Looks familiar... Northern Liberties??
ON sunny afternoons, Budapest’s central square, Erzsebet ter, is bustling with skateboarders, tourists in open-top buses, guests from the high-end hotels nearby and visitors to the Godor Club, a cool cafe and performance space.
But even considering the square’s normally busy standards, I was surprised by the number of people when I arrived there one Sunday this spring. More to the point, I was surprised by what had brought them in: WAMP, which stands for Hungarian Design Market in Hungarian). The monthly design market features more than 100 vendors who sell local clothing, furniture and accessories in the shade of the square’s former bus depot.
“Every month we choose a topic,” said Bori Mester, one of the market’s organizers. “And it’s all different kinds of Hungarian design: toy designers, furniture designers, industrial, jewelry and fashion designers.”
Although cultured travelers have long had many reasons to visit Budapest — outstanding wine, glorious music, hip night life — it is probably safe to say the local sense of style was not among them. And yet the city has an emerging design scene unlike almost anything I’ve found in the former Eastern bloc. Beyond each monthly WAMP (www.wamp.hu), Budapest Design Week takes place in October and Budapest Fashion Week each April.
The city is also the base for The Room, an inch-thick international fashion and art magazine with texts in English and Hungarian, and up-and-coming clothing labels like Nanushka, which regularly pick up praise on English-language style blogs. There are creative industrial designers as well, like Ivanka, which just showed off its remarkably expressive and fluid home furnishings made from concrete at the Milan international design fair.
Read the rest of the article:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/travel/07journeys.html
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