SHELF LIFE

Three Worldly, Stylish New Books For Your Coffee Table This Month

Editions that take you from downtown New York to Tokyo to inside Rick Owens’s home.


The Basket Bag series, a collaboration by Beams Boy and Disney.
Harumi Obama

These alluring new tomes will land on our coffee tables this month. Ryan McGinley: The Kids Were Alright brings together the photographer’s formative, exuberant works from 1998 to 2003, when his downtown Manhattan living room doubled as an art-kid nexus, and he snapped 10,000 Polaroids of friends like Dash Snow and Dan Colen. McGinley turned the camera on himself too. “There’s so much self-scrutiny that’s happening, and so much self-discovery, self-loathing, self-examination,” says the book’s author, Nora Burnett Abrams, who also curated the accompanying exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

The Basket Bag series, a collaboration by Beams Boy and Disney.

Harumi Obama

Beams: Beyond Tokyo takes us to Japan, where the 40-year-old retailer gained cult status by collaborating with iconic Western brands and championing of-the-moment labels like Kim Gordon’s X-Girl and Sofia Coppola’s MilkFed. Reflecting on the 1990s heyday of Japanese youth culture, Coppola writes, “It seemed like Tokyo was run by teenage girls.”

Rick Owens’s Tomb Chair, 2014.

Adrien Dirand/Owenscorp

Meanwhile, in Rick Owens: Furniture, the designer showcases his passion for furniture and predilection for ox bones, petrified bark, and other unusual materials. From gown to chaise longue, his contemporary goth sensibility is consistent, perhaps a result of one of his earliest influences: Sleeping Beauty’s glass coffin.

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