004: CUNTY LITTLE CUTLERY SETS
We all have to eat.
It’s funny that flatware is a subject that’s fascinated me for so long because in all likelihood, we’re all not going to buy more than a few sets in our lifetime. In my dreams, I have a Villa Necchi–style butler’s pantry at home, where each drawer opens to reveal a different dinner service, cosseted in velvet. But in reality, I’ve owned four flatware sets in my adult life — an Ikea starter kit with too-small spoons that I ultimately dumped at the nearest Goodwill; the Finnish set with stepped prongs I put on my wedding registry; the classic cream acrylic-handled Sabre collection; and the thick, satin-finished Odeon by David Mellor. I realize this is already more flatware than many people will have in a lifetime. And yes, I do have a Live Auctioneers alert set for several vintage sets by Georg Jensen. It’s a problem.
The barrier to becoming a true collector of cutlery is often how much of it you need in your day-to-day. Service for four if you’re a takeout girlie? Eight if you have a family or like to invite friends over for dinner? Ten to twelve if you’re regularly hosting dinner parties or your family’s in town from Missouri for Thanksgiving? It’s both a lot of money to spend and a lot of drawer space to give up.
About a year or so ago, I started to notice what I would come to refer to, just because it’s fun to say and because I’m far too online, as “cunty little cutlery sets,” popping up here and there. These sets are usually just three pieces — knife, fork, spoon — and they’re often quite petite. They’re frequently designed by jewelers, and they are uniformly sculptural — it’s very, do I actually put this in my mouth or do I display it on a coffee table? Crucially, these sets are also usually very expensive, but this didn’t deter me from falling down the rabbit hole. Cunty little cutlery sets became a fun way to indulge my flatware obsession and my need to compulsively research home decor items, even if I didn’t really plan to buy them.
There were the Jessi Burch ones, with their rows of silver-plated tiny balls, inspired by Josef Hoffman’s iconic 1908 chair ($595). There was a set sold at my favorite Chinatown mall shop, Old Jewelry, made by the Mexican atelier of the late modernist William Spratling in a limited quantity each year. ($1,400, but they come with a lifetime guarantee from the atelier; if you think those are expensive, take a look at this complete Spratling service, which sold for $27K in 2020.) There was Jardin, a delicate, floral-embellished trio designed by Conie Vallese in collaboration with Elhanati, studded with black diamonds ($4,200). There were sets that explored silverware’s negative space, by Heath Wagoner ($2,000) and Natalia Criado ($680).
I began to wonder: Who is buying these little cutlery sets and how do they use them? Do people actually eat with them? And, perhaps most important, why are they suddenly a thing?
To find out, I hopped on Zoom with the most knowledgeable person I know in this field: Dung Ngo, the author, book publisher, and God-tier design expert who runs @knifeforkspoon.co, an Instagram account dedicated to the more than 5,000 examples of modernist cutlery Ngo has collected over the past 20 years. Ngo is currently at work on a cutlery exhibition, happening this spring at the Denver Art Museum, as well as an accompanying book, so he had plenty to say on the subject:
“I think there’s a confluence here of a couple of trends, but the one that’s most interesting to me is that many of these sets are by jewelry designers. I kind of hate when people say flatware is the jewelry of the table. You can go out without earrings, but try eating without a fork. But there’s something to it. There’s a certain scale here that is more diminutive, and there’s something to the fact that it is often women who are designing these pieces. I’ve been doing research for my book and it’s shocking how few women designers did flatware and cutlery. It was not until the ‘60s that you had women designing cutlery.”
Indeed, there’s a short history of women moving from the jewelry world to flatware, spanning from Vivianna Torun at Georg Jensen (an incredibly undersung silversmith I’ll be exploring more in a later newsletter) to Charlotte Chesnais, the Parisian jeweler who just released a collection with Christofle. And Ngo is right — in addition to Jessi Burch, other contemporary jewelers dipping a toe into the cutlery world include Alice Waese, Suna Bonometti, and Rosh Mahtani, the London-based jeweler behind Aligheri. “There’s also an interesting trend that instead of taking a larger concept and scaling it down — the way that Alessi did in the ‘90s when they were commissioning [primarily male] architects to design flatware — designers are now scaling up,” says Ngo. (This is explored in this excellent search-for-the-perfect-flatware article, though not as exhaustively as I would like!)
But that didn’t explain why these sets are currently having a moment, so I chatted with two of the designers who are actually making them, Suna Bonometti and Heath Wagoner. Both of them stressed that despite their delicacy and price, their CLC™ sets were meant to be used; whether you display them as precious things, use them only for fancy parties, or eat your morning yogurt with them is up to you. “Cutlery, like jewelry,” says Bonometti, “is a 360-degree object. You’re holding it, you’re looking at it from different angles, you’re putting it in your mouth… It’s an intimate experience. Jewelry is also an object that you experience in 360 degrees. But we all have to eat. What’s been fun with cutlery is I’ve opened up a whole new audience, but I get to use all of the same skills and ideas that I use in making jewelry. I also just really like making small things that I can hold and carry, versus making bigger things that require a different kind of financial and spatial commitment.”
For his part, Wagoner — who considers himself a metalsmith rather than a jeweler — also spoke to these more practical concerns; he loves making his pieces in sterling silver rather than stainless steel both because it’s more fun to work with and because it’s, frankly, a little bit of job security. “We could wake up tomorrow and somebody could say, like, Hermes bags aren’t worth anything anymore. That’s not going to happen with silver or gold, really.” But he also points out that the little sets, despite their price, have a certain unfussy appeal in their finite nature. It’s not service for 12. “You don’t have to set your table in this very stuffy, everything matches, way. The expansion into five pieces or more is simply not how we dine anymore. People are hosting at home; maybe you’re putting down silver spoons for dessert and a couple of pints of ice cream and everybody just family styles it. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have inherited sets of silver, and they hate them. I’m always telling people, just break it up — take the knives and put them out with cheese, take the spoons and use them for ice cream. Melt it down, sell it, make some money!”
Funnily, the other actually unfussy place you can typically find a CLC™ set is in a store like REI — for camping. When camping, of course, you need only the essentials. But the three-piece travel set is also, Ngo told me, something that evolved from the way cutlery was used prior to the mid-18th century. “Cutlery service — the kind that’s on the table when you show up to a dinner — is a fairly new thing,” says Ngo. “Before that, when you traveled, you carried your own. You might have had a wooden spoon; those were cheap. Forks were usually little pokers to pick up meat and hot things. And the knife was just a pocket knife. Those three pieces evolved independently until a certain point, when royalty began to have them and they began to be made from gold and silver.”
When researching this letter, I found examples that were decidedly utilitarian — a $14 stainless steel set with case from MoMA, Alessi’s diminutive Food à Porter series — and those that still manage to be, well, kinda cunty. (I’m looking at you, Prada’s 3-piece travel cutlery set with carrying case for $480)
Perhaps the most iconic example of a CLC™ set— and one that splits the difference between utility and decoration — is the trio Raymond Loewy’s office designed for the inaugural Concorde flight in the late 1970s. A chic brown or gray plastic-handled trio embossed with the Air France logo, or a fully stainless steel version — most of which you can still find on the secondary market — Loewy’s flatware was instantly iconic, often squirreled away by sneaky travelers for use upon disembarking. At once highly aspirational and a sign of the times in which we live — just like your favorite cunty little cutlery set.
THE KITCHEN SINK
I briefly considered sending a newsletter last week but didn’t, for reasons that included spending time with my far-flung family, being a tourist in my own city (ask me about inter-generational karaoke, a perfect Keens order for people who don’t eat meat, Rashid Johnson and Gabrielle Münter at The Guggenheim, and what to wear to Thanksgiving dinner at Le Rock), and generally holding strong opinions about not working on holidays. To be fair, I was also working on this — a guest edit for Domino Magazine, where I wax poetic about dull, roughed-up, textured silvery metals that look like they’ve been dinged or scuffed, or like you put them through the garbage disposal. Silver nitrate, sand-cast aluminum, soldered steel, textured bronze, zinc, silver-plated copper, and, of course, pewter.
Speaking of silvery metals, this is a great plug-in sconce by LA-based Ekua Ceramics. It’s the studio’s first-ever lamp, and it’s available for order now. It’s chrome-glazed ceramic, not metal, but scratches the same itch!
I didn’t host Thanksgiving this year, but I did host a harvest-themed potluck two days later, and frankly, whenever I’m faced with hosting a dinner party, I feel a little bit of “those who cannot do, teach” — a very specific breed of imposter syndrome. As someone who researches decor and trends for a living and is aware of practically every product on the market, shouldn’t my tablescape be fully dialed in? Well, spoiler alert, it’s not! But for those who, like me, continue to buy pieces they love with no real plan as to how to put them together, this new East Fork platter in glossy red is a stunner.
I’m tickled by this 1930s sycamore drinks cabinet at European auction next week. In some ways, it’s no different from a credenza with open shelving on either side but something about the placement of the doors is very but why?? Like a little safe in the middle of your cabinet.
Still not sure if I’m going to do a gift guide here — and if I do, it will be very much of the “things I bought for myself that you might enjoy” variety — but just a heads up that the Sight Unseen gift guide, of which I am the author of half, launches this Thursday! Sign up here to get it in your inbox!
A million times yes
I have started to read these first thing on a Monday morning. They start the week on a delightful note. Thank you!