Arsenic and Old Lace

I seem to be seeing lace-inspired products everywhere lately. Lace is a material that many might associate with their grandmother's curtains and chair doilies, or the petticoats donned by Laura and Mary in Little House. Perhaps not the most "edgy" or exciting of materials - right?

When one considers lace solely as an aesthetic object without all of the frou-frou assocations, it is really quite beautiful - reminiscent of patterns made in nature (such as those in a spider's web). What started this train of thought was the pair of lovely earrings I picked up in New York in February:



Little did I know, that was only the beginning.

The newness of these lace-inspired objects is really dependent upon their context, which has often been shifted. To follow are a few of my favorite examples of postmodern riffs on lace.

Marcel Wanders' Crochet Table is a new favorite of mine. It has fantastic texture - I just want to reach out and touch it! I especially love its inherent contradiction - it's made of a perfectly sturdy resin material but its delicate appearance is a deception. If the table were actually made of lace, it would of course collapse. From Moss.


And then there's Flor's Amazing Lace tiles, available at CB2. The pattern is abstracted enough, I think, to keep it looking modern.


While I have tried to show atypical uses of lace (i.e. on furniture and other design objects) and have thus avoided any clothing examples, this cut-out lace belt is just gorgeous. From Anthropologie.



Finally, we have Tord Boontje's until dawn curtain. Pretty much everybody knows about it by now, but I couldn't not include it because it's just too pretty to ignore. Even in my most whimsical snowflake-cutting episodes, I could never have dreamed of producing something as fantastical as this. Thank goodness someone else did!