The Story of Antwerp’s Historic Glove-Makers, Ganterie Boon

Once called upon for dancing, driving and dressing for dinner, the glove has long since relinquished its place as an everyday essential. Not so in Antwerp’s Ganterie Boon, where leather gloves still emerge from the drawers and boxes of François Bollekens’ exquisite 1929 Art Deco shop, and a rather particular craft continues much as it has for 140 years.

Sought out by the world’s most inspiring tastemakers and remarkable hotels, Cara Bauermeister creates ceramic vessels from her garden studio in South Africa’s Cape Winelands. Like the pages of a flower press, her pieces bear the marks of a wild garden in bloom, balancing intricate painting and sculptural silhouettes with everyday utility.

Berlin-based designers Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn bring together two very different paths: his as a carpenter, trained in the Bavarian Forest, hers as a fashion designer who spent nearly a decade at Y-3. Their Armadillo series, showing in their joint Companions exhibition at Gallery FUMI during PAD London, began with century-old beech shingles taken from a farmhouse in the Vogelsberg, where they had been weathered by rain, wind and sun. The pair looked to nature's own overlapping surfaces, from fish scales to butterfly wings to the armor of armadillos, creating pieces that seem to have wandered out of a storybook.

Until just a few decades ago, workshops making decorative wooden mouldings were not hard to find. Scattered across the country, alongside the craftsmen’s workshops they supplied, they produced all the small, delicate pieces that went into the finished product – furniture, bedheads, frames and wall panelling. Gradually, however, they began to disappear. Today, wherever you speak to people in Italy – or even elsewhere in Europe – there is one name that invariably comes up as the surviving supplier, and one that is consequently held in high regard: Ebanisteria Marelli,.

For Jodie Fried and Sally Pottharst, Armadillo began with a simple desire: to make the kind of rugs they wanted in their own homes: "something simple, beautiful, natural and exceptionally well made, with a real respect for the hands that made it." Fried, a former costume and production designer, found her way to India and its extraordinary culture of craft; Pottharst came from a family steeped in the flooring trade. Since founding Armadillo in 2009, the pair have worked between Los Angeles, London and the Adelaide Hills, developing their rugs slowly with generations of Indian artisans.

Born and raised in New York City, William Reardon, founder of New York Stoneware, grew up determined to establish a craft-based career. Now living and working as a full-time potter, craftsmanship for William is a process of accumulation: ideas, images, techniques and influences gathered over a lifetime and transformed at the wheel. From art school in Chicago to his Brooklyn studio, he reflects on the mentors, rituals and restless curiosity that shape his stoneware.

From a chance meeting in the Amazonian jungle between Jenny Boucher, a Canadian textile designer, and Mauricio Navarro, a Peruvian industrial designer, DAR Proyectos was born. Working alongside local artisans, they transform gemstones into objects that invite interaction and play. Their work is a rare alchemy between ancestral craft, contemporary industrial design, and a philosophy of connection.

While most textile makers focus on warp and weft, Zena Holloway prefers roots and shoots. Grown from living wheatgrass and coaxed into intricate forms through hand-carved beeswax moulds, her remarkable creations transform an unseen subterranean world into lamps, vessels and sculptures that feel at once ancient, futuristic and entirely unlike anything else in contemporary craft.

The Tango region of Kyoto, facing the Sea of Japan, has long been celebrated for its unique weaving culture and the making of exquisite kimono obi. Within this rich textile tradition, Tamiya Raden has created something extraordinarily rare: a craft that transforms shell nacre into shimmering threads, woven into cloth through an innovative adaptation of hikihaku.

Su Yu-Xin grew up on a farm on the remote east coast of Taiwan, and imbues her work with alchemy and philosophy. Capturing transformation, impermanence, and nature’s will: her work is acutely imaginative. Su Yu-Xin experiments with materials she forages. Crafting her own pigments, going beyond what’s readily accessible to find rare shades and minerals, she manifests the connection between reality and fiction, science and nature, the industrial and the sublime. Now painting from the coast of California, Su Yu-Xin has travelled from one side of the Pacific ocean to the other, with formative years in Taipei, London, and Shanghai in between.

At Charleston House, the exhibition Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press (through September 6, 2026) brings into focus an often-overlooked dimension of Virginia Woolf’s legacy as a printer and maker. Through rare hand-printed editions, working materials, and intimate archival correspondence, it traces how the Hogarth Press became both a site of radical literary production and a deeply personal craft practice.

Lace, though not technically a fabric, has threaded through European history as dress, trim, and signifier of status. Traditionally crafted by women, it is distinguished by its disciplined construction from thread and air, which holds both technical and cultural significance. Despite its delicacy, lace has endured through centuries of changing fashion. Cabana explores its history with Catherine Gauthier, curator of lace at Brussels' Fashion & Lace Museum.