ROOM FOR EVERYONE

“If your customers come to you in a limousine, you’ll go home in a bus. If your customers come to you in a bus, you’ll go home in a limousine.” The famous line attributed to Oleg Cassini, the fashion designer best known for dressing Jackie Kennedy, summed up last century’s attitude toward exclusivity, scale, and economics. In our post-internet age, when the limousine itself has fallen from fashion, the rules connecting money, access, and taste have become less rigid. Today, it seems, Cassini’s bus and limousine have arrived at the same online address: Kelly Wearstler and H&M’s 29-piece collaboration.

The L.A.-based multihyphenate has always made a point of breaking down the boundaries around high design. The H&M collaboration is consistent with a career that has balanced the rarefied world of private commissions with an unusually public design persona. She embraced reality television early, taking herself and her work to a mass audience, and was an early and skillful adopter of social media, where she now counts more than 2.3 million Instagram followers. In retrospect, it can seem as though Wearstler has always been fostering the audience for this collaboration.

I attended the H&M collection preview last April during Milan Design Week at Palazzo Acerbi, a 17th-century palace that had long been closed to the public. In the courtyard, hundreds of wooden Noxen stools were stacked into a wave, a modular geometric overload recalling the serial sculptures of Sol LeWitt. Inside were upholstered chairs, marble tables, lighting, glassware, and the trompe-l’œil Cyma vase, a bulbous classical urn rendered flat in wood around a simple glass cylinder. Wearstler presided over it all in a crinkled metallic-copper jacket and matching skirt that flashed against the Baroque interiors.

On its own, the Noxen is much simpler: a small, useful, well-proportioned pine stool whose wooden geometry is divided between black and natural wood. It can be a stool when friends come over and a side table when they leave, equally at home in a first apartment or one of Wearstler’s affluent client projects. The question was whether I would still want one outside the drama of the presentation. I would. And at $269, I can have one. It is an unusually high price point for H&M, yet a rare opportunity for the part of Wearstler’s considerable fan base that could never before afford her work. “It’s been a dream to bring my designs to a wider audience while preserving the elements central to my work,” Wearstler says.

Beyond the assortment of glassware, candlesticks, throws, and trays, Wearstler took on the more complicated prospect of affordable upholstered seating. The demands of scale led to modularity: one seat could become two, three, or an entire sofa. “What began as a technical challenge became one of the defining ideas of the collection,” Wearstler explains. Furniture had to be manufactured, packed, transported, and sold in quantities her studio had never worked with before. The Soluna, Poma, and Avern seats range from $479 to $749, built from swollen upholstered volumes with rounded corners, broad seats, and backs and arms that appear almost inflated. In Milan, the modules were stacked toward the ceiling.

Seating was not the only category to require reengineering. The Morix Side Table was originally conceived in tile, its checkerboard pattern continuing from the top down its blocky legs. At H&M quantities, tile proved too heavy. The design was reengineered in metal plating, preserving the depth and reflectivity of tile without the weight. “The challenge across the whole collection was maintaining a high caliber of design at a much larger production scale, making the collection accessible without compromising quality or character,” Wearstler says. “The materials, finishes, and construction have to feel considered at every level. That is never negotiable.”

And after a career spent dressing rooms, with her H&M collection Wearstler will finally dress the people who live in them, too. Today’s launch includes an eight-piece ready-to-wear capsule: a coated-cotton trench, leather jacket, boxy white button-down, embroidered cotton tee, cargo pants, low-slung denim, sequin skirt, and a vase-print slip dress. “Fashion has always been an important part of my creative language,” Wearstler muses. “I approached these pieces with the same attention to proportion, materiality, and form that I bring to interiors.”

Wearstler’s work is normally encountered at architectural scale: private homes, hotels, and generally rooms in which every surface, object, and finish is designed as a cohesive whole. H&M reverses the proposition, breaking her total environments into pieces small enough to carry away. You may still have to take the bus home, although now your trip can be accompanied by a $139 Cyma vase in your bag.