File under: AWESOME
One of our former tenants has been featured in The New York Times.
designer Ellen Van Dusen at home in Brooklyn | Credit: Ricardo Nagaoka
Sourced from NYT piece By Evan Nicole Brown Published October 4, 2021
Growing up, Ellen Van Dusen became FIXATED on kinetic colors and infatuated by Ellsworth Kelly's paintings. She would be inspired by her trips to the museum when she was a kid growing up in Washington, D.C. Ellen Van Dusen, now 35 years old, is the owner of a textiles and home accessories brand "Dusen Dusen."
She was an undergraduate at Tufts where she majored in a multidisciplinary mix of art history, neuroscience, and visual anthropology.
“I studied the visual process from different angles. Neuroscience is where I focus on vision: how things come through the eye, how they’re processed through the brain, and what evolutionarily draws the eye.””
Van Dusen has created costumes for the university's theater department, which helped prepare her for internships both during and after college, with big fashion brands such as Norma Kamali and Proenza Shouler. She even landed a post-graduation job in the studio of the designer Mary Meyer. While she was busy working, she also made time to work on her own bright, pattern-centric clothes, which she has been doing since high school.
Van Dusen’s most recognizable designs with signature stripes and squiggles in bold color combos | Credit Ricardo Nagaoka
Van Dusen’s home-accessories line, Dusen Dusen Home includes Towels and bedding | Credit Ricardo Nagaoka
A few years after moving to New York, that is when Dusen Dusen was born. She created her own womenswear line and quickly became disenchanted with the dictates of the production process and with the need to adhere to a rigid seasonal cycle. Dusen didn't care so much about the fashion cycle and would rather work and do her own thing instead. The scene was never appealing to her. She was more persistent and interested in the fundamentals of color, pattern, and her own prints.
Dusen realized that there was a lack of attention being paid to domestic design items such as bedding. That's when she decided to take on the task of creating more home items. The brand expanded to towels, pillows, kitchen textiles, and home accessories. This type of re-orientation opened up a lot of creative challenges. She found that it was an opportunity to work with prints on a bigger and uninterrupted scale.
Van Dusen’s prints on some of her line’s top-selling products. At right is a painting by the artist | Video by Ricardo Nagaoka
Her bold colors and geometric patterns — wide stripes, cursive squiggles, and '60s flower prints have a fun, whimsical childlike quality and her work goes back to our primitive human psychology: Children "are drawn to bold shapes, bold colors because it's the way we're wired to exist," she says.
It's a real shame that there's not much in the world for adults that's also super colorful and fun. But Ellen is here to change all that, that’s for sure.
visit Dusen Dusen online 👉🏼
and @dusendusen
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