Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 17 i The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR THE START OF the year is naturally a time for reflection on our destinations in life — the places we’re going, the places we’ve been. So it’s fitting that our first edition of 2024 focuses on the peripatetic theme of “Journeys”. We’ve asked the talented creatives who worked on this issue to undertake all kinds of expeditions — from the sensory to the political to the more typical globetrotting variety. And what we’ve found, amid the dazzling medley of contributions that came back, is that no matter what form they take, our most memorable journeys are often the ones that take us to new, or long-forgotten, parts of ourselves. In “Playing Paradox” (page 62), our cover star, the Australian actress Sarah Snook, expounds on this topic.…

SINCE ITS FOUNDING nearly 120 years ago, Rolex has chosen simplicity over arcane complications such as tourbillons and minute repeaters. Now, though, the Geneva-based brand has dived headlong into whimsy with the latest iteration of the Oyster Perpetual Day-Date 36. The watch, which comes in rose, yellow or white gold, features a champlevé enamel dial in a jigsaw motif with 10 baguette sapphires in rainbow hues as the indexes. Unlike other Day-Date 36 designs, whose apertures show the day of the week at 12 o’clock, this one displays words of inspiration, including “Gratitude” and “Eternity”, and the 3 o’clock window, instead of the date, features 31 emojis, including a four-leaf clover, an eight ball and the Rolex coronet. In an era that seems to call out for a jolt of…

OUR LANGUAGE IS full of weird and wonderful phrases we barely pause to contemplate before using. What does it really mean to “bite the bullet”? Why would a cat ever have your tongue? Isn’t breaking a leg a terrible thing to wish on an actor or dancer? Spilling the beans, or beating around the bush, or turning a blind eye: what on earth are we talking about? Recently, I told my American partner that I was just popping into a shop for a stickybeak. He looked at me as though I were mad as a hatter. There is one phrase that has become particularly prevalent in the past few years. It is a phrase, or a term, that seems utterly nonsensical if you really think about it: bucket list. What…

THE POLISH BRAZILIAN designer and architect Jorge Zalszupin hated the beach, but he loved the beach house he built in 1972 for his family. Set back from the Atlantic coast in Guarujá, a resort town 64 kilometres southeast of São Paulo, the 264-square-metre white concrete dwelling looks like a block of bleached coral pulled from the ocean. The front door opens onto a spiral staircase that leads to a pair of bedrooms and a lofted lounge; below, the walls of a sunken living room curve up to a sculptural ceiling. A built-in couch wraps around a bell-shaped fireplace, its crescent hearth like an open mouth. Shielded from the Brazilian sun that his wife, a homemaker named Annette, and two daughters adored, Zalszupin would spend entire weekends listening to Chet Baker…

ON THE MENU of Sydney’s Fabbrica Bread Shop is a kind of fairy bread that puts the margarine-and-Wonder White creations of our youth to shame. Head baker Aniruddha Bhosekar’s version — or perversion, depending on your perspective — is made from leftover croissants from the bakery, which are torn up, soaked in custard and then baked until fudgy and dense. Butter is still key, but it’s found in the pastry layers rather than thickly spread on top. And in the traditional place of hundreds and thousands is a scattering of crayon-bright candied fennel seeds, known as saunf mithai — a nod to the baker’s Indian heritage. For Bhosekar, the dish was a way of blending his memories of the minty spice, which is served by the handful as an after-dinner…

WE WERE PROMISED opulence. A return to fashion form that mirrored the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties. Garments would be flounce-filled and voluminous, with clashing prints and devil-may-care hemlines. The post-Covid world was going to be paved with gold lamé and mirrored paillettes, and our heel heights would betray the many months and years our feet had spent ensconced in ergonomic footwear. When the lockdown curtains eventually rose, our collective festive spirit surged. But at the commencement of 2024, with the dust somewhat settled, fashion consumers aren’t swimming in the glittery sea of sartorial decadence they’d envisaged. Party wear still has its place, but on a day-to-day basis, according to recent reports, we’re more likely to forego the sequinned slip dress in favour of a nylon puffer jacket — the…

FOR AT LEAST half a decade, Juliana Ayako has been fascinated by a strange, slapdash house on a bare hillside that she passes when she drives from her home in Rio de Janeiro to her partner’s family farm on the outskirts of Teresópolis, a small city roughly 97 kilometres to the north. It’s nothing special, the 31-year-old architect says, at least not in any traditional sense — just a sagging prism of faded timber with a pitched roof and a narrow verandah raised over a precipitous slope on slender wooden stilts. Still, when the opportunity arose during the pandemic to design a country house near Teresópolis, she referenced that structure. Called Casa na Arvore (or House in the Trees), Ayako’s 120-square-metre project likewise consists of a rectangular volume, built here…

IT’S TWO DAYS before Christmas, and Sarah Snook has just finished rehearsals for the year. “I’d been struggling with the narrator, but today I finally cracked it,” she says. She’s referring to the anonymous omniscient narrator of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, the acclaimed Sydney Theatre Company adaptation of which she will star in — as each of its 26 characters — when it makes its West End debut at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket this month. Adapted and directed by STC artistic director Kip Williams, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” premiered in 2020 starring Eryn Jean Norvill, with three sold-out seasons in Sydney and tours to Melbourne, Adelaide and Auckland that left audiences and critics stunned. The production enables a single actor to play its entire script through…

In 1847, Louis-François Cartier opened a modest jewellery workshop in Paris where he sold crystal bracelets, strands of pearls and brooches with floral motifs. Over the decades, his three grandsons, particularly the eldest, Louis Cartier, became known for mixing Old World craftsmanship and new techniques, as in the 1904 Santos pilot’s watch, named for a pioneering Brazilian aviator and decorated with tiny screws resembling airplane rivets; or the so-called mystery clock, a timepiece popularised by the brand in 1912 with jewelled hands that appeared to float (its rack-and-pinion gear system was hidden in the base). In 1914, Louis Cartier met Jeanne Toussaint, the Belgian French style icon who would become his muse and rumoured lover. Often immaculately dressed in her signature turban and silk pyjamas, she captivated Cartier, who recruited…

IN RECENT YEARS, it’s been hard to keep track of the cultural landmarks emerging along Hong Kong’s soaring skyline. So many notable galleries, museums and theatres have popped up that the so-called “vertical city” has laid claim to a new title: Asia’s arts capital. From the new West Kowloon Cultural District, set along a twokilometre waterfront promenade, to an ambitious blend of creativity and commerce at the sprawling K11 Musea, these institutions bring a bold contemporary presence to Hong Kong’s cultural landscape. Of course, the city is also home to Art Basel Hong Kong, which, together with parallel event Art Central, underpins the annual Arts in Hong Kong celebrations in March. The event returns to full pre-pandemic scale this year, with 243 leading international galleries and an impressive program of…

LESS THAN A week after presenting his third collection as Ferragamo’s creative director in Milan, Maximilian Davis was at ease. The clothes — a combination of asymmetrical dresses and Italian tailoring — had been well received. Born in Manchester, England, to Trinidadian and Jamaican parents, Davis, 28, the youngest of three children, spent his summers in Trinidad until the age of 13. A passion for clothing ran in the family: his maternal grandmother taught him to sew when he was six, his mother was a working model and his father studied fashion design. In 2013, Davis moved to London to pursue a degree in womenswear at the London College of Fashion, cultivating a circle of creative-minded friends, including the singer-songwriter Kelela and the photographer Liz Johnson Artur, and his fellow…

WHAT GETS YOU in the mood for love? (Admittedly, a forward question, and one that will bait a number of personal imaginings best left for another time.) In geographical terms, some might say it’s bustling foreign cities, with their promise of anonymity amid crowds and monuments, that elicit a certain frisson. For others, it’s the vision of white sands, free from neighbours, lapped by turquoise waters and backed by untouched, verdant bushland, that sets the heart racing. With their sealocked privacy, tropical islands in particular continue to attract couples wanting to fuel (or reignite) passion. “Island destinations are always a popular choice with travellers because they usually combine the best of nature, relaxation, adventure and, of course, romance,” says James Kavanagh, the global leisure CEO at Flight Centre Travel Group.…