Tiny Life

During their quarantines, creatives challenged their followers on social media by encouraging them to design « tiny houses », with materials and tools found at home. In the midst of confinement, American designer Eny Lee Parker posted a series on her Instagram account titled Clay Play that illustrates the collection she would have launched in 2020, clay and miniaturized version. In France, Garance Vallée also had fun creating microscopic houses that look like academic models.

The Brooklyn-based carpet brand Cold Picnic is surprising with its lookbooks, each more playful than the last. Last year, the American label presented its novelties through hyper cute and desirable dioramas. Small spaces like dollhouses that showcased the tufted rugs of the house in singular and vintage universes.

Lately, craftsmen are becoming more meticulous and skilled at making tiny objects.

Inspired by a book entitled « Creating Ceramic Miniatures, » artist Jon Almeda uses a one-inch scale to handcraft ceramics of minute proportions. A « meditative » approach to pottery.

In the panorama of miniature objects, there is also Vitra, which has been reproducing its iconic pieces for the Vitra Design Museum in Germany for over twenty years.

By working on the smallest details – from the wood grain to the reproduction of the screws – of each design icon with a scale of one sixth, Vitra pays tribute to the history of design. Collectibles that also serve as teaching aids for design and architecture schools.

The mini nomadic lamps are more than ever in the air of time. The latest trend: small lights with a round and squat silhouette, topped by a dome in the image of gnomes or small endearing mushrooms. In fact, the Setago lamp by Jaime Hayon for &Tradition evokes a mushroom (« seta » in Spanish).

Singular pieces dictated by the need to reinject fantasy into interiors and exteriors.

If this phenomenon has been particularly noticed in design and lifestyle, it can also be observed in Art. Ever more conceptual, contemporary art is shrinking under the hands of British artists such as Sean Scully, Damien Hirst, Magdalene Odundo or Gillian Wearing who create pocket-sized masterpieces for the 2021 Model Art Gallery in Pallant House.

And the Parisian art scene is not left out. The exhibition « Small is beautiful, Miniature Art » presented at the Galerie Joseph until January 15, 2022 reveals the works of twenty French and international artists of Miniature Art. A zany, utopian and enchanting retrospective on the world of the infinitely small.

On the fashion side, Dior presented for the fall-winter 2020-2021 season a collection of miniature haute couture dresses for customers on the other side of the world during the epidemic. An initiative inspired by the Theater of Fashion, a traveling show organized to showcase French virtuoso know-how during World War II by traveling a trunk with fabric and embroidery samples. A fascinating universe that perpetuates and reinvents Dior’s enchantment in the midst of a health crisis.

Another miniaturizing phenomenon in fashion: the micro bag. A trend carried by Jacquemus and its Chiquito, or its Nani, the famous lipstick case.

Today, Fendi, Hermès or Chanel follow him with their collections of XXS accessories that redefine the notion of bag, its usefulness completely passed to the second plan.

The trend is also disrupting food. California design queen Kelly Wearstler has teamed up with Flamingo Estate and the nonprofit STRUCTURE to compose California-inspired edible gingerbread mini-homes with modernist architecture and playful checkerboards. Sales of the 100 limited-edition houses will be used to rebuild homes destroyed by natural disasters. 

Pancakes as small as a shirt button, spaghetti as thin as a needle… After the success of the hashtag #MiniatureArt on social networks, the hashtag #TinyFoods is also flourishing on platforms, posted more than 4.2 million times on Instagram with accounts with thousands of followers like TinyFoods. A trend from Japan as entertaining as Instagramable, about to become a culinary art in its own right.