My words and pictures on/of @gabrielhendifar and his apartment and @apparatusstudio universe in NY for the new issue of @admiddleeast. One of the common threads running through everything bearing the Apparatus name – from wild looking sci-fi chandeliers to hand tufted modular rugs connected by brass hardware – is a sense of the future. You can see it in the home of the Iranian-American co-founder Gabriel Hendifar’s on Bond Street, in a luxury apartment block close to the Bowery in downtown Manhattan: “My sense of futurism comes from being a first generation American, born to people who left a place they didn’t want to leave,” says Hendifar. “I have an intense connection to an Iranian culture I have only been able to experience through food, music and stories. It’s always been a fairy tale to me, something that exists far way. So, with no tangible legacy for me to respond to, I’ve created a world that visually references one, but it’s not of this time. It’s not of the past.” When Apparatus Act IV was released, it was through a short film starring the fashion model @madamedebrashaw, who was an early muse for Alexander McQueen. I had the idea in my head of creating a set piece with an archetypal 1960s socialite interacting with the furniture,” says Hendifar. “I was thinking about Babe Paley and Lee Radziwill. I grew up working in fashion, and that kind of woman held a lot of power in my imagination. But I wanted it to be a woman of colour, so I could access that reference in a different way.” Andrew Cinnamon, the Apparatus design studio’s Senior Vice President of Creative, suggested Shaw. “As a teenager, I had a subscription to Vogue, and the Peter Linbergh image of her wearing Dior couture by Galliano in 1998, with all the African beading jewellery, was seared into my brain. I couldn’t believe we could actually get her, and then when we did. It felt like closing a creative loop in my brain. She is the truest definition of the term ‘muse’.