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Hermès installation by Studio Simone Post

Sometimes, it pays to sugar-coat your ideas. With her recent installation for Hermès, Living in Lightness, Rotterdam-based designer Simone Post binges on sweets to create a spectacular candyscape that spans several windows of the French fashion house’s Tokyo flagship. The end result is a Willy Wonka-like wonderland that looks lifted straight from a childhood dream.

Hermès installation by Studio Simone Post

Post’s pastel-hued domestic compositions are constructed using mostly marshmallows but also the occasional string of candy beads. Her first vignette, arranged in the store’s left window, recreates an outdoor terrace and looks through an arched window framed by a flowing bonbon curtain. To the right, a coordinating interior scene presents common household furnishings like a coffee table and coat rack built from an assortment of puffy concoctions.

Post’s most fantastical creations are perhaps the small trees that anchor each of the windows. Potted in marshmallow-wrapped planters, their twisting branches culminate in intricately constructed flowers.

Meanwhile, the 16 small window boxes that run along the side of the building frame candyland equivalents of accessories like coffee mugs and martini glasses.

Photo by Studio Simone Post
Photo by Studio Simone Post

The sugary dessert theme builds upon Hermès’s spring/summer collection, which explores the idea of lightness through sunny hues and delicate silhouettes. By leveraging the similarly airy nature of puffy confectionery, Post seeks to provide an antidote to the heavy times we live in.

“They bring you back to your childhood,” she says of the marshmallows she engaged as an unlikely building material. “I think we can all use something that makes us dream.”

Photo by Studio Simone Post

Post tapped Frisia-based candy factory Astra Sweets to manufacture candy for the installation in a range of different sizes — from the bite-sized mini marshmallows that frame the living room’s mirror to the more robust twists that comprise the nearby cabinet.

Photo by Studio Simone Post

Along with evoking Hermès’s hand-stitched textiles, Post’s woven arrangements of these yarn-like marshmallows also nod to her own portfolio of textile designs.

In particular, Living in Lightness builds upon a past project, Bite Me Basket, that Post completed for Basketclub, the Instagram-based initiative that invites designers to create a basket inspired by a single emoji. (Her initial prompt was a lollipop.)

Hermès installation by Studio Simone Post
Photo by Studio Simone Post

By successfully extending that conceptual exercise into a full-scale environment, Post has created a delicious tribute to pure imagination. “In front of the shop window, your mouth is watering,” she says. “In a sense, a certain world is created that is almost unreal. You’re unable to reach it, but you do wish you could.” Whatever the Easter Bunny has planned for Sunday morning, he might want to step up his game.

Studio Simone Post Builds a Pastel Candyland for Hermès

Just in time for Easter, the Dutch textile designer appeals to the sweet tooths — and the imaginations — of Tokyo shoppers.

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