Kuboraum Burnt C2 and Moooi Smoke Chandelier
I’m always down for some firm self-interrogation - one of the key aspects of living a punk life, I’d say - but when it comes to understanding my attraction to burnt stuff, I’ve tried, and I’ve got nothing insightful or valuable to share. Sometimes things are surface-level cool and there isn’t much more to it, I guess? Flames are bad-ass, I don’t have to tell you that, and while I always use an oven mitt to extract my bagel from the toaster, I still consider fire to be one of my favorite elements. So much so, in fact, that I’m super into the two things discussed here today, related only by the process in which they came to be: getting the hell burned out of ‘em.
Let’s start with the Kuboraum C2s. The Berlin-based eyewear company Kuboraum isn’t yet a decade old, but they’ve made a significant name for themselves designing glasses for Morpheus, Neo, Trinity and their minions. Unlike many of their goth craftsman peers (such as dour jewelery designer WERKSTATT:MUNCHEN), they can actually get down with a little kookiness, which normally doesn’t fly in the digital-goth crypto-steampunk world. For starters, they insist on calling their sunglasses “masks” instead of "sunglasses”, which will assuredly never catch on (though it’s actually somewhat applicable to this ridiculous headpiece they made), and while they mostly abide by standard goth aesthetics, there are plenty of instances where they go absolutely buck wild, like this pair for instance, the disturbingly named “Breakfast Audio”. I’m not goth by any real measure, and I love a lot of their stuff, so what does that make them, or me?
While a good majority of Kuboraum’s work seems to be aimed toward holistic body-piercers, Satanic life-gurus and corporate synth-poppers, there’s at least one pair suitable for any vaguely interesting person. I own a pair of understated-by-comparison K7s, but I’d gladly trade them for a pair of (literally) burnt C2s. You see, Kuboraum offers “burnt” variants of a few different models (like the particularly steam-ish A5 model), which is to say that quite simply, the frames were char-broiled at some point in the fabrication process. My favorite by far is the bulky C2 model, a classic frame architecture rendered with a handsome sleekness. There’s something to be said for the rigid uniformity of assembly-line Ray-Bans, but the burning process here ensures a tantalizing “no two pairs are exactly the same” quality, and with Kuboraum, they’re not just saying it - look at this gnarly pair, not only extra molten but accented with metal studs on top (which of course makes them kind of embarrassing by punk standards, and probably weighs them down even further on your poor nose, but still - their existence is worth noting). That studded pair sold for $355 a while back, but I’m more interested in this less intense yet still undeniably burnt pair pictured below anyway. They’re sitting at $266 on Grailed right now, but honestly, you can go buy them if you want - there are enough burnt C2s in circulation these days that I’m waiting for a mega-deal, though this particular pair, with lenses the color of a 20-foot diving pool, is probably as good as they get.
Let’s move on to the other item of the week, the Smoke Chandelier by Maarten Baas. It comes from Moooi (pronounced “moo-oi”, in the parlance of a skinhead cow), a Dutch design firm headed by the wonderfully tweaked Marcel Wanders, he himself certainly worth a Googling1. Moooi’s essentially the incorrigible prankster of modern furniture design, bold enough to actually bother making this $8,000+ horse lamp, an artifact so impossibly dumb yet popular enough to inspire these Etsy knock-offs2, while also stocked by all the usual suspects like Lumens, YLiving, Hive Modern, and so forth. Lots of gleefully outlandish stuff, with endtables and lamps too ostentatious for the likes of David Lynch or Carson Kressley, yet some filthy rich person must be buying them… probably the ones who need to furnish their luxury hotels with a touch of quirk. There are so many filthy rich people out there that it can be hard to keep track of them all.
Designer Maarten Baas put together an entire “Smoke” series for Moooi, a concept which is executed thusly: dining chairs, armchairs and this chandelier, all rendered in pitch black following a literal burning. I feel like a luxury designer peddling arson-chic verges on the distasteful; I know people who’ve suffered apartment and house fires, uniquely devastating horrors where one’s only option is to start anew and be thankful it wasn’t somehow worse. The saving grace here is that these chandeliers are an enticing mix of the beautiful, ridiculous and spooky, much closer to modern art than Balenciaga selling a pair of scraggly JNCO rip-offs for $1,200. It really comes down to the execution here; the fact that this chandelier is more often than not missing one of its arms (due to the severity of the aforementioned fire) is the boldness I’ve come to expect from Moooi3.
I don’t have one of these chandeliers (yet), though I’ve been staking them out for a few years now. There’s a great little shop here in Philadelphia called Minima that stocks it; I used to swing by every few months just to appreciate it in person, but Minima’s hours have lived up to the boutique’s name, even in the pre-pandemic era - I swear they’re like, 11:00 - 3:00 Thursday through Friday only, but the few recent times I arrived within that window they were inexplicably closed anyway. I also have a saved search on Chairish, a second-hand furniture site who sends me insufferable email advertisements with subjects like “Sunday Scaries? Give Your Kitchen A Glow-Up!”, but it’s my best chance to find any of the few Moooi pieces I’m interested in second-hand (not that Chairish sellers expect anything less than 5% below-retail for their wares, but I digress).
I like to think I’m creative and fun, but the level of creative and fun productivity he has sustained over the past few decades is inspiring. Plus, he looks like this.
Perhaps I’m the dumb one if there’s an opportunity to sell thousand-dollar horse lamps and I’m missing out on it.
