafted elements, with a runway show in downtown Manhattan that was, in a departure from the traditional fashion presentation format, open to the public. “We reject the idea of exclusivity and embrace an open and democratic policy,” says McKinney. “We want to share this experience with people outside the fashion world.” The name SC103 is a nod to the pair’s personal bond: It’s derived from the first letters of their names, combined with the building number of their first shared apartment and studio. For fall 2020, the designers will show brightly colored hand-knits paired with workwear-inspired trousers, armor-like garments made from linked leather panels, and shrunken sweaters and pants designed to mimic ones that have been washed on too high a heat.


Nensi Dojaka, 26

Nensi Dojaka graduated from Central Saint Martins less than a year ago but is already presenting her third collection in London. She was one of five designers selected by Fashion East, a nonprofit organization that cultivates and promotes young brands. Born in Tirana, Albania, Dojaka grew up with a deep-rooted love of art; her family didn’t live near institutions with regular exhibitions, so she created her own imaginative drawings. Those early works tended to depict colorful panels arranged in puzzle-like formations, and you can see traces of similar abstract patterns in her clothing today. Dojaka moved to the United Kingdom in 2009 to attend high school and later studied at both the London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins. Last March, her graduate collection — which comprised deconstructed dresses made from layers of different types of sheer fabrics — caught the eye of the Canadian luxury retailer Ssense and, with the store’s encouragement, Dojaka decided to continue and build her namesake label. “My woman is complex, she embodies a perfect marriage of severity and delicacy,” says Dojaka of her ideal wearer. “I try to translate this idea into my clothes, creating delicacy from severity and vice versa.” Her fall 2020 collection will include draped black jersey dresses cut to give them a subtle movement, and a series of mini dresses with thin straps and cutouts. The designer frequently turns to ’90s-era magazines for inspiration and nods to that decade will be as present as ever this season.


Amy Trinh, 28, and Evan Phillips, 28

Since meeting at Central Saint Martins, Amy Trinh and Evan Phillips have built impressive resumes: Trinh interned at Louis Vuitton, Craig Green and Stella McCartney; Phillips assisted Richard Quinn with his first collections before working on development at Simone Rocha. Both of their careers shifted course, though, when Trinh got engaged in 2018 and discovered that the type of unconventional wedding dress she wanted didn’t exist. “I realized there was something missing,” she says, “namely, dresses that could be worn more than once.” She reached out to Phillips to help her create a dress, and that conversation became the starting point for their bridal-inspired ready-to-wear label WED, which debuted last year. The pair’s goal is to create garments that can be worn both on and long after a person’s wedding day. “It’s about making bridal wear more sustainable and changing the mentality that a wedding dress should be boxed up and never worn again,” Phillips says. The pair also want to reimagine what wedding attire means in a world where the concept of marriage is changing and becoming more inclusive. Their new collection, which will be their second to date, will be shown by appointment in Paris. “The garment drapes are based on a swirling movement,” explains Phillips of the pieces, which include an A-line taffeta skirt with a dramatic spiral-like silhouette. This season, the designers have also collaborated with the 300-year-old English mill Stephen Walters, and have repurposed many of the company’s dead-stock fabrics, from a quilted jacquard to a striped satin.


Shuting Qiu, 25

Shuting Qiu was born in Hangzhou, China, and began dreaming up ideas for fantastical garments as a young child. Hoping to make those early designs a reality, she moved to Antwerp at 18 to study at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts. There, under the instruction of the designer Walter Van Beirendonck, the head of the school’s fashion department, she cultivated her eclectic tastes and love of unusual combinations of colorful prints. The collection she presented at the end of her bachelor’s degree in 2017 — defined by extravagant silhouettes and loud clashing patterns — was selected by the online fashion platform and store Vfiles to appear in its spring 2019 runway show during New York Fashion Week and she launched her own brand not long after. If there is a common theme between each of Qiu’s collections, it is references to travel and the traditional clothing she’s seen in parts of Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Accordingly, her prints — which range from floral motifs to vibrant checks and plaids — come in rich contrasting colors and are often finished with intricate embroidery. She will show her latest collection, which will include faux fur, by appointment in Paris.

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