After working for three years at Habitat in London, interiors and home-accessories designer Ross Menuez is back in New York—and with a hot new project that, curiously, has nothing to do with furniture. The 37-year-old Manhattan native is making a name for himself with a line of T-shirts he calls Salvör. In business for a little less than a year, he’s already selling to stores in London, Moscow, and Tokyo.
Salvor is another word for “salvager”; Menuez salvages the images he uses on the shirts from old drawings and photographs in his personal archive, from museum dioramas, and from his latest obsession—Dutch and Italian encyclopedias from the twenties. He screen-prints all the shirts himself, with images ranging from a lone, bold falcon to more complex, multilayered work: “I like mixing imagery like a wispy background superimposed over a face, a wing, some rocks—each one changes the other completely.”
Albertine (13 Christopher Street; 212-924-8515) carries the entire Salvör line and even a few one-of-a-kind creations by Menuez. When you pile on the images, Menuez says, “you never know what you’re going to get.” (Short-sleeve shirts, $52; long-sleeve, $55–$60.)