Tabla de contenidos para Issue 14 en The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

IT’S 5:10AM AT The Upper House hotel in Hong Kong. Having woken too early due to jet lag, I’m in the gym on the 48th floor, pounding away on the running machine and watching the skyscrapers come alive in the faint dawn light. Someone else enters the gym: a stocky guy in a white Adidas T-shirt wearing a bandana over his cornrows. He gives me a nod as he heads into the adjacent weights room. Isn’t that the rapper Pusha T? Presently, I hear him counting his reps and recognise the timbre of his grunts from his music. It is indeed Pusha T and I have a suspicion he’s in town for tonight’s event: Penfolds’ global launch of its new range of wines. If my hunch is correct, it’s a…

AS A CHILD in Messina, Italy, a port city in northeastern Sicily, Marco De Vincenzo, whose parents owned a vehicle registration agency, assumed that a career in fashion was, if not impossible, at least ambitious. And yet, “I remember hearing the story of Gianni Versace,” who grew up just across the sea, says the designer, Etro’s creative director since June 2022. “I thought, ‘If he started from here and succeeded, so can I.’ ” At 18, De Vincenzo left home to study fashion at Rome’s Istituto Europeo di Design. Three years later, he was hired at Fendi — where he remains head designer of leather goods — and in 2009, at 30, he founded his own womenswear brand, which featured loud patterns and opulent trimmings. In 2014, LVMH acquired a…

Tune in to T Australia: TV to see Dan Knott’s behind-the-scenes shoot footage. taustralia.com.au…

WHEN I RETURNED my rental car at the airport in Calama, I’d driven 2,412 kilometres through the Atacama Desert, drawing a zigzag through Chile’s far north. The driest place on earth — vying with parts of Antarctica — the Atacama covers an area of 105,000 to 128,000 square kilometres, depending on how inclusive your definition is, and stretches along 1,100 to 1,600 kilometres of Pacific coastline. It’s a place defined by absence, or at least extreme sparseness. Of water, of life. Whatever is determined enough to exist there — people, plants, even microbes — must be hardy, resilient and well adapted. From the road, I’d seen life hanging on. I’d ventured into the desert and also seen what dryness preserves (bones, ruins) and what it exposes (mineral riches, the stars).…

From butterfly brooches to bracelets in the shape of leaping panthers, fine jewellery has been inspired by the animal kingdom for centuries. But perhaps no other creature is so perfectly suited to adorn the body as the snake, its sinuous form at once alluring and dangerous. A motif in jewellery since ancient times, the serpent symbolised health to the Greeks and eternal love to the Victorians. Bulgari, founded in Rome in 1884 by the silversmith Sotirio Bulgari, has long explored the power of the reptile’s undulating curves: the house debuted its first gold watch made to resemble an abstract snake 75 years ago. Since then, its designers have come to interpret the Serpenti motif more literally and with daring aplomb. Case in point: this high jewellery necklace, in white gold…

EMMA LEWISHAM CO-FOUNDER, EMMA LEWISHAM FRUSTRATED BY A lack of pregnancy-safe natural skincare products — ones as luxurious as those she’d religiously purchased prior to falling pregnant — Emma Lewisham set about creating her own. Not only would her eponymous line use science-backed, naturally derived ingredients, it would also be carbon-positive, with offsets outweighing emissions. Since the brand’s launch in 2019, the 38-year-old New Zealand native has made significant inroads both in terms of company growth and environmental impact. Her sustainable Circular Beauty initiative has helped Emma Lewisham earn B Corp certification (almost all containers can be returned to the company and either refilled or recycled), and in the past financial year, sales in Australia increased by 99 per cent. In part, that’s due to the brand’s Mecca debut —…

A YEAR OR two ago, I began following a chap on Instagram who is engaged in a curious project. British, from rural Northumberland, he now lives in Manhattan and spends many of his weekends working on an 1830s cottage in upstate New York. His original home was “too sleepy and small” and somewhat “unaccepting” of him, his blog says vaguely, so he moved across the Atlantic. But he is now devoted to recreating his “little slice of England” on the cottage grounds. His Instagram posts document the radical transformation of an old American estate into something distinctly English: garden beds of foxgloves; William Morris wallpaper; his mum’s homemade pillows on the settee. He moved away from Northumberland only to return to it on his own terms — a version of…

ON A QUIET residential street in Arlington, Virginia, one garage is not like the others. Clad in white corrugated steel, the structure is tall and thin with a sharply peaked roof, suggesting a giant pencil poking up through the earth. And while its neighbours might house minivans and power tools, on a grey December afternoon the door to this one, which is not really a garage at all, opens to reveal a cross-shaped plywood table set, as if for a meal, with brightly coloured wares. At the centre of the spread are a pair of ornately dimpled pastel-glazed earthenware vases by the French ceramist Saraï Delfendahl, each the size and silhouette of a baby elephant’s foot. A chubby-armed sky blue ceramic chandelier by the New York-based artist Braxton Congrove hangs…

ONE OF THE world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336–1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders. The plays dramatise myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colours and embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status. But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the…

BORN IN 1942 to a Spanish mother and a Czech father, Manolo Blahnik grew up playing amid the banana trees of La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. When he was young, his mother convinced a local cobbler to teach her how to make her own shoes; Blahnik spent hours watching her craft them by hand out of delicate satins and brocades. After studying law at the University of Geneva and pursuing theatrical set design in Paris, Blahnik moved to London in 1969, where he began working as a sales assistant at the boutique Feathers. The following year, he opened a shop of his own. In the spring of 1971, in collaboration with the British fashion designer Ossie Clark, he presented his first shoe collection as part of Clark’s Black…

IN 1937, THE fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli created an off-white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband. A more salient detail, however, was the gigantic lobster printed on the skirt. The man responsible for the crustacean was Salvador Dalí. Apparently, the artist was disappointed when Schiaparelli refused to allow him to add a final surreal flourish in the form of a dollop of mayonnaise, though she conceded a few sprigs of parsley. That lobster dress is pinpointed as the object that ignited the fashion world’s obsession with artist collaborations — think Louis Vuitton partnering with Jeff Koons in 2017, or Alexander McQueen and Damien Hirst in 2013. More recently, watch brands have become equally fascinated with cross-pollination. Swatch hooked up with Keith Haring in 1986, Zenith has been colluding with…

FROM HEART EMOJIS to hands held to form a heart, heart motifs abound at the moment, and the jewellery world has gotten the memo: heart-shape stones seem to be everywhere. The large heart-shape diamond now worn by Lauren Sánchez — reportedly estimated at 25 to 30 carats and the ring Jeff Bezos used to propose marriage, made headlines during the couple’s cruise around the Mediterranean. It had some competition in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Natalie Portman honoured emerging talent at the Trophée Chopard event in a blue Dior gown that matched her Chopard necklace of 25 sapphire hearts, totalling 119.95 carats, with each one trimmed in diamonds. Just days later, Gigi Hadid was photographed on the red carpet in a Messika Toi & Moi ring that juxtaposed…

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS AUSTRALIAMOTORING THERE’S AN UNDENIABLE buzz around the car industry at the moment. Manufacturers are releasing cars in debut segments, internal combustion engines are standing side by side with electrified powertrains and technology is so plentiful it’s hard to know what to do with it all. With so many options available to prospective buyers, it’s also one of the most confusing times to select a noble steed. The American psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this conundrum “The Paradox of Choice”, wherein presenting people with more choices has the unintended effect of paralysing their decision-making ability. But, rather than being overwhelmed by the current automotive smorgasbord, now is an excellent time to take stock of tried-and-tested marques that have been honed over decades. For sports cars, there’s the Porsche 911;…

THE CHEF MOST often credited with inventing the croquembouche, the French-born confection that towers haughtily over any table it graces, was, unsurprisingly, an architecture enthusiast. Towards the end of the French Revolution, years before he baked the cake for Napoleon Bonaparte’s (second) wedding, Marie-Antoine Carême began an apprenticeship near the Palais Royal. He’d spend his afternoons in the national library across the street, mesmerised by images of architectural marvels. “He copied in ink — and then created in pastry and marzipan, in sugar paste and spun sugar — the ruined castles and hermitages, temples, pyramids and fountains he had seen in the Bibliothèque,” writes Ian Kelly in his 2003 biography of Carême, “Cooking for Kings”. Among Carême’s most heroic specialties were his statuesque pastries, known as extraordinaires, some shaped as…

AMONG “SERIOUS” WHISKY drinkers, there’s a fair amount of shade thrown at blended whisky. Single malt, the thinking goes, is the good stuff. But like so much we’ve been fed by marketers and self-styled connoisseurs, it’s far from the truth. Regardless of how you feel about Johnnie Walker and his old-world counterparts, modern blended whiskies have much more to offer than simply being cheap mixers. New-school blenders are working their magic to create drams of outstanding distinction without the “single malt” moniker. I recently sat down with Jota Tanaka, the master distiller and blender at Japan’s Fuji brand, whose Single Blended Japanese Whisky won the Best Japanese Blended category at this year’s World Whiskies Awards. “Most whisky produced in Japan is designed to be affordable, approachable and with good flavour,”…

FIVE YEARS AGO, at the San Telmo flea market in Buenos Aires, the New York-based interior designer Nicholas Obeid saw a midcentury chandelier in perforated red metal that he admired but didn’t want to carry home on the plane. A year later, he was still thinking about that chandelier and, on his next trip, he was surprised to find the $100 piece right where he’d last seen it. (Obeid’s mother was born in Argentina, and he visits the country whenever he can.) Now rewired, it hangs in the kitchen of his Greenwich Village apartment, above a stainless steel baker’s rack. “I saw something similar on 1stDibs for thousands of dollars,” Obeid says. “Almost identical.” The fixture is emblematic of Obeid’s approach: the designer, who’s in his 30s, scours the globe…

WOMEN’S BREASTS HAVE been a fixation of Western artists since Western art began. The prehistoric sculptor who carved a hunk of mammoth ivory into the “Venus of Hohle Fels” — the earliest known depiction of a human being, unearthed in Germany in 2008 — gave her proportions fit for the pages of Juggs magazine. Since then, male artists have portrayed breasts as erotic objects, fonts of nourishment and sometimes both at once, as in the case of racy Baroque depictions of the Roman virtue Caritas as a young woman nursing her father. Bare-chested women have represented our brightest political ideals (as in the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 allegorical work “Liberty Leading the People”) but also our worst transgressions: in medieval European art, lust often appeared as a woman…

RELEASED IN 2000, the Chanel J12 was a game changer in watch design. Made from high-tech ceramic — a lightweight material almost as hard as diamond — it was available first in jet black and later in white, melding the functionality of a sports watch with the elegance of a bracelet. Aside from its singular looks, it was groundbreaking in another way, too. The J12 was marketed as unisex, a novel idea in an industry that, until very recently, had stubbornly clung to rigid ideas about gender. Over the past 23 years, the J12 has been remixed in countless iterations, sizes and with both mechanical and quartz movements, but in October the ceramic will finally become fused with gold. The glossy, polished 38-millimetre case is still available in the yin…

WITH BEACHES ENCIRCLING our sunburnt country, the ocean helps define our national identity. Indeed, some 87 per cent of the Australian population live within 50 kilometres of the sea. Despite this, surprisingly few of us tend to delve beneath the surface. Scuba diving remains a niche activity, with the Australian Sports Commission estimating that just 94,800 residents venture into the briny depths each year. Given this limited interaction, it’s somewhat curious that people continue to splash out on dive watches. Yet these amphibious timekeepers remain overwhelmingly popular, regularly appearing on the wrists of people who’ve never donned a wetsuit in their lives. Strictly speaking, to qualify as a dive watch, a timepiece must meet the requirements of the International Organisation for Standardisation. Its list of regulations includes a need for…

The story of high jewellery in Europe is often said to have originated more than 100 years ago, when family-run ateliers began opening on Paris’s Place Vendôme. But Laurence Graff, the London-based founder and chairman of Graff, has always revelled in a counternarrative. Now 85, he still celebrates his start as a scrappy East End teen in the mid-1950s, repairing Victorian baubles while planning to become an international diamond entrepreneur — having the stones mined, and then polishing, designing and selling the finished pieces. As his boutiques proliferated, he bought up many of the world’s best-known rough diamonds, including the honey-coloured 299-carat Golden Empress and the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona — at the time, the largest discovered in over a century — and cut them into exquisite gems. Such showstoppers…