Turning Leaf and Basso & Brooke launch at the Shop at Bluebird

Last Tuesday I was invited to the private launch of the new Turning Leaf/Basso & Brooke collaboration of limited edition designed Wine Bottles and Interior Homeware. You might remember a little while ago I wrote about the collaboration here, and so I was really glad to have the opportunity to see the collection for myself. It really is amazing:

Basso & Brooke are well known for their amazing prints and fashion designs, and seeing their eye-poppingly colourful style (with the Turning Leaf logo/illustration and colour palette cleverly intertwined) on throws, cushions, tables, lamps... pretty stunning. I would kill to have any one of those items in my house - certainly a statement piece if ever I saw one! They are all available to buy apparently (huzzah!) but I overheard a woman saying that prices were around £9000.... so....yeah, that's more than half my yearly salary. I don't think so. In my dreams!

And so the evening was rather in that vein for me unfortunately; everything was in my dreams and out of my price range! The Shop at Bluebird is beautiful and full of amazing designer clothes (all in size 6 from what I could see...) but not one single thing in there could I afford. Boohoo. Except perhaps some of the art books lovingly displayed on the tables. While I wandered through the room with my (free, yay) glass of Turning Leaf Pinot Noir staring longingly at the goods on display, I realised slowly that I was in the world of Prada, but wearing Primark. To be fair though, the evening wasn't really centered around actually buying anything (thank god), just admiring the collaboration and chatting with cool people. It was a shame because my friend got food poisoning and had to pull out, so I'm sure I would have stayed a bit longer if I wasn't there on my own, but I just felt a bit strange amongst it all. We would probably have stood there pretending to be dotcom millionaires and loved being in that kind of atmosphere, soaking up all the designer-goodness aura. But alas. I just wanted to stare at the pretty Basso & Brooke collection all night and if I did that, I'd have looked weird.

The beautiful people. If you look closely you can see ether Basso or Brooke (I don't know which is which... that's terrible of me, I do apologise) admiring their handiwork.

And here they are with their lovely wine bottles. Suffice to say, I did not take this picture. I did see them milling around but was way too scared to actually say anything. I would probably just have said 'omg, you're like, so amazing, eeee' and ran away so it's probably a good thing I didn't.

It was really lovely to be invited (thanks Turning Leaf!) and was great seeing the collaboration firsthand. You just can't imagine the level of detail in the artwork... stunning.

Basso & Brooke and Turning Leaf Interiors Collection available from 15th June at The Shop at Bluebird for June, July and August. They are running the Turning Leaf complimentary bar, every Thursday and Friday 5 - 7pm, from June 17th until 30th July (my birthday... maybe I'll go back!) at The Shop at Bluebird. Check it out if you're ever near Kings Road, it's worth a gander.

Inspiration: Turning Leaf and Basso & Brooke

Wine. Everyone loves wine. Nice nice nice. I generally prefer the red variety, on a friday night to melt away the worries of the week. Or, as tonight, on a tuesday night because it was already open and I like to numb things. Wine labels are quite fascinating to me, as an illustrator/designer it's nice to look at the care (or not, in some cases) that are gone into their designs. Who hasn't bought a bottle of wine because the label was nice? (especially if it's half price, that's always good too.)

 So imagine my glee when I discovered that Basso & Brooke, those crazy fashion designers best known for their fearless prints, have teamed up with little known wine company Turning Leaf (well I'd never heard of them) to design these amazing bottles. The first image is from this spanish(?) site, the larger images were kindly emailed to me from Turning Leaf themselves after they saw this original post. Aren't the designs amazing? Here is bit more about the collaboration from Turning Leaf themselves:

- As well as curating a blog for Turning Leaf, where Basso & Brooke will open up their little black book of secrets, the designers will also be developing a range of bespoke, limited edition products with Turning Leaf. 

- Some limited edition products will be available to Turning Leaf customers and others via exclusive retail partners.

- The blog will reveal ‘what’s hot’ during the Spring/ Summer months and will be hosted on the Turning Leaf Wines website 

- Over the next six months Basso & Brooke will also be launching a series of Turning Leaf events, including an exclusive retail partnership and a pop up shop in April.

 - Basso & Brooke will be visiting the Turning Leaf vineyard in California's Sonoma Valley near San Francisco, following their London Fashion Week show on 23rd February

The pop up shop sounds amazing - more info from me on that soon....


Here is a good article from the FT about the collaboration - discussing their inspiration from Jeff Koon's collages, with this great bit - "Brooke presented Dennison with the flamboyant bottle and said, “It’s not particularly conservative.” Dennison inspected it. “And Turning Leaf has traditionally been a conservative brand,” he said.
“But you’ve got to be on people’s lips,” said Brooke. “You’ve got to think out of the box.” Dennison warmed to the idea. “This is going to catch their eyes,” he said. “Then catch their fantasy.”

I think that idea is great - Turning Leaf's motto is 'Taste the Colour' and you certainly get that feeling from the designs, which have snow leopards and volcanoes (how apt) intertwined, among other things. Wine is always seen as so serious - even when you drink it, you feel somehow more restrained, and sometimes wine is fun and you want something that isn't all Serif fonts and cream, heavy matte paper. You know?

As soon as I find more of the shots of the bottles, I'll post them. In the meantime, Basso & Brooke's website is here -beware, you can do nothing but click to open an email, but it's still pretty, and Turning Leaf's site. Here are some images of Basso & Brooke's amazing fashion design to get your juices flowing...

From http://vagarms.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/inspiration-basso-brooke/

From http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050706/biz.htm

From The Swelle Life

From Handbags & FagHags

Just beautiful examples of what can be created with digital printing techniques and genius handling of colour. Oh, to wear something like this... and have the legs for it... ah.

All images credited to where I found them, etc etc.