Life

Wednesday

Kara Newman

Your carriage awaits

What’s so amazing about bar carts? The novelty and inherent theatricality of it all, sure. The opportunity to personalize a drink at your table, instead of sending instructions back to the bar – yes, that too. But perhaps the most astonishing aspect? It prompts diners to put. the phone. down. From my perch across the room, I’m spying on a table at Bazaar Meat by José Andrés where, in its New York and Las Vegas outposts, tableside martini service is part of the steakhouse’s opulent appeal. A group of four has ordered a round of martinis from the cart; for the first drink made, everyone instinctively whips out their phone to capture the initial dramatic swoop of dry-ice smoke, faithfully documenting every dash, splash, and pour.

Tracey Llewellyn

A social movement

There are now so many watch events in New York that owning a timepiece has become almost incidental. On Monday there might be 100 or so people at Bucherer TimeMachine. Then Tuesday could bring something smaller at Material Good or The Armoury, followed by a brand dinner, a Phillips auction preview, or a watchmaker arriving from Switzerland armed with six watches and no intention of returning with any of them. The faces become familiar but each time, the crowd grows. It would be easy to dismiss this as New York mistaking itself for the entire United States. Yet it is better understood as a test bed for something happening across the country. Windup Watch Fair now travels to Dallas, San Francisco, and Chicago before returning to Manhattan.

Nick Scott

Keeping it real

With eight years until its centenary, Ettinger’s story has seriously gathered pace over the last few decades. A house founded in 1934 as a supplier of leather goods to Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, and Asprey, it was granted a license to produce official leather merchandise for the Wimbledon Championships in 1992; was granted a Royal Warrant by the then-Prince of Wales – now His Majesty Charles III – in 1996; acquired James Homer Ltd., one of England’s oldest leather factories, in the Midlands town of Walsall (the saddlery and leather-goods capital of Victorian Britain) in 1999. Then came the international expansion milestones: the opening of its Tokyo (2013) and Seoul (2021) boutiques, and a residency in Turnbull & Asser’s New York Townhouse in 2019.

James Gurney

Top of the charts

Just as quartz watches (and later, smart watches) signally failed to kill off traditional watchmaking, so the advent of sat nav and Google Maps has seen a resurgence of interest in real maps. As with watches, the obsolescence of their obvious use has revealed what lies beneath: layers that tell stories of craft and history, of technology and ambition, of people. From the dragons of medieval mappa mundi to the Sykes-Picot line and the 34th parallel, maps can fire imaginations and stoke resentments, a phenomenon Helen Sunderland-Cohen understands better than most. She’s custodian of the Sunderland Collection, founded by her father, Dr. Neil V.

Alfred Tong

Strategic dressing

Luca Faloni is a former management consultant. There, we said it. But in menswear, that may – as a management consultant might say – represent a strategic advantage over the moody mercurial creative genius of popular imagination. His eponymous brand is also, lately, a growth strategy. Last year it opened a second Manhattan address, a 3,500-square-foot boutique in the Meatpacking District with Canaletto walnut fittings and Carrara marble – and, last fall, its first Toronto store, on Bloor Street in Yorkville, its third North American market after New York and Miami. For a label founded online to bypass the traditional wholesale markup, opening its own stores has become Luca Faloni’s next stage of growth. ‘You need to be focused on giving men what they want.

Amy Raphael

Ben Okri discusses the power of the short novel

Ben Okri is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and playwright, knighted for services to literature in 2023. Born in Nigeria, he went to school in London and returned to Nigeria on the eve of the civil war. After reading most of the books in his father’s library, Okri has since written a dozen novels including 1991’s Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road. Recent novels include Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Brokenhearted, a modern fable that pays homage to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Waking the Warriors. Here, he discusses four short novels, representative of different cultures, that he thinks people should read. Short novels are tricky to write and require a totally different discipline to a long novel.

Peter Howarth

An Italian design classic and pop-cultural icon since 1946, Vespa remains an archetype of easy freedom and continental cool

It was 80 years ago in Pontedera, Tuscany, that the Vespa was born. Imagined by Enrico Piaggio, who wanted to give post-war Italy a new means of accessible mass transport, and created by aircraft designer Corradino D’Ascanio, the Vespa (Italian for “wasp”), with its distinctive step-through shape that allowed everyone – including women in dresses and priests in robes – to ride easily, has come to symbolize Italian sprezzatura. D’Ascanio, apparently, was no fan of motorcycles, disliking their messy, oily chains, the difficulty of changing tires after punctures, and what he felt was their uncomfortable riding positions.

Gemma Billington

Step into the mind of George Lucas via the filmmaker’s new temple to the art of storytelling

The freshly opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been dubbed many things during its eight-year construction: futuristic, controversial, an alien spaceship, a billion-dollar vanity project. But according to Mellody Hobson, the museum’s co-founder alongside her husband, Hollywood filmmaking legend George Lucas, the endeavor is like “stepping into George’s mind.” “We’ve been working on this project together, basically, as long as I’ve known him,” Hobson told the Wall Street Journal. For the record, that would be 21 years – the couple first crossed paths at a business conference in 2005. “George had decided that he was going to build a museum a very long time ago… [it’s] very cool, very creative, unexpected… the detail is so nuanced.

Gemma Billington

Globe-Trotter’s heritage cases provide a perfect medium for collaboration and restoration

If you’ve walked through an airport with a Globe-Trotter suitcase, you’ll know this scene: heads turn, whispers swirl, inevitably someone will come up and ask, “Where did you get that fabulous suitcase?” Globe-Trotter’s signature case is from its Centenary collection, launched in 1997 to mark 100 years since the company’s founding. It may not be as famous as a Louis Vuitton monogram trunk or industrial Rimowa number, but it is close to the platonic ideal of a suitcase – a children’s illustration luxuriously realized, with handcrafted leather straps, corners, and handles, and an old-fashioned double-lock system that opens with a satisfying click-clunk.

Lucinda Bredin

Love is complicated – as is the history of its most iconic and influential deity

We know Aphrodite as the goddess of love and beauty. But there is more to her. A troublemaker, certainly – she did ignite the Trojan War over a golden apple. But protector of sailors? Symbol of Roman imperial dynasties? As a deity for fertility, she covered all seasons. Roman Republican silver coin (47-46 BCE) [Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford] Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess, coming soon to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum shows through more than 200 objects the extent of the goddess’s influence on the minds of the ancient world – and how her myth, and that of Venus, her Roman name, has lasted more than 5,000 years to the present day.

Johnny Davis

Despite its squelchy origins, the brogue has become a classic fall footwear staple

Few shoes have traveled as far as the brogue. Its origins lie in the boggy countrysides of Scotland and Ireland, where its signature rows of tiny perforations (called broguing) were said to help drain water from sodden leather. That practical purpose disappeared long ago, but the detailing remained. Today, while its close relative, the plain Oxford, belongs in the office, a brogue looks as though it has loosened its tie and gone somewhere nice for lunch. It comes into its own at this time of year, too. As wardrobes move away from cotton towards flannel, corduroy, and heavier wool, the brogue simply looks right. For a shoe that has been around for well over a century, it still leaves shoemakers a surprising amount of room to maneuver.

Alexandra Zagalsky

Rewild your aesthetic with high-jewelry pieces that draw on elements of the sky, sea, and shoreline

It could be argued that the true wizardry of high jewelry lies not only in extraordinary craftsmanship, but in its rare ability to distill vast ideas into exquisite miniature works of art. Within the confines of a jewel, entire worlds can be summoned. The following collections do precisely that, capturing our enduring fascination with the celestial realm above and the mysterious waters below, translating sky and sea into poetic jewels that reinterpret familiar forms with imaginative vision. Sophie Bille Brahe’s Sky 3 diamond ring For her debut high-jewelry collection, Tangerine Sky, Sophie Bille Brahe found inspiration in the playful unpredictability and ethereal beauty of clouds, albeit indirectly.

Polly Rappaport

Montblanc really sank its teeth into this suitably gothic homage to one of horror’s literary greats

Autumn is a season tinged with shades of the supernatural – when nights lengthen, imagination unfurls its inky wings, and All Hallows’ Eve sees the veil between the realms of fact and folklore become gossamer-thin. It’s a season for tales best told in the dark. What better time, then, for luxury pen maker Montblanc to honor an innovator of the horror genre with its Writers Edition Homage to Bram Stoker collection: a tribute to the author who gave us an indelible archetype of the vampire legend with his gothic masterpiece, Dracula.

Bridget Arsenault

Playwright Lindsey Ferrentino’s visceral writing finds the ordinary in extraordinary people

Working with Kim Kardashian wasn’t on Lindsey Ferrentino’s “dance card,” the playwright opined in a recent social media post. And it’s true, at first glance the collaboration might jar. But the pair have found common ground on the subject of prison reform, leading Kardashian to come onboard and produce Ferrentino’s latest Broadway production, The Fear of 13, which tells the true story of an American man who spent 22 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Raised in South Florida, Ferrentino is the daughter of a former X-ray technician father who made the unusual transition to stand-up comedy and magic shows, at one stage touring alongside Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. At 17, she chose the age-old migration path, landing in New York to pursue acting.

Georgie Young

Handmade leather bags from one of Birmingham’s last remaining gunmakers

Most people know Birmingham in the UK as the soot-blackened backdrop to period crime drama Peaky Blinders – or the birthplace of leather-clad rockers Black Sabbath. But two centuries ago, Birmingham was known as “the workshop of the world” or “the city of a thousand trades,” thanks to thousands of small workshops specializing in all manner of handmade goods – from guns and jewelry to buttons and pens. Although many of these workshops have since been swallowed into the soot, a handful have survived, and one of the city’s few remaining gunmakers is Westley Richards. William Westley Richards opened his first shop in 1812, overlooking what is now the Bullring Shopping Centre in the center of Birmingham.

Nick Scott

With Thom Sweeney’s Madison Avenue opening, America’s crush on British tailoring has become a full-blown love affair

Purveyors of premium menswear don’t come more British than Thom Sweeney. The house’s roster of celebrity clients includes Daniel Craig, Tom Hardy, and Davids Gandy (of D&G ad fame) and Beckham. Walk into its London flagship – a four-story townhouse on Mayfair’s Old Burlington Street – and you’re likely to hear The Rolling Stones or Britpop blasting through the speakers. Even the house cut – high armhole, slim sleeve, silhouette softened a little – is characteristically British. Thom Sweeney’s ‘elevated and grand’ Madison Avenue interior [Matteo Verzini] So it’s perhaps inevitable that America has embraced Thom Sweeney with such gusto.

Peter Howarth

National Geographic’s new museum, supported by Rolex, is an immersive tribute to the history and pursuit of exploration

“To date, I’ve made 75 deep submersible dives, including 33 to the Titanic,” filmmaker James Cameron announced at the inauguration of the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Washington, DC earlier this year. Only feet away from the Hollywood director lay a scale replica of the prow of the ill-fated ship, one of the exhibits at the museum, authentically covered in what look like assorted organisms of the deep. “In 2001, I started work with a new sub that could go to the deepest place in the world’s ocean, and I worked with this polymath engineer in Australia [called] Ron Allum,” Cameron explained. “It took us seven years to build the Deepsea Challenger, and that expedition would not have been possible without Rolex acting on its own spirit of exploration.

Tuesday

Kristina Murkett

AI is turning the world into slop

It seems AI is not just making everyone sound the same, but now everything must look the same too. I haven’t been able to walk into a pub, cafe or shop this summer without noticing the uncanny, slightly unreal sheen of an AI-generated poster. From caricatured cartoon children on a nursery advertisement to an abnormally glistening burger on a food menu, every billboard, flyer and sign now seems to have been regurgitated from the same ChatGPT printing press. We are hurtling ever closer to a flattened future in which everything converges toward the average, the mediocre, the visual mean There are many telltale signs that a sign is generic AI-slop.

ai slop

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Maine character syndrome

When I arrive at the Longfellow Hotel in Portland, Maine, the weather is as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described it: “Into each life some rain must fall/ Some days must be dark and dreary.” In his childhood home, I stand in the “rainy day” room, where Longfellow is believed to have written those words in 1841. A portrait of his sister Anne hangs on the wall. She was a caring soul, who helped hold family life together while her brother became a celebrated poet. His portable writing desk is on display, complete with white quill. The first poem he published, aged 13, was written in this house. Six years later, he sailed to Europe. His early travel sketches appeared in the New England Magazine, while his observations of European life were brought together in Outre-Mer and Hyperion.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Brown furniture isn’t dead

Throw out your grandfather clocks, the naysayers said, and banish your commodes to the scrapheap and junkshop. Brown furniture – invented in the Georgian and Regency eras and popularized for the mass market in the Victorian period – has been decreed by those tastemakers in the know to be as dead as Jacob Marley – a man who undoubtedly would have cherished those heavy mahogany bed frames and cabinets that were synonymous with his age – and showing even fewer signs of returning, even in spectral form.   The reasons for the apparent demise of brown furniture are less to do with a rejection of sturdy, well-built items that were once the pride and joy of any household and more because we are living smaller lives, in all senses.

brown furniture