Tea & Pistols

An elegant tea setting accented with porcelain pistols

If you're planning an elegant tea party, along with the designer tea bags, some of Yvonne Lee Schultz's porcelain pistols are a nice touch. Modeled after James Bond's Walther PPK or the contemporaneous P99, the porcelain pistols are painted with patterns that match the tea serving.

The contrast is interesting. The porcelain pistols are fragile chinaware, painted with feminine floral patterns that serve only as odd decorative accents to a table setting. Real pistols are of course an entirely different beast composed of metal, machined parts, intricate mechanisms and gun oil. It also goes without saying that their penultimate purpose is far more active than to just lay on a table cloth.

They are a clever subversion of the old Louis Sullivan design cliche "That form ever follows function. This is the law." Although the form of the objects is the same, there is in fact no intrinsic connection between the form and the function. Ah well, to cite another cliche, "rules are made to be broken."

(via How to be a Retronaut) 

matching floral patterns