In celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, June Object of the Week posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection.  In 1987, artist and designer Dan Friedman was commissioned by his friends and collaborators Willi Smith and Laurie Mallet to design the interior of a new Paris retail store for their clothing brand WilliWear. In...

This stainless steel sugar bowl designed by architect Michael Graves for Italian metalwork manufacturer Alessi S.p.A. is part of a line of kitchen and table wares that have found their way into homes around the world. Graves’s model 9093 whistling kettle of 1985 was the initial object in the range. The conical shape–with its polished...

Though not directly connected to the Memphis Group, a collective of young designers based in Milan during the 1980s, this Memphis cocktail glass suggests a similar postmodernist approach to design. Postmodernism rejects the severe aesthetic and sweeping and universal claims of modernism in favor of “complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.”[1] The playful design...