The Museum of Everything at Selfridges

From tomorrow until the 25th October the Museum of Everything takes over Selfridges, London with it's fourth and most ambitious project yet.

In what will be the largest art installation ever seen at Selfridges, the museum will include over two hundred drawings, paintings and sculptures by international contemporary artists.

The Shop of Everything will occupy the Concept Store in the Wonder Room selling an array of bespoke and collectable products, including its own label, Everything Ltd, a fashion collection by Clements Ribeiro and shoes by Tracey Neuls, all of whom have artworks featuring in the show.

Image: Limited edition offset lithograph print by George Widener.

The Grace Kelly Barbie collectors series

After a summer of royal weddings it was only a matter of time before Mattel paid their own homage in vinyl to the ultimate Princess Bride, Grace Kelly - as if poor Princess Charlene of Monaco didn't already have enough to contend with.

The Barbie Grace Kelly collectors series debuts with Kelly’s first appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, a 1955 romantic thriller about jewel heists on the French Riviera. She wears a blue chiffon dress inspired by the Edith Head designed gown worn by Grace Kelly in the film.

The Romance doll recreates the outfit she wore to the 1955 Cannes Film Festival where she first met her husband, Prince Rainier. She wears a fabulous floral print dress from an "easy to sew" pattern the actress modeled for McCall magazine. She also comes with a deep navy blue coat and matching dress.

The collection comes hot on the heels of another 50s style Barbie series inspired by Mad Men.

The To Catch a Thief Barbie is available now. The Romance and Bride dolls are available from 1 October 2011.

Via Barbie collector

Obsessionistas, more interesting than Fashionistas...

We were rather flattered to be described as "more interesting than fashionistas" in a recent feature on the The Women's Room after they were tipped off about Obsessionistas by WGSN fashion trend forecasting editor Francesca Muston. 

The feature also includes an interview with me about the current trend for curated piles of stuff and the addiction of both collecting and reading about collecting. You can read it here.

And is if that wasn't exciting enough we were also voted 'Blog of the Week' by WGSN Homebuildlife last week and were honoured to be featured alongside some of our favourite sites such as Anthology and Things Organized Neatly.

Maglev sells on ebay for £100

If you are a train buff then you might be a tad jealous of Andy Jones in Warwickshire (UK). He recently bought an original Birmingham International Airport Maglev (magnetic levitation) shuttle train for just £100 on eBay, after a previous bidder failed to stump up a pledged £25,100. Not only a real bargain of but a slice of engineering history as well.

Driverless and ‘flying’ at an altitude of 15mm above it’s tracks, the shuttle train was the world's first commercial automated maglev system (1984-1995), running at speeds of up to 26mph between the airport terminal and the mainline railway station (620m in 90 seconds).

“I thought I would just start the bidding, but I had no idea that I would end up getting it.” said Andy “We have offered it to various museums since we bought it, but nobody has been able to accommodate it. As a consequence I’ve got a five tonne train in the field opposite my house!”

Six months ago we bought a beautiful black and white image of the very same Maglev by photographer Steve Cooper.  At the time we joked that we should have bought the real thing for an Obsessionistas office, but the £25,000 price tag was a bit much. If only we’d known it had gone back up on eBay we could have bid £101. As the picture hangs in our Obsessionistas office and we look at it every day, we thought we really ought to pop over and have a look at the real thing.

After driving around a small village north of Kenilworth, I eventually found it situated in a field surrounded by a couple of horses, goats and chickens. Andy’s wife Jenny kindly let me take these shots of it and told me that he was going to call it “Milligan” (after Spike)… as Andy’s a fan and he thought Spike would have appreciated the absurdity of it all. Here at Obsessionistas HQ we are very jealous… a true collectors item that went for a song... lucky old Andy!

More info on the history of Maglevs are available here.

The other few remaining Birmingham Maglevs can be seen at Railword in Peterborough and the National Railway Museum in York.

Embrace your inner Geek and watch it in action here (a chap gets caught in it’s doors at 7.10mins !)

Images © Graham Powell of Obsessionistas.

An ode to mid century Manhattan

They were an iconic feature of the New York City streetscape. If you've always fancied turning your living room into an ode to midcentury Manhattan you can now buy your very own yellow 'Walk /Don't Walk' street sign.

First introduced in the 1950s, they became immortalised in classic films such as Taxi Driver and Saturday Night Fever. The city began decommissioning them in 1999 when the decision was made to replace them with an LED graphic version that featured pictographic hand and man signs and was considered more appropriate to New York's culturally diverse population.

The now extinct design classics are part of the fabric of what most people think of as 'New York' and as such exert a powerful nostalgic pull for the collector. Gloucestershire based industrial lighting and salvage company Trainspotters has sourced a quanity of these original yellow street signs.  If you want one you'll have to be quick though as they are selling fast after recently being featured in the New York Times.  We understand that a number of them have already made the transatlantic crossing back home again to New York buyers.

We think they make a pretty cool collector's item.

Images used with the kind permission of  Trainspotters.