Designer Sean Brown’s Toronto Apartment Elevates the Y2K Aesthetic
The creator of the beloved CD rug mixes business and pleasure, treating his own digs as a life-size vision board for his home line Curves.
The creator of the beloved CD rug mixes business and pleasure, treating his own digs as a life-size vision board for his home line Curves.
Toronto-based multi-hyphenate artist Sean Brown is hard to pin down, though many know him for his hand-tufted CD rugs (depicting iconic albums such as Sade’s Love Deluxe and The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine), adored by design and music buffs alike.
Sean Brown’s Toronto apartment is stacked with a collection of nostalgic magazines from the 90s and early 2000s, coordinating with his viral CD rugs.
Photo: Sean Brown
After getting his start in fashion design as the founder of sportswear clothing label NEEDS&WANTS in 2013, Brown met singer-songwriter Daniel Caesar on the heels of his Praise Break EP, soon becoming his creative director. Since then, Brown has gained whirlwind recognition for his musical collaborations—including the 2020 Audience Award Prism Prize for directing Caesar’s "Cyanide (Remix)" music video alongside Keavan Yazdani.
A CD rug celebrating Lil Kim’s debut album Hard Core pairs with a gold velour couch in the living room.
Photo: Sean Brown
Brown professes that there isn’t a succinct formula to his creative approach. Instead, he hits the drawing board after being given an evocative reference point—as was the case with his futuristic nameplate artwork for SZA and Ty Dolla $ign’s "Hit Different." And with a love for the early-2000s aesthetic, it’s a fitting development that Brown has recently become Diddy’s creative director, spanning the rapper’s various brands including CÎROC and Sean John.
"Puff’s done so much to inform my aesthetic, and now I have to find a way to take [his brand] to a different place," says Brown. "He’s not interested in recycling culture—that’s who he was decades ago. I have to find a balance between that kind of look informing my work and being like, ‘How do make it look new? What does the architecture of the second phase of his life look like?’ Even as a person who celebrates the Y2K era, I’m still interested in the future."
Brown’s Curves collection got a shout-out in Beyoncé’s Black Parade Route directory of Black-owned businesses.
Photo: Sean Brown
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