CATEGORIES
Canvas the City - Martha Diamond captured the brisk energy of Manhattan.
How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”
Off the Beat - Mainly known as a producer, O'Connell Finneas is releasing a new heartfelt LP.
Finneas O’Connell likes to disappear. A tendency toward self-effacement may seem like an unexpected character trait for the youngest person ever to win a Producer of the Year Grammy, a prize that has pride of place in Finneas’s living room, alongside the other nine he’s earned for his work with his sister, Billie Eilish. But seated at the dining table in his LA home, the 27-year-old musician elaborates. “When you hear a song and you’re like, ‘Wow, who made this?’ That’s what I’m trying to do when I write,” he says. “He can really tap into the other person,” says frequent collaborator Ashe, née Ashlyn Rae Willson. “He is a phenomenal listener.”
Spinning a Web - Not muscle, not bone, but fascia the network of tissue that connects it all is grabbing the therapeutic spotlight.
Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
Nothing Like Her - Billie Eilish was adored by millions before she fully understood who she was. Now, as she sets out on tour without her family for the first time, she is finally getting to know herself.
It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.
Coming Up Rosy - The new blush isn't just for the cheek. Coco Mellors feels the flush.
If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It's no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient Egyptians used ground ochre to heighten their color; Queen Elizabeth I dabbed her cheeks with red dye and mercuric sulfide (which, combined with the vinegar and lead concoction she used to achieve her ivory pallor, is believed to have given her blood poisoning); flappers applied blush in dramatic circles to achieve a doll-like complexion, even adding it to their knees to draw attention to their shorter hemlines
Different Stages
A trio of novels spirits you far away.
The Wizard
Paul Tazewell’s costumes for the film adaptation of Wicked conjure their own kind of magic.
THE SEA, THE SEA
A story of survival on a whaling ship sets sail on Broadway. Robert Sullivan meets the crew behind the rousing folk musical Swept Away.
STAGING A COMEBACK
Harlem's National Black Theatre has been a storied arts institution in need of support. A soaring new home is shaping its future.
Simon Says
Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South-but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
MOTHER SUPERIOR
The character of Rose in Gypsy is the acting Everest for many one-name acting legends. This fall, Audra McDonald takes it on.
WALK THIS WAY
THE FASHION FOR OUR FUTURE MARCH HAD A SINGULAR PURPOSE: TO GET OUT THE VOTE.
Written in Stones (and Etched in Metal)
Three years after taking the reins at Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy unveils his first fine jewelry collection.
Northern Light
Long an escape for British royals, Norfolk is fast becoming a creative haven.
An Un-Still Life - The vibrant paintings of Hilary Pecis pulse with energy.
On an uncharacteristically overcast afternoon in August, I meet Los Angeles-based painter Hilary Pecis at her Eastside studio. The largescale works for her new solo show, "Warm Rhythm," line the oblong warehouse walls and are getting touched up in preparation to ship out, bound for a September opening at the David Kordansky Gallery in New York.
Out of the Box - A biopic –made from Legos – for Pharrell Williams.
Anyone unfamiliar with Pharrell Williams’s background would be hard-pressed to make out his origins given his vast remit: designing Louis Vuitton’s menswear collections, overseeing a skin-care line, manning a digital auction house. Was he one of those Central Saint Martins guys? The heir to some crazy fortune, just seeing what stuck?
The Numbers Game - Age has long been like a board game: Hit 40, and you can no longer pass Go. But all of that is now changing, says Maya Singer.
All of a sudden, I couldn't stop crying. For some reason, around the turn of the year, I was waking up in tears. Then, the rest of the day, any little thing would set me off: train delays; a remix of Whitney Houston's Greatest Love of All playing at the gym; showering, weirdly. To say this was uncharacteristic would be an understatement. I am pathologically level-always quick to steady myself. Until now. I was a black hole, future dimming, my weeping the weeping of a collapsing star. What the hell was going on? Maybe, a friend offered, gently, as I wept to her over martinis, this is perimenopause.
Giddyup Cup - The storied Austrian glassware maker Lobmeyr looks to the American West.
Over the course of Lobmeyr's two-centuries-and-counting, the company has supplied drinkware to the House of Habsburg, collaborated with Josef Hoffman and the Wiener Werkstätte, and lit up Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House with mesmerizing starburst-shaped chandeliers. This fall, it explores a new kind of frontier with its first-ever cowboy-themed collection. Launching this month, the Marfa Collection includes six tumblers and a pitcher inspired by the mystical town in Texas. It's a collaboration between the family-owned glassmaker, currently run by three cousins (Andreas, Leonid, and Johannes Rath) whose family has worked for the company for six generations, and Douglas Friedman, the well-known interiors and fashion photographer.
What's Going On With Pants? - The current (and oft-confusing) proliferation of them mirrors our lives today
We all have our ways of processing the world. The pastoral setting had put me in mind of Jonathan Anderson's fall 2024 Loewe show-its countrymanor-through-the-looking-glass vibe. One striking thing about that collection was its smorgasbord of trouser silhouettes: balloon-shaped cargos; swishy harem pants; one style I can best describe as überjodhpursexplosive volume through the thigh, tapered at the waist and calf. This is a very incomplete list.
Shape Shifter - Who is Lady Gaga now? A Hollywood superstar, a pop innovator, and a much happier, more grounded creature altogether. But as Jonathan Van Meter discovers, she's still an ever-evolving puzzle all her own.
Who is Lady Gaga now? A Hollywood superstar, a pop innovator, and a much happier, more grounded creature altogether. But as Jonathan Van Meter discovers, she's still an ever-evolving puzzle all her own.The first four or five or six times I encountered Lady Gaga, in London or Paris or New York, backstage in Vegas or Madison Square Garden or the O2 arena, at the top of the Skytree in Tokyo or from inside a giant replica of her fragrance bottle at a party at the Guggenheim, or even when, six years ago, we hung out in her kitchen in Malibu and danced and cried while listening to music-Like, real Italian style, she said-every single one of those times, in all of those places, she was both there and not there. She was viscerally present and accounted for but also somehow absent. This is not a complaint.
WOMAN TO WOMAN
Chemena Kamali's debut for Chloé was notable most of all for the way it connected with so many. Chloe Schama meets the designer whose name is on everyone's lips.
In Wonderland
Coach creative director Stuart Vevers and husband Ben Seidler's country cottage on 40 rolling acres is filled with antiques, flea market finds and their gorgeous young twins.
SUPERNOVA
A searingly modern take on Sunset Boulevard, starring Nicole Scherzinger at the height of her powers, comes to the New York stage.
Mr. Happy
Kieran Culkin as electric an actor as he is a constitutionally ambivalent one-anchors the dark comic indie A Real Pain, and is leading Glengarry Glen Ross to Broadway. It's a lot to process.
Full Flower
Erdem Moralioglu plants a new seed with his bloom-adorned bag.
Mixed Company - An artist alliance between chef Daniel Humm and painter Francesco Clemente blossoms in a new bar
Three years ago, Francesco Clemente was in his Manhattan studio speaking with a friend, a devoted vegetarian, by phone. “She was asking me if we should go have a meal at Daniel’s restaurant,” recalls Clemente, meaning the much-acclaimed and then newly plantbased Eleven Madison Park, helmed by chef Daniel Humm. “I said to her, ‘I don’t know Daniel.’ And then the bell rang, and Daniel was in the room.”
Eastern Passage - On trips to India and Bangladesh, the novelist Nell Freudenberger struggled with what to wear—and what kind of woman she wanted to be.
I was 22 when I first went to India. In the late ’90s, the hippie trail from Agra to Jaipur to Rishikesh was still full of backpackers. Germans, Israelis, and Australians traversed the country in elephant-printed harem pants and Buddhist prayer beads, indulging in banana-pancake breakfasts and cannabis-laced bhang lassis. My boyfriend—a serious student of the subcontinent, equipped with maps, train tables, and a prestigious fellowship—planned to do India differently. We would dress respectfully, live on a local budget—less than $5 a day—and see places other backpackers missed. When we bought cannabis, it was from a farmer in a Himalayan village where they grew the world-famous Malana cream. We were two recent Harvard graduates in India, and we were all about doing our homework.
Trust Your Gut - New at-home biome tests offer insight into the microorganisms that rule much more than just our stomachs.
According to a publication called Nutrition in Clinical Practice, these days, internet searches for "gut microbiome" and "gut microbiota" generate millions of results. Amazon teems with microbiome books, including microbiome books for kids- Meena and the Microbiome (forthcoming in 2025) and dogs- Healthy Gut, Healthy Dog. Gut health is taking over TikTok. Scan your refrigerator for the word "probiotic". Brands are shilling directly to your bacteria!
The First Wild Garden - A new book celebrates the historic English garden that launched a modern movement.
Without naming the most grotesque examples of tree mutilation in England, it is clear that much beauty is lost in our gardens by the stupid and ignorant practice of cutting trees into unnatural shapes,” wrote the Victorian-era gardener William Robinson in Gravetye Manor: Or Twenty Years’ Work round an Old Manor House (1911). Robinson’s fighting words were laid out in the preface to his book, an account of the decades he spent creating his garden at the Elizabethan house of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England, and recently reproduced in facsimile by Rizzoli alongside stunning contemporary photographs.
Clean Sweep- Two seasons into her tenure at Carven, Louise Trotter is reimagining the label with pieces at once mindful, freeand beautiful.
Two seasons into her tenure at Carven, Louise Trotter is reimagining the label with pieces at once mindful, freeand beautiful. In February of last year, Trotter took up the role of creative director at the 79-year-old maison, reawakening it from a five-year slumber, and a chauffeur—customary for an artistic director at the helm of a Parisian fashion house—simply doesn’t fly with her bluff Sunderland upbringing.