simplepretty

One booth that I never miss at NSS is Sweet Bella. Their roster of vendors is a marvelous mix of sophisticated workaday and avant-garde product. It gives me a good chance to visit perennial favorites, like Korea’s O-Check and Italy’s Antica Cartotecnica, as well as see what owner Nina Allen’s unfailing eye has discovered while I’ve been away. This year, I was all about the Maison Martin Margiela collection from L’Atelier d’Exercises, pictured above. I love my MMM “Tabi” shoes, so of course fell hard for the stationery version, chicly interpreted as a leather bookmark. Utilitarian luxe indeed. Also from L’Atelier d’Exercies is the “endless notes” (above, far left). Write, then rip off the strip of paper to suit the message length. Fantastic.

Embarrassingly, I have yet to visit Sweet Bella’s retail boutique, Top Hat, located on Broome Street in NYC’s Lower East Side. Next visit: and while I’m at it, lunch at The Fat Radish, too.

photos by jane potrykus. to see more from the show, visit my flickr set, “stationery show 2013”