Adler’s portal into the world of fantasy
Master of whimsy; rocker at heart?
That was my primary takeaway when I caught up by phone with Jonathan Adler in advance of the monumental installation he has up this week at the Interior Design Show (IDS) in Toronto.
The designer, who even nondesign people can name out of a police lineup — and who has come to be known as much for his ebullience as he is for his all-seasons uniform of white jeans — famously started his career as a freelance potter. Born in a little farm town in New Jersey, the compulsion began during a stint at summer camp in 1978, whilst — as it happen — he was outfitted in a Rush concert tee.
The image? Seared into the self-reel that he carries around in his head.
“I was an ’80s kid, in my Rush T-shirt — how is that for Canadian content? — making bongs, also listening to the Grateful Dead … and I fell in love with clay. Clay was my religion. Clay is my forever love. But I guess you can you say it was like ‘Bill and Ted Goes to Pottery Class!’ ” It all sputtered out of Adler. Fast-forward 40-plus years, and the man whose very name is his brand — like Dior, or Kleenex! — now boasts a wholesale business spread over 1,500 locations globally, a knot of Adler stand-alones in a myriad of cities (starting with the original one in Soho, in the “Sex and the City”-embalmed era of New York City), plus a variety of high-profile callingcard projects (example: the Parker Palm Hotel, in Palm Springs). Today, his layered, happy-glam esthetic — think: an orange lacquer backgammon set! — denotes membership in a decorating tribe as clearly as any gang tattoo.
The Adler template, which has always run on a motor of suitably cheeky commandments — “when it comes to decorating, the wife is always right — unless the husband is gay,” for one; “we believe celebrities should pay full price,” for another — is also what the New York Times once gleefully dubbed as “cyncerity.” A justso mélange of cynicism and sincerity — one that should be in full display in Canada this week!
That new mounting, here at IDS, by the way? It comes courtesy of Caesarstone, the quartz design concern that always collaborates with a different big-deal designer at the show. It planned to fete Adler at an invite-only, high-up dinner at the CN Tower. For the 2020 show, specifically, they asked Adler — as the decorator told me — to come up with “a portal into the world of fantasy.”
So, think “celestial.” Think: “surrealism.” Think, also, a little Roman. “Clouds and rainbows,” Adler went on, launching then into dudespeak, when he teased, “You gotta go for the ’gram, bro.”
His own always-ready roster of muses? It includes the likes of David Hicks, the late English decorator known for his brash colours, and a mix-and-match prowess, as well as Gio Ponti, a swami of Italian midcentury modern. Never far, too: the German-born Hans Coper, a one-time dynamo of pottery.
Asked about his upbringing, Adler told me declaratively: “I am very much a product of my parents, no matter how you slice it.” They taught him, if nothing else: “never be banal.” His father, he went on, “was a brilliant artist who decided to become a lawyer — in order not to sully his art. I, of course, went full sully.” Mother, meanwhile, was “a fashionable bohemian, you could say” who once upon a time worked at Vogue, but was — amusingly, he adds —“replaced by Joan Didion!”
The rest, as they say, is history. And armoires.
The winding road for Adler included going to university at Brown (semiotics and art history!) and a stint as an assistant in the movie business, one that eventually got him fired (“I was literally sleeping with everyone in the office!” he side-barred in his cheeky, and-that-is-another-story way), and then the universe eventually led him back to his first love (behind the wheel!). He was reconciled to being a penniless craftsman, but things shifted and really took off when Barneys gave him a huge order for his pottery.
Indeed, Barneys — “R.I.P.,” he said, as we went on to discuss — played an outsized cosmic role in his life in two different ways. One, by kick-starting his brand in a real way. Two, by eventually bring him his husband when he went on a “semiblind date” with Simon Doonan, the celebrated windowdresser, author, and bon vivant.
Reflecting on his marriage — their much-photographed
Shelter Island house is the stuff of power-gay heaven! — Adler told me that the biggest joke of all about their union is this: “When we first met, I thought I was getting a very bourgeois, button-uped fashion executive, and he thought he was getting a hippy-dippy bohemian potter — and it has turned out to be the exact opposite in terms of our temperaments.” Noted. A Chatty Cathy at heart, and a delightful gossip — we, of course, off-topic-ed to #Megxit for a bit — I later wound up wrapping our convo by asking him if, indeed, was wearing his signature white jeans as we spoke.
Yes, siree. “Funerals, weddings, brises, bar mitzvahs … I wear them everywhere.”
Even, indeed, to the pottery studio.
See Jonathan Adler at the Interior Design Show 2020, Canada’s largest design exposition, until Sunday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Twitter: @shinangovani