Lynn Yaeger Goes Collecting with Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan

By Lynn Yaeger
March 30, 2010

“What’s great about plates is, you can wash them! I’m very prissy. I like a collectible you can Windex. That gives me beaucoup de joie!’ says the irrepressible Simon Doonan, the Creative Director of Barneys, when I catch up with him by phone to ask him about his collecting habits.

Doonan is stuck in Palm Beach because of a weather emergency, but that’s ok because 1) his life partner, the quirky potter-slash-entrepreneur Jonathan Adler, is right there with him and 2) this unforeseen delay means they have even more time to explore the thrift shops on Dixie Highway, where, Doonan says, “We have found so much groovy stuff over the years. What did we find there, Johnnie?” he calls out, and I hear Adler in the distance answer, “Weird ‘60s paintings, totally freaky stuff!” Not to mention some of those super-cleanable vintage dishes.

Doonan became so obsessed by a group of 1970s plates issued by artist Leroy Neiman and depicting a variety of clowns (“One of them looks like Leigh Bowery,” he tells me) that he has managed to fully assemble three sets, one for each of his and Adler’s residences in Palm Beach, Manhattan, and Shelter Island. “I actually found a lot of them online. There are five in the series, and I found the first at the 26th Street Market [in New York]. Then, I became so obsessed it set off an eBay frenzy! They make you feel good! They’re better than a dose of Zoloft!”

When pressed as to what he’s buying right now, Doonan says he loves Liberty of London floral prints—so much so that he is considering the purchase of a pair of Liberty of London for Target bicycles, a collectible of the future if ever there was one. “We could ride around Shelter Island on them! I hope people won’t throw rocks at us.”

Plates and bikes notwithstanding, Doonan denies being a fanatical collector. That definition, he cheerfully confides, describes his Johnnie, who takes the phone and admits that he is tooling around on eBay even as we speak. “I tried for a long time to kick it—it was a bad addiction. But now I’m back.” As for his other half, Adler claims that Doonan's hands are hardly clean when it comes to compulsive collecting: “We’re both on the hunt for a bit of butch man-tiquing.”

Adler is full of good advice when it comes to the general rules of accumulation: he knows you may have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the object of your dreams. And he insists that you must be rigorous in vanquishing those amphibians: “You have to not be afraid of throwing stuff out.” So what is Adler hunting for these days? “A lot of Gemma Taccogna—she was a cool Mexican chick who made groovy paper mache heads. Anna Sui has a ton of her stuff.” Does Adler have a ton too? “I have about 10. I need to crank it up. I hope I buy them all before this article comes out!” What else? “I find that Blenko glass is a great a space filler. Any awkward space, just add a bunch of colored glass.”

Suddenly Doonan chimes in that oh, they forgot to tell me, they also collect something called horological collages. “I think I cornered the market on vintage car collages made from old watch parts.” Somewhere in the back of my brain there is a trace memory of this sort of thing hanging on a den wall in Massapequa where I lived (and happily left) many decades ago." Not only are Doonan and Adler collectors of these, er, works of art, but they are also scholars of the genre. “A lot of them were made by a British dude from the ‘60s called Kersh. And also a guy called Ken Broadbent,” Doonan elucidates. “They’re mostly British. I have about 50.” Is it a problem, displaying 50 horological collages? “It’s all a problem, a huge problem,” Adler adds in. “But they’re cute! They’re mostly eight by ten inches, but we have a really big one that’s like five feet wide.”

Just before we hang up, Adler shares with me one more poignant category of collectibles he is searching for. “I’ve actually bought back a lot of my own stuff. I just found a vase that I made in the late ‘90s. When you make stuff all the time, you sometimes don’t treat it as reverently—you're on to the next thing. It’s great to find your own old stuff.”

And herein may lie the key to his whole collecting philosophy: “I make stuff for a living, I pour my heart into it. So I’m always looking for stuff by people who bring the same inspiration and passion to their work as I bring to mine.”