Eugene Angelo
On sacai dyed knitwear, post-Apple electronics, CSM design, and more.
Welcome to Weaving Webs, where creative people share their creative references.
Today’s guest is Eugene Angelo (@eugeneangelo), the 24 year old founder of his own design studio and cofounder of Lychee alongside Tigris Li, a newcomer hardware company eyeing down Apple. (Yes, Apple).
The CSM grad’s impressive visual work has led him down a prolific path and into some brilliant insights regarding the future of tech and culture at large. We’re very grateful to have him on.
And if you’re not already familiar, we’re building a platform for people just like Eugene!
Silk is a new layer of the internet oriented around creative research, moodboarding, and subculture. We invite you to read more and sign up for our waitlist → here :)
Warning.Camera
An amazing book to come out recently is from Bafic's warning.camera project. he's one of my favourite artists/thinkers... the project revolves around a yellow warning sticker, intended for laptop screens/phones etc, which he started giving to friends. through the memetic power of people posting selfies with the sticker on their phone, it's now been distributed to a much broader global community and formed a powerful symbol. the book is a record of all the instagram stories and posts where the sticker is visible, showing the trajectory of an idea going from an extremely niche inside joke to a symbol with global reach... and because the sticker is so nondescript, I think it's the clearest reflection of our culture today — it exposes all the social networks and mimetic forces that drive it. a yellow sticker becomes a social network & communal symbol. it's soooo good.
Real Review / Kazeem Kuteyi
I'm massively inspired by my friend Kazeem Kuteyi — founder & editor of new currency in toronto, DJ and overall cultural connector — who recently wrote an article in Jack Self's Real Review magazine called "WE OUTSIDE". It's the most distilled explanation of how Kazeem works: how he's forming a global community and culture around art, music, fashion & design; how he appears to be everywhere at once; and how he's turning online connections into offline meaning. this article & his practice are worth studying. he's figuring out a really important archetype within our culture in real time — a combination of diplomat, connector, curator and archivist. we need a lot more people like kazeem in the world if we want a global, intercultural community to thrive. shoutout to REAL review too — a real frontier of thought across so many disciplines.
Riovaz — “Waiting Alone”
There's a major shift in music right now... I feel like we're entering a 2020s equivalent to the 1980s post-punk era, in which people started to push a heavily saturated punk genre into all kinds of experimental directions. it feels like the same thing that happened to punk is happening to mainstream music right now; and two super talented young artists in Riovaz and Kanii really represent that. they're crafting a whole new lane in dance music / popular culture for the youth. their new song "waiting alonE" is like a follow-up to "Heart Racing" with Nimstarr, both great songs. Ted Childish and I worked on the cover together, under our makeshift "LETS PLAY" design imprint... hoping to help shape the aesthetic for a whole new generation of dance music.
Sacai
Been going crazy over this new knit sweater from Chitose Abe's sacai, which has been my favourite brand to wear for a couple years now. she's been on a crazy run of collections, and to me has built one of the most distinct design languages in fashion. with this sweater the colours are so on point... some gradients only make sense when you take them off the screen and onto a new material. praying I can catch one for cheap on a Japanese auction site.
CSM Industrial Design
I went to the industrial design degree show at Central Saint Martins fairly recently, and was super energised by all the people imagining new possibilities for consumer electronics. I really believe that we're in a post-apple era, and the hardware products we use every day will begin to change... so hopefully we'll start to shift away from the extreme iPhone-dependency that's emerged over the last decade. The fact that a whole generation is so eager to design new ways of living alongside technology is proof of that. I really loved Ethan Doughty's ultra-tactile music device, as well as Yifan Zhang's shoe-as-an-interface.
ORBE BY Jobe Burns
Jobe Burns' new company ORBE recently launched, with a unique perspective on home furniture and design. I visited Jobe's studio a few months back and instantly fell in love with the silicone bowl he'd made — a lot of his work is about subverting people's expectations of an object. soft-looking objects will be hard and hard-looking objects will be soft. the playfulness and sensitivity of his work feels really timely with how the home is becoming more and more quantified & minimised... it's so exciting to witness the beginning of a journey you know is gonna last decades.
Who else would you most want to see share their refs?
Toby Feltwell / Sk8thing of Cav Empt, Eastwood Danso, Tigris Li, Whak&Mo!
Follow Eugene on Instagram here or Twitter here to keep up with his creative practice and Lychee’s impending rollout.