A small taste of my former fashion and beauty columns that exhibited my concepts for each issue: writing, product and image choices. IN Kansas City, a lifestyle magazine.
WRITING + STYLING FOR FINEFOLK @shopfinefolk - Branding done by Design Ranch @design_ranch
STYLING AND ART DIRECTION FOR ASIATICA - A unique Kansas City specialty shop and studio.
A valuable collaboration with artisans making one-of-a-kind clothing within a design atelier and storefront selling home furnishings, furniture, clothing and accessories.
Asiatica, Fall 2023
Asiatica, Summer 2020
Asiatica 2019 White Collection
A DAY AT THE MUSEUM
Styled Asiatica, 2019 at Haw Contemporary Crossroads, featuring Debra Smith textile artworks.
Former positions as Editor-in-Chief of Home & Design Miami and M the Magazine for Kansas City Moms
My first cover as the Editor of Home & Design for The Miami Herald. Story about the lovely, highly-creative @adriennebonhaes. Photo by @troycampbellstudio
Cover for a renovation issue. This home was across and down the street from mine and I didn’t know the homeowner. I admired it everyday for a year. Finally I knocked on the door and said I wanted it for a cover. The exterior was a huge change and the inner courtyard was perfect for styling up. Photo by @johnellisphoto.
This was a fun one to create for my family lifestyle magazine, M the magazine for Kansas City Moms. A young mom @themakerista wearing @hadleyaclark with her kiddos. Alexander McQueen’s fall 2006 collection was my loose inspiration.
Assigning and editing stories and art directing photo shoots at M was a pleasure, especially when the subject was as interesting as Toma Wolff (see the piece below). Toma was co-director of the 18-year family contemporary art business, Byron Cohen Gallery (Kansas City), and the last 12 years she has served as a private art advisor and an online gallerist representing global artists. www.tomawollf.com
Toma Wolff at home in front of a Zhang Xiaogang work. I had the pleasure of art directed her website, for which these images are were taken. www.tomawolff.com
An M cover story on Kansas City artist, Ricky Allman and his family, 2012
OTHER COLLABS by SUSAN + KATE
Beyond our early Storyteller Interiors projects, Susan and Kate have, and still continue to work together on image-making for branding and editorial of fashion, beauty and wellness clients. Susan, directing and styling, while Kate doing her make-up, hair and grooming magic. Client here - Design Ranch, with photographer Forester Michael.
@storytellerinteriors @susancannon1 @katenortonmakeup @design_ranch @foresterm @voicesandmodels
The ‘Polymorphous Genius’ of Carlo Mollino
by Susan Cannon| written for thehighboy.com | March 2015
In an effort to get to know the somewhat obscure 20th-century Italian architect and designer, Carlo Mollino, we’ll have to take his fast track, because it’s not so simple to keep up with the manifold endeavors of this wildly flamboyant and controversial character. Mollino’s passions ran deep, wide... and fast.
Who He Was
Born in 1905, the enigmatic Carlo Mollino lived and worked in Turin, Italy until his death in 1973. Already showing artistic flair as a child, he went on to study mechanical engineering, art history and architecture, graduating with honors in 1931. After taking on a position in his prominent father’s engineering firm, yet receiving very little acceptance by him —Mollino’s quest was more on track with human side of creative beauty than with practical design that his father propounded—he embarked on a wide breadth of his own creative pursuits and zealous recreational activities, all of which were highly expressive in artistic interpretation, and largely influenced by Futurism and Surrealism.
Mollino’s expert achievements included architecture, engineering, interior and furniture design and photography. But that’s not all: He was a professor of architecture, an author, an airplane and automobile designer, a stunt pilot, race-car driver, ski enthusiast, and a fashion and set designer, not to mention there were numerous patents he developed. Mollino took on this impressive oeuvre with dynamism and a ravenous hunger for the provocative.
Mollino once said, “Everything is permissible as long as it is fantastic!”
His Architecture
Most of Mollino’s expressionistic architecture, which had a baseline influence that ranged from Le Corbusier to Gaudi, was demolished throughout the years. The highly regarded Teatro Regio, (Royal Theatre in Turin) originally realized in 1740, which Mollino redesigned and completed in 1970 after it had been destroyed during WWII, is a remarkable showcase for the city today. Among his other prized designs were the Equestrian Association in Turin, the modernist Casa Del Sol ski chalet in Cevinia Breuil, and a Ski Station at Lago Nero.
Drama on the slopes… Carlo Mollino stylishly downhill skiing.
Versions of Mollino’s 1959 Fenis Chair, now produced by Zanotta.
His Furniture Design
Mollino developed a special process for bending plywood, creating furniture with unusually biomorphic and an often-feminine form—startling on impact. There was an apparent appreciation for what came out of the Art Nouveau period, and the surreal works of Salvador Dali. His unique furniture design is now regarded as historically significant for its avant-garde style and rarity. Unlike his Milanese contemporaries Gio Ponti, the Castiglioni brothers and Franco Albini, who had their furniture produced by large manufacturers in the Italian design capital, Mollino’s Turin-based furniture production was all hand-crafted as one-offs, or in small quantities, usually custom-designed for commercial and private clients. The result is a body of work among the most rare and valuable today. Just ten years ago, an original 1949 Carlo Mollino Reale Table sold at Christie’s auction for an astounding $3.8 million.
The orginal Carlo Mollino Reale Table sold at Christie’s auction.
His Interior Design
Casa Miller
His Photography
Mollino also had a passion for photography that spanned more than 30 years. After much experimentation, beginning with his black-and-white series shot in Casa Miller, for which Man Ray’s work and Surrealism played an important influential role, he penned in 1949 what now is one of the most widely collected and coveted books on the history of photography, The Message from the Darkroom (Il Messaggio della Camera Oscura).
It was a deep collective of images ‘representing feminine complexities and seduction’ of hundreds of women. This collection perhaps speaks more clearly today—in light of our highly technological world of quickly produced images—and especially considering the singular nature of a Polaroid and how its process effects the perception of that sole image left behind.
Teatro Regio - Turin, Italy
Drawing of Ski Chalets Mollino designed in the early 30s; Three of Mollino’s chair designs.
Mollino’s Ardea Chair and Ottoman designed in 1944, produced by Zanotta.
Above: The original Cavour Desk designed by Mollino in 1949, which is produced today by Zanotta. below: Reale Table produced by Zanotta.
Casa Miller
Mollino created decoratively elegant interiors for private clients, public spaces, and his personal use.
CASA MILLER
He designed Casa Miller in the early 1930s as a small private studio. Lush yet spare, he furnished it with tufted velvet walls and a chaise lounge reminiscent of a Freudian analysis bed, floor-to-ceiling curtained backdrops, and sinuously formed track lighting (emulating the race track for which he had an obsession). Mollino practiced a great deal of black-and-white photography there; a taste of which Gio Ponti editorialized in his publication Domus in April of 1937.
CASA MOLLINO
Casa Mollino, which was his personal residential project of the 1960s, is preserved today by design scholars/authors Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari as the Museo Casa Mollino. This 18th-century apartment depicts the epitome of sumptuous Mollino style. In truly eccentric manner, Mollino designed one room specifically as his space to pass on to the afterlife—to model his dramatic death after the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs.
The elegant Casa Mollino above, left, and above left.
Mollino taking a self portrait in Casa Miller.
With his dark and irresistible features and the fearless speed with which he lived his life—plowing downhill on skis and writing a 300-page manual on his theory of downhill racing techniques, creating rare furniture and interiors, or designing the automobile “Bisiluro Nardi”, racing it at LeMans—Mollino’s trailblazing, expressive force left reverberations, even if his efforts were an overcompensation, out of his father’s lack of confidence in him.
Ultimately, Carlo Mollino’s fascinating set of achievements have been rare and tanilizing, and the art and design worlds still can’t look away.
