This year, artists and designers seemed to take a cue from François-Xavier Lalanne, showing oversized creatures as friendly and huggable as the midcentury artist’s iconic fuzzy moutons. I spent an afternoon with American artist Katie Stout, winner of this year’s Design Miami Curatorial Lab commission, who created a series of whimsical benches in the shape of a whale, frog, dog, turtle, horse, and a mermaid, among other creatures for the city’s Design District. “I wanted them to feel like they had been sculpted by a giant’s thumb,” Stout told us of the series, titled Gargantua’s Thumb. When a toddler climbed on the whale, wrapping his sticky melted-ice-cream hands around the piece, she looked only delighted. She also created what was arguably Design Miami’s main attraction: a fully functional carousel where visitors could sit astride a bulbous walrus, seagull, or mermaid. (Stout likes mermaids.) It was genius selfie material, and I only regret not climbing aboard for a spin.
Elsewhere at the fair, Ukrainian designer Victoria Yakusha showed four mythical animals—similarly rounded and friendly to the touch—hand-sculpted in ZTISTA, her signature material made of clay, flax, wood chips, and recycled paper. “Sit on it, please!” she encouraged guests. “The point is to bring joy. It’s a reminder that light persists even when the world trembles,” she said, herself dressed in a white balloon-like garment that made her resemble one of her own hugimals.
But when it came to the most cuddly (and gargantuan) creation of the week, the winner had to be the yeti-like “monster lamp” by Mexican designer Fernando Laposse at Friedman Benda. The friendly long-haired Patachon (2025), enrobed in fluffy agave fibers that beg to be stroked, stands over six feet tall, its rounded hands lit up like E.T., one arm raised in a salute. Greetings, earthlings.—C.H.
Stranger Things
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