Shopping in Stockholm (/falling in love)

The Scandinavians are well known for their distinct and innovative sense of design, and this is certainly one of the reasons I was most excited to journey North. Before this trip my personal encounters with Swedish design were fairly limited to the mismatched Hanna Anderson outfits in which my mother dressed me regularly until the age of eleven. While I’d like to think my tastes have evolved beyond the stripe-on-inverted-stripe aesthetic of my onetime go-to label, I found that much of the same playful attitude imbues Swedish decor in the home. Here are some of the shops from which I found it the most difficult to not shoplift:

Svenskt Tenn:

Far and away the most beautiful store I visited in Stockholm, this enchanting world of decor was described by our Swedish guide as the “anti-Ikea.” The description was apt; for everything Ikea is bare-boned, minimal, and mass produced, the goods here are fanciful, ornate and elegant. Unfortunately, it is also everything Ikea is not in regards to market-cornering pricing. One day I’ll be able to afford a calfskin bench, but until then my Instagrams will have to tide me over. 

Leave it to the Swedes to create a festive contemporary update to Grandparents’ Beach House chic. 

Splatter Me

After Chanel sent its models down the spring runway looking like the palettes of extremely organized watercolorists, the “painterly” trend has been cropping up everywhere, including in home design. Since I’m all for bold colors and particularly talented at uneven paint jobs, it’s taken much of my resolve not to drench all of my furniture in a myriad of Benjamin Moore samples. So long as I’m holding steady I’ve been trolling the internet for more marketable examples of this aesthetic. Here are some of my favorites:

Portrait of the Wall as a Young Wall

Collected masterpieces awaiting installation.

I like to live by the theory that our wall hangings should aptly mimic our life trajectory. If you’re anything like me, your arrival at the now ubiquitously trendy “gallery wall” arose organically through a progression relative to your general life path.

Assuming you lived under the care of fairly liberal-minded parents whose new-age child rearing philosophies permitted “creative expression” to (occasionally) interfere with the color dynamic of a home, your immediate surroundings likely developed accordingly along with your age and interests. To look back through my own first attempts at decor is to follow an impressively comprehensive story of my young life. 

After the first childhood scribblings tacked askew on a pastel colored wall I began curating a more narrowly focused collection, prioritizing subject matter over medium to result in a vast display of work with one common theme, namely anything featuring ponies. Outgrowing that trend, I moved right along to representations of budding childhood friendships, challenging formalist method with my proclivity towards blurry polaroids more often than not taken on my trampoline. As I entered my so-called “tween” years, I gravitated, as many females this age are wont to do, towards a more realist aesthetic, favoring photographic renderings of artistic subjects in the vein of, say, Aaron Carter. After that came the requisite bevy of SPRING BREAK snapshots, painstakingly cultivated to achieve an accurate representation of the very coolenss of my high school friends (just in case our iridescent Michael Stars tees and velour Juicy pants didn’t clue you in). 

Eventually, and perhaps somewhat reluctantly, realizing the frivolity of those, I moved on to a tastefully curated mix of fun-loving yet (relatively) mature group shots interspersed with a few choice concert posters from bands especially selected to reflect my supremely hip yet undeniably individual taste (with perhaps a SPRING BREAK photo or two remaining in an ironic way). The latter mix got me through four years of college, with the help of a couple dozen rolls of double-stick tape, and a not insignificant percentage of Shutterfly’s business. And then what? Once I left college and moved into a real (read: small, likely roach laden and exorbitantly overpriced) apartment, it seemed that my wall hangings should adequately reflect this maturation (so, at the very least, have frames on them and be hung with something more dependable than double stick Victoria’s Secret brand body tape). One thing I learned quickly is that putting a frame on just about anything will make it look worthy of prominent wall placement. Given my limited budget and proclivity towards hoarding this was a valuable realization. Given the price point at Surprise Surprise and my ever-dependable cache of spray paint, it was also easily acted upon. 

Things framed on my wall right now include but are not limited to: coasters from various bars (some more beer-saturated than others), pages cut out of auction catalogs, oversized postcards, magazine covers, baseball tickets, travel souvenirs, calendar images and paintings purchased for 75 cents at a central New York flea market. As for serving as a reflection of my life, I’d say that about sums it up.

An Outsider's Take on NYFW: Coats, Coats, Sweaters and Coats

I don’t consider myself much of a fashionista, but the looks spotted on the streets this NYFW (yeah, I guess there was some cool stuff on the runways, too) were f*ing incredible. In perhaps the only positive outcome, besides the occasional decent “snowstagram,” of New York’s polar past few weeks, the city’s stylish masses flocked to Lincoln center unable to ignore one serious consideration: keep warm. As such, streets swarmed with layers on layers of coats, hats, sweaters (even, be still, my heart, more than a few turtlenecks!), coats and more coats swaddled around fashion’s finest. 

Since I’m a cold, cold person with a dark heart, I live for cold weather clothing, and the looks I saw this week had me seriously considering a buffalo-hunting trip out west so that I, too, might procure my very own wearable hide. 

I had to keep from drooling while clicking through Adam Katz Sinding’s gallery of street style looks for W magazine. Eva Chen expectedly nailed it in a killer purple coat that looks like something Willy Wonka would wear to tour Siberia (and I mean that as the highest praise).

Someone showed up in a pea coat bold enough to wake me from the snowstorm-induced daze under which I’ve been operating for the past three weeks (how the $*#% is it February already?!) and a hat which may finally present a solution to getting lost from my friends at the bar. 

Lauren Santo Domingo got a little black fox to hold down her lapel. (I’d like one of those, please!), and Lynn Yeager reigned over everyone in a drapey hide which I feel should have been hiding scrambling style bloggers in a Fashion Week version of The Nutcracker’s Mother Ginger. Also, any New Yorker is lying if she says she hasn’t wanted to crawl into one of these at some point over the last few weeks.  

I was transported back to my kilt-wearing private middle school days by this tartan dream, and reminded of the era of Furbies with this orange fuzzball. Louis Vuitton made Little Red Riding Hood a style icon, and someone (very) seriously wore a feather duster. New York’s lumberjack invasion undoubtedly proved very confusing for the native hipsters, who, miffed that the fashionable set got their hands on their flannels, have subsequently declared them “uncool.” For dessert there was Neapolitan ice cream. 

Thank you and goodnight; I’m off with a crossbow to whatever mythical land Eva Chen’s coat-animal inhabits.