Innehållsförteckning för issue 25 från The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

THE ADAGE OF “not all who wander are lost” is especially true in this edition, our annual travel issue, which explores the many ways we move about the world for pleasure, and what we hope to find in ourselves as we do. In our cover story, “All Rise” (page 54), the Australian model and actress Charlee Fraser says she had no choice but to “trust the universe” when the world of showbusiness beat a path to her door — rather than the other way around — and she was thrust into the high-profile role of Mary Jabassa in the highly anticipated prequel to 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road”. Fraser tells Victoria Pearson about her experience filming “Furiosa” alongside Hollywood heavyweights Chris Hemsworth (a fellow Australian) and Anya Taylor-Joy, and how…

Yellow diamonds have been highly coveted for several decades, but Laurence Graff, once a scrappy apprentice in London’s Hatton Garden jewellery district, now the paterfamilias of an international empire, was among the first to champion them. In 1974, he bought the Star of Bombay, a 47.4-carat square, canary-hued gem held by an aristocratic Indian family, challenging the centuries-old primacy of pure, colourless stones. Since then, the company, now headed by his son Francois, has acquired many of the world’s most spectacular specimens, which get their golden shade from impurities in the nitrogen they contain. Over the years, the house has also amassed a cache of smaller yellow diamonds, which its artisans incorporate into effervescent modern pieces. These cascading earrings are set in gold, with 62 fancy pear-shaped stones together totalling…

IN LATE 2020, Charlee Fraser needed a break. The Australian modelling export had recently moved back home after a busy four-year stint in New York, and was shaping her schedule to take some well-earned time off. As with many of life’s best-laid plans, the universe (or in Fraser’s case, the Academy Award-winning Australian filmmaker, writer and director George Miller) had other ideas. “My [modelling] agency got an email from a casting director who requested an audition from me,” she says. The role was for Miller’s latest blockbuster, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — a prequel to his 2015 epic, “Mad Max: Fury Road”. Fraser, an Awabakal woman from Newcastle, had no acting experience at the time, but says she has always been “attuned to opportunity”. “When it comes to my…

The day after the Germans invaded Paris in June 1940, the French Modernist designer Charlotte Perriand boarded a ship in Marseille bound for Kobe, Japan, where she’d been invited to advise the government on how to make products for the West. Two years later, World War II made it impossible to return to Europe, so instead she moved to Frenchoccupied Vietnam, where she met and married her second husband, Jacques Martin. In 1943, pregnant with her only child, she designed a chaise longue called the Indochine. Since her preferred tubular steel was unavailable during the war, she had the prototype built with rattan. Now the Italian furniture house Cassina, in collaboration with her daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac, has released a new version in the material that Perriand, who died in 1999…

IN THE EVER-shifting landscape of fashion, where trends rise and fall with dizzying speed, the once-revered territory of vintage clothing is being quietly overshadowed by a mountain of newly manufactured, mostly lower-quality garments. As the industry churns out more product than ever, it leaves behind an unsettling legacy: in 2023 alone, the fashion world reportedly generated a staggering 97 million tons of waste. Of that total, 18 million tons were discarded textiles, 2.5 million tons comprised chemical waste and 3 million tons were packaging materials. Authentic, high-quality vintage pieces, on the other hand — rich with history and individuality, and representative of a high level of craftsmanship – are becoming harder to find, precipitating a looming sense of cultural loss. “The most sustainable garment is one that’s already in circulation,”…

LIKE COMEDIANS, DANCERS tend to be good imitators. They’re both masters of fine detail, able to pinpoint and replicate the minutiae that make a choreographic phrase, or a sketch character, click into focus. As a dancer and a comedian, Sarah McCreanor, known as Smac, likes to up the ante. Why mimic a dance or a person when you can turn yourself into an emoji? A head-bobbing chicken? An object being crushed by a hydraulic press? “I think one of the funniest things you can do is try to dance the undanceable,” McCreanor says in a Zoom interview. “I look at, like, a video of a hydraulic press crushing something, and I see choreography.” You have to go back a generation or two to find a good analogue for the 32-year-old…

THE DOORBELL TO my Silversea veranda suite rings and there stands an immaculately dressed woman in a tailcoat with an offer to get my dress pressed and shoes shined. It’s formal night on board the ship and everyone is getting prepared. Soon guests will be mingling in the Panorama Lounge with an aperitivo while a pianist plays. The wonderful butler assigned to my suite, Carren, whisks my frock to the laundry-master and returns minutes later with a tray of Italian bathroom amenities for me to choose from, including Bulgari as well as Ortigia where the scents are distilled from the flowers of Sicily. Carren, who hails from Nairobi in Kenya, then talks me through a list of everything else a butler onboard Silversea can offer. “For starters, there’s a pillow…

IN 1984, ON an Air France flight from Paris to London, the English actress and singer Jane Birkin dropped her straw carryall, spilling its contents across the floor. The man in the seat next to hers, Jean-Louis Dumas, then the executive chairman of Hermès, suggested that she get a replacement with compartments big enough to hold her things. Birkin, who had three children, complained that nothing practical was ever elegant enough. As they flew over the English Channel, they traded ideas and sketches for what would become known as the Birkin, a handbag so enduringly popular that it can still take months or even years to acquire. “I think I drew it on the sick bag — or the not-be-sick bag,” Birkin, who died last year, would later recall. “And…

IT’S A SCHLEP, this travel thing. Just ask anyone who has had their flight cancelled at the last minute, or who has landed back at home only to find their suitcase hasn’t. But next time you’re lying in your hotel bed at 3am, wide awake because your body thinks it’s in a different time zone, spare a thought for a different kind of weary traveller: the Pfeilstorch, or “arrow stork”, that landed in the village of Klütz, near Germany’s Baltic Coast, in May 1822. In the Northern Hemisphere, the return of the white storks to their nests, built atop roofs and chimneys, has long heralded the advent of spring. What generated excitement among the villagers of Klütz was that this particular stork had a massive wooden spear thrust through its…

FASHION’S ENDURING PREOCCUPATION with the “next” makes Gucci’s interrogation of its archives, and the reintroduction of some of its most iconic pieces, feel almost subversive. At the Gucci Cruise 2024 show in 2023, set against the stunning backdrop of Seoul’s 14th-century Gyeongbokgung Palace, the brand incorporated its historical codes, reimagining them for a contemporary audience through the bags on the runway. This year, the label unveiled a sleek and sensual interpretation of another classic — The Jackie — paying homage to the iconic former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Now, for the 2025 Cruise show in London, the spotlight was on the return of a true 1970s icon: the Blondie bag. This ’70s-inspired silhouette, renowned for its distinct round logo, has been beautifully redefined through exquisite artisanal craftsmanship. The Gucci…

THE ADELAIDE HILLS winery Bird in Hand did well in naming its newly opened accommodation with the single letter “O”. It’s the exact sound that guests make as they walk in and discover that they’re getting an experience that goes far beyond a standard winery stay. Part homestay, part art gallery and part private tasting room where you can sample the full range of Bird in Hand wines (including the exceptional members-only 2021 chardonnays, the Tribute Series TED Chardonnay and the Nest Egg Chardonnay), the “O” Quarters, to give the space its full name, marks the latest chapter in the brand’s growing hospitality offering at its Woodside estate. Named after Oscar, the son of Bird in Hand’s co-founders Andrew and Susie Nugent, the “O” Quarters represent a deliberate effort to…

FROM A DISTANCE, Visan, France, resembles a Provençal village like any other, charming but unassuming: a crop of pale stone buildings on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards. During the medieval period, however, the region was the seat of powerful dignitaries, including the Dauphin of Viennois, a count whose family owned the village’s now-ruined castle. In 1349, Humbert II — the last dauphin before the title was transferred to the French crown — burdened with debt and without a male heir, ceded his remaining land to the king. Five years earlier, in a similar exchange with the pope, who then led the Catholic church from the nearby city of Avignon, he had offered up Visan. The village became part of the papacy’s wealthy enclave, remaining so until the French Revolution; its…