Tabla de contenidos para Issue 31 en The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia

FROM HIS BASE in Paris, the designer Jean-Pascal Lévy-Trumet spent nearly 35 years perfecting the art of the modern extravaganza. More than merely an event planner — the term was still relatively new when he began in the 1990s — he was a builder of worlds, an orchestrator of spectacular celebrations. For D-Day in 1994, he arranged for thousands of volunteers in colour-coordinated outfits to pour out of a five-storey metal pyramid erected in a field in Caen, France, 16 kilometres from the beach in Normandy. For the 1992 Winter Olympics, he sent 20,000 people dressed in white down the Champs-Élysées. And his 20-metre-tall balloon-like puppets ushered in the 1998 World Cup. What made his work so extraordinary was not merely its scale but its ephemerality. One day there would…

SIZE MAY NOT always matter in high jewellery — until it does. Van Cleef & Arpels’s Treasure Island collection brings together more than 300 jewels, objects and transformable designs, making it one of the largest thematic collections in the house’s archive. Unveiled in Phuket, Thailand, this year, it set Robert Louis Stevenson’s eponymous 1883 novel against a maritime stage. The dimensions of the collection are as much numerical as narrative: a 47.93-carat emerald, a 14.32-carat sapphire and more than 900 carats of jadeite. It is, in the most literal sense, a story written in stones. The collection is organised as a trilogy. The first sequence takes place at sea. The Hispaniola clip depicts the fictional ship in white and rose gold, its sails covered with more than 500 diamonds. The…

In the 17th–19th centuries, the European aristocracy perfected the ritual of the Grand Tour. It was both finishing school and pilgrimage, a gap year (or three) of wandering Roman ruins, Florentine galleries, Venetian canals and Parisian salons. Young men of means would return home with sketchbooks, sculptures and Canalettos as souvenirs. To pass through the temples of Greece, the villas of Italy, the ateliers of Paris, was to absorb a narrative of civilisation that would shape politics, taste and culture across generations. Now, three and a half centuries later, the cultural compass needle has shifted. The Grand Tour no longer terminates at the Mediterranean, but arcs eastward to the Arabian Peninsula and the Caspian Sea, where new institutions rise from desert and stone, and nations are investing unprecedented resources in…

FOR VAN CLEEF & ARPELS, the art of time is less a measure and more an artistic medium. Like gold, like enamel. Its Poetic Complications watches are performances of timekeeping at its most aesthetic and romantic. What minute stretches longer than that between lovers waiting to meet? The Maison captures the ethereality of the original timekeepers, stars, as they arc across the sky, while back on Earth, flowers sway in a breeze. A dancer leans into a pirouette that stands forever mid-turn, while a fairy seems to balance on light itself. Since 2006, when the collection was first launched, the themes that mark the Maison’s pillars of time — Love Stories, Poetic Astronomy, Enchanting Nature and Ballerinas & Fairies — have served as expressions of movement and meaning where each…

IN AUGUST, THE New South Wales government unveiled an ambitious three-year plan intended to support the growth and continued diversification of Australia’s fashion industry. Dubbed the NSW Fashion Sector Strategy, this public initiative — described by spokespeople as the “the first of its kind” nationwide — was developed in close consultation with industry voices, embodied most prominently in a working group whose number include co-chair Alex Schuman, leader of the Carla Zampatti group of companies, and Powerhouse Museum CEO Lisa Havilah. Among multiple far-reaching priorities, the strategy makes provisions for an “Australian Fashion Hub” at the University of Technology, Sydney, as well as a grant totalling about $300,000 for emerging and First Nations designers seeking to promote their work at Australian Fashion Week. Reactions thus far have been mixed. While…

Gemologists refer to opals, which are formed when silica seeps into the earth’s crevices, as amorphous. Technically, the term speaks to the mineraloid’s lack of crystalline structure, but it also suggests a certain mystery. While common opals most often are milky bluish with pastel swirls, the rare black opal is stormy and inscrutable. Principally mined in Lightning Ridge, a town in outback New South Wales, the deep navy stone, its colour caused by trace elements of iron oxide and carbon, engenders a visual phenomenon called play of colour — a fiery, Marc Chagall-like cosmos of reds, greens and oranges that shifts from every angle. It was the gem’s chromatic intensity that led Louis Vuitton to choose a nearly 31-carat Australian black opal, positioned like a downward-facing arrowhead, as the centrepiece…

THEY SAY NOTHING beats the classic, but there’s a new guard of lamingtons that come pretty close. One of the country’s most iconic baked goods has become subject to reinvention by a cohort of clever bakers and innovative restaurateurs — these are lamingtons made luxe. “I love a lamington. We have a drink on the menu at Silver’s [Motel, Enmore, Sydney] that draws inspiration from it. For actual lamingtons, my go-to is Tokyo Lamington in Marrickville [Sydney]. Their base sponge is where it’s at — the perfect softness, but still holds shape and just the right amount of moisture.” — Michael Chiem, owner, PS40, Sydney “Lamingtons are very nostalgic for me. The local Italian grocery store in Fitzroy North [Melbourne], Piedimonte’s, offers a couple of great classic bakery versions. When…

Even in the rarefied world of Champagne, not all blends are made uniformly — with the same sweetness, grape varieties or proportions. In this instalment of Champion, Challenger — a series in which T Australia compares one class-leading product with an interesting, often underrated alternative — we put Pol Roger’s beloved, robustly constructed Sir Winston Churchill cuvee next to the Chardonnay-led La Perle from Ayala. Both bottles embody the winemaking craft of their respective house at its most elevated, but it’s in the drinking that their individual distinctions become apparent. AYALA PERLE, 2015 Until fairly recently, you could be forgiven for describing Ayala as a niche Champagne. Yet in the years since the house’s acquisition by famed neighbour Bollinger in 2005, there have been signs that this is changing. The…

THE FASHION GIRLIES want to know what Jackie O is wearing. “Loving this Jackie O outfit! Anyone know who the dress is by?” “She’s done it again! Any ideas on Jackie o [sic] jacket please?” On High End, a private Australian Facebook group devoted to pre-owned luxury fashion with more than 100,000 members, requests roll in thick and fast to identify the star’s looks. At one point last year, the feed became so flooded with Jackie O content you might have mistaken it for spam, or the work of a shrewd publicist. “I had no idea about [the group] until I was at [Australian] Fashion Week and the girls who run the page told me,” says Jackie “O” Henderson, the Australian radio and television presenter, and the subject of the…

JAYNE WRIGHTSMAN EPITOMISED the American dream. Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1919 and raised in Los Angeles, where she worked at a department store, she’d later marry the oil magnate Charles Wrightsman, establishing herself in New York society and becoming a patron of the arts and one of the 20th century’s most discerning jewellery collectors. Before her death in 2019, at age 99, she amassed countless treasures, including a 1984 Bulgari necklace made of gold, diamonds and emeralds. Inspired by Surrealism and the work of the Belgian painter René Magritte, the Italian house featured the piece in a campaign called Bulgari Dream, in which strands of tourmalines, citrines, amethysts and peridots, all framed by Bulgari’s logo, shone against a backdrop of blue skies and white clouds. This past autumn, the…