An incredible "knockoff" grail from New Delhi
18 East's Antonio Ciongoli comes through for RARE MIDCENTURY CHAIRTALK + more
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Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
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18 EAST — it’s a small independent brand with a slapper-to-brick ratio currently holding firm at ~ 1,000 : 0, baby!!
Based out of NYC and masterminded by designer Antonio Ciongoli, 18 East went cuckoo in 2020 and shows no indication of entering any other mode anytime soon, nailing a quasi-paradoxical sweet spot where soft shapes, beautiful hand-loomed fabrics and outdoor utility converge …
Among other gems, 18 East makes some of the poppingest pants on the market … in drop after drop, Antonio flips sublime baggo cargo pants out of double-weave jacquard … clean chinos out of organic khadi denim … pleated trousers out of silky cabled Japanese corduroy here & pulsating cotton ikat there …
And the pants reliably sell out within nanoseconds because the public recognizes greatness when they see it !!
Antonio’s produced the vast majority of his collections in Jaipur and New Delhi. “It’s one of the few places in the world where things are still really made by hand,” he told us the other day.
When we asked him to serenade a rare & cherished possession, he told us he wanted to get into some turbo-mode Indian chairtalk & put us on to a bunch of cool fascinating s--t — we were happy to oblige …
Blackbird Spyplane: I asked if u wanted to talk about rare cherished garments and you said (I’m paraphrasing) “no, f—k garments.” 😉
Antonio Ciongoli: “Ha ha, I just feel like all of my ideas are better when I’m referencing things outside of clothing. Art and design occupy a huge part of my thought process. So it took me a minute to figure out what would be interesting to talk about besides, like, Nike ACG and 45 RPM, which are my favorite things from a clothing perspective.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You decided on two interconnected possessions, one of which you tragically lost. The first, though, is a very cool chair — you sent me a picture and I thought this was a Pierre Jeanneret, before I looked closely at the arms. What is it?
Antonio Ciongoli: “On my first trip working on 18 East I went to visit the suppliers — and in Delhi a designer told me to stay at this little hotel called Scarlette run by two French expats. It was amazing, it felt like someone’s home, and sitting on the mezzanine was this chair. It looked like a Jeanneret chair, but it wasn’t…
Blackbird Spyplane: Right, so in 1951 the Indian government famously hired the god-tier Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh and a bunch of buildings there, and Le Corbusier was tight with Pierre Jeanneret, who designed a bunch of stuff for the project, too, including furniture …
Antonio Ciongoli: “Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Le Corbusier and his work on Chandigarh when it comes to 18 East, because it’s an interesting comparison, since I’m also someone who’s not from India, relying on Indian craftsmanship to make something new and different — he was a reference of mine from the beginning.