collaboration

As if you needed another good reason to purchase the fine formulations of Kiehl's Since 1851, the L'Oreal-owned apothecary brand has launched a limited-edition holiday collection of its famed Creme de Corps that features label artwork by KAWS, the artist also known as Brian Donnelly. Better still, Kiehl's is donating 100% of its net profits from the sale of the creatively labeled lotion to RxArt, which brings contemporary art to healthcare facilities. The label's mix of color planes and cartoony gloved hands marked with an "X" is indicative of KAWS's more recent paintings, which deconstruct his graphic signatures and trademark characters. The limited edition KAWS Creme de Corps is available in three sizes, and prices start at $26.50. "Continued use for 10 days will provide a skin texture heretofore unattainable," promises Kiehl's.

Mongoose Civique. Pastelogram. Utopian Turtletop. These were but a few of Marianne Moore's inspired suggestions to the Ford Motor Company when, in 1955, an executive approached the poet to suggest some names for its latest product line. Writer Danny Heitman recounted the story in a recent New York Times op-ed piece that suggests a literary bail-out for the beleaguered auto industry.

Moore apparently had no qualms about enlisting her muse in the service of the automotive industry. She was also willing to embrace the risks of the marketplace, agreeing to be paid only if she came up with a winning name. As Moore's biographer Charles Molesworth points out, she "had always enjoyed the language of advertisement, delighting in its inventiveness and ebullience, and even relating it to the poetics of praise."

(Photos: Discover Today's Motorcycling)

Continuing with last week's cycling theme, we bring you this pair of motorcycle helmets painted by Mike Shinoda (left) and Troy Lee (right) for "Celeritas," an exhibition of motorcycle culture-meets-street art that is on view through August 16 at SURU in Los Angeles. The show includes motorcycle helmets and "leathers" customized by the likes of Barry McGee, Mark Dean Veca, Audrey Kawasaki, James Jean, Stash, and Futura, whose spatter-painted headgear conjures visions of Sam Francis astride a Harley. Championed by actor John Hensley (Nip/Tuck) and Linkin Park's Joe Hahn, Celeritas kicked off earler this month with an auction that raised more than $65,000 for Riders for Health, an organization that provides motorcycles and maintenance training to aid workers in Africa who provide medical care to remote populations.

With the season three premiere of Mad Men only weeks away, AMC is rolling out a slew of online gewgaws (which we prefer to "social media-based viral marketing initiatives"). Along with the typical quizzes and e-cards is Mad Men Yourself, a just-launched site that allows user to create their own stylized '60s avatars (that's us, at left, going for a chic Betty Draper look that is very Michael Kors fall 2008) by choosing from an assortment of body shapes, facial features, hairstyles, and accessories—including a martini, a cigarette, and a doughnut, recalling a time when all three were acceptable to savor in the workplace. Drop your avatar into settings such as the Sterling Cooper offices, a picnic, or a pattern that looks ripped from the Draper family sofa. The illustrator behind the application's infinitely customizable characters is none other than Dyna Moe, who you may recall as the creator of Mad Men Illustrated, the delightful series of drawings inspired by scenes from the show and the New York-based illustrator and designer's own cache of period advertisements. "The show is famous for its meticulousness," she said recently. "And I try to reflect that in the simple cartoony way that I draw." Now go forth and Mad Men Yourself.

(Photo: Giovanni Troilo)

Weekend project alert! Grab that rusting Huffy and give it a baroque makeover à la Dzine, who created this custom lowrider for the Nike-sponsored Stages art exhibition to raise funds the Lance Armstrong Foundation and its LIVESTRONG campaign. The show, which opened last week at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris and travels to the United States in October, also includes works by Ed Ruscha, Cai-Guo Qiang, Richard Prince, Catherine Opie, KAWS, Shepard Fairey, Christopher Wool, Tom Sachs, and Rosson Crow.

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Following in the sponsored tire tracks of artist Robin Rhode, who recently used a BMW Z4 as a 300-horsepower paintbrush, Brussels-based graphic designers Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta have created a typeface using an iQ (pictured at right), Toyota's answer to the Smart Car. Smeets and Aresta teamed up with interactive artist Zach Lieberman and seasoned racecar driver Stef Vancampenhoudt to trace and digitally map letters and characters on the floor of an airplane hangar (watch the design process in the below video). The result is iQ Agility, a Eurojaunty typeface that reveals the iQ's incredibly tiny turning radius.

Next up for Smeets and Aresta? The pair are at work on a typeface inspired by the title sequence of Antonioni's Eclipse and another one for a club. In the meantime, they have a ongoing project to spot first names—from Adam to Zorba—in commercial signage. Both Stephanie and Steve remain elusive, but check if they've found your name here.

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Comic books and video games are going straight to hell—all nine circles of it. Beginning Thursday, Electronic Arts and DC Comics will preview their adaptations of The Divine Comedy at Comic-Con in San Diego. Both companies are hellbent on bringing the first infernal cantica of Dante's epic poem to a contemporary audience, one that would rather skip the 14,000 lines of verse and jump right into the vivid doom. EA's Visceral Games division is developing an elaborate video game version, Dante's Inferno, in which "a soldier...defies death and fights for love against impossible odds," picking a path through the afterlife with the help of a soul-reaping scythe, holy powers, and the ability to tame horrific creatures. For those who prefer to prowl the underworld on paper, DC Comics is at work on a comic book mini-series based on the Inferno. Illustrated by Diego Latorre (The Incredible Hulk) and written by Christos Gage (X-Men/Spider-Man), the comics go on sale this December, just in time to prime audiences for the 2010 launch of the game. Can't make it to Comic-Con? EA's website invites you to view a trailer for the game and "Explore Hell," where you can Twitter in Limbo.

What happens when Western and African cultures meet in a Victorian warehouse in central London? The Double Club, Carsten Höller's latest art project. Backed by Fondazione Prada and directed by Jan Kennedy, the temporary space offers a unique approach to entertainment and hospitality with a restaurant, bar, and disco that are equal parts Western cool and Congolese hot—but never a lukewarm fusion. In practice, that makes for deliciously bifurcated meals: diners at the Double Club restaurant can choose from parallel menus (family-style Congolese dishes or bistro classics) in a room that is a cultural checkerboard, with dark African hardwood and humble plastic tables alternating with French brasserie tiling and supersleek Breeding Tables by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, who led the design of the project's "Western side." Hungry for a wild boar terrine served on a Congolese tablecloth, a goat brochette fresh from the oil drum barbeque, or just a night of Ndombolo dance hits? Stop in soon, as the cultural coexistence ends July 11.

We still curse the sense of fiscal responsibility that kept us from purchasing those splendid Jeff Koons-printed frocks that Stella McCartney-showed for spring 2006. Now older, wiser, and able to subsist for weeks on a family-size bag of mixed nuts from the dollar store, we're not about to let her latest art-tastic collaboration pass us by. Famed artist and designer Peter Blake (or as we call him, "Sir Peter") has created a print for McCartney that appears exclusively on a summer capsule collection she designed for high fashion e-tailer net-a-porter. As you might recall, Blake designed an album cover for a band in which McCartney's father played.

The Blake-designed cloud print appears on a breezy silk jersey dress and shirt as well as beachy accessories such as strappy espadrilles and a canvas bag. There's also a cloudy t-shirt (organic cotton, of course) and a coordinating pair of dip-dyed skinny jeans. From a distance, Blake's motif smacks of Super Mario Bros., while up close it conjures the Benday-dotted skies of Roy Lichtenstein. In fact, this is Blake's first go at clouds. "I've avoided them. They're difficult," Blake told McCartney in a conversation taped in his London studio and posted on net-a-porter. "Most of my paintings have a clear sky, oddly enough, so when you asked me to do it, instantly I thought of [British painter John] Constable. I researched Constable's clouds." McCartney considers the collaboration a success. "What I love is the print is quite bold and it's quite a statement, and yet I think it's very approachable still, which is kind of quite hard to achieve," she tells Blake. "Well done." Quite.

Previously on UnBeige:

Just in time for the release of Gloria Vanderbilt's steamy novel about the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect (warning: it involves a discovered cache of letters wrapped with a magenta ribbon), the Guggenheim today launched an online forum that will address the subject of how design can enhance or detract from everyday life. "Between the Over- and Underdesigned," which runs through July 2 on the museum's website, is the first in a series of moderated online discussions on the arts, architecture, and design. Leading the inaugural forum is journalist and critic Aric Chen, who is virtually joined by panelists Sarah Herda, executive director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Arjo Klamer, professor of the economics of art and culture at Erasmus University in Rotterdam; Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Guggenheim. The forum encourages visitors from around the world to submit comments and questions for consideration by the panelists and to participate in two live chat sessions scheduled for this Thursday (with Chen) and next Tuesday (with van der Leer). Lupton has already gotten things off to a rousing start:

Imagine walking into a brand-new public building—let's say it's a museum, a campus student center, or a mental-health clinic. Every detail has been designed, from the drop ceiling to the polished floors. But taped to the security desk is a paper sign, printed out in all-caps Times Roman, that says Restrooms Are Downstairs in the Basement Behind the Boiler Room or Don't Even Think About Asking Me Where the Elevator Is. These homemade signs boil over with irritation, directed at a clueless public who don't know how the building works. What's happening here is not a failure of the public, however, but a failure of design.