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We're Going on a Cool Hunt
My friend Julka got a grant from Intel to study what we’re calling Making 2.0. She wants to study how crafters are using the Internet to design and market hand-made stuff. As her design buddy (and faculty sponsor), I went to LA with her on a tour of home-grown crafting establishments. We started out at the ReForm School in Silverlake. The store sports a stylish retail space: think Scholastic Books meets Post-Industrial Loft. Their sparely curated collection of books and art comes together around a strong eco-element. My favorite find was this repurposed book by Tyler Bender:
Teaming up with Jenny Ryan, of Felt Club and Craft Magazine, ReForm School will soon be running classes on wall paper making, sewing, and other arts of the hand and soul. After sublime hot beverages at Intelligentsia, we zipped over to The Little Knittery, a tiny store front lined with organic yarns on one wall, a sofa filled with knitters in the center, and a young man named Mark teaching stitches and discoursing to us on the virtues of recycling. I don’t have the patience for knitting myself, but I did pick up some slick ribbony yarn that I’ll use for a book making project, and I loved their business card (silk screen on cracker box):
We ended the day in Chinatown, where stores filled with shiny imports are interspersed with small galleries and art shops. Ooga Booga is a walk-up hole-in-the-wall above the main mall in Chinatown, legendary in LA for its truly indie selection of zines, music, and a few deliberately off-hand pieces of art (ceramic french fries; plastic bags sewed up with yarn). I picked up a zine by K8 Hardy, a NY-based artist who founded the queer feminist art collective LTTR. The paper feels like ECC (Early Color Copy), and the belligerent hand-writing, in several pen weights and colors, communicates the sloppy precision of revision.The in-your-face crudeness of K8’s little meditation on t-shirt fashion drew me right out of my beige-ois heteronormative masquerade for, like, at least ten minutes.
Downstairs, we stumbled into The Flock Shop, which felt like Urban Outfitter’s after Ooga Booga’s slackers-till-we-die non-self-presentation. Really, though, the Flock Shop is another Very Small Establishment, with t-shirts by small designers such as I hate fashion (I bought one) and Hakka Apparel. This Asian-owned business features work by Asian and Asian-American designers as well as your Euro-Etsy crowd. The Flock Shop keeps the “China” in Chinatown while supporting the growing arts scene in the hood. That and cheap parking was a great way to end the day. — Julia Lupton · 2009-01-23 |
