Inside Svenskt Tenn’s Chic Dinner at Manhattan’s Consulate General of Sweden

The 3,925 miles between New York and Stockholm lessened considerably Thursday evening as the design brand Svenskt Tenn hosted a chic dinner at the Consulate General of Sweden on Park Avenue, hosted by CEO Maria Veerasamy. Those attending included Mickalene Thomas, Sally Singer,  Johan Lindeberg, Mickey Boardman, Maria Cornejo, Lynn Yaeger, Vogue’s very own Chioma Nnadi, and Swedish photographic and creative direction duo Peter Farago and Ingela Klemetz Farago.

Svenskt Tenn is renowned for plenty of things, not least the pioneering spirit of founder Estrid Ericson, who began the company in 1924, its gorgeous store on Strandvagen in Stockholm, and for one Josef Frank, an Austrian emigre designer who, for much of the 20th century, created such iconic pieces for the company as the sprawling bed-sized Liljevalchs sofa, and oh so many joyous and exuberant textiles, from Baraquilla to Mirakel to Navigare. (Many might want their ashes scattered at Bergdorf Goodman. Me? I’d take Svenskt Tenn any day.)  

The dinner was both a curtain raiser to the brand's 100th anniversary next year, and to honor the work of Frank, whose particular brand of life-affirming Modernist aesthetic was shaped by his time in Manhattan during the Second World War. There he designed some of his most famous textiles and furniture pieces, hence the name for tonight’s festivities, The American Chapter.  “Josef made fifty of his most cherished and important prints in New York,” said Veerasamy. “To be here is to experience what it is about the city that made him so creative.”

Those ultra-vivid patterns of his made quite an impact at the dinner. Four long tables were dressed in different fabrics of his design, with Frank-authored flower and fruit textile cut-outs strewn across the top for good measure, all adding to the merriment. (The general rule with Frank’s work: more is more, and even more is even better.) Guests ate an equally vivid (and absolutely delicious) menu that included tomatoes dressed in sea buckthorn oil, Hispi cabbage, grilled sea bass, smoked potatoes, and brown butter cake swirled with whipped cream and lemon curd.

If Frank was a guest of honor, then so too was one of his most famous designs, named, appropriately enough, Manhattan, which he came up with sometime in the early Forties. With its bold evocation of the New York grid system, parks, and rivers, the print is as much a love letter to Frank’s temporary home as it is a highly stylized map. If you’ve been in New York these past few days, you might have seen trucks passing by emblazoned with a blow-up of the textile zipping by - or maybe one of Peter Farago and Ingela Klemetz Farago’s photographs of a chair upholstered in Manhattan and perched in splendid isolation on the island of Borgen. That’s just one of a series of striking images that the twosome shot as part of a project to reimagine Frank’s iconicity for today, and which were included as part of a special commemorative magazine they conceived and created.

Farago and Klemetz Farago started to shoot last year during one of those endlessly light Swedish summer days, transporting Svenskt Tenn furniture and textiles by speed boat to the hauntingly desolate location, including meters and meters of the Manhattan fabric, snaking it across the landscape. They also brought some of the spirit of their fashion photography work to aid in the reimagination of Frank and of Svenskt Tenn. “Usually, when a company photographs their furniture, they show a lot of it,” said Klemetz Farago. “But we wanted to treat the pieces more like models, to shoot them alone, so we could focus on one at a time.”

For Farago, those images are a perfect evocation of the brand, and those whose work continues to make it what it is today. “That day, there were no waves, the cliffs were warm...we were in a beautiful place with this beautiful furniture,” he said. “It didn’t feel like we were doing something miles away. It felt like we were in Estrid and Josef’s world.” And thanks to The American Chapter dinner, so were we.