Looks from the spring/summer 2010 collections of Prabal Gurung (left) and Bibhu Mohapatra (right), who are among the 12 designers selected for tenancy in the CFDA Fashion Incubator.

With fashion week looming, a crop of young designers have received the good news that they have been selected as the inaugural tenants of the CFDA Fashion Incubator, a business-boosting initiative of the Council of Fashion Designers of America that was established last fall with a $200,000 grant from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Each designer (or design team) will be able to take advantage of a two-year lease on an individual studio in New York's Garment Center at below-market value rates as well as business mentoring, educational seminars, and networking opportunities. The designing dozen are:

Last week saw us back in product wonderland, better known as the New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF). Our first stop at the biannual gifts and home accessories extravaganza is always the juried Accent on Design division, where the likes of Marimekko, Jonathan Adler, Umbra, and Artecnica showcase their latest and greatest items. Tasked by the fair to select one item as "the next big thing," we chose the Brelli: the world's first biodegradable umbrella! Designed by Pam Zonsius, the Brelli covers a bamboo parasol frame with a sleek canopy of transparent biofilm. The result is a sturdy reimagining of a delicate design classic that also happens to be 100% green. Available in three sizes that retail from $38 to $62, the Brelli comes tucked inside an organic cotton carrying case and can be decorated with permanent paint markers (non-toxic, of course). Finally, a way to protect oneself from the environment without contributing to its destruction.

Previously on UnBeige:

Looks from the spring/summer 2010 collection of Sophie Théallet, who will show her fall collection next Tuesday, February 16, in New York City. (Photos: Dan Lecca)

"For me, creating a collection is a very painful process. I just like looking at my environment: walking in Prospect Park, going to the movies, reading a book, listening to music. At some point, something shows up and I begin to design on the paper, and I start to play with it. It depends on a lot of things but when the ideas come, I feel free and happy."

-Sophie Théallet, winner of the 2009 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Prize

Unfortunate and belated as it is, you run into some pretty interesting lives in the obituaries. Case in point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that Clifford A. Nahser passed away last week. In addition to working for the Atlanta Public School System for 26 years, designing new buildings for them, and being "an early expert in the installation of AstroTurf," Nahser was also the chief architect behind the Waffle House, the iconic, greasy spoon restaurant chain you run into every two minutes in the south of the country. Here's the story:

Co-founder Joe Rogers Sr. asked him to help design new restaurants from the prototype diner he opened in Avondale Estates in 1955. Mr. Nahser worked on the blueprint for one of the earlier units, then went on to help design hundreds more as the restaurant chain grew.

Tweaked and updated a little over the years, the same basic plan was used for Waffle Houses in 28 states, said his brother Donald Nahser of Alpharetta.

"He used to say, 'Anybody who's ever traveled through the South by car has been in one of my buildings,'" his brother said.

As the LA Times' critic Christopher Knight puts it: "'Great Recession'? What 'Great Recession'?" He's commenting on the news that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced that it has raised $250 million in just six months, largely to help expand their space to make way for the massive Donald Fisher Collection, which you'll remember they were able to hold on to after the Gap founder's sudden, unexpected passing last year. Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there haven't been any designs yet for the new extension, but now that the money has poured in, the museum is planning to add roughly an additional 100,000 square feet to its current facility, making it one of the largest modern art museums in the country, larger than the MoMA in New York. The big story of all of this, however, is this:

The $250 million raised thus far comes from what [museum director Neal Benezra] called "core members of the board" and is intended to challenge other affluent friends of the museum to pitch in. The museum will not divulge individual contributions, but its board includes luminaries of business and philanthropy such as Charles Schwab, Mimi L. Haas, Helen Hilton Raiser, Paul Sack and Roselyne Swig.

To which Christopher Knight responds, "Those pockets are not merely deep, they are also open. Good for them."

We think we've made it perfectly clear in the past that there are a lot of things we don't know about Barbie. We know it was the doll's birthday last year and she can get Jonathan Adler to design her Malibu Dreamhouse, but that's about it. So it was interesting to read about a controversy surrounding the iconic toy coming out of Buffalo, New York. Story goes, according to the Buffalo News, is that a 2002 competition called "I Can Be," which asked the public to select the next career-themed edition of the toy. But when "Architect" won, "Mattel balked at producing an architect doll." Now that the company has launched another similar contest eight years later, architecture professor Despina Stratigakos has kicked off a campaign to finally give architecture its due. Here's a bit:

"This is a powerful icon, and it does speak to little girls," said Stratigakos, an assistant professor in [University of Buffalo]'s School of Architecture and Planning. "We need role models."

Architect, environmentalist, surgeon, news anchor and computer engineer are the five jobs voters can pick from in the contest, which runs through Wednesday at www.barbie.com/vote. "An architect designs buildings and makes sure they're safe, sturdy and cool-looking," the job description reads on the contest Web site.

We're sure your head hurts too after last night's pummeling of greasy food, beer, and some occasional bits of football thrown in there for good measure, so we'll start out gently this morning. An interesting new iPhone app has been released by the Japanese company Wowlab. Called addLib (not to be confused with the popular sound card company, AdLib, of the 1980s), it's essentially a random design generator. You plug in a photo, it kicks out a poster that looks like it might have been laid out by some famous Swiss designer, all at random, using "the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio, and the Facial Recognition System." A fun toy, sure, but we'd be interested to hear what you think it says about design, that quality can come from formula rather than unique, practiced artistry. Or are we just over thinking the whole thing? Here's the app in action:

Diana Vreeland and Louise Dahl-Wolf prepare model Lisa Fonssagrives for her close-up in this 1947 Arthur Rothstein photograph, among the images from Look magazine on view through April 10 at the Museum of the City of New York.

Founded in 1937 by Gardner Cowles, Look magazine's mission was to meet "the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures." The hefty lead times of the day—two to three months—took their toll on some of Look's news value (as when the bi-weekly published the results of an opinion poll on the 1964 presidential election three weeks after Kennedy's assassination), but the photos always packed a punch. Des Moines-based Look was particularly enamored with New York City, as captured by photographers including Weegee and a young Stanley Kubrick. An exhibition on view at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) gorgeously reveals the extent of this fascination by showcasing highlights from the museum's vast Look collection. Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, the show looks back at New York life from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s. Admire the trained dobermans once employed as Macy's mascots and many other images at the MCNY through April 10 or in the pages of the accompanying book: Only in New York (Monacelli).

Ammar Eloueini's plastic CoReFab chair, created with digital animation and manufactured using 3D printing technology, is among the objects that go on view today in "Action! Design over Time," a new installation of the contemporary section of the architecture and design galleries at the Musuem of Modern Art.

Today Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum announced the winners of the Ordway Prize. Named for naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway, the award bestows $100,000 in cash upon both a curator/art writer and an artist "whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition." This year's winners are Hamza Walker, the director of education and associate curator at Chicago's Renaissance Society, and Polish artist Artur Żmijewski. Among the finalists for this, the third Ordway Prize were Sabine Breitwieser, Hou Hanru, Tania Bruguera, and William Pope.L. They were selected from a global slate of nominees by a jury led by Jennifer McSweeney, director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, chief curator at the New Museum.

"I wish I had a grand vision for the award," said Walker in a statement issued today. "But as it stands, the bricks and mortar of my life are in severe need of tuckpointing." For Żmijewski, whose work was recently exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the "quite unexpected" win is particularly thrilling. "My art is important to me, and now it has been recognized by others in a significant way and that pleases me immensely," he said. "The considerable amount of money that comes with this award will surely help to realize my future projects."

This is not a new thought, but with devastating events happen, like Katrina or Indonesia or, most recently Haiti, we've always been a little uncomfortable with the seemingly endless photos and video of the suffering. Certainly we understand the importance, to show the realities on the ground, but there's that discomfort in knowing that a photo didn't just take itself, that there were likely dozens of shooters all vying for that perfect bit of pain. Patrick Witty has filed a great report on the increasingly excellent NY Times Lens blog, "Too Many Angles on Suffering?" which addresses just that: how many photographers are too many? And, more specifically, are there too many in Haiti right now? It's not a long essay, and it doesn't even begin to answer a largely rhetorical question, but it's some great thinking, and the shots they've selected to illustrate both the number of shooters and how each sees one specific subject, is just brilliant, if not extremely uncomfortable.

On Tuesday, we told you about the National Endowment of the Arts kicking off a logo design competition. While the prize is big, $25,000 for the winner, the noxious air of spec designation couldn't escape it. As such, the AIGA's executive director, Richard Grefe, has responded to the contest's launch by issuing a letter calling out the NEA for requesting spec-based work, which is particularly negative, being that they are a government agency whose job it is to foster growth in artistic and creative endeavors, not exploit, as some would say is what spec contests do. It's a fantastic read, Grefe's letter, and really hits hard where hard hitting is needed, summarizing the entire anti-spec stance in just a few paragraphs, with several particularly cutting examples that certainly might do the trick in swaying the NEA to alter the contest. Or they might just ignore the complaint(s) all together. Who knows. Will be interesting to see what happens. Here's one of many great sections:

...capable and professional designers do not work for free. While there will always be some designers who are willing to create designs in response to an open call for work, without any assurance of compensation, the buyer immediately relegates his or her choices among those designers who least likely to be experienced, knowledgeable designers who are in demand among clients and who work according to the professional standards of the profession. Only too often, it results in a client eventually having to bring a more experienced designer onto a project in order to execute it.