In a scene from the 1934 film, The Thin Man, retired detective Nick Charles (William Powell) demonstrates to a group of bartenders the skills needed to shake a good cocktail. While vehemently shaking a cocktail shaker with one hand, he says to them, “See, the important thing is the rhythm, always have rhythm in your...

This Austrian tea service was designed in a thoroughly modernist style. Forms have been radically simplified to their stark geometric essence. The pieces have no applied ornament, adhering to the principle of “form follows function”, one of the central tenets of modernist industrial design. Following the First World War, new economic and social conditions made...

George Schmidt might have been on to something in 1987 when he wrote to Cooper Hewitt curator David McFadden that he was “firmly convinced that plastic is finally losing the murky reputation of the past as a cheap substitute material and is being accepted as a viable contemporary medium.” This mug, from Schmidt’s 1986 line...