Innehållsförteckning för issue 24 från The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

Next Stage

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR WE LOCKED IN the acclaimed, experimental, sustainability-minded chef Josh Niland for a cover shoot with photographer Jason Loucas a while ago, as I knew he’d be a perfect fit for T Australia — not to mention the beautiful menswear styled by Patrick Zaczkiewicz. The fact that he was awarded a very deserved third chef’s hat for his Sydney restaurant Saint Peter just a couple of days before the interview was the kind of happy coincidence you can’t plan. But as you’ll learn in the revealing profile by Nina Rousseau on page 58, it was no surprise. Niland has been driving himself to excel — and upending the odds — since he was young and stricken with a rare form of cancer. In the interview, he shares…

3 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

THE THING

The intricate mechanical movements of a Swiss timepiece are what often win the hearts of connoisseurs. But its face — that deceptively simple flat plane adorned with markers, hands and subdials — is what it shows the world. Guillochage, the process of sculpting a watch’s surface with a precise geometric pattern, which is sometimes then enamelled to add depth, is a centuries-old technique that emerged in watches around the late 1700s. Now, Rolex has added this treatment to the dial of its platinum Perpetual 1908, named after the year that the house’s founder, Hans Wilsdorf, registered the Rolex name in Switzerland. With a classic rice grain motif in glacier blue, the rippling surface beneath the bold Arabic numerals not only catches and holds the light but bends it into an…

1 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

YES, AND…

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS AUSTRALIANOTES ON THE CULTURE BEFORE THE PHRASE “yes, and?” was made into an anthem of unflappable disregard by Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey, it was a well-known rule in improvisational comedy. An actor throws something out there, and his scene partner accepts the statement and runs with it, adding their own embellishments: “The children appear to be turning into goats,” says Actor One. “Quick, let’s hide the washing before they start eating it off the line,” replies Actor Two. Actor One then begins gathering the laundry, and adds their own new twist. If they refused to do this, or if Actor Two rejected the initial observation that the children were turning into goats — if they said “no”, in other words — the scene would grind to…

5 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

Escape Rooms

HOTELS ARE OFTEN agents of change in a neighbourhood. That’s certainly true in New York, where buttoned-up Wall Street and the frenetic NoMad district, north of Madison Square Park, are just two of the beneficiaries of the city’s latest hotel boom. More than 40 properties have opened across the five boroughs since 2022, during a post-Covid rebirth that’s brought fresh energy to long-overlooked pockets of Manhattan as well as to its most well-trodden quarters. Among these new arrivals are the Hotel Chelsea, a long-awaited revival of the venerable art-crowd hangout, and Nine Orchard, an elegant makeover of a 1912 bank building on the Lower East Side. Then there’s the Aman, the hushed retreat that opened two northern summers ago in the middle of Midtown. At least two more luxury hotels…

5 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

DO THE HUSTLE

WORKING FULL-TIME as chief of staff for one of the world’s biggest tech brands keeps Clare Barrins more than busy. She relocated to Silicon Valley from Melbourne almost seven years ago for what many would consider a dream role operating within the upper echelons of leadership. Although it can be demanding and challenging at times — one day, Barrins could be mapping out and executing a strategic plan, the next managing stakeholders and working out how to improve operational efficiency for the tech juggernaut — she loves the work. Yet Barrins always wanted to pursue her own business. On and off for the past decade, she has been working on various ideas, but never fully progressed them. That was until 2022, when she conceptualised plans for a new venture after…

10 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

The Inheritance

IN SEPTEMBER 2018, the fashion designer Maria Koch sent her husband, the magazine editor Joerg Koch, the real estate listing for a two-storey, Alpine-style house at the eastern edge of Berlin’s Grunewald forest. From the street, it resembled something out of a Bavarian fairytale: exposed wooden beams, decorative wrought-iron window grids and a white stucco facade with a gabled roof. Compared to the other houses in the wealthy neighbourhood of Schmargendorf — “white palazzos, really tacky stuff”, says Joerg — this one stood out. But inside, wall-to-wall cream carpeting and silk curtains made it look more like a stage set from a 1980s soap opera. The 700-square-metre, four-bedroom home, which was constructed in 1935, had been vacant for over a year following the death of its most recent resident, the…

8 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

REAL TALK

AT THE END of 2019, David Finnigan, a writer and performer from Canberra, agreed to do his father a favour. John Finnigan, a climate scientist, was being treated in hospital for a spinal infection, and the drugs made him too foggy to work on his paper about “six key moments in human history, six turning points where we changed course”. The premise was that humanity is “an adolescent species”, still growing up, but by examining these turning points in our collective past we might be able to glean lessons, or morals, to help us secure our admittedly precarious future. How, for instance, had Homo sapiens survived the catastrophic eruption of Toba, a supervolcano in Sumatra, which nearly wiped out all life on earth some 74,000 years ago? What might the…

6 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

Born Free

I LOVE BEER. I’m a career bartender, a drinks writer and the co-owner of a bar. Alcohol is my life. But now that I’m in my 40s, I’ve started taking months-long breaks from drinking alcohol every year to reset my head and give my liver a break. When I first embarked on my bouts of self-imposed sobriety, the options for enjoying the experience of drinking without the alcohol were seriously limited. But in recent years, non-alcoholic beer in particular has come so far that, apart from my total lack of hangover, I hardly notice the difference. So good are these new brews, I can sit at the bar sinking craft tinnies of XPA, IPA, sour beer and stout to my heart’s content without ever approaching the legal limit. So what’s…

6 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

TIME LORD

WHEN THE GUITARIST John Mayer took the stage in Las Vegas, to cap Dead & Company’s 10-week residence at the Sphere arena, his wristwatch naturally loomed large on the venue’s massive LED screen. “I happen to have a job where my wrist is naturally looked at,” Mayer, 46, says on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. That suits the longtime watch collector (and downright watch nerd) just fine. “The number of people who come up to me and ask me what I’m wearing is far greater than the number of people who come up to me and say, ‘Love your music’, or ‘how’d you write that song?’ ” he says. “People want to know about watches more than anything. They’ll say, ‘Gotta ask: What do you have…

8 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

CHEF’S KISS

HE’S BEEN CALLED a “creative disruptor”, a “fish alchemist” and a “trailblazer”. Jamie Oliver says he’s “one of the most interesting chefs on the planet”. He’s acknowledged in the hospitality industry for redefining the way the world views seafood, his boundary-crossing restaurants forging new waters in the high-stakes world of global fine dining. Why? Because, unsettlingly with an ever-warming planet, Josh Niland’s “scales-to-tail” food and sustainable fish philosophies feel extra important right now. At Niland’s restaurants, fish guts are treated with as much reverence as the flesh itself. Aged 27 and with a financially haemorrhaging fish restaurant, Niland realised he was throwing away half his product — offal costs the same when buying fish by weight. While Niland was working at Sydney’s now-shuttered Fish Face, the chef Stephen Hodges had…

14 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

FIRST OF ITS KIND LAST OF ITS KIND

BORN INTO A textile manufacturing dynasty in German-held Alsace in 1907, Jean Schlumberger resisted his parents’ attempts to steer him into banking or the family business and eventually made his way to Paris in the 1930s. There he began working under the couturier Lucien Lelong (who would later become Christian Dior’s mentor). Known to frequent the stalls of the Marché aux Puces, Schlumberger would collect antiques: handpainted relics, Victorian serpents and multicoloured glass objects. By 1936, he was transforming porcelain flowers from old funeral wreaths into fantastical brooches, which were worn by his circle of artist friends, including Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. Schlumberger’s whimsical creations also caught the eye of the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who asked him to create buttons shaped like starfish and plumed hats for…

2 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

URBAN OUTFITTERS

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE between a good public space and a bad one? For most of us, it’s a feeling more than anything specific, but whether you’re at a train station, a playground or a shopping centre, it’s a gut instinct that’s impossible to ignore. Every city has that one area where developers (either public, private or both), have promised big, beautiful things and instead delivered post-apocalyptic spaces of lifeless concrete. “Great cities don’t happen by accident,” says Barrie Barton, CEO of the urban innovation company Right Angle, which he co-founded with his brother Chris in 2005. Operating on four continents, Right Angle is involved in a broad range of urban projects including positive gentrification in Africa, luxury property development in Asia and major infrastructure projects in Australia, aiming to make…

4 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

ANOTHER THING

As a watchmaker, you know you’re onto a good thing when one of your timepieces gets a nickname. And for Hamilton, the Murph has been a very good thing indeed. The design, which draws on Hamilton’s rich legacy of military field watches, was originally a one-off prop watch made for Christopher Nolan’s sweeping space epic from 2014, “Interstellar”. Unlike most watches on the silver screen lucky enough to get a flash on the lead actor’s wrist, Hamilton’s, worn by the character Murphy “Murph” Cooper (played by Jessica Chastain), is an important plot device — but more than that, it’s a potent example of how an object can be imbued with great emotional weight. While the watch initially wasn’t something you could buy, there was, unsurprisingly, demand from fans, leading to…

1 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

ON THE SCENT

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS AUSTRALIAFRAGRANCE NICOLAS BONNEVILLE DESCRIBES his collaboration with Jaeger-LeCoultre as “a project that was unusual in two ways”. The renowned French perfumer is the latest artisan to join the watchmaker’s storied Made of Makers initiative, an opportunity he tells T Australia was unique — not only in its non-commercial nature (the scents will be offered as a special experience for clients), but its focus on “exploring the heritage, legacy and spirit of the maison”. A series of collaborations with artists from various disciplines, Made of Makers aims to reimagine the house’s creative expression through a new breadth of perspectives. For this holiday season, Bonneville has interpreted Jaeger-LeCoultre’s identity with a portfolio of original fragrances for the home, distilling its spirit into three bespoke olfactory signatures: The Timeless Stories,…

5 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP

AT A DUSTY studio space in an industrial corner of Los Angeles, LL Cool J bounces and vibes in black satin and bulging size 13 Balenciaga boots. This actor and rap luminary is filming a video for a sexy track, “Proclivities”, from his new album — but he isn’t in front of the cameras, or rehearsing. He’s just cheerfully shooting the you-know-what, with a late night of production ahead of him. Background players in feathered dresses float by; his security circles. He does a little dance, demonstrating the inspiration for another song. He walks with a swagger and stands with a spring, too much rhythm in his six-foot-three frame to keep still. “Making fantasies happen,” he says, grinning, taking all of it in. LL Cool J is 56 and has…

9 min

The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia|issue 24

ALL OF ME

THE CLIFFS FRAMING the sand glow golden in the Moroccan sun as the swell surges towards Imsouane beach and a shoal of surfers paddles out. At least some of them have more on their minds than just catching waves. Under the supervision of Josh Dickson, a London-based psychologist, a group of trauma survivors has come to Morocco’s Atlantic coast to work on their issues. Surfing is a key part of the process, for beginners and experienced wave-riders alike. “Surfing forces you to be present for a couple of hours,” Dickson says. “When you’re out there, even if you’re not catching a wave, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t think about your mortgage, about the state of your relationship, your tax bill, your childhood trauma. You’re totally present for…

6 min