Weekly Highlights
Highlight from this weeks articles, conversations and creative inspirations from Rosie Lee and our community. Opening the lid on topics, news and inspirations that affect our thinking and our work.
Welcome to spring! I know we forgot to say it last week but here we are…as the seasons change so too do our projects. We’re wrapping up a few and starting a few more - as usual we can’t talk much about them just yet but its always great to get out there and explore during the immersion phases. This time round James is visiting New York and LA for a few days to get more of a first hand experience for a really exciting retail design project we’re working on.
At Unorthodox Blend we’ve finished editing our conversation with Jo Taylor, ready for next weeks’ release. It will definitely be worth a listen for anyone working in fashion, sport, culture or any intersection - she has some great experiences and wisdom to share that we can all learn from.
Mark’s article about doubt was released on Sunday and we’ve continued to share a diverse range of inspirations - see below for this week’s summary.
UBA135 - If You Don’t Know Doubt
This week’s article, written by Mark, is all about the doubts, worries, sleepless nights and risks that are scattered throughout everyone’s career, and how they are the things that inch you closer to real success.
Knowing that you might get things wrong - being reactive, reflective and agile - these things are what really count. As Mark says “The ‘oh-shit’ moments still arrive. They always will.” It’s what you do with them that matters.
Friends
Friends - Paul Ricketts
This week’s Friends Q&A is with Designer Paul (Order) Ricketts. Paul worked at Rosie Lee previously on some of our most epic projects, and we’ve been following his journey ever since.
He was always fun and thoughtful to work with, and we have a lot of memorable moments aside from the work - the “studio sessions” - making sure Paul, James and Boyce were playing deep cuts while we jammed, with long conversations running alongside.
Paul brings a great mix of methodical thinking and cultural references which elevates his ideas and means they resonate more deeply, which is key to so much of the work we do.
And yes yes yes, we still continue to listen to his mixes on the @theyesness.
Inspirations
“No one can run a marathon for you”
Runner’s World put Harry Styles on its Spring cover, photographed by Laura Jane Coulson and written by Sophie Heawood, and it is one of the more quietly radical editorial decisions a mainstream magazine has made in a while, not because Styles is an unusual choice for a running magazine (he ran Berlin in 2:59:13 and Tokyo in 3:24, which are genuinely serious times) but because they chose to treat the cover story as something other than a celebrity fitness piece. Instead they put him in conversation with Haruki Murakami, author of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and finisher of more than 25 marathons, and let the two of them talk about discipline, solitude and what sustained physical effort does to the interior life.
Relooted
A 2018 report commissioned by Emmanuel Macron estimated that more than 90% of Africa’s material cultural heritage sits outside the continent, in the glass cases and climate-controlled storage of Western institutions that acquired most of it during the 19th and 20th centuries, when European armies moved through Africa and helped themselves.
Marcel Duchamp Retrospective
The MoMA is staging the first North American Duchamp retrospective in 53 years - Fountain, The Bicycle Wheel, Nude Descending a Staircase, The Box in a Valise, his portable museum of miniature reproductions of his own life’s work.
If you have any inspirations that you’ve seen or made that you’d like featured on Unorthodox Blend, then please share them with us.
News from our friends
The Thinking Man - 39 Years of Jasper Morrison and Cappellini
We’ve worked with Jasper and his studio on various projects over the years, and having been lucky enough to visit the studio many times (it helps that it was just a few minutes walk from our office). There’s something fascinating about seeing his practice laid out in full that makes the methodology even clearer: the commitment to essentiality, to doing less and meaning more, has never wavered across nearly four decades.
Curated by Jasper and Cappellini together, the installation wraps the furniture in a refined green palette, a dialogue with the beige tones that have always defined his aesthetic language and the effect is less a showcase than an argument: that rigour and restraint, held consistently enough, become their own kind of radicalism.
Talk with us
Come and say hi! Get in touch if you want your work featured in inspirations, or want to feature in our Q&A or Conversations. Also we’re always open to ideas that won’t fit inside our existing structure so hit the button if you have something to talk with us about!