Town & Country March 2022

1975 LIVING TREASURES OF JAPAN In 1975, T&C encountered a few of Japan’s most extraordinary assets. These were neither historic relics nor wonders of nature, but individuals. Around 1950 the country had established a Living National Treasure designation for its distinguished artisans, from kimono makers and ceramicists to bamboo weavers and costume doll makers (such as Goyo Hirata, pictured here). “The traditional ancient arts of Japan have not been forgotten in its new age of industrial miracles,” we wrote. “This—in the realm of art and craft—is sainthood.” This unique system of preserving craftsmanship continues to this day. As of 2021, just 111 masters hold the title—you might even call them Japan’s OG artisans.…

Grit is not a word often associated with a Cartier Panther—but let me finish. Since it made its debut in 1914 as a wristwatch, it has never stopped, determined to keep prowling and pouncing on collectors’ desires. It has changed shape—from watch to brooch to bracelet to ring—and it has morphed through materials—diamonds and onyx, gold and emeralds, fossilized wood—changing its spots but keeping its place in the kingdom. You could call pieces like these classics, and that they are, every one on this page, but the term implies a stasis that is misleading. We call them O.G.s: the ones that started it all but have never ceased to move forward, keeping us rapt and keeping us guessing. There is a kind of grit in that, isn’t there? We began…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? To the Broadway revival of Plaza Suite, Neil Simon’s 1968 comedy exploring love and relationships in three acts, each set inside suite 719 at the Plaza Hotel and featuring a different couple. They will all be played by Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who are not only performing together for the first time since 1996 but also celebrating 25 years of marriage this spring. PREVIEWS BEGIN FEBRUARY 25 WHAT ARE WE WEARING? In 1810 Abraham-Louis Breguet made the world’s first wristwatch, for the queen of Naples, a sister of Napoleon. Centuries later it inspired Breguet’s Reine de Naples timepieces, marked by their unique oval silhouettes and innovative complications. As for him? How about a paragon of horological precision, courtesy of a Blancpain Villeret, with its…

In early January I started seeing a trickle of peculiar posts in my Twitter feed. A few of my brainier friends would post a little grid of squares—gray, mustard-yellow, and green—topped by a series of numbers split by a slash. The last number was always six. At the top of each post it said “Wordle.” I thought, at first, that the figures signified a fraction, and this was some kind of statistic: how much snow had fallen the previous night, or Joe Manchin’s approval numbers among independent voters. It was baffling. The puzzling posts were, it turned out, actual puzzles. Wordle—that’s what this thing is called—very quickly became something that virtually all of my online friends, plus some offline ones, were talking about. What I was seeing was everyone’s score…

CRYPTIC Are the Brits just constitutionally good at puzzles? Leaving aside the whole cracking the Nazis’ Enigma code thing, their newspapers (especially the Times and Guardian) offer cryptic puzzles that require more than a stiff upper lip. NYT SUNDAY The paper of record resisted adding a crossword until 1942. Today its digital versions generate huge profits, though the old saw about doing the puzzle in pen being the definition of “egotism” remains indelible. SPELLING BEE Built-in scoring (from Good Start to Genius) whispers Burke’s Peerage. The chance to declare oneself Queen Bee for earning the best possible score: Absolute Monarchy! WORDLE The inventor says it should be solved in a few minutes, which means almost anyone can play. Bless their hearts.…

Jamie Lloyd may be best known for directing works by the likes of Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, and William Shakespeare, but he credits at least some of his status as a British theatrical wunderkind to a more unexpected collaborator: ’90s matinee idol Freddie Prinze Jr. For his first job out of drama school, where he studied acting, Lloyd served as the understudy to Prinze in a West End production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth. “I remember waiting in the wings to a packed house, and they announced the understudy to Freddie Prinze Jr. was going on,” Lloyd says. “All I could hear was loud booing.” Besides inspiring him to work behind the scenes, the experience helped Lloyd, now 41, understand a fundamental lesson about live theater: that part…