Everyone’s a New Yorker with This Whimsical New Home Collection

In a spectacular ode to the artists and cartoonists who endear readers with their piercing wit and facile pencils, The New Yorker joined forces with Schumacher on a collection that deftly translates the magazine’s pages into playful wallpapers and textiles. Made for shoebox-size studios, serpentine railroad apartments, and sprawling classic sixes alike, it features fizzy new prints by the magazine’s illustrators alongside nods to enduring classics.

“For years, readers have cut out cartoons and magazine covers and taped them to their walls to create their own wallpaper,” notes the magazine’s creative director Nicholas Blechman. “Now, we’re finally formalizing that beloved tradition.” So began a collaboration that balances visual brilliance with humor.

The collection includes two patchworks of beloved New Yorker covers: The City-View Covers is a tapestry of metropolitan vignettes and vistas, while the Seasonal Covers chronicles the passing seasons in all their pastoral and urban glory.

In Street Scenes, Joana Avillez does the impossible, evoking the latent charm in the city’s signature grit. Among artful sewer caps and sidewalk detritus, cockroaches stomp about in sleek boots while cherubs materialize out of steam pipe clouds. Avillez even coaxes the beauty out of a hazard zone’s traffic drums, entwined with ribbons of caution tape that gracefully catch the breeze. “Joana draws grit in such a charming way,” says cartoon editor Emma Allen.

To give the magazine’s canine cartoon lovers their due, Good Dogs Everywhere brings a revered trope to the fore with a typology of dogs by various cartoonists—from Charles Barsotti to Roz Chast—fetched from The New Yorker’s archives. (It’s also available in peel-and-stick form—a first for Schumacher—that’s sure to appeal to the most curmudgeonly landlords in the Big Apple and beyond.)

One particular cover, a 1930s fox chase by Margaret Schloemann, gets its own moment: Schumacher unearthed the composition from the magazine’s vast archive and re-envisioned it as a rollicking motif—with all the trappings of a soon-to-be interior design icon.

In the spirit of looking forward, Blechman and Allen approached illustrators Joana Avillez, Edward Steed, and Pascal Campion to dream up new works for the collection, each available in three colorways. The new prints fizz with the vitality of Washington Square on a Friday afternoon in June.

The darkly witty Edward Steed defies expectation with his Towers of Flowers, a vertical floral stripe hand-drawn in great detail. In his vibrant ecosystem of winged creatures and well-pollinated flora, Steed cleverly makes reference to a certain butterfly, the subject of fascination for the magazine’s dandy mascot Eustace Tilley, who has been tilting his monocle at one since The New Yorker’s first issue in 1925.

SEE MORE FROM SCHUMACHER’S NEW YORKER COLLECTION

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 13 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!