Keeping House

Shoppers who’ve been stuck indoors are finding solace in a new offering from their favourite designers—say hello to haute homeware

- Rosana Lai

“I like my money where I can see it—hanging in my closet,” Carrie Bradshaw famously professed in Sex and the City. Almost in the same breath, she admitted that she uses her oven space for shoes. But that was 20 years ago. This year, Carrie would probably swap her Fendi Baguette for a real baguette baking in a Dolce & Gabbana x Smeg oven.

During this unprecedented period of confinement, when frequent flyers and conspicuous consumers no longer exist, many people have developed an appetite for shaking up their nests instead of their wardrobes. Those who used to spend their cash on a new statement coat are instead setting their sights on statement centrepieces. And savvy designers who’ve been stung by the widespread shift to WFH, where sweatpants are the new norm, are only more than happy to satisfy this hunger with new lines of haute homeware.

Fendi, Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani planted flags in the space as early as the Seventies, but the pandemic has spurred a broad array of fashion labels to dive into the home category. In the last year alone, historic Japanese brand Kenzo launched K3, its furniture range; Balenciaga debuted an objects line in November with a limited-edition sculpture of the Track.2 sneaker; and even a niche label like Bernadette from Antwerp started marrying its prints with ceramics and table linens. Designer dishes and kitchen gadgets began cropping up all over our digital feeds, from Ann Demeulemeester’s minimalist porcelain made with Belgian homeware label Serax to Dolce and Gabbana’s Sicilian-patterned kitchen appliances with Smeg, which began making refrigerators with the Italian designers five years ago. Like the perfume and beauty frenzy of decades past, homeware has become fashion’s next frontier.