Innehållsförteckning för issue 21 från The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

THE STAGE LIGHTS burned into my eyes as a crowd of more than 100 focused intently on my every move, the heat causing sweat to bead on my temples. Above me, the vaulted ceilings of Petroff Palace, built by Catherine the Great, looked like the inside of a giant Fabergé egg. Everything was noise and light and heat. And then someone said, “Your time starts … now.” It was 2014 and I was working as a bartender at Melbourne’s cocktail stalwart The Black Pearl. I had entered the Bacardi Legacy cocktail competition, never imagining it would lead me to a palace in Moscow. At the time, Australians were still getting used to cocktails as part of our drinking culture. A major driver of that uptake was competitions organised by spirits…

FROM ITS ORIGINS as a small watchmaker nestled in the Swiss mountains in Le Locle, Tissot has grown into a luxury player on the world stage, collaborating with global sports superstars. From recruiting as ambassadors the American basketballer Damian Lillard, the Italian motorcycling sensation Enea Bastianini and the Slovenian cyclist Primoz Roglic, to partnerships with the NBA, MotoGP and the Tour de France as their Official Timekeeper, Tissot has become synonymous with both sport and style. The brand’s latest endeavour is bringing sports, technology and luxury to the consumer. Its new unisex watch, the T-Touch Connect Sport, has been designed for active individuals who value the outdoors and strive for wellness, and who also appreciate a genuine timepiece on their wrist. Like its predecessor, the T-Touch Connect Solar, the T-Touch…

THERE ARE A lot of reasons to visit Matsumoto, a city at the foot of the Japanese Alps in the central prefecture of Nagano. Most visitors head there to see the 16th-century castle, one of the oldest in the country, or to bathe in the natural hot springs. But few, even within Japan’s large community of watch fans, know that Matsumoto also is home to the Timepiece Museum, a bright and airy three-level exhibition space that displays about 120 of its 800 clocks at any given time. According to the website of the Japan Clock & Watch Association, the museum has “one of Japan’s richest collections of antique clocks in motion so that visitors can enjoy the movement of pendulums and the sound of bells”. (And you should hear the…

“Move back!” yells a ranger as a large male orangutan lumbers down the wooden walkway at Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre. “Move back!” other rangers yell, louder this time, as the tourists are proving slow at following directions. With no enclosures or fences in the park, rehabilitated orangutans are able to roam outside its boundaries. Wild apes such as Malim, the 24-year-old orangutan who is making his way past the now safely distanced tourists, are also free to wander in to snack on bananas left out on the feeding platform. The Sepilok sanctuary spans 43 square kilometres in the north-east of Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo (the island is shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, while a small remaining region comprises the sultanate of Brunei). Opened in 1964 to rehabilitate orphaned baby orangutans,…

JEFF DUNNE WAS just 16 when he learned he would be competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics, on August 9–10. The then Year 10 student, who’s known in breaking circles as B-boy J-Attack, beat 36 other hopefuls in the B-boy category of the Oceania Breaking Championships last year at Sydney Town Hall. Since discovering breaking, aged seven, when he was dragged along to his sister’s hip-hop dance classes, Dunne has been obsessed, training up to six hours a day, balanced with school on New South Wales’s Tweed Coast. Dunne recognises breaking is as much a mental sport as it is a physical one. “Before I go into any battle, I’m always super nervous just thinking about what I’m going to do,” he says. “But as soon as I step on…

WITH DAVID BECKHAM revealing on Instagram that he’s spending more and more time tending to his chickens and planting Queen of Sweden shrub roses in his garden, it appears the luxury space is in need of some new soccer stars. Enter Eduardo Camavinga, a midfielder for La Liga club Real Madrid; Phil Foden, who plays for Manchester City; and Arsenal player Kai Havertz. Together, they are the sporting faces of BOSS Triumph Elixir — a new addition to the BOSS Bottled fragrance family. At first glance, they are three strikingly different footballers from three different countries, but they do have one thing in common: a reputation for skill, dedication and unwavering determination. (And don’t worry about Becks, he’s just signed on as a menswear designer for Hugo Boss in a…

WHEN AYOUNG AN was eight, her parents bought her a violin. She slept with the instrument on the pillow next to her every night. Two years later, a shop selling musical instruments opened in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, her hometown, and An became a fixture there, pelting the owner with questions. “I think I bothered him a lot,” An, now 32, said. As a teenager, she decided she would become a violin maker. Eventually, a journey with twists and turns took her to Cremona in northern Italy — a famed hub for violin makers, including masters like Antonio Stradivari, since the 16th century. There, An, a rising star in the violin-making world with international awards under her belt, runs her own workshop. Set on a quiet cobblestone street, An’s studio is…

AS THE FOUNDER of the streetwear brands A Bathing Ape and Human Made and the artistic director of the French luxury brand Kenzo, the designer and record producer Nigo has, over 30 years, asserted himself as one of the most revered aesthetic talents in Japan. So, last decade, when he decided to erect a concrete shelter by the sea, he surely could’ve commissioned Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, Shigeru Ban or any of the other Japanese architectural legends known for building such structures. Instead, as Nigo, 53, explains via a translator one grey morning last year, he wanted to hire “someone who hadn’t done a house in Japan but had done these kinds of beach houses”. Standing in the wide, low main room that comprises the 530-square-metre home’s bottom level, it’s…

WHEN THE RACING driver and art collector Hervé Poulain first brought the idea of an “Art Car” to BMW in 1975, it was to spread interest in motor racing to a wider audience — and partly an excuse for Poulain to drive a BMW 3.0 CSL, spectacularly painted in primary colours by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in France. Calder hugged Poulain before that race, urging: “Hervé, win … but drive carefully!” And then they were off. That car was a prelude to what has become an eclectic series of 20 BMW cars designed by visual artists from around the world. In 1977, Roy Lichtenstein flanked a 320i Turbo with his characteristic “Ben Day dots”. Jeff Koons printed an M3 GT2…

IT’S EASY, IN today’s era of pervasive corporate tie-ins, to assume that a sporting “partnership” is merely a polite term for “sponsorship”, defined, before anything else, by the deepest pockets. When it comes to Omega’s role as Official Timekeeper of the Olympic Games, however, the depth of the Swiss watchmaker’s skill matters more than anything else. Omega has been keeping track of time on track and field with split-second accuracy since the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Of course, the scope of the role has changed a little in the past 90-plus years. Omega sent one watchmaker and 30 stopwatches to the 1932 games, while the 2020 games in Tokyo saw the brand deploy 530 timekeepers and a staggering 400 tonnes of equipment — a telling snapshot of how…

IN THE EVER-expanding wellness world, one of the latest trends is actually one of the oldest: soaking in, and sometimes drinking, therapeutic waters. In ancient Greece, physicians, including Hippocrates, prescribed mineral-rich baths to treat everything from skin diseases to insomnia. (According to one theory, the word “spa” is an acronym of the Latin phrase “sanus per aqua”, meaning “health by water”.) The practice has also been employed in Asia since at least the sixth century AD, when nomadic Buddhists are said to have brought the concept of onsen (inns and bathhouses built around natural geothermal pools) to Japan from the Korean Peninsula. Now, with various forms of hydrotherapy, such as cold plunges and steam saunas, making a comeback, wellness entrepreneurs are debuting properties centred on bathing. Here, five places to…