Bling Bling, It’s Bedazzled Taxidermy

Brooklyn-based designer Peter Pracilio meticulously applied Swarovski crystals to taxidermy animals “to archive their beauty”. The blinging beasts are currently available on Fab.com for 50% off. Fab members notoriously snap up stags to mount in their lofts in the initial moments of a Fab flash sale, but Pracilio’s iced animals are still (with the exception of the Fuschia Springbok Skull above) hanging around. What’s the deal?

Here’s my take: People who buy taxidermy do so because either A) they like the look and feel of taxidermy animals or B) they enjoy the idea of the lifestyle that hunted and mounted animals offers them. By covering his skulls with shiny ornamentation and making them bedazzled taxidermy, Pracilio puts off those people, and ends up in the turf of Damien Hirst collectors, who, most likely do not shop flash sales. However…

Don’t get me wrong. Up close like this, there’s something kind of beautiful (and OCD) about such a precise application of crystals. And certainly, Peter Gronquist continues to gild his game. Each to his/her own. I just think Pracilio does a better service to animal-kind with his Go!PetDesign and sold-out designer dog crates. For a Swarovski crystal-emblazoned object that gets my thumb’s up, I point to Kirkland Jue’s 2008 custom vinyl toy featuring 3,000 shiny crystals and one bird-flipping finger.

Peter Pracilio’s My Mother the Hunter Collection is on sale for the next three days at Fab.com.