Niké Bada

Bermuda-based concept store Merch. launched their little + local campaign on Small Business Saturday to remind the public that shopping on island and at small, independent businesses can have a huge impact on the local economy. 

Bermudian documentary photographer and visual storyteller Nicola Muirhead used the various lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 as a way of challenging her creativity while coming to terms with the fear and anxiety she felt for the future. 

Converse continues to keep relevant via a deluge of collaborations including one with Tyler the Creator that dropped earlier this year.

Designed by ACLA Architecture as a celebration of the tropics, the Stargazing Pavilion perched as it is atop a hill at Villa Being, Tobago makes great use of richly detailed hardwood doors and windows to frame an uninterrupted views of land, sea and sky.

 

We recently stumbled across this fantastic piece of mid-century modern furniture which was produced in the 1950s in-house by Vynex, an Australian-based fabric company that was a division of ICI.

We have long been a fan of Camper shoes for their quirky, whimsical and often amusing take on footwear, but we also love when they collaborate in a thoughtful way which they have done here. Camper have developed a limited edition reimagining of the original model of their distinctive "stepping islands" or "walking islands" boot in conjunction with the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), a programme of the International Trade Center, a joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.  

 

Japanese designer Kodai Iwamoto has incorporated hegi, a traditional technique for making roof shingles and the walls of religious shrines, in the manufacture of his furniture line called Pari Pari, so named after an onomatopoeic Japanese word that describes the sound of breaking glass or ice.

H&M

Fashion icon Iris Apfel has joined together with Swedish retailer H&M on this collection which is stated to be a portal to a truer you, a gateway to creativity, and a path to personal style. Famed for her bright colours and pattern clashing skills, Apfel is the instantly recognizable and infinitely inspirational reigning queen of personal style. The Iris Apfel x H&M collection gives us a peek into her refreshingly bold and uncompromisingly unique universe.

A pretty, but pedestrian, collection from Jason Wu to kick off fashion month.

The gorgeously graphic Aline chair by Willie Tay and Christophe Gaubert was developed with the support of National University of Singapore's Design Incubation Centre as part of an outdoor furniture collection created for the first net zero energy building at the University's School of Design and Environment.

Venerable fashion designer Meiling Esau and online store and creative studio Papaiÿo have collaborated on their first collection titled 'Wren'.

We all know the saying "history is written by the victors" and there has been a long tradition of celebrating people and events we now publicly recognise as problematic. What we hear less about and are less apt to remember are the persons treated as collateral damage, those whose blood and toil were exploited along the way such as the estimated 400,000 enslaved Africans who were transported to Barbados during the 17th and 18th centuries while the island was a British colony.

2021 saw a number of monuments to colonialism overturned in the UK and more steps are being taken to recognise those who suffered, but as far as we are aware, no monument has yet been conceived or built in the West Indies that matches the scale of this memorial designed by Adjaye Associates, the architecture studio led by RIBA Royal Gold Medalist David Adjaye who has spoken publicly about the need for more memorials and monuments dedicated to the victims of slavery. 

London-based designer Ilse Crawford and Danish design company Carl Hansen & Son have once again collaborated to reimagine five of Hans J. Wegner’s earliest designs.

This collaboration between Art of Ping Pong and French illustrator Marylou Faure who aspires to create works that invoke joy scores all the points.

British-Bermudian artist Charlie Godet Thomas takes a diverse approach to his art with pieces that intersect between the disciplines of  writing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, photography, sound and video.  

Anya Hindmarch

Single-use plastic bags continue to be popular as they are cheap and convenient even five years after the British government imposed a tax on their use. Before her time first with her 'I Am Not A Plastic Bag' launched with supermarket giant Sainsbury’s fourteen years ago, and then later with her 'I Am A Plastic Bag' campaign, British designer Anya Hindmarch has always led the charge on raising awareness of the environmental damage caused by single-use shopping bags. She returns once again with The Universal Bag, her latest sustainable fashion initiative.

Designers doubled their reach this Spring. Why limit yourself to one gender when you can cater to all?

We are not huge motorheads, but even we were excited when we caught sight of the new BMW iX which was unveiled at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

Trinidadian architect and designer Laura Narayansingh designed the Bush House as her family's home with the aim of showing that with thoughtful design, a lot can be achieved with a brief constrained by both topography and budget.