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"View Slideshow\n\nMariano Fortuny was a Renaissance man\u2014painter, photographer, lighting designer, as well as a couturier whose crinkled-silk fashions turned women into Greek goddesses. The Spaniard, who died in Venice, his adopted city, in 1949, also made handprinted fabrics that Marcel Proust said \"swarmed with Arabic ornaments, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultanas behind a screen of pierced stone.\" Still he left a few decorative arts unexplored\u2014namely plates, flatware, and home accessories. Young designer Elad Yifrach, founder of L'Objet, an American luxury-tabletop company launched in 2004, has now splendidly redressed that oversight.\n\nFrom shapely serving platters to cocktail picks embellished with amazonite beads, Yifrach's L'Objet pour Fortuny collection, which is now being introduced at Bergdorf Goodman and will be in select Neiman Marcus stores September 1, inventively reinterprets the protean master's multicultural work.\n\n\"It was a really challenging project when you consider how genius Mariano was,\" says Yifrach. For nearly two years he explored the 92-year-old firm's archives, studying motifs that could be translated onto objects for the home. A carafe is ornamented with details taken from Rabat, a fabric pattern that is a riff on Moroccan embroidery. A magnified section of the tattoolike print Maori enlivens a plate. The slinky Delphos gown, created around 1907, is reflected in the line, too, its silk pleats channeled into a striking black bisque vessel for scented candles.\n\n\"For a long time people saw Fortuny as strictly traditional,\" says Maury Riad, who has been reinvigorating the brand with his brother, Mickey, since acquiring it in 1988. (Fortuny's new showroom at Manhattan's Decoration &amp;amp; Design Building opened last year.) \"But the patterns work in both classic and modern settings.\" Thanks to L'Objet, that now means on a table near you.\n\nClick here to see pieces from the new L'Objet pour Fortuny collection."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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