Lisa Perry: Living Confluence of Art, Fashion and Interior Design
If there’s art inside you, it finds a way of coming out and expressing itself. We designers give vent to our inner art on the spaces that surround us. Fashion designers express their art through apparel, sculptors do it through the forms they give to materials, and painters simply let it spread out on a canvas and so on. Then there are those of us who manifest our aesthetic aptitude through multiple outlets, most of us do so, in fact. But, very few make successful careers out of each of the pens or brushes we wield or hats we put on. New York based designer and artist Lisa Perry is one of these few who translated popular art works onto her equally successful fashion line and then these two skills found their way into homes designed by her to influence a popular range of interiors as well. Perhaps one of the pioneers of the trend of creating ‘signature homes designed by fashion icons’, Perry has been showing how an innate artistic sense can be leveraged into different creative forms.
Born to artistic parents, Lisa Perry is often heard crediting her well-honed aesthetic sense to her childhood years growing up with a father whose hobby was painting and a mother who curated art with a family which had a business in textiles. Her earliest recollections are very much the simple childhood brushes with art that any of us may have had – observing and being creative with everyday stuff like the furniture, linen and upholstery, bead curtains and cushions that surrounded her at home. She participated sometimes in directing the outcome of a wall mural her father painted at home or in discussions with artists whose works her mother curated for exhibits. But, these apparently insignificant interactions seem to have had a life-long impact on Lisa Perry, on the choices she made and the life she created for herself.
If there are two defining words one could pick to attribute to Lisa Perry’s lifestyle, art and fashion, they would be ‘pop’ and ‘fun’. Solid bright colours in pure basic forms come to life usually on a pure white surface in all of Lisa’s works and interact to create happy, fun-filled expressions that attract and infect inescapably. Having gravitated earlier in life towards art styles and fashion of the 60s and 70s, she has cultivated her passion for those and developed her own iconic brand image based on this interest of hers.
While starting with a career in designing fashion from the 60s and 70s, Lisa passionately collected pieces of fashion from that period and adapted them into her own line, even dressing in them and literally living her passion. The Lisa Perry brand of apparel showcases cuts, prints and weaves that were popular in the 60s and 70s era and makes them contemporary trends, leading to her being named 60s fashion icon. She has often collaborated with artists like Roy Litchenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakamito translate their art onto dresses to make art wearable and turn artists into fashion brands.
Being married to one of 1000 richest men in the world as declared by Forbes magazine, Richard Perry, Lisa shares three of the most spectacular homes in the world with him. All three have interiors which are a veritable curation of pop art and of her collection of pieces from the 60s and 70s. Their palatial penthouse at Sutton Place South on Madison Avenue, NY, has actually been treated by her as a ‘museum’ of pop-art. Indeed, the pleasing, cheerful visuals of this home of hers and her success at demonstrating how comfortably liveable such an arrangement can be have led to her foray into interior designing services wherein her firm offers signature Lisa Perry designed homes.
Her homes typically have walls, floors and other surfaces in pure brilliant white over which colourful pieces of pop art and pop inspired accessories like cushions and rugs make a stunning splash, thus maintaining a visual balance. Also family rooms like the library, media room and bedrooms are carpeted wall to wall to give them a cosy feel while allowing the art to dominate visually through patterns and arrangements. For her 6000 sq ft Palm Beach house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, she is famously supposed to have asked her architects Harper Design Build to completely tear down the former ornate interiors and convert the place into a white box!
A case in point is her penthouse media room which has a semi-circular arrangement of deep, cushy sofas arranged with candy pink cushions placed around to coordinate with the mock colonnade lining the curvature of the back wall. The vibrant colours of a painting adorning the wall do contrast and mutually set off with the earth coloured carpet with a bold black geometric pattern, the shiny donut of a centre table only adding to the pop drama.
Lisa Perry’s lifestyle stores at high street locations sell a range of her pop art products including apparel, accessories like bags and jewellery, homeware and furnishing products. These stores which are laid out like any one of her homes are extremely popular and attract a wide clientele. Being married to a super-rich businessman may definitely have given Lisa Perry’s business that extra bounce and visibility, but the creations are all her own. She has surely been brave and explorative with these creations of hers and, as we do know, fortune favours the brave!
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