Radical Design Culture

Holly Rollins

Holly Rollins is creating a vision for the world she wants to live in. A designer, creative director, and model all rolled into one, she’s cultivated a distinct aesthetic profile that is as sensual as it is modern. The catalog of her design house, Rolstudio, is at once icy and plush. She describes her pieces, like the curved and curling Aura chair, as artistic responses to her inner world and emotions. They also invite interaction: chairs that you can sink deeply into and sofas with an irresistible bounciness. This type of connection is a key part of her process. “I find a lot of my creative joy comes when I’m not actually creating but interacting with others,” she says.

Larry Tchogninou

Larry Tchogninou is a true polymath. You name a type of object, and Tchogninou has designed his own version of it—sunglasses, piggy banks, fruit peelers, and more. The designer is an exemplar of versatility, both in his own practice, as Ruptur Vision, and as part of the duo Points of Sail with James Langford. Originally from Benin, West Africa, Tchogninou has called Chicago home since 2018. The designer’s portfolio brings to mind the spirit of 1960s and ’70s radical design, when designers challenged the status quo. “Holding the first prototype of anything that I am designing makes me happy,” he says. “The first physical sample makes it real.”

Jinyeong Yeon

Puffer jackets, car parts, and deconstructed sneakers are repurposed and transformed into sculptural forms through Jinyeong Yeon’s vision. His work blends, remixes, and reimagines what design can be. Seoul has become something of a world leader in progressive design, and Yeon is one of the many designers in his home city bridging this gap between fashion and furniture. The designer’s portfolio includes collaborations with and reinterpretations of household-name brands including Volvo, Samsung, and Nike. Yeon’s work encourages us to examine our complex relationship with consumption. “Anything excessively cute doesn’t appeal to me,” he notes.

Isabel Yang

“I want to change the relationship people have with their objects,” shares Isabel Yang. “The Internet has made it so that we can feel connected to the world without ever physically interacting with parts of it.” There’s a subtle elegance in the asymmetrical, multi-dimensional way that she recontextualizes simple and common silhouettes, like a candle, into something anachronistic and self-examining, such as her lighting piece, New Standard Time, a four-foot-tall bees-wax coil that measures 20 minutes of time for each inch that burns. Yang’s designs advocate for what she calls “more emphasis on nurturing strong relationships with our immediate surroundings: our homes, objects, and furnishings.”

Formas

Whether you’re yearning to see a Gufram Capitello chair up close or looking for a lamp shaped like a piece of fruit, Formas is more than likely to stock it. The LA design hub is the eclectic brainchild of life and business partners Natalia Luna and Josh Terris, and is building a community through welcoming events and a come-on-in attitude. Its archives are also no joke: Alvar Aalto coat racks, recreations of Enzo Mari chairs, Ettore Sottsass lamps, cheese-shaped bookends, custom USM units, a seat signed by Gaetano Pesce, and rock lamps by André Cazenave have all graced Formas at one time or another. Fans of all eras, its founders believe that old design is more relevant than ever due to reasons ranging from “sustainability, quality, wanting unique pieces, and social media,” says Luna. Terris agrees: “Good design will stand the test of time.”

Parafernalia

Mexican design duo Genki Matsumura and Sebastián Zorrilla share a passion for discovery that animates their design studio Parafernalia. Their signature Horchata collection refines common metal patio furniture into sleeker ovular forms. There is a miniature filing cabinet crafted in powder-coated steel, an industrial lamp covered with bismuth, and a vibrant glass-blown coffee table. “There’s always a sweet spot that we both agree on,” says Zorrilla of their collaborative process. “We want to keeplearning,” adds Matsumura. “These projects, this studio, it’s all an excuse for learning new things.”