8 posts tagged "Lindsey Thornburg"
Bohemian Bliss On The LES
“There’s something fundamentally hippie-dippy about us,” said cloak designer Lindsey Thornburg last night at the opening of she and Some Odd Rubies designers Ruby Canner and Summer Phoenix’s new Lower East Side store. “We just accept it. It’s always going to be there.”
Indeed, the trio’s new shop, which, appropriately named One One Four, is nestled on 114 Stanton Street, has its bohemian elements, like vintage dressing screens, raw wood floors, and racks that hang from braided fabric. And it would seem that, considering Thornburg was raised between Montana and Colorado and Canner was brought up on a commune in Tennessee, the boutique’s cool, rural accents, like animal skulls on display tables, pink roses in old water jugs, and a rusted metal lamp in the shape of a peace sign, stem from the designers’ childhood memories. “It’s earthy and institutional!” jokes Canner, who met Thornburg back in 2003.
The store carries pieces from ready-to-wear label In Residence, sunglasses by Thierry Lasry, shoes from Pointer, and a host of unusual albeit covetable jewelry. But naturally, the main event is its founders collections. Walking by a rack displaying her fall range among Some Odd Rubies’ reimagined vintage wares, Thornburg noted that she found the inspiration for her herringbone alpaca capes and tribal-print dresses during a recent safari in Africa. The sage that burned while shoppers perused the store’s offerings was a token from her trip, too. “I picked it in Botswana while watching hippopotamuses,” she said. Next on Thornburg’s travel radar? A holiday yoga retreat in Big Sur. She’s not sure if she’ll return with anything for the shop. Rather, she hopes to pick up a keepsake of another sort. “I’m just planning on bringing back some clarity.”
One One Four is located at 114 Stanton Street, NYC.
Lindsey Thornburg Channels David Lynch
Lindsey Thornburg built her business on “witchy” felt cloaks. For years, she cut up old Pendleton blankets found in her grandfather’s closet and at thrift stores, and for Fall, the designer officially partnered up with the heritage brand for the first time to create three of her signature mantles from scratch (prices start at $1,380). Thornburg shot the lookbook featuring those co-branded pieces (as well as the rest of the collection, which is now in stores) in Snoqualmie, Washington, the small logging town where David Lynch’s cult television series Twin Peaks was filmed in the nineties. Fans of Lynch’s eerie thriller will recognize landmarks including the “Great Northern Hotel” and Snoqualmie Falls from the show’s opening credits, which the model poses in front of. That epic waterfall segment almost didn’t happen. “When we [Thornburg and photographer Olivia Malone] arrived, we didn’t realize the most important setting for the shoot, the ominous waterfall, was under construction. All paths were closed and the views were obstructed by cranes,” Thornburg told Style.com. “Luckily, that night, after location scouting, we went to a small strip mall and had a glass of wine, and complained to the waiter about not being able to access the Falls. He just so happened to know the crane operator for the dam being built, and the next evening, they lowered us down 500 feet in the crane with a harness on to get our two photos in front of the falls. It felt very beautiful how the plan came together without force.” Here, Style.com has a first glimpse at the shots.
Trapped In Paradise
Having made her name with a collection of cloaks, Lindsey Thornburg is not a designer you’d think would flourish in the Spring. (And in fact, she’ll have a big new development coming this Fall: After spending several seasons creating cloaks out of deadstock Pendleton fabrics, she’s introducing a co-branded line with the Oregon-based company.) But the sun suits the New York-based Thornburg too, judging from the new film she’s created for her Spring collection, shot in sunny Key Biscayne, Florida, with model Martha Hunt. “Martha is lustful, she has that sort of lazy angst that boredom creates,” explains Thornburg. “She’s captive in her affluent environment while her lover is away. Her fantasy is to be carried away into the oblivion with the man she passed at the cinema the previous day.”
To pass the time, Hunt spends her time floating in the pool, gallivanting on the tennis courts, and making sand angels, wearing Thornburg’s signature “urban witchy” (as she describes them) pieces—a variety of billowy maxi dresses ranging from a pink cutout number to a simple black one. Not that customers are encouraged to be so cavalier. “This collection is very special, limited or one-of-a-kind,” the designer says. “The focus on this collection was to use the tactile nature of different silks while unifying them by specialty dye processes.” Unifying the entire video is music by Scout LaRue Willis—progeny of Demi and Bruce—and Nicolas Jaar; it debuts exclusively here on Style.com.
Two’s Company
“I didn’t think I’d ever have a store,” Sophomore’s Chrissie Miller says. “I thought, crazy people shop and I didn’t want to be involved in that. But I did it in L.A. and I loved it—that lifestyle, being there and talking to people about the clothes. As soon as I got back, it’s all I was thinking about.” So when a small shop space opened on Ludlow Street, Miller (above right) and friend and fellow designer Lindsey Thornburg (above left) pounced. Just one month after signing on the space, their new collaborative store, 143 (named after the building number, though Miller notes it’s also pager code for “I love you”), the first permanent retail space for either designer, is set to open this Friday.
143 will be divided between the Sophomore collection, which Miller designs with Madeleine von Froomer, and Thornburg’s cape-heavy namesake collection. (Both designers have also moved their studios to the building as well.) But it will also feature new and vintage pieces from a network of friends and the likeminded, including clothes, books, art, and jewelry. “The neighborhood is super vintage-heavy; I think people go [here] looking for vintage,” Miller says. “So I found the best vintage dealers I could, rather than go to New Jersey and try to buy a bunch of stuff myself.” She’s been following the Texas-based dealers Sisters of the Black Moon on eBay for years, for example, and L.A.’s Filthmart, at whose now-shuttered New York store she worked years ago, is supplying vintage menswear.
Shen Beauty will curate an assortment of beauty products, and Miller’s boyfriend, actor and artist Leo Fitzpatrick, will organize art and art books from the likes of Nate Lowman, Bruce Weber, Richard Kern, and Cass Bird. “Leo is obsessed with art books, and we don’t like keeping them in the house after we’re done with them,” Miller says. Retail, the broom of the system! By the same token, shoppers can expect to find Sophomore and Thornburg samples and one-offs on the racks.
143 opens Friday, November 18, at 143 Ludlow St., NYC.
Witchy Woman
The Lindsey Thornburg look is often described as “witchy,” and for good reason, given the designer’s taste for cloaks and crushed velvet. And for her first-ever fashion week presentation last night, which drew the likes of Nate Lowman and Aurel Schmidt, Thornburg took over a suitably gothic venue—the grottolike wine bar Bacaro—and tapped the talents of a rather chic coven. Thornburg’s pal Anna Sheffield (of Bing Bang) chipped in with the sterling silver, ruby, and black diamond jewelry; her friend Chase Cohl, of the burgeoning accessories line Littledoe, collaborated with her on a small range of brushed felt fedoras bedecked with raw crystals and feathers. The hats summed up the city-Wiccan vibe of the Fall ’11 collection, which saw Thornburg riffing on her signature Pendleton-fabric cloaks, turning them into blanket wool trenches and overcoats, and branching out into slouchy, casual suiting. “I feel like I’m at the point, now, where I can start to push the things I’m known for in new directions,” Thornburg explained. “The inspiration always comes from the same place, from nature, but there are endless ways to interpret that.”