Add It Up

A bathroom, of all places, was the inspiration behind Muriel Brandolini’s new accessories collection. An interior designer by day, Brandolini was so pleased with a beaded wall treatment she devised for a client’s bathroom that she reworked the motif into handbags for her new accessories collection, which also features embroidered silk scarves. The lineup that hits Barneys New York in November was made in Vietnam, where Brandolini spent her early childhood. “Vietnam has greatly influenced my sense of color and taste,” she says. “Attention to detail [there] is shown even in the presentation of meals.”

The days when New York’s SoHo district was known for its pioneering galleries may be long gone, but Ilori is bringing a little of that artistic edge back to the neighborhood. The new luxe eyewear boutique was designed from a curator’s point of view, with avant-garde displays inspired by Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Alexander Calder. The merch itself includes shades made by Luxottica for Chanel, as well as hard-to-find styles by Tom Ford and the first collection from Fabien Baron, creative director of French Vogue. A second Ilori just opened in L.A., with three more U.S. shops to follow.

While she made sure to stock her favorite brands like Vivienne Westwood, Givenchy and Azzedine Alaïa, Davinia Wang also had another set of names in mind for Edon Manor, her jewel box of a shop in New York’s TriBeCa. “We’re very into the idea of nurturing young designers,” notes Wang, a recent Parsons grad who was born in Hong Kong and raised in London. She modeled Edon Manor after an English country estate, replete with rolling ladders and old-school canapé chairs, to showcase shoes by Rupert Sanderson, Tania Spinelli and Laurence Decade.

After teasing devotees with a limited selection of boots this fall, Gryson is launching a collection of shoes for spring to complement its modern urban bags, which launched last year. The range of Italian-made ballerina and strappy flats and easy summer sandals is often worked in rich patent leathers and colored pythons, with slip-resistant rubber soles for the sake of practicality. “I love the subtlety of details, designs that are not overbearing,” says designer Joy Gryson, who did a stint as director of design and development for Marc Jacobs’s accessories. “It is the little nuances that combined make the product beautiful.”