Jason Wu debuts at New York Fashion Week, a thrill to see!

We’re two weeks away from New York Fashion Week, the festivities kicking off on February 9th with the usual fanfare. We enjoyed attending several shows last September and look forward to seeing what the world’s top designers have been up to in the interim. Given there is always a relationship between fashion and design, we thought we’d highlight one of our clients on the blog today, as we believe there is inspiration in this story for any company regularly debuting design products.

Marivi Calvo with LZF's Armadillo.

Larry Lazin, CEO of Global Lighting, brought Marivi Calvo to our attention. BB, as her friends and family call her, is the co-founder of LZF-Lamps with her real-life partner Sandro Tothill, and she has always approached the release of products with a fashion designer’s attention to detail. We asked her to explain the highly considered nature of her orchestration, which Larry deems choreography at its finest, and we couldn’t agree more:

BB: When we are working with designs for our products, I am not just thinking about the product itself but how it will be presented. I am thinking concurrently about the product and the shows or showrooms in which they will be displayed. There are actually two different tasks I am attempting to achieve at the same time.

With this shot of the Armadillo, you can almost feel the swish of a skirt trailing along the runway, a la Jason Wu above!

Adroyt: Can you explain how you developed this way of “seeing” or would you say it is innate?

BB: We know the product because we created it—and we should know it, so there is a natural affinity to “seeing” all aspects of it!

Sandro: I’d like to chime in here because I think this will explain her level of orchestration. When I met BB, she was crazily designing suits for a ballet she wanted to do. They were made of antique bits and bobs, such as tin funnels and cake molds! Her work had gone far beyond what some people would categorize as art, and even though those suits were garments that a person would wear, they were works of art in every sense of the word. The group she was working with was doing the entire ballet—writing the music, choreographing the dance and creating the costumes. She was to the point of taking photographs of the suits on the models when I met her, and the project was simply amazing!

When we branched into the lights, I knew BB could have gone in any direction and the tack we took came about very fortuitously! The lights we make now were born on a summer evening when we were trying to decide the veneer for the kitchen cabinetry of our home. We had a client who always bought paintings from her and he had collections of catalogs—tiles, flooring and other materials. He showed us some psychedelic reconstructed wood veneers that were extremely cool but were fragile and kept breaking. We had placed them on the light table, which BB switched on as it grew dark outside. We turned to look at them and it was so perfect because this was clearly an “aha moment.”

LZF's Mikado swirls like feathery fabric swishing along the catwalk!

Adroyt: We think this story truly represents the spirit of design at its most inspired; we applaud any design team that has such a fortuitous experience but there is a discipline to creating highly-refined products that must go hand-in-hand with serendipity. This is present in the LZF model in the level of attention BB lavishes on their designs, production and presentation, as she approaches each from an aesthete’s point of view. The company’s attention to detail is reminiscent of this quote from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.” 

BB is one of those true students of aesthetics and her story of living as a young painter in New York City, making her way along the Bowery as Jean-Michel Basquiat scavenged for construction waste on which to paint nearby, is one that most artists don’t even dare to dream. She tells Larry Lazin about this experience on the Global Lighting blog today. Click here and you’ll find a fascinating story awaiting you.

Footnote: A contingient of our favorite bloggers/social media friends will be in town for Jason Wu's fall fashion debut thanks to Brizo. I was amongst the first fortunate group to be invited (the proof is here!) and all I can say is they are in for a wonderful ride!