Does the opening of the Chimi eyewear retailer on Grand Road in SoHo create a Little Sweden or a Nordic Means? Hästens and Pimples Studio are down the highway, Toteme is across the nook, and Danish Ecco is on the nook of Broadway, in spite of everything.
Based in Stockholm in 2016, Chimi is the brainchild of Charlie Lindström. The son of architects on his father’s aspect and designers on his mom’s, he studied microeconomics at his mother and father’ bidding, and has utilized his math abilities to entrepreneurship. Within the retailer, Chimi’s always-available core assortment is organized in response to X and Y axes with kinds organized in rows by colour choices. At first, he defined on a walk-through, “I needed to create iconic kinds with none huge logos, and attempt to make the very best product relating to high quality.”
The subsequent problem was to seek out methods to create newness to enrich the core assortment. Lindström got here up with a “labs” idea, wherein particular merchandise are developed round totally different subcultures. Chimi x Koeingsegg—fronted by Yung Lean—tapped into automobile tradition, whereas Lindström’s hook-up with Christer Fuglesang, “the primary Swede in house,” targeted on futurism. LVMH Prize winner Ellen Hodakova Larsson used extra Chimi lenses and frames to create seems to be and equipment for her spring 2025 present.
To commemorate the opening of the primary US store, a Chimi symphony was commissioned from the Swedish maestro Jacob Mühlrad. Visible concord is created within the house by way of using curving parabolas that “had been clearly a bit impressed by how we work with steadiness from the eyewear,” Lindström famous. There’s a U-shaped wall, an undulating seating space, C-shaped stools, and an overhead gentle with rounded edges that appears a bit like an eyeglass lens. A round desk and a cone-shaped column (which recall the sort of props that seem in Sheila Metzner photographs for ’80s Vogues) are fabricated from silicon in a pinkish colour you would possibly discover in a pick-and-mix gummy sweet combine.