Much of sustainable design today is presented through a softer lens, clean visuals, neutral palettes and carefully curated messaging intended to make conscious consumption feel comfortable and aspirational. Joshua Samuels heads in a completely different direction. His latest project, Broken Homeware, doesn’t attempt to romanticise sustainability or package it nicely. Instead, it embraces contradictions and discomfort. It reflects on the messy reality of how people actually consume, discard and live with objects.
Rather than presenting an idealised image of eco-conscious living, the collection exists somewhere far more familiar and grounded. Samuels frames the work less around pastoral fantasies of slow living and more around the imperfect environments where most real-life consumption takes place, think of messy flats, pubs, parks and bedrooms filled with objects carrying histories of wear, neglect and sentimentality.
That attitude is central to Samuels wider practice. Undef the Broken Homeware umbrella clothing is only one component of a broader approach centred around interception rather than creation. Existing objects are taken out of their original context and pushed into unfamiliar territory, forced to communicate something entirely different from their intended purpose.
Reworking Forgotten Objects
On one end of the collection sits a side that’s genuine labour and attention to detail, hours spent sourcing, darning, stitching and rebuilding discarded materials. On the other, there’s conscious effort to interrupt that care through a crude intervention and agressive slogans.
The project starts with a one-of-one vintage Persian rug, reworked using custom fabric panels made from reclaimed knitwear. Draped across the rug is an evolved interpretation of Samuels’ long-running “Bones” motif, a deliberately blunt skull-and-crossbones graphic acting as a symbol for forgotten objects and discarded possessions that were once valuable.
That same philosophy carries through into a series of vintage 10-inch dinner plates. Each plate remains unique in its original form, but Samuels overlays them with crude slogans that immediately rupture their traditional domestic associations. Phrases such as “LOOKS SHITE MUM,” “BEIGE DINNER AGAIN,” “PROPER WANK, THIS” and “I’M LEAVING YOU” sit awkwardly against delicate vintage tableware, deliberately disrupting expectations of refinement and sentimentality.
Every plate is then finished with the line: “beautiful vintage tableware completely fucking ruined by Joshua Samuels.” The wording feels intentionally self-aware, mocking both the reverence often attached to vintage objects and the idea that preservation alone automatically equals value.
Humour and Discomfort
The final part of the collection welcomes a series of king and double duvet covers produced from deadstock bedding, unused pre-consumer waste that otherwise would have been unsold and forgotten. Onto these fabrics, Samuels applied vintage Dickies appliqué alongside intentionally abrasive slogans including “SECOND HAND PRE-CUM SHEETS” and “MY GIRLFRIEND FAKES IT.”
As with the rest of the project, the language is designed to create friction. There’s humour in the bluntness, but also discomfort in the way intimate or disposable thoughts are permanently stitched into everyday domestic objects. That contradiction is ultimately what gives Broken Homeware its identity.
