In the more than eight decades since the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published “The Little Prince” (1943), his philosophical fable about a stranded pilot and a young traveler has sold an estimated 300 million copies. It has also been adapted for the screen approximately a dozen times and inspired many ballets, operas and theater productions. Now the Parisian men’s wear house Berluti is using the tale to inform a limited-edition accessories collection. Its brown leather Deux Jours briefcase has watercolorlike renderings of baobab trees, which play a symbolic role in Saint-Exupéry’s story, warning that small troubles can grow when not resolved. And the black leather Alessandro oxford is embossed with a rose motif that references another of the book’s lessons: that an object — whether a flower or a shoe — derives its value from the time and care that go into creating it.
— Mackenzie Oster
Furniture That’s Intentionally Imperfect
Though he trained as a master carpenter, Luke Malaney makes furniture and objects in the spirit of a painter: gestural and unpredictable. In his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the 39-year-old shapes local wood and sheets of copper based on how they respond to his tools, applying and sanding layers of paint to create washes of color and instinctively carving divots he then daubs with pigment. He has even embraced the ultimate woodworker’s mistake — visible glue — as a signature embellishment. “A lot of times, the little details aren’t really thought out,” he says. “They’re discovered after the fact.”
A lifelong (and, since 2019, professional) skateboarder, Malaney credits the sport for his sense of form and detail. “You’re always on the search for something to skate on; it trains your eye to intersect with the world and the built environment differently,” he says. “That trickles into my work subconsciously: I surprise myself and maybe form a new language.” On view next spring at Maison Monna, Dorian Grinspan’s Hudson Valley inn, a cedar totem with a copper top serves as a sculpture, a birdhouse and a bench. And for an exhibition at the Get, a new cultural space in Ghent, Belgium, Malaney created a hand-painted walnut mask inspired by both Himalayan rituals and hockey equipment — with a pocket for a cigarette.
But mostly he makes furniture, including wavy-edged cabinetry and hand-hewn chairs. A new coffee table with its joinery intentionally askew is named after his first child, Ruby, who was born this past August. “There’s an inner child in everyone,” he says. Summoning that is “when the work comes out the best.”
— Eviana Hartman
A Panerai Watch Designed for Explorers
Founded in 1860 on Florence’s historic Ponte alle Grazie, Panerai started making precision instruments for the Italian navy early in the 20th century, a partnership that compelled the watchmaker to incorporate technical innovations like luminescent dials and deepwater functionality. In 1998, the company honored that maritime history with its first collection of submersible watches, which included military-ready features like a lever-activated bridge that protects the crown from impact and moisture. Its latest model has a brushed-steel case, a 24-hour bezel that tracks the hour across two time zones and a 42-millimeter dial, which, along with its brown leather strap, makes a bold statement on any explorer’s wrist.
— Jameson Montgomery
Earrings That Channel a Lunar Eclipse
Pliny the Elder, a Roman military commander and naturalist, is said to have argued back in the first century A.D. that moonstone, a type of feldspar formed in igneous and metamorphic rock, assumes the shape of the moon in real time. No wonder, considering that the gem displays the rare, otherworldly quality of adularescence, an optical phenomenon in which a pearly sheen seems to float just below the translucent surface. In Indian Ayurvedic literature, moonstone is thought to have medicinal powers. In contemporary speculative fiction, the gem often confers invisibility — but with this pair of earrings, the New York-based jeweler David Yurman aims for maximum impact. The graduated towers of icy moonstone cabochons are anchored by vivid violet cushion-cut tanzanites, sparking a contrast as powerful as a lunar eclipse.
— Nancy Hass
