Innehållsförteckning för issue 18 från The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR LATELY, HERE AT T Australia, we’ve been thinking a lot about love. Familial love, non-binary love and polyamorous love; the love we have for our children, pets and friends. Love is the beating heart of humanity — it binds us and gives us the will to keep going. Love has inspired countless movies, songs, books and plays. But what, exactly, is it? In this, our first ever “Amour” issue, we examine love in all its complicated glory, unpacking what it means to love and be loved in this day and age, when all the old rules have been abandoned. In our cover story, “True Romance” (page 68), Lance Richardson ponders the real meaning of love, and finds it with help from the Bard. “Everything can be…

OFTEN REFERRED TO as “the Leonardo da Vinci of horology”, Abraham-Louis Breguet was the most significant inventor in watch history. Not content with just delivering the very first wristwatch, Breguet also dreamed up the first tact watch, readable by touch, and the first gravity-defying tourbillon among his many innovations. Yet his technical prowess was not confined to dry land. In 1815, the watchmaker was recognised with another accolade when King Louis XVIII named him the “Horloger de la Marine”, the official chronometer maker to the French Navy. At a time when the wealth and security of a nation were largely determined by its power at sea, this appointment was a very big deal. Back then, timekeeping played a critical role in marine navigation, with chronometers used by ships to determine…

BY DESIGNPEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS IN THE CENTRE of Paris, in the First Arrondissement, around the corner from the Jardin du Palais-Royal — with its orderly tree-lined promenades — there’s a ragged bistro called Juveniles at which tourists jostle for tables and locals buy bottles of wine to bring home after work. It’s a true neighbourhood spot in an office-dominated district where most Parisians could never imagine living, even if they wanted to: nearby are the Louvre, the Opéra Garnier, Sainte-Chapelle and other landmarks so intrinsic to the grand cinematic vision of the city that the relatively few apartments that become available around here are almost immediately snatched up. But two floors above the restaurant, on the Rue de Richelieu, is the small, austere home of Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo…

New Western Rugged denim, boots and hats fit for Brunswick or back o’ Bourke. C-Suite Modern tailoring and subtle accessories that whisper, “I made partner.” Androgynous A sheer top, a Thom Browne skirt and pearls telegraph comfort in your own skin. Performance Gorpcore staples and technical fabrics for the man of action.…

AUSTRALIA I WAS RECENTLY reading “The Children’s Bach”, by Helen Garner, when a sentence stopped me in my tracks. Dexter, a gregarious stick-in-the-mud living in 1980s Melbourne, is talking to another character about relationships. “Love!” he roars. “I’ve never been in love, then. In lerve. I don’t even know what that is.” There’s a familiar cynicism here: the Australian habit of dismissing anything too sentimental by making it the subject of mockery (“lerve”). But what caught me was the last part: his incomprehension. Dexter is a bit of a fool in “The Children’s Bach” — his wife leaves him for a reason — but he was on to something here. What is love, anyway? And why, as a wise woman once said, does it make us so crazy? (“Looking so…

THE CHERUBIC FACE of a child stares intently down. I’m in a Turkish minibus owned by Fatma Celik Karakol, who has tenderly decoupaged a photograph of her granddaughter to the entire span of the skylight. Karakol was the first female ambulance driver in Denizli province. Now working in tourism, she navigates the steep and spindly tangle of Istanbul’s blaring backstreets with as much ease as she does the hairpin twists of a mountain ascent. Like women everywhere, she must be twice as good to do what’s considered a man’s job. Clip-on koala bears dangle from the rearview mirror as mementos of happy travels past. In tunnels, Karakol will flick on the LED disco lights to make her passengers laugh and “oontz oontz”. The grandmother, and divorcee, didn’t stop driving when…

THE YEAR IS 1922, and the late-night cafes of Paris are filled with artists, revellers and soldiers. Champagne flows and the world feels young and full of possibility. No drink better embodies these heady days of the Parisian Années folles (crazy years) between the world wars than the French 75. Essentially a gin sour topped with sparkling wine, the French 75 is a simple combination of gin, sugar, lemon juice and champagne. But the complexity and effervescence of the wine lift the drink from a simple classic into the realms of ethereal celebration. Champagne tends to go straight to one’s head, so spiking it with gin makes the drink even more potent and fast-acting, said to hit you like a blast from a French 75mm field gun. During this wild…

Montreal Biosphere (1967) by Buckminster Fuller “Fuller wasn’t a trained architect, but he was dreaming of the future. It still looks very modern now, especially compared to [contemporary] buildings.” Rover Safety Bicycle (1885) by J K Starley “Starley [incorporated] the drive chain mechanism, and it remains mysterious to me how quickly you can travel with so little energy. I tend to go for things that are engineering eureka moments rather than mere design.” Sacco Chair (1968) by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro for Zanotta “In the 1960s, people wanted to find new ways of socialising. I still remember sitting on my first beanbag chair and thinking it was a massive leap of imagination coupled with a new material (polystyrene balls), which is always what pushes design forward.” Hippopotame…

IN THE POST-PANDEMIC era, boundaries are blurring in a mashup of categories and styles. In fashion, “corpcore” – corporate dressing with a twist — is taking over as the new version of “business casual”, as at least 37 per cent of workers now work in a hybrid home-office model. Think suits worn with sneakers, or zip jackets in place of suit jackets, produced in a range of luxury fabrics. BOSS’s new spring 2024 menswear range takes this to the next level, with high-end fabric such as camel hair and expert tailoring evident in stylish linings and subtle trimmings. The brand chose Lee Min-ho, the South Korean actor and singer, as one of the faces behind its spring 2024 collection. Well known in his homeland for his role in the hit…

SHE’S MORE FIELD hockey than femme fatale, the woman who will lead Winston Smith to his doom. A “bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements”, Julia moves through the grey, constantly surveilled world of Airstrip One with an energy that cannot be ignored. The outlawed affair between Winston and Julia sits at the heart of George Orwell’s “1984”. It ends badly: in Room 101, where the worst thing in the world awaits. And although Orwell focuses on Winston’s tragedy, it is Julia, with her strong desires and her worldly ways — she procures the black-market goods with which they celebrate their trysts — who is arguably the more appealing character. Most of Julia’s life has remained hidden from readers. Until now.…

FROM THE PEARL-SHELL designs of Darrell Sibosado, a Bard man from the Kimberley, to a colour-saturated mural by the Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man Dylan Mooney and the intricate body tattooing of the Baiga people in India by Mangala Bai Maravi — these are just a few of the 14 First Nations artists from Australia and around the world brought to the 2024 Biennale of Sydney by the event’s “Visionary Partner”, Cartier. The legendary jeweller is supporting the arts festival through its Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain — the company’s art museum at its headquarters in Paris. Another key element of the partnership is the appointment of a First Nations curatorial fellow. The first recipient: Tony Albert, a Kuku Yalanji artist from Queensland who is well known…

OOH LA LAPEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS AUSTRALIA IT IS 6PM and 26 degrees. On a narrow street on the outskirts of the city centre, in front of an open doorway, half a dozen tables are sprinkled across the footpath, each occupied by two or three fashionably dressed young people drinking butterscotch-coloured wine and picking at plates of tarte au comté. Inside, a chandelier casts a Sunkist glow over the compact kitchen and two-storey dining room. Despite appearances, this intimate venue, Caravin, isn’t in the French capital’s 11th Arrondissement. Rather, it’s a new-ish Parisian restaurant and wine bar in Sydney’s Potts Point. Caravin’s owners, Greg Bampton and Phil Stenvall, say the Ward Avenue property’s structure and location was influential in deciding the style of cuisine but, serendipitous origins aside, Caravin’s existence (and…

ON A DREARY November day in Paris, the soft morning light is creeping into the American fashion designer Rick Owens’s 18th-century mansion, just south of the Seine in the Seventh Arrondissement, where he and his French wife and business partner, Michèle Lamy, 80, have lived for 20 years. One of the few truly independent creative heads of a major brand, he’s built an improbable empire by making clothes as grotesque as they are glamorous. But three decades into his career — and a few days after turning 62 — Owens finds himself at a crossroads. He’s just returned from a birthday trip to the Pacific Coast of Jalisco, Mexico, where he rode horses with his muse, design assistant and frequent travel companion, the towering 30-something Australian model Tyrone Dylan Susman,…

Lately, haute joaillerie designers have been practising their own version of democracy, combining stones of all sorts — from ancient and rare specimens to faceted minerals only recently extracted from the earth — without regard to hierarchy. Thus, a single bedazzled collar like this geometric one in shades of rose from the Italian jewellery house Bulgari can be seen both as an object of beauty and a primer on how gems emerge from and reflect history. Bits of reddish-orange coral, used for eons as decorative amulets in classical and Indigenous cultures, are interspersed with large cushion-cut pink tourmalines, stones initially documented in 1890 in the mines of San Diego. A lattice of oval and pavé diamonds provides the necklace’s Art Deco-inspired pattern, but it’s the iridescent glow of some semiprecious…

AS IF MECHANICAL wristwatches aren’t anachronistic enough, some brands now are going back in time: they’re equipping new models with mechanical movements that must be wound by hand. Unlike the self-winding watch that uses a rotor to harness the movement of a wearer’s wrist to keep the timekeeping going, a hand-wound movement relies on the wearer to wind it. Almost all watches had to be wound this way until the 1920s and ’30s, when makers, including Rolex, developed a number of improvements and Louis Recordon patented a self-winding wristwatch in England in 1924. In addition to having vintage cred, manual-wind watches seem to have a particular appeal in our world-weary times. According to a Euromonitor report on the top 10 global consumer trends for 2023, people are feeling overwhelmed and…