Watch Artist Peter Shire Turn 9 Everyday Beauty Objects Into Extraordinary Works of Art

While considering the theme for this year’s Met Gala, “Manus x Machina,” we began to muse over the clash between the artistry involved in our beauty routines and the industrially produced products that get us there. Why shouldn’t those transformative bottles lining bathtub ledges, drugstore shelves, and beauty counters across the globe be as customized as the looks they produce? For this, we turned to Los Angeles–based designer Peter Shire who, in his landmark work with furniture, ceramics, and sculpture, has spent a lifetime toying with the tension between mechanical design and craft. If anyone understands the power of customization, it’s him.

Nearly everything inside Shire’s Echo Park studio wears his thumbprint—from the dip-dyed mugs waiting to be fired in a kiln to the ombré-ed and striped tool boxes that line the walls. “I can’t control what’s jarring and ugly and greedy [in the world], but everything stops at the door. This is my world,” he explains of his impulse to, say, flank a flat-screen television with red-and-white striped fabric. So, naturally, when we shipped him a box of beauty products pulled from the houses of everyone from Garnier to Hermès, he took a break from preparing for upcoming exhibitions at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum and Derek Eller Gallery (both set to open this September) and set to work spattering and striping.

“It could be Joy, it could be Dove, it could be Pledge,” mused the designer, observing the ubiquitous shapes at his disposal. Before earning a place on his own shelves, tubes and tubs were dipped in gesso, adorned with Pantone colored paper in amorphous shapes, and daubed with acrylic paint. A candle became a stand for a galaxy of bamboo skewers topped with hand-painted spheres. When housed in odd bits of ceramics lying around the studio, a flacon of Chanel No. 5—an already “killer” design, admits Shire—became enshrined. “Spread your wings. It’s always just better to [expand],” says the designer, who encourages a fearlessness of spirit in defying expectations of size and shape. “It’s about excitement and being exceptional—that’s what’s interesting.” Consider it one small step for man.

 

 

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