Mark C. O'Flaherty

The cultural response to the events of 2020 will be fascinating. The business of fashion and design will change as both reflect on and react to the consequences of the current disruption. How designer, author and DJ Virgil Abloh processes these events will undoubtedly be radical. His work has always mixed polemic with humour: from his cult Off-White label to his menswear collections for Louis Vuitton, where he has been artistic director since 2018.
His forays into furniture design are no exce...

This ethereal sculpture show is connecting cultures through contemporary art in AlUla

The artist may be best known for his sculpture, but a forthcoming retrospective proves his minimalist furniture was just as revolutionary.

Kelly Wearstler is seriously jet-lagged. Her flight from Japan landed at LAX in the early hours and she’s already hard at work with her team of 50 in her 6,000sq ft studio, housed in a 1960s Craig Ellwood modernist building in West Hollywood. It is not a remarkable day. “I’ve flown to Hong Kong for a three-hour meeting many times and got straight back on the plane home,” she recalls.
To say Wearstler – a creator of textiles, furniture and sculpture as well as commercial and private interior p...

Collaborators in life and art, James Crump and Ronnie Sassoon have been spending a lot of time commuting between their apartment in SoHo, downtown New York, and a second home in Connecticut, where they are working on a documentary about the architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer. ‘He was so prolific,’ says James, ‘but our film, Breuer’s Bohemia, is focused on his residential practice and how it exploded in the early 1950s on the East Coast, and in Connecticut in particular. The area i...

The 2017 documentary about influential fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez made for compelling viewing. Subtitled 1970: Sex, Fashion & Disco, it captured the era and his supercharged aesthetic with élan. The film is testament to the resurgence of interest in fashion illustration over the past decade, with major exhibitions and books buoying the art form. But while the focus is nearly always on drawings of women, some notable figures in fashion illustration over the past 100 years – Puerto Rico-...

French cooking is just an excuse to eat French bread. Country pâté? Goes on bread. Escargots with parsley butter? It’s a dip. The bread is everything....

“The moon will always play a significant role in the human future,” says Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni, which showed its Moon Walk collection of furniture at Milan’s Salone del Mobile earlier this year (available online at LuisaViaRoma). “It is home to new prospects and new explorations. It represents a conquest, but also a starting point. It is a destination and yet the beginning of a new journey ahead.” Risso’s words resonate in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the fi...

There is a wealth of family history on display in the Paris apartment of Alice Lemoine and Benjamin Paulin (pictured), son of visionary furniture designer Pierre Paulin. Situated in Barbès, a short walk from Gare du Nord, it is furnished with a mixture of Paulin classics and antiques from the castles (there are two) that belong to Alice’s side of the family.
‘I grew up with a lot of the furniture you see here,’ she explains. ‘My grandmother was someone with a lot of style and my mother actual...

Strong as the darkest rock, with the freshness of air, Luna Rossa Carbon brings together steam-distilled botanicals and synthetics in a mineral-forward mix: metallic notes of Lavender, green Citrus of Vert de Bergamote from Italy, radiant Wood of Patchouli and dry Amber of Ambroxan.

Engineered as much as designed, the bottle for Prada Luna Rossa Carbon develops the visual themes of the Prada Luna Rossa line, but using radically different materials. It has the visual depth of slate, coal or je...

You’ll love the return of Wild Honey at the Sofitel London St James – but you’ll see red in the rooms

A new V&A exhibition shows how the photographer creates his surreal magic – Mark C. O'Flaherty talks to him, and his key collaborators about their unique approach to image making

Themes are taken to extremes at the new Roxbury Hotel in rural New York State

The works of Milanese architect Gio Ponti offer a bold way to explore 20th-century design in Italy.

The vast subterranean hall opposite Madame Tussauds in London has a curious life story. Once a hub of industrial innovation (it was a concrete testing bunker instrumental in the creation of the Channel Tunnel) the space has been used for the past few years as a blank canvas for art and fashion events, with well-dressed guests trooping through its murky loading bays before descending into 14,000sq ft of dazzling lights, champagne and photographers.
Next month, Ambika P3 – as the space is now k...