When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Thom Browne, the American designer and tailor who turned sartorial standards and masculine stereotypes on their head with the shrunken proportions of his signature charcoal grey tailoring, brings a similarly uncompromising line to tabletop in his first collaboration with Haviland Limoges porcelain.
Haviland, a company established in France in the s by an American family, interpreted Browne's desires for generous volumes and exact lines across the collection of teacups, a pot, sugar box, creamer, tea plates and bowls. In translucent white, each piece is decorated with four grey bars echoing the brand's stripe insignia applied through Haviland's Chromolithography process.
We can happily imagine Browne, a big collector of artefacts, and his partner, Andrew Bolton, the visionary Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at The Met, entertaining at their elegant home β a restored s mansion built for Anne Vanderbilt on the Upper East Side.
Browne is among a host of fashion and music creatives who are turning their hand to fine porcelain. Another New York-dwelling visionary, the legendary Vogue fashion director Grace Coddington, is equally enamoured with the ritual of teatime. The something, Welsh-born Coddington, who began her career as a model for Norman Parkinson and Helmut Newton, has teamed with French family firm Astier de Villate founded in to create mugs and teapots featuring her three treasured Persian cats, Blondie, Jimi and Blanket.
Coddington's feline friends clearly have a stellar career of their own, having already featured as muses in her illustrated book "The Catwalk Cats" published by Steidl , which is full of her witty illustrations alongside photographs by her partner, Didier Malige.
