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The Candy-Colored Shelves Infiltrating the Neutral Millennial Home
GQ US|February 2025
How the once-staid office furniture specialist USM turned shelves themselves into a work of art.
- NOAH JOHNSON
The Candy-Colored Shelves Infiltrating the Neutral Millennial Home

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, we are all curators. We might not think of ourselves as such, but curating is what the modern world of style is all about: collections of things arranged in just the right way. We do this on our bodies with what we wear, in our homes with objects and furniture, in our offices, in our cars, even at the table in a restaurant. This is how we express our taste, our personality, our identity. We exhibit our personal curatorial projects on Instagram and Tik Tok, on YouTube and Twitch streams, in the backgrounds of our Zooms and FaceTime video calls. From the lowly Pinterest mood board artists to the creative director of your favorite fashion house, curation is how worlds are built.

When building their world together, Olivia Kim and her husband, Alex Dymond, relied on the sturdy Swiss-engineered USM Haller modular furniture system. Anyone reading this has almost certainly encountered USM furniture recently, though you may not know it by name.

Maybe you've seen images of Kenzo designer and Japanese streetwear impresario Nigo's banks of USM cabinetry in his Tokyo atelier, where he also houses a museum-quality collection of furniture by Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. Or seen USM used as a display at your local third-wave coffee shop or favorite sparely furnished fashion boutique. Algorithms might have fed you a video of a FurnitureTok influencer assembling and reassembling an olive USM dupe behind their Togo couch (also likely a dupe). It has a distinct design that is radically unique but can also disappear into its surroundings.

Kim is the senior vice president of creative merchandising at Nordstrom, and Dymond is a freelance fashion designer who spent over 10 years designing for Supreme.

This story is from the February 2025 edition of GQ US.

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This story is from the February 2025 edition of GQ US.

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