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Women’s Fashion February 15, 2015

Features 198 Soul in the Machine On the eve of Bjork’s eighth studio album and a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Nordic nymph looks back on the good, the bad and the ljotur of her boundary-shattering career.

By Emily Witt Photographs by Inez and Vinoodh Styled by Mel Ottenberg 206 Notes on a Scandale A fairy tale of sex, lies, more sex and presidents in the City of Light.

By Liesl Schillinger Illustrations by Pierre Le-Tan 210 The Human Touch The season’s most elegant clothes honor the artisan, revealing the touches — frayed edges, exposed topstitching — that make them special.

Photographs by Craig McDean Styled by Joe McKenna

222 Philip Johnson’s Not Glass Houses The legendary transparent box the architect built on his Connecticut estate may be his greatest achievement, but it might not be quite right to call it his home.

By Alexandra Lange Photographs by Dean Kaufman 228 Anywhere, U.S.A. From all-American letter jerseys to high-tech mesh, today’s athletic sportswear stars on and off the court.

Photographs by Karim Sadli Styled by Joe McKenna

238 A Local International Art Scene Thanks to a progressive sheikh and his artist daughter, Sharjah — an emirate previously overshadowed by Qatar and its flashy billionaires — is fast becoming a center for the Middle Eastern avant-garde.

By Carol Kino Photographs by Bharat Sikka 242 Mostly True For a pair of authors, keeping a diary is an honest means of self-preservation. But in the case of one visual artist, it’s also a way to twist the truth.

By Sarah Manguso, Amalia Ulman and Heidi Julavits Photographs by Nicholas Calcott Marc Jacobs jacket, $995, and pants, $2,900, (212) 3431490. Marc by Marc Jacobs boots, $498, (212) 924-0026.

Page 141

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BEN GRIEME

ON THE COVER: Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh. Styled

by Mel Ottenberg.

Hair by Christiaan.

Makeup by Dick Page.

Bjork in a Syren top, $360, and gloves, $27, syren.com.

Copyright ©2015 The New York Times

122 Watch Report Timepieces with nude bands stand out by blending in.

124 Market Report Giddy up — the saddlebag is back.

126 Runway Report Thanks to expert tailoring, dressy denim is no longer an oxymoron.

132 On Beauty Natural, nondescript hair is remarkable for how unremarkable it is.

Page 178

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Editor’s Letter

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Behind the T

Lookout

136 By the Numbers A close-up of the makeup artist Pat McGrath.

138 Take Two Helena Bonham Carter and Kim Gordon chew on duck-fat caramels, jazzy rap and the anti-Barbie.

105 Sign of the Times As designers stray further from their assigned lanes, one writer assesses the promise and perils of a world without trends.

Page 152

Quality 141 In Fashion Florals for spring? Mixed with utilitarian staples, it’s anything but predictable.

150 Profile in Style From granny gloves to Pina Bausch, the Irish-Chinese designer Simone Rocha opens the book on her wildly diverse influences.

152 Objects Reflective hardware that makes otherwise ordinary shoes and bags shine.

Page 186

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BRUNO OSIF; BON DUKE; EMILIANO GRANADO

108 This and That Japanese chefs take Paris; Baccarat opens a shiny hotel; Neil Patrick Harris hosts the Oscars; the Birkin’s extreme makeover; and more.

114 The Moment From textured tights to body-hugging sweaters, spring fashion is infused with a quirky innocence.

Right: the 25-year-old director of ‘‘Mommy,’’ Xavier Dolan, photographed in L.A. Above left: spools of yarn in the studio of the Argentine rug artist Alexandra Kehayoglou. Above right: Roger Vivier sandals, $850, (212) 861-5371.

Moynat bag, $2,800, Dover Street Market, (646) 837-7750. Agnona vest, (212) 471-4542.

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Page 160

160 In Fashion Naughty meets nice when bad-girl leather is paired with virginal lace.

170 In the Air Leading minds in fashion, art and design take a magical walk in the woods.

Arena

186 On the Verge Xavier Dolan’s films are intense, inspired and provocative — not unlike the man himself.

190 Arts and Letters Stricken with a rare skin condition that forces her into constant darkness, a writer finds her light on the page.

175 Food Matters How did Joost Bakker, a high school dropout from a family of Dutch tulip farmers, become the world’s leading authority on zero-waste living? It all started in a garbage dump.

178 Home and Work History courses through the loom of Alexandra Kehayoglou, whose natureinspired terrains weave modern whimsy into an intricate art that’s been in her family for generations.

182 By Design Christian Louboutin dips his signature red-soled stiletto into the beauty business.

194 A Picture and a Poem Tatiana Trouvé holds a mirror to Fady Joudah’s meditation on love and longing.

248 Document Leanne Shapton paints the pottery of Lucie Rie.

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Upcoming Issues: Men’s Fashion March 8, 2015 Design March 29, 2015 Culture April 12, 2015 Travel May 17, 2015 Beauty June 14, 2015 Entertaining July 19, 2015

Right: Tod’s blazer, $1,345, (212) 644-5945. Stella McCartney culottes, $730, (212) 255-1556. Proenza Schouler shoes, $1,180, (212) 4207300. Above left: What Goes Around Comes Around jacket, $850, (212) 343-1225. Roberto Cavalli top, $1,605, robertocavalli.com. Acne Studios jeans, $260, acnestudios.com.

Alice Waese Jewelry. Above right: the frame surrounding the home of the Melbourne-based florist, restaurant owner and compost master Joost Bakker.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MATTHEW KRISTALL; EARL CARTER; LENA C. EMERY

168 The Thing Van Cleef & Arpels’s bejeweled bracelet plays a pretty trick on the eye.

FE N D I B O U T I Q U E S FE N D I .CO M

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Page 228

Editor in Chief Deborah Needleman Creative Director Patrick Li Deputy Editor Whitney Vargas Fashion Director Joe McKenna Managing Editor Minju Pak Photography Director Nadia Vellam Entertainment Director Lauren Tabach-Bank

FASHION

FEATURES

ART AND PHOTO

Style Director/Men David Farber Market Director Malina Joseph Gilchrist

Design Editor Tom Delavan

Senior Art Director Aurélie Pellissier Roman

European Editor Rita Konig

Art Director Shawn Carney

Senior Fashion Editor Jason Rider

Senior Features Editors Nicholas Haramis, Emily Stokes Contributing Editor Nancy Hass

Contributing Senior Designer Alex Goldstein

Copy Editors Lisa Ferber, Mona Mansour, Namara Smith

Senior Photography Editor Gina Liberto

Production Manager Alison Colby

Contributing Staff Editor Hilary Moss

Photography Editor Caroline L. Hirsch

Production Editors Ilona Fabian, Julia Röhl

Online Features Editor Alexandria Symonds

Contributing Photography Editor Carter Love

Research Manager John Cochran

Senior Photography & Video Editor Jamie Bradley Sims

Associate Fashion Editors Angela Koh, Alex Tudela Fashion Assistants Kelly Harris, Renata Mosci, Camille Vazquez-Reyes

Associate Features Editors Brooke Bobb, Jeff Oloizia Features Associates Jennifer Macksamie, Lauren Poggi

COPY, PRODUCTION AND RESEARCH Copy Chief Naomi Fry

Research Editors James Dobbins, Kristina Ensminger, Julia Yepes

Administrative Manager Linda Conte

ONLINE Deputy Online Editor Eviana Hartman Online Managing Editor Alainna Lexie Beddie Senior Staff Editor Sylvia Rupani-Smith

Contributing Photography & Video Editor Betsy Horan Photo Associate Brian Nichols

Critics at Large Andrew O’Hagan, Jody Rosen Contributing Editors Gay Gassmann (Art), Sara Ruffin Costello, Alice Gregory, Carolina Irving, Konstantin Kakanias, David Netto, Meghan O’Rourke, Dana Thomas

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Advertising Directors Scott Kunz, International Fashion; Michael Carroll, Travel and Education; Sherry Maher, Beauty/Retail/American Fashion; Edward Celata, Fashion/Fine Jewelry and Watches/Home Furnishings; Laura Sonnenfeld, Packaged Goods and Alcohol/Media/Healthcare/Corporate; Doug Latino, Automotive and Technology; Kevin Thomas, Luxury Real Estate; Brendan Walsh, Financial Services; Stefanie Paletz, Entertainment; Shari Kaplan, Live Entertainment; Nancy Karpf, Fine Art; Karen Farina, Magazines For advertising inquiries: tmagazineadvertising@nytimes.com

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KARIM SADLI

Vice President/T Publisher Brendan Coolidge Monaghan Associate Publisher Amanda Smith

Editor’s Letter

The End of Trend

TYPICALLY, FASHION EDITORS sit at shows seeking out

common threads or ideas to bring back to their offices and translate into fashion spreads that tell us what we ought to be wearing that season. This service is what you might think that we, at T, are here to provide. But times have changed. Technology and the economics of fashion have overthrown the old hegemony in which what was fashionable was proposed by designers, decreed by editors and proselytized for by department stores.

We live in what appears to be a post-trend fashion world — with no clear guidelines for our sartorial choices and an endless array of options. New shows and collections seem to be springing up constantly throughout the year, consumed hungrily and instantaneously around the world on a variety of platforms before the editors have even filed out the doors. So inundated are we with images that we’d be bored to tears with any single trend by the time it hit stores.

The solution is to rely on our own instincts, which is

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something that many of the women featured in this issue — musicians, writers, artists, Bjork! — have in common: an ability to filter myriad influences to create an unmistakably personal voice.

All of which is not to say that we do not feature fashion in this issue. Of course we do. But the shoots in these pages reflect the things we liked best in the shows, which, far from adding up to a clear statement for the season, are remarkably distinct and disparate: more denim than you’ve seen since the ’70s (Page 126); clothes influenced by the world of sports (Page 228); good-girl lace paired with bad-girl leather (Page 160); Poppy floral prints worn with military jackets (Page 141); and luxury pieces with a handmade, artisanal edge (Page 210). Is choice overwhelming? Yes. But the freedom to dress how you like, in clothes that suit your body and reflect your tastes, is well worth exercising.

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Inez and Vinoodh (Soul in the Machine, Page 198), who shot our cover, have photographed Bjork 10 times over the past 16 years.

According to them, ‘‘She is the only person we know who has a direct line between heaven and earth.’’

(Louboutin Nails It, Page 182) is the author of ‘‘Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano’’ (out this month from Penguin).

She owns 14 pairs of Louboutins, which she owes as much to proximity as patronage: ‘‘I discovered in the mid-’90s that Christian’s shop on the Left Bank was perilously close to my house.’’

Emily Witt (Soul in the Machine, Page 198) got more than she bargained for when she traveled to Iceland to interview Bjork at the singer’s cabin on Lake Thingvallavatn. ‘‘The interview ended with us pushing her assistant’s car in a snowstorm,’’ says Witt, adding that, among other talents, ‘‘it turns out Bjork is really good at driving out of snowbanks.’’

Tatiana Trouvé (A Picture and a Poem, Page 194) is an artist who attempts to map each of the pathways — 212, by her count — that wind through Central Park with her new project, ‘‘Desire Lines.’’ The installation, a series of giant spools wound with colored rope that correspond with the length of each pathway, opens next month at the park’s southeast corner.

Craig McDean (The Human Touch, Page 210) photographed the new model Rianne van Rompaey, whose beauty he thinks ‘‘is a throwback to the models from the ’60s.

She has a lovely birdlike quality that perfectly suited the concept.’’

Fady Joudah Pierre Le-Tan (Notes on a Scandale, Page 206) began contributing illustrations to The New Yorker in 1968, when he was just 19. Of the political scandal that inspired his drawings for this issue, Le-Tan was cheerfully matter of fact: ‘‘In France, these things happen all the time.’’

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(A Picture and a Poem, Page 194) is a poet who works part-time as a physician and used to write between appointments; ‘‘Textu,’’ his 2014 collection of poems, was written on a cellphone. ‘‘There’s all sorts of emotions,’’ he says of his day job. ‘‘You’re going to go mad if you don’t know how to navigate them at a deeper level.’’

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: MICHAEL ROBERTS/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY; LAURENT EDELINE; ERIC KAYNE/HOUSTON CHRONICLE; FRANÇOIS COQUEREL; MAKI SONOBE; SIMON ROBERTS; PHOTOGRAPHY BY INEZ AND VINOODH; COURTESY OF EMILY WITT

Dana Thomas

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Behind the T

Behind the Bjork

ARMY OF HER Clockwise from top: Bjork atop a truck in New York City in her ‘‘Big Time Sensuality’’ music video (1993), directed by Stéphane Sednaoui; performing in the opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games; posing for Inez van Lamsweerde on a poster for a 2002 production of the play ‘‘Savannah Bay’’; with her alternative-rock band the Sugarcubes in the early ‘90s; as a robot in her ‘‘All Is Full of Love’’ music video (1999), directed by Chris Cunningham; the cover art for her 1997 album ‘‘Homogenic’’; shot by Inez and Vinoodh for ‘‘Biophilia’’ in 2011 and for ‘‘Volta’’ in 2007; onstage at Bonnaroo in 2013.

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CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: NICK KNIGHT/ COURTESY OF WELLHART LTD & ONE LITTLE INDIAN/COURTESY OF MOMA; INEZ AND VINOODH (2); COURTESY WELLHART LTD & ONE LITTLE INDIAN/COURTESY OF MOMA; MICHAEL STEELE/ GETTY IMAGES; THÉÅTRE DE LORIENT: SAVANNAH BAY 2002/PHOTOGRAPHY BY M/M (PARIS); STEVE PYKE/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY WELLHART LTD & ONE LITTLE INDIAN/COURTESY OF MOMA; DANNY CLINCH/COURTESY OF MOMA

In our cover story, we celebrate the polymath musician Bjork, whose first retrospective — an exhibition of sound, film, objects, costumes and performances drawing from over 20 years of groundbreaking work — opens at MoMA next month. Here, a small sample of the many indelible images that make up her career.

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Sign of the Times

The Post-Trend Universe In a world where fashion moves Instagram-fast, the ‘‘look’’ of the season is a thing of the past. And that’s a cause for rejoicing.

BY CATHY HORYN

IN THE WORLD OF THE ’50s, when Seventh Avenue was

For me, the top lemon of the spring collections is Raf full of manufacturers and rather timid in its ideas, a Simons’s white cotton smock dresses for Dior. At the time well-known editor used to march into showrooms and of the shows I heard people say, ‘‘Those are hideous’’ — say, ‘‘Show me the lemons!’’ She meant the styles that drawing out the word to make it clear they thought buyers had deemed too unusual but which, for that Simons had lost his mind by showing a high-collared reason, she thought, held appeal. dress that looked like a Victorian DATE WITH HISTORY From the full-skirted 1950s She could be assured that no one gent’s sleeping costume. But I and the mod 1960s to the flowy 1970s and the power-shouldered 1980s and beyond, influences else — or, no other magazine — adored it. Squeeze me a lemon! for the spring collections span decades. would have those rejected styles.

I could imagine someone, not From left: Donna Karan, Carven, Chloé, Balmain, They were different. necessarily me, wearing the Narciso Rodriguez, Tom Ford, Christian Dior.

February 15, 2015

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Lookout

Sign of the Times

strange cotton sack with beautiful gold sandals instead of the dark boots that Simons used. And you know what would happen: Heads would turn, looks of envy and delight would appear, and suddenly everyone would wish they had a dress as cool — and odd — as that Dior smock.

I mention this because we live in a supermarket of choices, not just in what we wear but also in the kinds of food we eat, the music we listen to and the decorating styles we might choose for our homes. There is no single trend that demands our attention, much less our allegiance, as so many options are available to us at once. According to the theory of lemons, anything could be selected and prized for its very individuality and we wouldn’t look out of step.

Of course, throughout the 20th century, the way women dressed was governed by trends — from the hobble skirt of the 1910s, a Paris invention that spread to small cities and was ultimately sold by Sears, to Dior’s radical New Look of 1947, to the ’60s miniskirt. But for lots of reasons, mostly to do with economics and, inevitably, the Internet, the industry has moved away from that model. The last big trend that I can recall, one that started on the runway and exploded among mainstream manufacturers, was the hospital-green cargo pants that Nicolas Ghesquière made for Balenciaga. That was more than a decade ago. Now, to look at the spring collections is to see broad categories based on distinct, vintage styles — the full-skirted ’50s dresses at Bottega Veneta and Michael Kors, among others; the ’60s mini-shifts and glossy surfaces shown at Carven, Louis Vuitton and Giambattista Valli’s younger line, Giamba; and the unbelievable amount of ’70s funk and color in shows like Gucci, Etro and Derek Lam. I could go on. The fashions of every decade since World War II are represented in the new spring collections. That may sound like more revivalism — but the ability to find styles that actually suit one’s body and personality is cause for celebration, offering women so many more forms of self-expression. In the past, trends allowed every part of the fashion business to get a piece of the action. Department stores could sell their beloved ‘‘hot items,’’ magazines could assert their authority over readers and manufacturers could produce endless knock-offs. This might have been great for business, but less so for the consumer.

Now, though, every brand, and every media outlet, is focused on creating its own universe, ostensibly for the people who want its products or to buy into a point of view. As popular as fashion is today, running on a mixture of media platforms, the information is usually too diffuse. That’s why branding is so dominant; it helps establish corporate identities — boundaries, really — but branding also functions as a filter for many consumers.

Fashion magazines also play an entirely different role than they did 20 or 30 years ago, when they could advise readers about whether or not pants were appropriate for the office. Almost no one cares about that sort of thing today. More often than not, the influence-makers are young people who promote their daily outfits on

Instagram, accumulating ‘‘likes’’ that are essentially data points for designer brands. It’s not unusual for some style gurus to rack up 25,000 or more ‘‘likes’’ for an outfit. Do they move merchandise? No doubt, but they don’t necessarily spur a mass following. Besides, someone new is always surfacing on social media to show off their stuff.

Luxury fashion is also partly to blame for the disappearance of trends. Think of how often in the past decade you’ve heard a designer emphasize the ‘‘specialness’’ of fabrics, couture techniques or elaborate trims, details that were either too esoteric or costly to be duplicated in great numbers. Indeed, the mania for exclusivity has evolved to an extreme, and very weird, point. During the red-carpet chatter at the recent Golden Globes I heard several actresses say their dresses were ‘‘custom’’ — as in, ‘‘It’s custom Narciso Rodriguez,’’ meaning no one else will ever have one. People have always sought to differentiate themselves, but you can also see how this desire to be special has limited the influence of high fashion designers. It may even be an oldfashioned ambition, to judge from the way designers like Ghesquière, now at Louis Vuitton, smartly focus on styles that are younger and also not overly complicated or pretentious.

Although the term ‘‘trendy’’ suggests speed and thoughtless consumption, the heyday of trends occurred, paradoxically, in eras when people had time to absorb change. A hemline remained in place for years, whereas today every length is on offer. In a funny way, I think we’re moving toward a more relaxed attitude about many things, if only out of necessity. We tune out the haters and the screechy TV dress pundits, and we tune out clothes that seem punishing or artificial to us. That said, we are more tolerant than ever before of the girl whose outfit and manner is intentionally gawky or who, in her wildest dreams, wants to look like an exploding Comme des Garçons flower or maybe a disciple of Gareth Pugh, with jacket sleeves falling in long streamers.

If anything, we probably need more individual expressions of style, even if they are a minimalist whisper. A couple of years ago, Simons created an eclectic Dior collection around the notion of freedom, with styles loosely inspired by a variety of global influences. You may ask: Aren’t we already free to pick and choose? But Simons was really addressing fashion insiders. Because, while we may live in a post-trend universe, there is still consensus among editors and buyers about what is cool or chic in a given season. In a way, insiders cling to the notion of clearly defined themes more than anyone else; that’s why you see the same styles repeated in stores. Simons was simply arguing for more open-mindedness, more oddball gems in the mix.

So I celebrate the trendlessness of fashion even as my head reels from all the choices and I sometimes feel a stranger among the competing style tribes, a latter-day Margaret Mead sizing up a flock of hippie suede or some Bardot-flirty gingham.

We are more tolerant than ever before of the girl whose outfit is intentionally gawky or who, in her wildest dreams, wants to look like an exploding Comme des Garçons flower.

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T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Lookout

This and That An Icon Goes Minimal

ART MARKET

Downtown’s Newest Gallerist Bridget Donahue, formerly a director at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, is opening a massive New York gallery with a refreshingly eclectic program. ‘‘I’m drawn to those who engage with the long game,’’ says the Iowa City native, who will champion artists of all kinds — older, under-the-radar, anti-establishment — who might otherwise get sidelined in Chinatown’s trend-heavy scene. Her debut exhibition will celebrate the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, a 73-year-old artist whose prescient mixed-media creations began addressing the relationship between gender and technology as early as the 1960s.

Following that, Donahue will host a show CLARITY OF VISION From left: ‘‘Sleepers,’’ a 1997 performance featuring the work of the artist and fashion

by Susan Cianciolo; ‘‘Burned designer Susan Cianciolo, whose homespun Bride,’’ a wax-and-gauze mold of the artist Lynn Hershman zines, pillows and clothing demonstrate artisanal Leeson’s face from her 1964 flair and a subversive sensibility that fits the ‘‘Suicide Series’’ performance; the gallerist Bridget Donahue. space. bridgetdonahue.nyc — MAIKA POLLACK

FASHION MEMO

Hit the High Seas Designers are riding a wave of rope detailing and sailor stripes.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

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It’s tough to improve on perfection, but that’s precisely what Hermès has done with the new hyper-pared-down Birkin Sellier 40. According to Couli Jobert, the leather artistic director at Hermès, natural brown was deemed too obvious for the new Birkin,, which is only y available in matte black with h silver palladium hardware. As the goal was to create an essential design n without clutter, the structured cowhide whide bag is extra-wide, has no lining and the stitching is extremely subtle.

It’s a radically modern update of the elegant classic,, which has been the subject of girl envy — and the cause of waiting lists — since it was first crafted in 1984. About $14,900, hermes .com CATHY HORYN

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS AND BRIDGET DONAHUE, NYC; DAVID N. REGEN; MARKO METZINGER; MAURICIO GUILLÉN

A Cultural Compendium

This and That

Deco’s Modern Twist Fro Louis Vuitton From to Prada, patchwork chwork seemed to pop op up everywhere thiss season.

NOW BOOKING

The Crystal Palace

Clockwise from top left: Prada ada spring 2015.

Osman spring 2015. MM6 spring pring 2015.

2015 Prada boots, price on request, (212) 334-8888.

Louis Vuitton bag, $6,700, (866) 884-8866.

Baccarat opens a glistening hotel in New York.

Not surprisingly, the new Baccarat Hotel, a grand mansion opening next month in midtown Manhattan, is a shiny affair. The French designers Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier have adorned lamps, walls, arches and even armchairs with the company’s gleaming crystal.

Thousands of backlit Harcourt tumblers — Baccarat’s most iconic design — flank the entrance, and tiered chandeliers hung from slack hemp-covered chains intensify deep red walls in the bar. The sumptuous guest rooms, bathed in crisp whites and grays, mix elegance with informality — which, says Boissier, ‘‘is so not French.’’ From $899 a night, baccarathotels.com — KATHLEEN HACKETT

REFLECTIVE MOMENTS Below: Kiko Lopez pouring silver onto glass in his studio in Provence.

Left: ‘‘Titan’s Forge,’’ a set of four mirrors by the artist.

BY DESIGN

A Gift for Glass Kiko Lopez makes mirrors that combine an 18th-century technique with a renegade spirit.

Using the painstaking process of verre églomisé, he covers engraved glass with gold and silver leaf, a skill he mastered in the South of France while apprenticing for several retired artisans after, he says, ‘‘they realized I was serious and wasn’t just going to make reproductions.’’ Although he’s committed to respecting tradition, the Puerto Rican-born artist makes pieces that feel completely modern, sometimes tweaking the patina with an accidental coffee spill or cigarette ash. Decorators such as Alberto Pinto, Chahan Minassian and Caroline Sarkozy have commissioned his work, which includes lustrous large-scale mirrors and Jean-Michel Frank-inspired glass fireplaces, and which is now available in America through the New York design shop Maison Gerard. Starting at $15,000, maisongerard.com — SADIE STEIN

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CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: ROBERT LEVIN FOR MAISON GERARD; COURTESY OF PRADA; MITCHEL SAMS; MM6; COURTESY OF PRADA; LOUIS VUITTON; PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

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HA UTE J OA I L L E R I E N e w Yo r k - B a l H a r b o u r S h o p s South Coast Plaza - Wynn Las Vegas 1 . 8 0 0 . C H O PA R D E x p l o r e t h e c o l l e c t i o n a t U S . C H O PA R D . C O M

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This and That

FEELING FOR

Modern Talismans Worn long and loose, pendant necklaces give a hint of hippie magic.

From left: Céline, $520, saksfifthavenue.com.

Hermès, $1,700, (800) 441-4488. Pilar Olaverri, $780, pilarolaverri.com. Edun, $1,095, edun.com.

Dries Van Noten, $495, IF SoHo, (212) 334-4964.

FOOD MATTERS

For years, aspiring culinary stars from Japan have been decamping to Paris to learn new techniques, but recently theyíve been leaving behind the Michelin-starred dining temples that trained them ó from Astrance to Taillevent ó to headline their own spots. At Restaurant ES in the Seventh Arrondissement, the chef Takayuki Honjo improvises with simple, market-driven dishes, such as roast pigeon in cocoa sauce, which are as delicate in flavor as they are graphic in presentation. At Neige d’Été in the 15th, Hideki Nishi dabbles in modern French cuisine including salmon with a Gorgonzola millefeuille. Over in the 11th, at 6036 ó a 14-seat izakaya named for the distance, in miles, between Paris and Tokyo ó the chef Haruka Casters plays up seasonal small plates (sake-steamed clams with cabbage, teriyaki burgers). ëëParis is a cosmopolitan city with many opportunities to improve oneís cooking,íí says Casters. ëëBut itís also much easier to be seen here than in a megalopolis like Tokyo.íí restaurant-es .com; neigedete.fr; resto6036.com — LINDSEY TRAMUTA

PURE AND SIMPLE Clockwise from top: the interior of Restaurant ES; grilled white asparagus with poached egg and bottarga at 6036; the ES chef Takayuki Honjo; the facade of Neige d’Été.

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Neil Patrick Harris on the pressure of hosting his first Academy Awards. ‘‘When I used to watch the Oscars at home with my family, we would print out ballots, write down our predictions and see who won. As I got older, our viewing parties had more of a gambling slant — same ballot, different stakes. Now they just involve more drinking, and when it’s at my house, there’s a lot of Velveeta and Pace Picante. ‘‘I’ll admit that I’m nervous to host, but it’s much less pressure than being a nominee, having to go down a red carpet filled with prognosticators saying, ‘I think it’s your night! I can smell it!’ Then you’re sitting in your chair, your heart’s pounding and you have 15 names that you pray to God you don’t forget — and your name’s not called. Or, even stranger, your name is called, and you’re blinded by adrenaline and panic. That’s much more nerve-racking to me than going out and saying, ‘Our next two presenters are the stars of this movie, please welcome Brad and Angelina.’ ” The 87th Academy Awards air Feb. 22, oscar.go.com

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MARKO METZINGER (5); COURTESY OF 6036; YOSUKE KOJIMA (3). ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

The Rise of Japanese Chefs in Paris

HUGOBOSS.COM

HUGO BOSS FASHIONS INC. Phone +1 800 484 6267

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The Moment A quirky innocence is informing fashion this spring, from eyelet nightshirts to textured tights.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNEMARIEKE VAN DRIMMELEN STYLED BY JASON RIDER

CROPPED FLARED PANTS The once geeky cut is now the look of the season, worn casually with brogues or platforms.

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Calvin Klein Collection pants, $1,895, (212) 292-9000. Etro top, $1,021, (212) 3179096. Margaret Howell shoes, about $463, margarethowell.co.uk.

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The Moment

TEXTURED TIGHTS Youthfully sexy, especially with a miniskirt and low heels.

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Falke tights, $49, shopbop.com.

Coach sweater, $395, skirt, $650, and shoes, $295, coach.com.

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The Moment

THE SHIRTDRESS Whether a cotton eyelet nightshirt or a button-down mini, the effect is one of crisp purism.

Dior dress, $10,000, (800) 929-3467.

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A SKINTIGHT SWEATER Snug and tucked in ó a fitting response to seasons of oversize knits.

Boss top, $295, Hugo Boss, (800) 484-6267.

Gucci skirt, $1,990, gucci.com.

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MODEL: PHILLIPA HEMPHREY AT NEW YORK MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY KRISTEN SHAW AT JED ROOT USING ORIBE HAIR CARE. MAKEUP BY GIA HARRIS AT ARTMIX CREATIVE FOR CHANEL BEAUTÉ. MANICURE BY PILAR LAFARGUE AT OPUS BEAUTY USING DIOR VERNIS. CASTING BY ARIANNA PRADARELLI. PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS: ALEX FOREMAN AND TESKA OVERBEEKE. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: KELLY HARRIS AND BENJAMIN KENNEDY

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Watch Report

In the Flesh

Embrace the tonal subtlety of a rose gold timepiece with a nude band against bare skin.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN

Clockwise from top left: Vacheron Constantin Traditionelle, $27,900, (877) 701-1755. Patek Philippe 7200R Calatrava, $29,300, (212) 2181240. Jaeger-LeCoultre Rendez-Vous Date, $20,400, jaeger-lecoultre.com. Harry Winston Midnight Timepiece, $19,000, (212) 399-1000.

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STYLED BY MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST. MODELS: JUN YOUNG AT TRUMP MODELS AND BEN JORDAN AT NEW YORK MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY RO MORGAN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. MAKEUP BY ANNE KOHLHAGEN FOR DIORSKIN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI FOR DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYCCLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MICHAEL KORS SWEATER, $995, (212) 452-4685. MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA SWEATER, $1,270, (212) 989-7612. NILI LOTAN SWEATER, $235, NILILOTAN.COM. SALVATORE FERRAGAMO SHIRT, $1,490, (866) 337-7242.

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Market Report

Saddlebags With its front closure and long shoulder strap, the sexy little ’70s throwback feels like a necessity this season.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA M C CLURE

Clockwise from top left: Proenza Schouler, $2,800.

Ralph Lauren Collection, $1,250. Louis Vuitton, about $3,700. Michael Kors, $1,295. Bottega Veneta, $2,400.

Gucci, $2,700. Hermès, $8,050. Jil Sander, $1,820.

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PROP STYLIST: PAUL MORENO. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PROENZA SCHOULER BAG, (212) 420-7300. RALPH LAUREN COLLECTION BAG, RALPHLAUREN.COM. LOUIS VUITTON BAG, LOUISVUITTON.COM. MICHAEL KORS BAG, (866) 709-5677. BOTTEGA VENETA BAG, BOTTEGAVENETA.COM. GUCCI BAG, GUCCI.COM. HERMÈS BAG, HERMES.COM. JIL SANDER BAG, JILSANDER.COM

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Golden Rule No. 9

You need a team as ambitious as your goals.

CITIGOLD CUSTOMERS:

EARN A $

400

CASH BONUS

WITH QUALIFYING DEPOSIT.*

This year, find out how a Citigold relationship can help you achieve what’s important to you. With Citigold, you’ll have access to a full team of specialists ready to assist you with your goal setting, banking and lending needs.

Visit a branch, call 1-800-336-2484 or go to citi.com/citigoldrewards

*

Cash bonus will be credited to new checking account within 90 days from end of the month in which offer requirements are completed. To earn a $400 cash bonus: (1) open a new checking account in the Citigold Account Package by 02/28/15, (2) within 30 days after account opening, deposit $50,000 or more in New-to-Citibank® funds into that account or a new or existing Savings Plus account and (3) maintain a minimum balance of $50,000 in the new checking or Savings Plus account for 15 days from the date the $50,000 deposit is made.

Annual Percentage Yield (APY) as of 12/02/14 for Citigold Interest Checking was 0.05% in all markets. APYs paid as of 12/02/14 for Citibank Savings Plus Accounts in the Citigold Account Package are listed below. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in NY, NJ, CT: 0.05% for a balance up to $9,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $10,000 – $24,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $25,000 – $99,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $100,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in CA and NV: 0.05% for a balance up to $24,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $25,000 – $49,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $50,000 – $99,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $100,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in MA: 0.05% for a balance up to $9,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $10,000 – $24,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $25,000 – $99,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $100,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in TX: 0.05% for a balance up to $9,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $10,000 – $24,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $25,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in MD, VA, DC: 0.05% for a balance up to $9,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $10,000 – $24,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $25,000 – $99,999.99; 0.12% for a balance of $100,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in FL: 0.05% for a balance up to $24,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $25,000 – $49,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $50,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in branches in IL: 0.05% for a balance up to $24,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $25,000 or more. APY for Savings Plus Accounts in a Citigold package with a linked checking account opened in all other states: 0.05% for a balance up to $9,999.99; 0.08% for a balance of $10,000 – $24,999.99; 0.10% for a balance of $25,000 – $99,999.99; 0.15% for a balance of $100,000 or more. APYs are variable and subject to change without notice after the account is opened. Fees could reduce account earnings.

New-to-Citibank funds are funds not currently held by Citibank or one of its affiliates.

Offer for new checking customers only, 18 years or older. Account must be open and in good standing at the time the cash bonus is credited. Fiduciary accounts (including Trust or Estate accounts) and business accounts are not eligible. If you have received a bonus for opening a new consumer checking account within the past 2 years, you are not eligible to receive the bonus associated with this offer. All accounts subject to approval, terms and fees. Offer is not transferable, cannot be combined with any other offer and may be modified or withdrawn at any time without notice. One offer per customer and account.

Important tax information: The bonus will be reported to the IRS as interest, in the year received, as required by applicable law. Bonus payments received by U.S. Persons will be reported on IRS Form 1099-INT for the year received. Bonus payments received by non-U.S. Persons will be reported on IRS Form 1042-S for the year received. Customer is responsible for taxes.

The terms, conditions and fees for accounts, products, programs and services are subject to change. © 2015 Citibank, N.A. Member FDIC. Citi, Citibank, Citi with Arc Design and Citigold are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc. EXQ115-M5-E1-F127

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Runway Report

Dress Blues From double-breasted jean jackets to starched culottes, tailored denim is the next big thing.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LENA C. EMERY STYLED BY TRACEY NICHOLSON

Burberry Prorsum jacket, $2,995, burberry.com. Burberry Brit skirt, $275, burberry.com.

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STUARTWEITZMAN.COM

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Runway Report

Above: Michael Kors jacket, $995, and jeans, $495, (866) 709-5677. Proenza Schouler shoes, $1,180, (212) 420-7300. Top right: E. Tautz top, $447, and shorts, $410, eastdane.com. Right: Burberry Prorsum jacket.

Sophie Bille Brahe earring, $880, Dover Street Market, (646) 837-7750.

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Runway Report

MODEL: MAE LAPRES AT FM LONDON. HAIR BY LOK LAU AT CLM HAIR AND MAKEUP USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE. MAKEUP BY GEMMA SMITH-EDHOUSE AT LGA. SET DESIGN BY GEORGINA PRAGNELL AT WEBBER REPRESENTS. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: HOLLY GORST

Left: Christophe Lemaire top, $465, christophelemaire.com. Carolina Herrera skirt, $690, (212) 249-6552. Louis Vuitton boots, $1,350, (866) 8848866. Below: Gucci dress, $2,300, gucci.com. Proenza Schouler shoes.

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BYE TO THE DYE Clockwise from left: at the Row’s spring show, models sporting various shades of brown hair, which appeared not to have come from a bottle; slightly messy, mousyhued locks that seemed unstyled at Mary Katrantzou; at Dries Van Noten, a middling cut — neither here nor there.

On Beauty

Meh Head The hairstyle of choice this season seems like no hairstyle at all. Unremarkable in color and length, and replete with flyaway bits, the look is effortless, but of course, it isn’t.

EVEN THE MOST AVID style.com clickers might not have noticed the uniting factor across the

spring 2015 catwalks. It wasn’t anything so dramatic as scarlet lips or as romantic as high blush.

But it was there, complementing the golden trompe l’oeil lip rings and Goa-appropriate caftans at Dries Van Noten, as well as the Row’s cult-leader robes, the starched white collars at Chanel and Isabel Marant’s perennial heathered crewnecks. It looked like nothing. And in many ways it was.

Adjectiveless in color, lank and complete with flyaways, non-hair appeared again and again: not ‘‘chocolate,’’ not ‘‘chestnut,’’ not bluntly cut nor superlative in length. This was passive-aggressive hair, proof that the head from which it came looked enviable without any help at all.

If the ombre of seasons past telegraphed a beachy disregard for appointments and status quo, non-hair is a full-out (if faux) throw-the-Filofax-away refusal. And in its visually subtle noncompliance, it more successfully captures the laissez-faire attitude that imbues so many attempts at stylized apathy: dewy skin, unpolished nails, the proud and public consumption of Coca-Cola (not Diet). According to Garren, the hairstylist and co-founder of the hair-care line R+Co, designers for a few seasons were scrambling for models with short hair, shag and bowl cuts. Now the look is no look: ‘‘a real girl with hair tucked behind her ears.’’ The allure, of course, is in the apparent effortlessness — and the tantalizing threat of a thwarted approximation. The desire for drab non-hair rekindles that specifically middle-school shame of trying, and failing, to achieve the perfectly undone ponytails of girls more popular than yourself. ‘‘It’s a status symbol in a way,’’ says Bumble and Bumble’s editorial stylist Jimmy Paul. ‘‘These

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ARNO FRUGIER/COURTESY OF THE ROW; SCHOHAJA; INDIGITAL IMAGES

BY ALICE GREGORY

48 Great Jones St, New York 31philliplim.com

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A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE Clockwise from above: a too-busy-for-a-cut-or-brush look at Dries Van Noten; natural-seeming flyaways at Chloé; a parade of not-quitestraight, not-quite-wavy tresses at Louis Vuitton; one of the Vuitton models with her hair tucked behind the ears like ‘‘a real girl.’’

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women, they do nothing to their hair, but the clothes are right, the shoes are right, they’re fit, their skin is beautiful.’’ It’s true that without gamine hips and the perfect leather boots, one is apt to look more like an Alice Munro protagonist than a postcoital chanteuse. Paul, who styled the admirably unremarkable hair of Freja Beha Erichsen for the latest Louis Vuitton campaign, confesses that though the locks look undone, they’re actually quite considered. ‘‘It’s the elegance of restraint,’’ he says. ‘‘Whoever is cutting hair this way has that sophistication that you get from just being in a city like New York.’’

Practically, and to the chagrin of many, the style demands patience and pricey redress: the growing-out of layers, the investment in salon-corrected color. ‘‘It’s an expensive thing to do if you don’t have it naturally,’’ admits Paul. Time-consuming, too.

Non-hair, like any other fad, is readily available to only a select few: Those with curly hair require a flat iron, black girls a chemical relaxer. Even silky-straight towheads, so tiresomely the ideal, need some hands-on texturizing. ‘‘It’s funny, most of this hair is colored,’’ says Rita Hazan, who has an eponymous Fifth Avenue salon. ‘‘It seems natural, but it’s a whole process.’’ Hazan, who likes to think of the trend as the natural vestige of the once-trendy bob, speculates that non-hair is a remedy to recent peroxide-happy seasons. ‘‘So many women come in, and their hair has just taken a big beating recently, mostly from bleach. It’s so fried,’’ she says. ‘‘They come in saying, ‘I really need to get my hair back in shape.’ ’’ The restoration often involves staining artificially pale strands with a mild, non-damaging vegetable dye.

If non-hair has an exemplar, it’s the endlessly Instagrammed Jane Birkin (and her daughters, Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg). In her heavily documented heyday, Birkin had the luxury of being not only rich and rail thin, but also of looking intoxicatingly good without either makeup or bras. Her hair — flat on the top, heavy on the bottom, and fringed with schoolgirl bangs — was the perfect correlative for her seductive-virgin sex appeal: the woman who doesn’t shower but still seems clean.

The trick to achieving non-hair, apart from lucky genetics and/or a good stylist, is using minimal product to add weight but not grease. A shower in Paris, where the water is hard, might help too.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine

NOT NOTHING Clockwise from above: Rahua shampoo for an organic wash, $32, rahua.com; Phyto 7-day cream, to keep hair hydrated and silky, $28, phyto-usa.com; L’Oréal Paris Txt It spray for a tousled texture, $5, drugstore .com; David Mallett Australian salt spray for a beachy look, $45, david-mallett.com; Philip B. Maui Wowie mist to create volume, $22, philipb.com; Living Proof PhD 5-in-1 styling treatment to condition, $26, livingproof.com; Philip Kingsley Elasticizer Extreme for bounce, $50, philipkingsley.com.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: INDIGITAL IMAGES; CATWALKING/GETTY IMAGES; CATWALKPICTURES; SCHOHAJA. PRODUCTS: MARKO METZINGER (9)

This was passive-aggressive hair, proof that the head from which it came looked enviable without any help at all.

A L E X I S B I T TA R .CO M

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On Her Instagram:

696 17 6

By the Numbers

Pictures of models

15,000+

Pat McGrath

Applicants for her #backstagewithpatmcgrath search for a new fashion-week team

In the beauty universe, you could say the world spins around Pat McGrath. Over the course of her three-decade career, the prolific, self-taught makeup artist has worked with in-demand models (Naomi, Gisele, Cara, Kendall), major fashion houses (Christian Dior, Versace, Prada) and the top photographers (Steven Meisel counts her among his closest collaborators). A backstage fixture, McGrath can set trends with a wave of her hands — she famously prefers to work with her fingers instead of with brushes — and is nothing if not extremely versatile: dewy, no-makeup skin, custom-made Swarovski crystal face masks and feather-adorned eyelids and brows are all in her wheelhouse. In 2004, she was made global creative design director for Procter & Gamble Beauty, and last spring, Queen Elizabeth II named her a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion and beauty industries. (To celebrate, McGrath snapped her first selfie.)

Here, a closer look at all things in McGrath’s orbit. — KARI MOLVAR

Pictures of furry animals

Selfies

305,000 Followers

1,000 APPROX. NUMBER OF FASHION SHOWS SHE’S WORKED

Avg. amount of sleep she gets per night during fashion week

4 hours

HIGHEST NUMBER OF MAKEUP ASSISTANTS ON HER TEAM FOR A SINGLE SHOW HER AVERAGE: 23)

2,000 Number of fake eyelashes she travels with

Favorite big-screen beauty looks:

7

Age she started wearing makeup

84 MAX. NUMBER OF MAKEUP TRUNKS SHE TRAVELS WITH

• Katharine Hepburn in the gazebo in ‘‘Suddenly, Last Summer’’ (1959) • Jordan as Amyl Nitrite in ‘‘Jubilee’’ (1978) • Elizabeth Taylor in the bar scene in ‘‘BUtterfield d 8’’ (1960)

SHE PUTS THEM ON FOR 15 MIN. TO REFRESH AFTER LONG-HAUL FLIGHTS.)

6 Times per year she sees the facialist Eneida Soares in New York for Juvesa ProSkin and Oxylight treatments

IN HER CLOSET:

100 + 500+ BLACK TOPS

10

NUMBER OF F STEPS TO CREATE E HER ‘‘NO MAKEUP’’ P’’ LOOK

HEADBANDS

SEE THE FULL TUTORIAL AT TMAGAZINE.COM.) E.COM.)

25

APPROX. NUMBER OF TIMES SHE HASN’T WORN ALL BLACK IN THE PAST YEAR

Favorite natural skin remedy: RAW ORGANIC HONEY (SHE RUBS IT ON HER FACE TO PREVENT ACNE AND TO SLOW DOWN AGING.)

167,000 Miles she traveled last year

‘‘THOUSANDS’’ NUMBER OF MAKEUP TESTS SHE DID BEFORE GETTING HIRED FOR HER FIRST JOB

OPERA SINGER

1,500 Number of Swarovski crystals in each face mask she created for Givenchy’s spring/summer 2014 show (It took her 10 hours to make each of the 16 masks.)

What she’d be if she wasn’t a makeup artist

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: DELPHINE ACHARD, CATWALKING/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID X PRUTTING/BFA NYC

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20+ YEARS SHE’S BEEN USING SK-II FACIAL MASKS

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Take Two

Helena Bonham Carter

Kim Gordon

Oscar-nominated actress and mismatchedshoe advocate who will soon be seen as the Fairy Godmother in Disney’s live-action adaptation of ‘‘Cinderella’’ and as a psychiatrist in Steve McQueen’s new HBO drama.

Noise-rock pioneer, lo-fi style icon and acclaimed visual artist who rose to prominence in the ’80s as a founding member of Sonic Youth. Her memoir, ‘‘Girl in a Band,’’ is out this month.

Iím afraid that rather than make little girls feel better about themselves, it might send them into depression: ëëAll youíve got to look forward to are stretch marks, cellulite and acne, possibly all at once.íí

The Anti-Barbie Lam Lammily, a doll with realistic body proportions ($25, scar and cellulite stickers sold separately; lammily.com). sepa

I thought her body looked kind of weird. Itís swayback, but it also looks like she has a terminally popped-out chest. I guess thatís to signify, ëëIím open to whatís coming my way!íí

Jazzy Rap This is for young, angry people. I like Edith Piaf and Fred Astaire.

I have a self-playing piano, and I have people over to record show tunes.

It was hardly jazz. To me it was more, like, jazzy. It was really just rap with easy music behind it. I think they should collaborate with Fiona Apple.

‘‘Sour Soul,’’ an album

by Badbadnotgood with Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah (lexrecords.com).

Greasy Treats My first thought was to become a vegetarian. Or just not a ducktarian, I guess. But theyíre delicious.

Iím not into incense, but I have spent the last week on the Internet trying to acquire a kitten. We have a tortoise.

We tried a chameleon but it died after six weeks. R.I.P., Kevin. He died green.

Itís not really my style, but Iím not a great barometer of taste. I make a lot of unfortunate choices ó thereís a catís tail Iíve been wearing lately. It helps the silhouette and thereís something sexual about a perky tail.

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Olive & Sinclair’s Duck Fat Caramels ($20, oliveandsinclair.com).

Smoking Cat S Astier de Villatte’s ’s incense holder, designed by y Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, Balthus’s widow ($289, 212-677-3917).

677-3917).

Alexander xander Wang Bag Inspired by the soles of classic sneakers ($1,395, alexanderwang.com).

Iím on a low duck-fat diet, but I like the idea of putting it in sweets. I donít really have much of a sweet tooth, although someone gave me half a caramel last month and it was pretty good.

I love it. It looks really French, not kitschy. I probably wouldnít use it as a diffuser, though.

Iíd just put my pot stash in it.

I hadnít thought about Air Jordans in a long time. Itís kind of amazing, but itís also quite heavy for how big it is. Like, who wants to carry around a sneaker?

BONHAM CARTER: DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES FOR BOWMAN SCULPTURES. GORDON: LAN/CORBIS. FROM TOP: LAMMILY (2); THOMAS DAGG; HANNAH MESSINGER (2); ASTIER DE VILLATTE; ALEXANDER WANG

A dual review of what’s new

In Fashion

Beautiful Unrest Vivid botanical prints lose their ladylike sweetness when paired with utilitarian staples.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEN GRIEME STYLED BY JASON RIDER

Sacai dress, $4,534, net-a-porter.com.

Marc by Marc Jacobs boots (worn throughout), $498, (212) 924-0026.

Quality

In Fashion

Max Mara coat, price on request, (212) 879-6100.

T by Alexander Wang tank top, $255, alexanderwang.com.

Marc Jacobs pants, $1,200, (212) 343-1490.

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see(k)

on location at MASS MoCA

Izhar Patkin, The Wandering Veil

abchome.com

abc carpet & home home within

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Fendi dress, $5,450, (212) 897-2244. Alternative Apparel T-shirt, $38, alternativeapparel.com.

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Diane von Furstenberg dress, $598, dvf.com.

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Marc Jacobs jacket, $1,200, (212) 3431490. Missoni dress, $3,510, (212) 517-9339.

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MODEL: TAMI WILLIAMS AT ELITE NEW YORK. HAIR BY TOMI KONO AT JULIAN WATSON AGENCY USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE. MAKEUP BY JUNKO KIOKA AT JOE MANAGEMENT USING CHANEL. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI FOR DIOR VERNIS. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: KELLY HARRIS, RAYNER REYES

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ON T HE ROC KS d esign f. binfarÈ | quickship

An Instagram of my parents, John and Odette Rocha, at the bird market in my father’s native Hong Kong.

Me in my granddad’s tapestry chair in Birr, Ireland, in 1987.

I would totally wear that now!

My walk to work in Dalston, London. I love the contrast of nature and man-made things.

Profile in Style

Simone Rocha From her close-knit, continent-straddling family to her darkly romantic references, the designer’s worldview is sweet yet subversive.

A look from the fall 2013 ‘‘Respect Your Elders’’ collection. My grannies always y wore gloves g while driving. g

BY EVIANA HARTMAN

A portrait of Elizabeth I on the wall in my office.

She’s in full regalia but still looks so porcelain.

ëëITíS ALWAYS, FOR ME, a contrast and a balance,íí says Simone Rocha of her

approach to style. As the daughter of the Hong Kong-born, recently retired designer John Rocha, the Dublin-raised 28-year-old grew up witnessing runway glamour firsthand, but she also turns to more personal subjects ó her large extended family and her pastoral teenage years in Ireland, where her mother, Odette, is from ó for inspiration. Though she calls herself a ëëgirlie girl,íí she reveres the avant-garde Japanese designers, and her cultural touchstones, like the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois and the choreography of Pina Bausch, reflect a taste for the conceptual. Her collections, likewise, recast codes of femininity ó full skirts, flounces and delicate embroidery ó through futurist forms and materials. ëëHard and soft, masculine and feminine ó this is what I really like to bring to the table when creating,íí Rocha says. ëëI never was interested in making garments that didnít have something to say.íí

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Pearl-adorned styles inspired by communion dresses, spring 2013. This show was kind of like a first communion for me.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CELESTINE COONEY; SIMONE ROCHA (2); JACOB LILLIS; COLUMBINE GOLDSMITH; JACOB LILLIS; ‘‘THE ERMINE PORTRAIT’’ OF ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND, ATTRIBUTED TO WILLIAM SEGAR, CIRCA 1585/HATFIELD HOUSE; JOHN ROCHA

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TOP ROW: SIMONE ROCHA (3). SECOND ROW: URSULA KAUFMANN; MAARTEN VANDEN ABEELE; EOIN MCLOUGHLIN. THIRD ROW: COURTESY OF ST. ANDREW HOLBORN; SIMONE ROCHA (2). FOURTH ROW: TOM WOOD/COURTESY THOMAS ERBEN GALLERY; EOIN MCLOUGHLIN

One of my process boards for spring 2015. I always sketch over the lineups. It’s like thinking on the page.

My dachshund Rufus at my flat in London. He comes to the studio and gives everyone attitude.

This look from spring has a pervertedsecretary vibe.

I was so moved by Pina Bausch’s ‘‘Der Fensterputzer,’’ set in Hong Kong.

It inspired the spring 2015 collection.

Me and Rufus in County Wicklow, Ireland, an area I grew up visiting with my family outside the city of Dublin.

When you’re always in the studio, you’re just dying to get outside.

Pina Bausch’s work is about human nature.

I also think about people when I’m designing, whether it’s my grandmother or teenagers making out.

St. Andrew Holborn, where we showed the spring collection.

I love all of the materials and patterns together.

‘‘Cupsnog’’ by Tom Wood.

I really like pictures of people kissing; there’s a real innocence to them.

I love Francis Bacon’s art — the texture, torture and beauty. It is very inspiring to have it hanging in my studio.

I wanted this spring look to feel 3-D, so we made flower appliqués out of the flower print.

Cycling home with peonies.

February 15, 2015

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Quality

Objects

Points of Interest Reflective metal hardware turns otherwise architecturally simple shoes and bags into modern art.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRUNO OSIF STYLED BY EKATERINA SKURIKHINA

Bally sandals, $895, (844) 442-2559. Tod’s bag, $2,265, (212) 644-5945.

Salvatore Ferragamo dress, $3,400, (866) 337-7242.

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Objects

Loewe shoes, $950, and bag, price on request, loewe.com. Vetements jeans, $1,650, lagarconne.com. Hermès shirt, $1,625 (800) 441-4488.

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Quality

Objects

Proenza Schouler shoes, $1,180, (212) 420-7300. ChloĂŠ bag, $1,890, Intermix, (212) 769-9116. Loewe coat, $11,890.

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Calvin Klein Collection shoes, $1,295, (212) 2929000. Jil Sander bag, $1,150, (212) 925-2345.

Milly coat, $625, milly.com. Hermès shirt, $1,625.

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Just Kids Virginal white lace paired with leather and suede evokes the sexy decadence of Patti Smith’s punk-rock days.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW KRISTALL STYLED BY JASON RIDER

Hilfiger Collection vest, $450, and skirt, $430, Tommy Hilfiger, (212) 223-1824. Chloé top, $1,095, (212) 7178220. Fogal tights (worn throughout), $55, fogal.com. Louis Vuitton ear cuff, $525, louisvuitton.com. Alice Waese rings, $150 (left hand), and $575 (right hand), alicewaese.com.

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PRADO sofa with cushion & EVERYWHERE sideboard. Design: Christian Werner.

LUMIĂˆRE NOIRE foor lamps. Design: Philippe Nigro. www.ligne-roset-usa.com

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Oscar de la Renta blouse, $1,790, (212) 288-5810. Diesel Black Gold skirt, $2,495, diesel.com.

Louis Vuitton boots, $1,390. Alice Waese bracelet, $600, and rings, $805 (left hand), $575 (right hand).

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STICKLEY. MAKE IT YOURS.

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Tom Ford jacket, $7,900, and skirt, $5,500, (212) 359-0300.

Givenchy bodysuit, $1,725, givenchy.com.

Louis Vuitton ear cuff. Alice Waese rings, $805 (left hand), and $575 (right hand).

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CH24 Wishbone Chair, $599 Designed by Hans J. Wegner To see all 25 colors and find an authorized dealer visit carlhansen.com/wishbone2015 SHOWROOM: 304 HUDSON ST., NEW YORK, NY. 10013, TELEPHONE: 1 212 242 6736

Chloé top, $2,495.

Costume National shorts, $1,310, costumenational.com.

Alice Waese bracelet, $600, and rings, $150 each (left hand), $575 (right hand).

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MODEL: ANNELY BOUMA AT DNA MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY TOMI KONO USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE AT JULIAN WATSON AGENCY. MAKEUP BY ASAMI TAGUCHI USING MAC COSMETICS AT FRANK REPS. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI USING DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. CASTING BY ARIANNA PRADARELLI. PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS: GASPAR DIETRICH, MORGAN ASHCOM, CHRIS CALLAWAY. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: KELLY HARRIS. HAIR ASSISTANT: MASASHI KAWAKAMI

Quality In Fashion

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The Thing Van Cleef & Arpels’s beguiling, one-of-a-kind bejeweled gold cuff is a riff on 1960s Op Art. When opened and laid flat — dozens of ribs make it as flexible as rope despite its rounded heft — the bracelet appears to be made of small interlocking onyx circles dotted with diamonds. But when clasped around the wrist, the circles part to reveal a dense underlayer of cultured pearls affixed to the armature.

A contrasting row of emeralds leads the way to the slyly hidden closure. Creating the bangle’s elaborate architecture required nearly 500 hours and the skill of 10 craftspeople — Van Cleef’s so-called ‘‘Mains d’Or,’’ or golden hands — among them a designer, a model maker, a lapidary, a gem setter and experts in hard stones, pearls and diamonds. Together, they’ve woven a rich illusion indeed. OpArt Perles bracelet, price on request, (877) 826-2533. — RACHEL GARRAHAN

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOANNA M C CLURE

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BOSTO N – C H I CAG O – DA L L AS – M I A M I – LO N D O N – LOS A N G E L E S N E W YO R K – SA N F R A N C I SC O – TO RO N TO – WAS H I N GTO N D.C. EQ U I N OX .C O M

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2

In the Air

Bohemian Rhapsody

1

4

Designers enter a dreamlike state this season, referencing a romantic love affair with the spirit of Mother Nature.

BY CAROLINA IRVING, MIGUEL FLORES-VIANNA AND CHARLOTTE DI CARCACI

IT WAS THE GREEKS who first imagined a lush

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5 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DETAIL OF ‘‘THE FAIRY FELLER’S MASTER-STROKE,’’ 1855-64, RICHARD DADD, 1817-1886, PRESENTED BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON IN MEMORY OF HIS FRIEND AND FELLOW OFFICER JULIAN DADD, A GREAT-NEPHEW OF THE ARTIST, AND OF HIS TWO BROTHERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR 1963 ©TATE, LONDON 2015; CATWALKING/GETTY IMAGES; ©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LIMITED (2009); GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY; ©CSG CIC GLASGOW MUSEUMS COLLECTION; ALBERTA FERRETTI

6

world drenched with ripe flowers and nymphs, but it was the Victorians who ran with it, leaving behind lasting visions of languid sweetness. From the fin de siècle to the Summer of Love to the current crop of fluttery fairy frocks, the wild child remains among us.

Richard Dadd’s meticulous daisy-studded tableau, ‘‘The Fairy Feller’s MasterStroke’’ (1), which took nine years to paint (1855-64), resides in the Tate museum and influenced everyone from Octavio Paz to Queen’s Freddie Mercury, who wrote a song by the same name. Dries Van Noten evoked a similarly idyllic scene on his spring runway, with models lounging to the sound of birdsong on a handmade forest-floor carpet (2) by the Argentine artist Alexandra Kehayoglou (Page 178).

This season’s gauzy, free-spirited style is redolent of the smoky, semi-opaque floral etching on a vase by the Art Nouveau master Émile Gallé (3) and the sinewy giltbronze arms of Claude Lalanne’s candelabra from 1990 (4). A Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, painted in 1894 by John William Waterhouse (5), is surrounded by water lilies and wearing a flowing blush-colored gown not unlike Alberta Ferretti’s for spring, which uses wispy, nude chiffon embroidered with a garland of blooms (6).

3

THE CONTEMPORARY NYMPHS on recent runways at

9

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ALEXANDRA NAHUM;; ((C)B&B ) ITALIA;; COURTESY OF TOOVIA;; TWIGGY,, COAT BY EMERIC PART PARTOS, NEW YORK, APRIL 14, 1967, PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON ©THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION/COVER: CONDÉ NAST; JENN SKI; LIBERTY FURNISHING FABRICS AT LIBERTY LONDO LONDON; VALENTINO; ETRO; ©VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

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Valentino (7) and Etro (8) look as if they sprang from the luscious, fertile gardens of Ninfa outside Rome (9), created in the 1920s from the ruins of a settlement that included a medieval temple dedicated to mythological creatures. Such a place might have sparked the imagination of Zandra Rhodes, the earth mother of modern fairy fashion, whose butterfly dress (10) still stands as an inspiration. Hippiedom’s Flower Power mantra transformed the Victorian nymph into a more graphic, pop-inflected celebration of nature. Twiggy, a mod nymph if ever there was one, was photographed for Vogue

by Richard Avedon in 1967 (11) wearing a green mink coat by Emeric Partos, adorned with Warholesque (or Prada-esque) daises. Pop Art flowers found themselves translated into enameled brooches (12) and onto psychedelic floral fabrics in the 1970s, like Liberty London’s dizzying Patricia cotton in Velvet Spice (13).

For her Crinoline series, the ever-whimsical contemporary designer Patricia Urquiola deconstructs iconic ’60s furniture with her abacá high-backed armchair for B&B Italia Outdoor (14), its bold woven botanical motifs reminiscent of ‘‘yarn bombing,’’ the current graffiti-like practice of fastening spiritual symbols to objects like the trunks of trees (15). Wild children, it seems, never learn.

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A S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S U P P L E M E N T T O T : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S S T Y L E M A G A Z I N E , F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 5

FONTAINEBLEAU MIAMI BEACH

The Great Revival Every great hotel has a great story — and this one is a doozy. Soaring ambition, initial rejection followed by redemption, cameos from many of America’s biggest celebrities, a setting of golden-era glamor, capped by a sudden, victorious return to center stage that restores the heroine to her rightful place among the world’s finest hotels. The story of Fontainebleau has it all.

It begins in 1952 when hotelier Ben Novack had an ambitious dream. He wanted to make a statement, to crown his long and successful career by building Miami’s largest and most superb hotel, a South Florida landmark so magnificent it would become the go-to playground for the traveling elite. He found the perfect property — a mansion on Collins Avenue that was the former home of Harvey Firestone, the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company — and hired Morris Lapidus, an architect acclaimed as much for his sense of bold theatricality as his architectural designs.

Lapidus gave Novack the statement he wanted: a hotel reminiscent of a movie set, with an ultramodern atmosphere emanating from dramatic flourishes such as a sweeping curvilinear facade, floating ceilings, walls that zigged and zagged, huge crystal chandeliers, curves and even a “Stairway to Nowhere” that allowed guests to make a grand entrance into the lobby. Novack was so satisfied with his creation that he named it after the opulent chateau outside Paris that belonged to the kings of France.

When the resort first opened in 1954, however, the design wasn’t to everyone’s liking. It was too avantgarde, people said. The critics panned it as garish and flamboyant and The New York Times went further, calling it “inspired super schlock.” But Lapidus stood by his design and his belief that “if you create the stage setting and it’s grand, everyone who enters will play their part.”

Time, of course, has proved his point. Soon after the lavish inaugural ball, attended by 1,600 people

(including the mayor of Fontainebleau in France), the beau monde arrived. Despite the fact that there wasn’t even a sign out front, Fontainebleau reigned as the top resort hotel in Miami Beach through the remainder of the 1950s and 1960s. The guestbook read like a Who’s Who of household names. The Rat Pack performed here, as did Elvis Presley, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Judy Garland, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Marlene Dietrich and Debbie Reynolds. Designed like a movie set, the hotel became one, starring in blockbusters from “Goldfinger” and “Scarface” to “The Specialist” and “The Bodyguard.”

Embraced by the rich and famous, Fontainebleau also received the architectural acclaim it deserved. Just a few years after the initial criticism, Lapidus was fully vindicated. He was heralded as a visionary and his once-derided design was declared a masterpiece — the very definition of Miami Beach’s exuberant architectural aesthetic.

While that would make a fine and tidy conclusion to Fontainebleau’s story, it doesn’t end there.

Like many of the celebrities it has hosted over the years, the resort has returned for a second triumphant entrance onto the world stage, stealing the spotlight once again thanks to a recent $1-billion top-to-toe restoration.

The redesign retains all the original glamour and historical design elements such as the

This special advertising feature is sponsored by participating advertisers. The material was written by Andrew Bill and did not involve the reporting or editing staff of The New York Times. ©2015 The New York Times

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

Photo: Fontainebleau Miami Beach

“If you create the stage setting and it’s grand, everyone who enters will play their part.”

circular ceilings and columns, bow-tie design motifs and the famous Stairway to Nowhere. But these golden-era details have now been artfully blended with a sexy, sophisticated and ultramodern spirit. Striking design, contemporary art, music and fashion all play supporting roles. And the combination is electric. Aimed not just at pleasing a new generation of tastemakers, it seeks to stir them with a truly unique guest experience.

When you first enter the famous lobby, the effect is breathtaking. Rising majestically from the 20-acre waterfront property, two new towers (the 37-floor Trésor and 18-floor Sorrento) complement the two original ones (Chateau and Versailles), almost doubling the number of guestrooms and suites to a total of 1,504. All are equipped with luxurious amenities and the latest techology such as flat-panel televisions and iMac computers that encourage guests to customize their vacation experience.

The suites, ranging from 500 to 1,742 square feet, come with kitchenettes, oversized jetted tubs and spacious balconies overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, South Beach, Biscayne Bay and Downtown Miami.

When guests can pull themselves away from their rooms, they have the choice of 12 highly stylized restaurants and lounges, so imaginative and critically acclaimed they make Fontainebleau a culinary destination in its own right. The lineup

—Morris Lapidus

includes two restaurants from Chef Michael Mina — StripSteak and Michael Mina 74 — plus two AAA Four Diamond signature restaurants, Scarpetta and Hakkasan.

For evening entertainment, LIV nightclub, housed in the former Tropigala Lounge, is a got-to-go fixture in Miami’s late-night scene. And the resort’s decades-long tradition of showcasing the top performers of the day is as strong as ever. Most recently the BleauLive performance series has hosted performers including Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams, crafting a fully immersive weekend around each performance.

For relaxation there is Lapis Spa. Known particularly for its mineral-rich water therapies using mist, rain and steam, the two-level, 40,000-square-foot facility has 30 private treatment rooms plus a co-ed pool and lounge area.

Fontainebleau’s poolscape, where James Bond and Goldfinger played out their heated game of gin rummy, has been renewed as a glamorous see-and-be scene. There is an adult-only pool surrounded by cabanas and sun loungers, several small dipping pools and an interactive children’s waterscape play area.

And that is as far as Fontainebleau’s story goes … at least for now.

For more information or bookings, call (877) 5128002 or visit Fontainebleau.com. •

FOREVER FONTAINEBLEAU There is yet more good news for those who want to make their own grand entrance this spring. Increasing the resort’s great value, the Forever Fontainebleau package is valid for travel now through April 30, 2015.

The longer you stay, the more you save.

Stay two nights double occupancy in a deluxe room and you get a $50 dining credit and a $50 spa credit. A booking of three nights comes with a $100 dining credit and a $100 spa credit, and so on up to a sixnight booking (a $250 dining credit and a $250 spa credit). Not bad, especially when you combine this offer with a complimentary fifth night for all those booking a suite.

To book, call (800) 548-8886 or go to Fontainebleau.com/ForeverFontainebleau.

LOEFFLERRANDALL.COM

Food Matters

The Trash Collector Joost Bakker grows flowers he trades for bones to make soup at his restaurant, and uses the leftovers to feed his garden.

Meet the poster boy for zero-waste living.

BY DAVID PRIOR PHOTOGRAPHS BY EARL CARTER

THE HOUSE THAT Joost Bakker built in

Monbulk, Australia, about an hour outside Melbourne, is wrapped with a reinforced mesh frame holding over 11,000 terracotta pots planted with leafy strawberries, and surrounded by a flower garden bordering a brush of wild eucalyptuses. The interior, where the florist lives with his wife, Jennie, and their three young daughters, is made up entirely of recyclable materials — unpolished plywood floors, industrial-felt curtains, training-wire ceiling lamps.

Inspired by what he had done with his home, the city of Melbourne commissioned him in 2008 to create a similarly sustainable temporary restaurant in the middle of prominent Federation Square. ‘‘Greenhouse by Joost’’ was built over two weeks in collaboration with a team of architects, farmers, chefs and environmental experts. It has since popped up in various locations, most recently at the 2012 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, where Bakker cheekily encouraged diners to ‘‘Give pee a chance.’’ He collected his

STOCK EXCHANGE The renegade florist Joost Bakker in the meat locker of the Rockpool Bar & Grill, where he has stuffed a beef carcass with stargazer lilies.

patrons’ urine in a large, opaque container at the entrance to the restaurant, and used it to fertilize several acres of mustard seed, which later became the oil powering Greenhouse’s generators. ‘‘The hospitality industry is shockingly wasteful and I wanted to show that it could be done differently,’’ he says, as he maneuvers a large evergreen into a repurposed silo on the counter of a cafe in suburban Melbourne.

Takeaway containers, in particular, rouse his ire. ‘‘They drive me bloody crazy,’’ he says, a

Arena

Food Matters

wide, boyish smile softening his outrage. ‘‘If you’re going to sit around sipping coffee for 30 minutes, why can’t you just use a regular mug?’’ The walls of the next cafe he stops at (but not the last — much of his day is spent delivering and arranging the flowers he’s grown on his property) are lined with used paper coffee cups, which he has turned into vessels filled with bushels of fragrant cilantro.

For an in-demand florist, Bakker has a rather peculiar interest in trash. Raised in the Netherlands by a family of fourth-generation tulip farmers, Joost (pronounced ‘‘Yoast’’) grew up scouring empty fields and landfills, collecting bits of glass, coins and clay smoking pipes. In the early 1980s, his father fell in love with Australia and, seeing better opportunities abroad, moved the family to Melbourne to start fresh. Not a particularly good student, Bakker dropped out of high school to learn the family trade, eventually mastering a masculine yet refined floral style that stood in sharp contrast to the studied prettiness that was popular at the time.

As word of his talent spread, he began experimenting with unusual specimens: whole branches of flowering gums and masses of white tulips, their roots fully exposed in glass jars. Soon, his installations climbed up walls

Since opening his high-end soup canteen, Brothl, Bakker’s refuse interests run more toward animal carcasses: beef bones, seafood shells and chicken frames. and hung from ceilings. Hundreds of blown-out light bulbs became elegant dangling vases for a canopy of lilies, while electrical clamps were used as a bouquet-binding substitute for jute.

Fifteen years ago, Bakker started asking his restaurant clients to give him their organic waste for compost, promising them in return even more spectacular blooms.

FULL CIRCLE Clockwise from top left: the facade of Bakker’s home in Monbulk, Australia, covered with 11,000 pots planted with strawberries; Bakker in his garden; the interior of his restaurant, Brothl, decorated with his floral arrangements; nutrient-dense bone broth; a discarded fish head ready for the broth.

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Since opening Brothl, a high-end soup canteen, in July, Bakker’s refuse interests run more toward animal carcasses — specifically beef bones, seafood shells and chicken frames, which he uses to make broth. A tiny space down a nondescript alley, Brothl is usually packed with people hungry for the nourishing and pungent seafood broth, served with a choice of

ingredients such as mussels or bacon. The waste from his own restaurant goes into the Closed Loop, an electrical machine that reduces organic matter by 90 percent in just 24 hours, transforming it into an intense natural fertilizer.

(Taking Bakker’s lead, the chef René Redzepi recently adopted this technology at Noma, considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world.) ‘‘I truly believe that nutrient-dense soil produces nutrient-dense food,’’ says Bakker. ‘‘We can’t keep stripping the land and not putting back what we take out.’’

As the sun goes down after a long day, Bakker, who, at dawn, harvested flowers and dropped them off to his clients and then took their bones to his chefs, is on his way home with the compost he’ll spread across his crops, like an antipodean Johnny Appleseed.

Arena

MAGIC CARPET Clockwise from left: the rug artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, with unfinished pieces at her studio outside Buenos Aires; her hanging work titled ‘‘Shelter for Some Happy Days’’; the artist’s covered chair, meant to evoke winter, in her studio.

Home and Work

Dream Weaver Born into Argentina’s first family of rugmakers, Alexandra Kehayoglou creates topographical wonders that elevate ancient craft to modern art.

BY STEPHEN HEYMAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILIANO GRANADO

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LAST SEPTEMBER, during Paris Fashion

Week, the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten sent a parade of wisplike models in flouncy silk and chiffon down a runway that resembled a mossy forest path. Nearly twice the length of a tennis court, it was actually a carpet created by Alexandra Kehayoglou, a 33-year-old Argentine artist who spent 16 days stitching it together, then shipped it in pieces to Paris and reassembled it right before the show.

Kehayoglou started making these landscapes — some of them pure white, others depicting trippy Patagonian glaciers and fields — shortly after finishing art school in 2008. Her

medium is closely connected to her family history. Kehayoglou’s Greek grandparents began making Ottoman-style rugs in Isparta, in present-day Turkey. After war broke out, the family fled to Argentina, arriving in the 1920s with their loom and little else. Today the family owns El Espartano, one of South America’s largest carpet companies. ‘‘I love the fact that her art is based on a craft that has been in her family for four generations,’’ says Van Noten. ‘‘I believe that this informs the clear truth of her work that some might confuse for naïveté.’’

In her workshop, an industrial space attached to the El Espartano factory,

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Home and Work

THE BRIGHT SIDE Clockwise from left: Kehayoglou’s grasslandsinspired textured rugs on the floor of her living room; a color key; the artist trimming individual strands for a new piece; Kehayoglou’s painting of a shoe to which she matched hues of yarn; her brushes, balls of yarn and a watercolor; in her studio, hand-tufting a rug on a large scaffold.

‘I grew up around rugs. And when I started to do it myself, I discovered that the process was far deeper than just using yarn.’

Kehayoglou hoists up her rugs perpendicular to the ground on a large scaffold, and wears headphones that block out the noise made by her hand-tufting machine. The textured, multicolored terrains come together in roughly two months, but she also creates carpets that look more like paintings — depicting a beach in Costa Rica, or a deer in the tall grass at night.

These take several months to execute. She recently collaborated on an installation in Berlin with the artist Olafur Eliasson, but also exhibits her own room-size works, such as ‘‘Shelter for a Memory,’’ which had a moonlit jungle covering the walls. On the ground, the piece sprouted tufts of grass. A real swing was suspended from the ceiling. ‘‘It’s hard for people to understand that a rug can be art,’’ she says. ‘‘But maybe that’s changing.’’

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By Design

Louboutin Nails It The maestro of the stiletto opens the chicest polish boutique in all of Paris.

BY DANA THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENOÎT PEVERELLI

WHEN THE SHOE DESIGNER Christian Louboutin decided to extend

his empire into the world of beauty — and to start with nail polish — the move actually made some kind of sense. After all, he came up with his signature scarlet soles 20 years ago by impulsively painting one in the factory with a colleague’s red nail varnish.

He wanted his first beauty boutique to link back to those early days, both in location and in look. That meant staying in the Galerie Véro-Dodat, the slightly shabby yet ornate 19th-century covered passage in Paris where he opened his original store in the early 1990s, as well as recreating that shop’s intimate, jewel-box ambiance. He found the perfect space next door: a tiny shop that had served as the headquarters for a gemstone hunter. But who would do it up for him? Louboutin had long admired the work of the Paris-based interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch who has worked with Hermès and the Hôtel Marignan Paris. ‘‘In Pierre’s work, there are very few details — it’s clean,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m used to baroque spaces with lots of objects. When I look at one of his spaces, I wonder, like a child, ‘Why do I find a space so beautiful with so little?’ Pierre is a master of that.’’

Louboutin showed Yovanovitch the nail-polish bottle shape he had designed, with a bottom of thick glass cut like a multifaceted jewel and a soaring black spear top inspired by calligraphy brushes.

Yovanovitch ran with it: When you enter the new boutique, it is as if you have stepped into the flacon. Imagine a minimalist version of the ‘‘I Dream of Jeannie’’ bottle. The front room is curved, lined with Louboutin’s signature arched niches, each containing a bottle of polish, and lit with a rotating rainbow of light, emphasizing the polish hues, including a sole-matching Rouge Louboutin. The ceiling is open, like a skylight, revealing on the second floor’s white plaster plafond a video projection of the Paris sky — ‘‘like a James Turrell work,’’ Yovanovitch explains, citing the American installation artist.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the beauty line is now influencing Louboutin’s footwear design: In his latest collection, there are heels decorated with disembodied Rouge Louboutin fingernails and little manicured hands. In the old days, he explains, ‘‘you mated your shoes with your gloves. Today, it’s your nails.’’

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ON DISPLAY Clockwise from top: Christian Louboutin (left) and the designer Pierre Yovanovitch in the new store; the skylight on the second floor features a video projection of sky on the ceiling; a bottle on a crystal formation; the exterior of the building; the view down to the first floor through a mirrored shaft; Louboutin’s signature red and other shades along the walls; Louboutin’s own Hopi masks decorate the shop.

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A NEW DIRECTION Xavier Dolan, 25, whose fifth film, ‘‘Mommy,’’ shared the jury prize at Cannes last year with Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘‘Goodbye to Language.’’

On the Verge

Coming Into Focus Like his films, Xavier Dolan is unruly, intense and inspired.

Just don’t call him an enfant terrible.

BY NICHOLAS HARAMIS PORTRAIT BY BON DUKE

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SINCE HIS DEBUT at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival,

critics have enjoyed anatomizing Xavier Dolan’s manic yet sublime style. He thumbs his nose at the fourth wall.

He shuts characters off from his audience by shooting them from behind. He speeds up and slows down scenes on a whim. He segues into surrealism — a living-room deluge, marshmallows as raindrops — without restraint.

There is no one vision, no straight path.

But though his aesthetic has been mercurial, his theme has arguably stayed the same. From his autobiographical meditation on the strained relationship between a mother and son (‘‘I Killed My Mother,’’ which he made at 19 without formal training), through a polyamory saga

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On the Verge

(‘‘Heartbeats’’), a psychological thriller (‘‘Tom at the Farm’’) and the story of a transgender schoolteacher in the process of transitioning (‘‘Laurence Anyways’’), Dolan has been drawn to vulnerable characters struggling to balance on the precipice of change.

Dolan himself is on that precipice. ‘‘Mommy,’’ his fifth film in as many years, shared the jury prize at Cannes last year with Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘‘Goodbye to Language.’’ Like ‘‘I Killed My Mother,’’ ‘‘Mommy’’ is a ‘‘working-class epic’’ about a single mother desperate to control and protect her outburst-prone son, and it reunites Dolan with two of his regular collaborators, the French-Canadian actors Suzanne Clément and Anne twisted into a deviant act. In two days, Dolan will fly to Dorval. In what is perhaps his most audacious cinematic Italy to promote ‘‘Mommy,’’ and also to meet Kit trick to date, he employs a 1:1 aspect ratio, squeezing the Harington, the ‘‘Game of Thrones’’ actor ‘‘with threetraditional film frame into the dimensions of an dimensional, Christopher Nolan eyes’’ who will appear in Instagram photo. the new film alongside Kathy Bates, Jessica Chastain and As one might expect, the 25-year-old actor, writer and Susan Sarandon. filmmaker is an erratic conversationalist. On a crisp The thing that keeps Dolan grounded, despite having winter afternoon, from the Formica-topped bar of an taken ‘‘something like 50 planes in the past month,’’ Italian cafe not far from his apartment in Montreal, he including a trip to Paris Fashion Week to ‘‘whore about admits that he’s hard of hearing, apologizes for spraying town in the latest apparel,’’ is Montreal, the city that on too much cologne and does something bordering on nurtured him. On arriving from Los Angeles for this stream-of-consciousness stand-up (‘‘Did you watch my two-day trip, he went straight to his best friend’s house movie on a laptop? Was it a Dell? No, I mean, was it and sat on the ‘‘Adidas couch’’ to watch bad movies in an Adele? Did Adele play it for you?’’). He drums his fingers old tracksuit. ‘‘It’s a rather seedy sofa,’’ he says, grinning. on the counter, waiting for his coffee to arrive. ‘‘Full of secrets.’’

Early in his career, Dolan’s mix of artistic hubris and Dolan’s phone lights up, then so does his face. Someone petulance in interviews earned him a reputation as the with a name similar to George Michael’s has retweeted ‘‘bad boy of Quebec cinema,’’ but the man in him. ‘‘I mean, I knew it couldn’t be the front of me seems more cautious. Right after musician,’’ he says. ‘‘Right?’’ He starts singing making a joke about the best filmmakers ‘‘Careless Whisper’’ — as a flirt, he’s seasoned MOMMY DEAREST Clockwise from top left: working today — ‘‘There’s really only Terry, but silly. A moment later, the conversation Dolan at age 19, acting Paul and me’’ — he winces. ‘‘Don’t write jumps from the suicide of his boarding-school with Anne Dorval in ‘‘I Killed My Mother’’ (2009), that,’’ he begs. ‘‘Nobody will understand that principal to how great Shannen Doherty was which was shot in his I’m kidding. They won’t understand it at all.’’ on ‘‘Charmed’’ to the Petit Ermitage in Los childhood home; Dorval and Antoine Olivier Pilon His next project will take him further from Angeles, a great place to stay while recovering in ‘‘Mommy’’ (2014); his comfort zone — and out of Canada — for from plastic surgery. He looks at his at the Cannes Film Festival last year with his first English-language feature, set partly fingernails, chewed down to the skin, and then Dorval (middle) and the in London, about a famous actor whose fixes his eyes on mine. ‘‘I’m sorry. What was I producer Nancy Grant; epistolary relationship with a young boy is saying? My mind just went somewhere else.’’ in the yard at age 6.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KINO LORBER; SHAYNE LAVERDIÈRE (2); COURTESY OF XAVIER DOLAN

The thing that keeps Dolan grounded, despite having taken ‘something like 50 planes in the past month,’ including a trip to Paris Fashion Week to ‘whore about town in the latest apparel,’ is Montreal, the city that nurtured him.

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Permanent Midnight What is a true self? For an author whose rare illness forces her to live in literal darkness, the issue is far from metaphorical.

BY SOPHIE ELMHIRST PHOTOGRAPH BY FLORIS NEUSÜSS

ANNA LYNDSEY’S CONDITION is the ultimate empathy test, impossible to

pass. The only way to imagine oneself with it would be to live it, but no one in her right mind would choose this life. Lyndsey exists, but on the surface her days bear no resemblance to life as most of us know it, as most of us live it.

Nine years ago, after the skin on her face reacted to her computer screen, to fluorescent lights and then to the sun, Lyndsey was diagnosed with photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis, in its usual form a well-recognized skin complaint. This later developed into a chronic and severe reaction over her entire body. When her skin meets light, even through protective clothing, it burns. Not a ripped-off wax-strip burn but a blowtorch burn (her metaphor).

The extremity of the reaction means she barely leaves her small house in Hampshire, and as specialists in London have denied her requests for a house call, she hasn’t seen one since her initial diagnosis. She spends her days in a blacked-out room, building up pockets of resistance which allow her out for a brief walk, before dawn or after sunset.

NOT I ‘‘Girl in the Dark’’ by Anna Lyndsey details her decade-long struggle to avoid light.

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So it’s like being in prison, people tend to ask on hearing her story. Sort of, except she’s free. It’s a prison where she’s both jailer and jailed, body trapping mind. Could it all be in her head? A skeptic might suggest the condition is psychosomatic; either way, the body’s response is pain. Then, the inevitable: How does she cope? Doesn’t she go insane? And then people usually go silent for a while as they try to imagine living like that for an hour, let alone a year.

Nine. In a new memoir called ‘‘Girl in the Dark,’’ Lyndsey, who uses a pseudonym for privacy’s sake, describes her life as one that has stopped, as ‘‘impossible.’’ And so here is a question: If your life ends, but you’re still alive, who are you?

LYNDSEY’S HOUSE LOOKS EXACTLY like every other red-brick house on her

road, except the curtains are all drawn. There are rules that accentuate the strangeness. Visitors have to wait on the doorstep after Lyndsey unlatches the door so she has time to retreat from the daylight that will follow them in.

All electronic equipment — phone, laptop, iPad, anything that might ooze light, however faint — must be switched off. A minute too long out of her room, and her skin riots.

She sits across the table, a slight woman, wearing small, oval glasses, a long red velvet coat and a corduroy beret. Her skin is pale, of course, and I don’t want to think that there’s something ghostlike about her, but there is.

Maybe it’s the outfit: just what you’d wear to night-stalk the halls of a Victorian mansion. Or maybe it’s just the darkness of the living room where we sit, illuminated only by a slim crack in thick curtains. Compared to her quarters upstairs, it’s Miami Beach. ‘‘There’s so much of me which is just the same as it was,’’ she says. She doesn’t mean her former self in the practical sense, the one with the government job and the flat and the life beyond these red-brick walls. She means her self, the self we like to think we own, a continuous core, the internal

PHOTOGRAM, ‘‘KASSEL, 1967,’’ BY FLORIS NEUSÜSS. COLLECTION OF STAATLICHE MUSEEN KASSEL. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND VON LINTEL GALLERY

Arts and Letters

W W W. R A I N F O R E S T. C O M

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Arts and Letters

identity that overcomes circumstances. For Lyndsey, that self might have become an article of faith: proof that the darkness hasn’t taken everything away. ‘‘I don’t think you ever completely adapt. I’ve always got a vision of myself. . . .’’ She trails off. The vision is painful: a past self, or a future one, in the light. ‘‘All the hang-ups I used to have — I’ve still got them. It’s so annoying.’’ Talking in public, worrying whether people like her — futile anxieties now that she hardly sees anyone. Never mind: The flaws are who she is, postcards from a former life.

Inevitably, a new self has had to emerge, the one that exists in the dark and can find joy in cleaning the loo when she hasn’t left her room in a while. Any faith she has is in the god of tiny pleasures. Her creed is pragmatism; you’ll find no spiritual epiphanies here. ‘‘If it had happened to somebody else. . . .’’ she says, amused. I skirt around the issue, nervously praising her honesty in the book, until she cuts right through. ‘‘It’s the obvious question. Didn’t you

she tried to write about her experience, but even the act of writing ‘‘I’’ was enough to make her wretched. So she wrote in the third person instead. ‘‘The girl in the dark did this, she did that . . . it was a bit like a fairy tale.’’ It was only after an agent, who had heard about her situation, asked to read her work and requested she change voice that Lyndsey entered her own story. She found that, with practice, she could write in her head — marshal thoughts into sentences, arrange sentences into paragraphs — before writing longhand in a notebook. It was liberating, not being able to see her words on the page.

Darkness, it seems, is also a cure for self-consciousness.

WHEN DEALING WITH LIGHT AND SHADOW, the temptation is to say all sorts

of grand things about revelation and shrouds. On page 133 of her book, Lyndsey warns readers of the lure of metaphor with the salutary lesson of the reiki healer who came to treat her one day: ‘‘I wonder,’’ says the healer, ‘‘when you’re in the light, do you feel . . . exposed?’’ ‘‘Exposed?’’ ‘‘Open to people’s gaze, lots of eyes looking at you.’’ ‘‘What I feel is, I’d better get out of this light before I have a painfulskin reaction,’’ I say, ‘‘which, given my experience, is a pretty rational response.’’

Lyndsey writes of wanting, when the healer suggests that there is always some hidden benefit to being ill, to smash in the woman’s face.

At another point in a memoir that is otherwise funny, sharp, mostly devastating, she devotes several pages to her battle with the local council over the lamps on her street. They’ve threatened to change the bulbs to the fluorescent kind — torture for her skin and a threat to her brief, beloved after-dark excursions. So she sends letter after letter until she finally receives assurance that the bulbs on her particular route will remain as they are. Victory. And, at the same time, an illustration of what this illness actually is: not an excuse for bad poetry, but a procession of daily mundanities, starts and stops. Lyndsey can write with intense lyricism, but this is how she described living with her condition at the end of our conversation: ‘‘I feel like a big bouncy thing that keeps throwing itself against a wall, hitting its head and then bouncing back.’’

feel like killing yourself at some point? Well yeah, obviously.’’ She didn’t, only in part for the sake of those who love her. When a chronically ill friend admitted that he was contemplating taking his life, she told him not to, because ‘‘he’d be letting the side down.’’ It’s the pact. Endure.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS that happen to you when you live in the

dark: You lose touch. Radio news only takes you so far. Lyndsey knows the facts of contemporary life, but not its nuances, has no way of keeping up with MAYBE THIS IS THE QUESTION INSTEAD: Strip a life of all its usual business those imperceptible shifts in culture you inhale only by walking the streets. and paraphernalia, of activity and variety, of the ability to have children or You become deeply aware of other people’s limitations. Screens of all kinds imagine a future, and what’s left? are banished, so the only way Lyndsey can access the Internet is through an Lyndsey and her husband, Pete, got together before she fell ill and in her assistant. Other people, it turns out, are hopeless at Google searching. ‘‘They book she writes about her guilt, the sense that she’s somehow trapped him in haven’t got the thought process!’’ the darkness with her. But a strong love is gymnastically flexible, able to You sharpen your mind. In her book, interspersed with her adapt to the most hostile environment — practically, not just accounts of her life in the dark, Lyndsey describes the various metaphorically, speaking. The pair of them, for example, word games she plays, often alone, sometimes with visitors. My invented the ‘‘puppy cage’’ — a black felt contraption that covers favorite is Crazy Daisy: One person comes up with a two-word her in the car so he can drive her short distances; they got clue for a two-word solution that rhymes. Lunatic flower = crazy married in a half-lit church; and yes, they have sex, in the dark. daisy. I set her three just before I leave (visual tailback; happy There are the friends with whom her relationship is fruit; angry soup) and she solves two of them before I make it to exclusively telephonic; this book, her missive from the darkness the front door. to the outside world. And, perhaps strangest of all, ‘‘I have this Your sense of time collapses. Lyndsey lives by ‘‘natural time.’’ massively increased awareness of light, and also love of light.’’

The hours of sunset and sunrise are her markers, dictating when Her enemy? ‘‘Yes.’’ She describes the rainbow of colors she sees she can leave the house. ‘‘In midsummer I’m completely thrown, in the house depending on the weather outside, the various because of the sun coming in from the northwest.’’ Her existence stages of dusk, the subtle differences between the light at is elemental, I suggest, pretentiously. ‘‘Stone age,’’ she replies. sunrise and sunset. ‘‘I went for a walk at dawn on Christmas You learn new skills. To fill the hours and years, Lyndsey Day, which was the first time I’d managed to do that for years,’’ listens to audio books, one after another like someone lighting a she said. ‘‘It was absolutely deserted, and the sky was this PAST AND FUTURE From top: Lyndsey in Corsica cigarette off their last, whatever she can get her hands on — lovely peachy, bluey gray, very tasteful, and there were all these in 2000, before the thrillers, whodunnits. ‘‘I know how to break people’s necks,’’ she magpies flying round the houses.’’ It’s the kind of thing most of us onset of her photosensitive says. The literary deep-dive had another effect. After a woeful see without seeing, a scene so ordinary it barely registers. condition; her memoir, attempt at blind knitting, she began to write. Fiction was off-limits Sky, magpies, houses: nothing of note. For Lyndsey, rare and forthcoming from Doubleday in March.

— she felt too divorced from the world to tell stories about it — so beautiful — art.

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FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ANNA LYNDSEY; COURTESY OF KNOPF DOUBLEDAY

‘All the hang-ups I used to have — I’ve still got them. It’s so annoying.’ Talking in public, worrying whether people like her — futile anxieties now that she hardly sees anyone. Never mind: The flaws are who she is, postcards from a former life.

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A Picture and a Poem

‘‘Untitled’’ by Tatiana Trouvé, 2014.

ALMOST YOUR LIFE

Then another fled resemblance and this an ancient poet confirmed as a bird of prey fluttered in place overhead when the after-rain had summoned the reed beds to disperse their taste Oh what wit witness our killers have returned and you stranger ask strange questions

the snail of reparation isn’t the snail of forgiveness carrying home on her back a howdah where love is made to a camel’s cadence Dear polyglot in which language do you dream and in which will we speak in Heaven?

Among reed beds by the sea whose wind burqaed your eyes and mouth with your hair the sea that almost took your life almost returned it FADY JOUDAH

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COURTESY OF TATIANA TROUVÉ, 2014. PENCIL ON PAPER, WATERCOLOR AND COPPER. POETRY EDITOR: MEGHAN O’ROURKE. ART EDITOR: GAY GASSMANN

In a mirror’s reflection, the artist Tatiana Trouvé finds a metaphor for the poet Fady Joudah’s musing on the thin line between desire and disaster.

FROM LEFT: IINEZ NE NEZ EZ Z AND A ND AN N VINOODH; ODH; CRA CR CRAIG IG M C DEAN; DEAN E EA ; DEAN DE KAUFMAN

February 15, 2015

Hello Spring!

The Peculiar Genius of Bjork 198 L’Amour Fou: a True Fairy Tale 206 Fashion’s Artisanal Movement 210 Philip Johnson’s Myth of Transparency 222 From the Track and the Field to the Runway 228 Thinking Global, Curating Local in Sharjah 238 The Fiction of Honesty 242

SOUL IN

HOW DO YOU Ang a song oN THE WALL? for her retrospectIve at MOMA, BJOrK COMBINED THE TWO SiDES OF HER CREATIVE GENIUS — SOLITaRY COMPOSITION aND COLLABORATIVE MASTERY OF DESiGN, TECHNOLOGY AND VISUALS — TO CHANGE The way wE EXPERIENCE MUsIc forever. agaIn.

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E

VERY ALBUM Bjork produces

resolves itself into a story. The story begins with the songs, the raw material through which Bjork channels emotion, autobiographical experience and philosophical ideas.

The songs cohere into a universe. They take on colors, elements, an instrumental sound. They have a physical character, whom Bjork will portray on the album cover: the shy-girl songs of ëëDebutíí as a virginal innocent in silver mohair; the volcanic beats of ëëHomogenicíí as a patriotic warrior; the tribal rhythms and trumpets of ëëVoltaíí as a wanderer in electric blue, neon green and red.

The albums and their stories map the bifurcation of Bjorkís artistry. There is Bjork the musician, who creates her music in an emotional cocoon, tinkering with technologies, concepts and feelings; and Bjork the producer and curator, who seeks out collaborators to help her translate her work beyond sound, who has an unparalleled ability to disperse herself across a vast range of media. In the popular imagination, it is the latter vision of Bjork that spectacularly dominates: Bjork who has a gorilla for a dentist; Bjork in a pearly dress that she pierces into her skin; Bjork wearing a mask of spines. But it should be known that by the

198

time these visions of Bjork reach us, even as they seem like dispatches from the future, they are snakeskins that Bjork has already shed.

They are the stories that have coalesced, while she has continued on into the protean, the experimental and the unsung.

THE LONG SEAM between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates runs mostly under the Atlantic Ocean and surfaces in Iceland, in a national park called Thingvellir.

Here, the plates inch apart above sea level, forming in their rift a deep and formidable lake, Thingvallavatn. A thousand years ago, the Vikings held their parliament here. It is near this place, on a snowy slope overlooking the water, that Bjork keeps a small cabin.

On the Saturday before the winter solstice, in the twilight of late morning, a veil of mist and snow lay over the landscape. The drive from Reykjavik was a journey through a desolate cloud, the sameness broken only by the occasional huddle of shivering Icelandic horses.

The lake was invisible behind a wall of fog, except when it vertiginously appeared alongside the road, gray and roiling.

Bjork drove to the cabin in a Land Rover. She waded through snow up the hill in white platform shoes, a dress and tights of fluorescent

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yellow and an ellipsoidal white puff coat. Later, one of her friends will tell me that she has been wearing neon yellow all year, a color she associates with healing and transformation. Bjork comes in from the snow with a lunch of bread, cheese, pastries, yogurt and chocolate. She finished mixing her newest album two days ago, followed by a party to which she invited the girlsÕ choir that sang on ÔÔBiophilia,ÕÕ the brass band that played on ÔÔVoltaÕÕ and her knitting group, which meets Wednesday nights in Reykjavik. BjorkÕs current knitting project is a lilac mohair sweater. She thinks she might have pulled a muscle from dancing. She puts on a pot of coffee.

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JORK HAS BEEN feeling a little sensitive about her visual

collaborations lately. ItÕs not that she isnÕt proud of them, but she worries sometimes that the visual element of her work overshadows the music, her lifeÕs obsession. ÔÔIt wasnÕt so much that I was really ambitious to do the best visuals in the universe,ÕÕ she explained. ÔÔIt was more that I burnt myself on spending a lot of time doing music and then seeing visuals accompanying them that just didnÕt fit that music at all.ÕÕ Bjork, now 49, spent her teens and early 20s immersed in the collective do-it-yourself ethos of Iceland, where ÔÔif someone else wanted to put out a record we would just make the poster by hand.ÕÕ She made a record of folk songs at 11, then found punk as a teenager, but she was, in pop music terms, a late bloomer when she diverged to what she describes as the ÔÔmatriarch energyÕÕ of electronic beats Ñ the effeminate, queer, culturally diverse heritage of underground dance music. In the late 1980s, as a singer in the postpunk band the Sugarcubes in Reykjavik, Bjork began secreting albums by 808 State and Public Enemy, teaching herself about a musical lineage that ran from Kraftwerk to Detroit techno and on into England, to Kate Bush, Brian Eno and Warp Records.

ItÕs only a two-and-a-half hour flight from Iceland to London, so thatÕs where she moved with her young son at the age of 27. It was 1993, early in a new technological era. She was a single mom with an interest in solitary endeavor, intrigued by what sheÕd seen in some nightclubs in Manchester. ÔÔIt was really difficult for me to be that selfish,ÕÕ she would later recall.

The move from the provincial to the global, from the charming mess of homegrown collaboration to the unknown possibilities of a career as a soloist in a newer genre of music, was also her declaration of independence from the macho vernacular of rock ÕnÕ roll. (You may have noticed that Bjork, who has used a Tesla coil as an instrument, has all but ignored the electric guitar.) From then on, ÔÔmostly it was my songs and my vision, and I would decide what would be in which song and when.ÕÕ Going forward, she would express her vision clearly to her collaborators, and choose them with great care.

As she finished her first solo album, ÔÔDebut,ÕÕ she saw a music video by a French band called Oui Oui on television. She contacted its director, a young filmmaker named Michel Gondry. They talked about their hippie parents and the Russian folk tales they had watched as children, and he directed the fairy-tale video for

'SHE CREATE A CIrcLE around her whIch Is hEr unIverse, and befORE EACH CIRCLE CLOSES ITSELF SHE JUMPS OUTSIDE TO CREATE A NEW CIRCLE. SO EACH ALBUM GOES INTO A NEW DIRECTION REGARDLESS Of THE SUCCESS Of THE PREVIOUS ONE.'

ÔÔHuman Behavior,ÕÕ her first music video as a solo artist. From then on, each album doubled as a nexus of deviation through which Bjork exposed popular audiences to often-obscure fashion designers, filmmakers and, later, when she made her first app for 2011's ÔÔBiophilia,ÕÕ computer programmers.

Unlike David Bowie, who created an alter ego, or Madonna, whose visual transformations always have a mocked-up, storyboarded feeling, Bjork tailored her collaborations to the specificity of each song, to the character and story that she wanted to convey. When she worked with the director Chris Cunningham, who directed the robot-sex video for ÔÔAll Is Full of Love,ÕÕ she told him the song was about where love and lust meet, and showed him ivory statues from Asia that he translated into his own melancholic vision. To invoke the scale of ÔÔBiophiliaÕÕ on tour, she wore dresses from an Iris van Herpen collection inspired by photographs of micro-organisms. ÔÔItÕs creating a whole universe and not only creating the music,ÕÕ said van Herpen. ÔÔShe really knows what she wants.ÕÕ From the vantage point of a couch in front of a cathode-ray television on some lost Saturday afternoon in 1998, I can see Bjork shaking her bald head as if avoiding a gnat and morphing into a silver polar bear. I was unsurprised when Andrew Thomas Huang, the 30-year-old filmmaker who directed a video for BjorkÕs MoMA show, had an identical adolescent memory of watching ÔÔHunter,ÕÕ the video directed by Paul White. Young Americans, bored in their homes, exposed to some vision of Europe and art and electronic music. Like the best science-fiction writers, Bjork has always tempered the futuristic with a reminder of the ancient. Both hunter and technobear, she is an avatar of the digital future, the soul in the machine.

Few musicians have so enthusiastically embraced technology, often using unorthodox methods. On her last two albums, she has used audio software called Melodyne to embroider harmonies with her own voice, altering the pitches on a single track and then weaving together the result. ÔÔI spend sometimes a couple of weeks on each song,ÕÕ she said of her process with the software, ÔÔlike painting the cathedral ceiling.ÕÕ When dealing with more complex technology, like the fabrication and programming of the new electronic instruments she has helped invent, she thinks of her role as ÔÔthe Kofi Annan that goes between two worlds.ÕÕ ÔÔShe doesnÕt even go in and make records in a traditional way,ÕÕ said Derek Birkett, BjorkÕs manager, whom she met 32 years ago when she was playing benefit shows for the miners striking against Margaret Thatcher with her band Kukl. (BirkettÕs label, One Little Indian, has put out her albums since then, and beyond selling distribution rights she has never signed over to a major label.) In search of new ideas, Bjork has toured the MIT Media Lab and attended the National Geographic Explorers Symposium. She has interviewed composers she admires, including Arvo Part and the late Karlheinz Stockhausen. She rarely records in a studio, preferring the spontaneous session. Antony Hegarty, who sings accompaniment on a song on the new album, recorded the track

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Comme des Garรงons coat, dress, boots and socks.

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while they were on vacation in the Caribbean. ‘‘We were just swimming in the ocean and then I was like, ‘Oh, do you want to sing on this song?’ ’’ she said. ‘‘I think he literally had sand on his legs when he sang it.’’ ‘‘She creates a circle around her which is her universe, and before each circle closes itself she jumps outside to create a new circle,’’ said Gondry. ‘‘So each album goes into a new direction regardless of the success of the previous one.’’

Or, as Bjork says, ‘‘When people expect something of me it’s the only thing I can’t do.’’ For her retrospective at MoMA, she has sought to ensure that the visitor will not merely see a visual or documentary archive, sterilized from the process of creation itself, but some combination of Bjork the orchestrator and Bjork the musician. The clarification need not be made that Bjork is an artist, but, as she has adamantly reminded the MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach, her medium is not her videos or photographs but the songs that precede them.

It was due to Bjork’s concern about the neglect of her songs that she initially hesitated at the prospect of the MoMA show because, she thought at the time, How do you hang a song on a wall? If she were going to do a retrospective, the existing museum practices for formatting sound would have to change from tinny speakers emitting noises in darkened alcoves into something entirely unfamiliar. As Biesenbach told me, the exhibition is not about Bjork’s art, it is Bjork’s art — an attempt to transform forever how a musician’s work might be presented in the context of a museum.

Wearing headphones, visitors will walk through an auditory hallucination of Bjork’s career, which culminates in a new immersive environment — in Bjork’s language, ‘‘a song.’’

The song, from her new record, is 10 minutes long and called ‘‘Black Lake.’’ I listened to it in Bjork’s cabin, watching the snow melt as it hit the windowpane and the water droplets roll down.

Outside, the pine trees trembled in the wind. Later, I asked Bjork what it was about. The question felt petty and even ruthless because I already knew the answer, as anybody who hears the song will know the answer. ‘‘Yeah. . . .’’ she replied. We sat and stared into our tiny glazed coffee cups. ‘‘It’s about an end of a relationship, really,’’ she finally said. ‘‘Probably that’s the best way to put it.’’

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HE OLDEST SONG on ‘‘Vulnicura,’’ Bjork’s new album,

is called ‘‘Quicksand.’’ It was written four years ago, when Bjork’s mother had a heart attack that left her in a coma for a week. Her mother recovered, but in the course of her illness a series of revelations about her health — undiagnosed dyslexia, an undetected cardiac condition and the aftereffects of a polio infection as a child — gave her daughter a new understanding of the worldview of the woman who raised her. Bjork always thought of the woman she calls her ‘‘nihilist mother’’ as cool and ‘‘kind of punk,’’ but it meant that growing up, Bjork often played the role of the Pollyanna in their relationship. In the two years that followed her mother’s

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recovery, Bjork’s optimism faltered. She underwent a complicated surgery for vocal cord nodes and ended her long partnership with the artist Matthew Barney, with whom she has a 12-year-old daughter. ‘‘It’s my turn or something, and then I have to deal with it — the black lake in me,’’ she said. ‘‘Because when a relationship falls apart, you have to. . . . It’s pretty hard-core stuff.’’

As Bjork was emerging with a collection of songs from that difficult time, she was introduced to the work of Alejandro Ghersi, who records under the name Arca and has produced beats for Kanye West and the R&B singer FKA Twigs. Ghersi is 25 years old, from Venezuela and gay. Despite the variance in their biographies and their age difference, the two musicians quickly formed a deep creative connection. Bjork explains that in the Chinese astrological calendar they are both snakes, and therefore intuitive and prone to merging. But she also sees Arca, along with emerging artists like Mykki Blanco, Kelela and Le1f, as the newest branch of the music she has loved, a generation for whom she now figures as a matriarch.

Bjork might still be in a reclusive compositional phase of work were it not for Ghersi, who interrupted her normal process of slow curation. They drove to her cabin for an exploratory session under her reindeer antler chandelier, and Bjork was impressed by Ghersi’s efficiency as a producer. For ‘‘Vespertine’’ in 2001, Bjork had crafted most of her own beats, but the process had taken three years. ‘‘There’s no way I’m going to wallow in this self-pity for three years, forget it,’’ she said of her decision to finish the album as quickly as possible, to close this circle and move on to the next. Over the next year, she and Ghersi continued to meet, sometimes joined by the producer Bobby Krlic, who records as the Haxan Cloak. The work went quickly and, unusually for Bjork, the songs in ‘‘Vulnicura’’ appear mostly in the order in which they were written, like a series of diary entries.

I was lucky to meet Bjork at a moment when the story of her new album had not been set. She described the video for ‘‘Black Lake,’’ directed by Huang and influenced by Ingmar Bergman, as operatic in scale but also stark, centered on her voice and her performance. ‘‘Like a black-and-white psychology movie,’’ she said, and then laughed. ‘‘I don’t know why that was funny.’’ Huang told me of a wound motif, of a clip she had sent him of a spider molting, of the album’s thematic use of lilac and yellow.

For now, there is only the album itself, which I heard just once. It is, I think, one of her best albums, intensely personal. String arrangements were prevalent on Bjork’s first four albums but they have been all but absent from her music for a long 10 years, swapped out for experiments with choirs, brass and beats. On this album, Bjork returns to strings, and the arrangements are the most complex she has composed. The intention was to create a solitary, psychological sound. ‘‘I used to say when I did ‘Homogenic’ that the strings are almost like your nervous system,’’ she said. ‘‘Like being played with a bow.’’

CREATIVE MOVEMENT DIRECTOR: STEPHEN GALLOWAY. MANICURIST: GINA VIVIANO USING CHANEL LE VERNIS. LIGHTING DIRECTOR: JODOKUS DRIESSEN. TAILOR: MARLEY GLASSROTH. PHOTO ASSISTANT: CHRIS DAVIS. STYLIST'S ASSISTANTS: ALEXA LANZA, YOHANA LEBASI. HAIR ASSISTANT: TAKU. MAKEUP ASSISTANT: RENA TAKEDA

WEARING HEADPHONES, VI,ITOR, TO mOma ILL aLk through an audItory halluCINATiON OF BJORK’S CAREER, WHICH CULMINATES IN A NEW IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE — IN BJORK’S LANGUAGE, 'A SONG.'

Syren top and gloves. Hair

by Christiaan.

Makeup by Dick Page for Shiseido.

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NOTES ON A SCANDALE FOR YEARS, FRANCE’S LEADERS HAVE BEEN CAUGHT UP IN A SEX FARCE OF THEIR OWN MAKING, PROVING THAT BEDFELLOWS MAKE FOR VERY STRANGE POLITICS.

BY LIESL SCHILLINGER ILLUSTRATIONS BY PIERRE LE-TAN

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NCE UPON A TIME , in a land far away, there lived a girl as beautiful as a sunset

on the Seine. She was tall and slender, with long, dark hair and mysterious, ice-blue eyes, and she was called CÈcilia. Her father, a furrier, was descended from Bessarabian gypsies and her mother was the granddaughter of a great Spanish composer, but they brought up CÈcilia and her three older brothers in Paris, in a grand apartment. The little girl grew up surrounded by love, comfort and gaiety, both in the city and in her familyís country house, which looked a little bit like a castle, and had a high stone wall around it. CÈcilia was not spoiled ó she worked hard on her lessons and practiced piano every day for hours, but her parents doted upon her, and friends and even strangers admired her, falling under the spell of her beauty. Yet, as she grew into a young woman, CÈcilia yearned to find her one true love.

At 20, she thought she had found him when a handsome photographer named Jean-Daniel dropped by her fatherís fur boutique, snapped her picture for French Vogue, and whisked her away to Venice on the Orient Express. They decided to marry. CÈcilia and her mother chose her wedding gown and prepared an opulent trousseau. HÈlas, her fiancÈ vanished like a cloud of fairy dust.

A few years later, CÈcilia found a more determined swain ó a jocular television star named Jacques, who cooked her poularde de Bresse en vessie and Ècrevisses ‡ la nage and dazzled her with his confidence. The man who married them in 1984, the mayor of the elegant Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, fell in love with the bride while he was performing the ceremony, but sadly, Nicolas, the mayor, could not marry CÈcilia. For one thing, he had just married her to somebody else; for another, he too was married. But never mind: In Paris, anything is possible, with the invincible power of amour.

After that wedding, CÈcilia and Jacques and Nicolas and Marie-Dominique (the mayorís wife) became very good friends. They went on holidays together and dined out at charming bistros, and Nicolas and CÈcilia became godparents of each otherís children. But one day, Nicolas kissed CÈcilia, and she realized he might be her heartís desire, and they soon said goodbye to their spouses. They couldnít marry for quite a while (Marie-Dominique blocked the progress of amour as long as she could), but in 1996 there was a wedding at last, and much of Paris applauded their happiness, including their friends, like the previous prime minister of France, and Bernard, the head of Franceís most famous luxury goods company.

But while Nicolas and CÈcilia were courting, another girl as beautiful as a sunset was also shedding Èclat by the Seine. Her name was SÈgolËne, and she was clever, patriotic and virtuous, and was admired for her long, pretty neck. SÈgolËne liked to blow kisses to admirers and sing the Marseillaise a cappella. Because she was so clever, she had come to Paris to study at a prestigious grande Ècole, where she met her heartís desire, FranÁois, who was studying there too.

He was just as clever and patriotic as she was, and they soon had four children, but they didnít marry, because SÈgolËne didnít think very much of the institution. But, no matter, both of them were devoted to France, body and soul ó and each longed to be its president, though for some

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time they did not realize they had that in common.

Nicolas, as it happened, also wanted to be president of France. Which of the three would become president first? The answer would be tied to another beautiful, clever maiden named Valérie, who had long, flowing hair and cared passionately about French politics. Valérie was a humble damsel — one day François would nickname her ‘‘Cinderella’’ — but in her early 20s she was invited to a grand soirée by the lord of the realm (who had just been chosen to rule France for the second time in a row). Upon arriving at the fête, she was instantly transformed into a reporter, and soon joined Paris Match magazine.

While writing about politics for Paris Match, Valérie got to know François, who was très amical, but though she wrote about his party a lot, she did not pay too much attention to him, because, naturellement, she was busy falling in love — first with a man named Franck, whom she briefly married, then with her next husband, a writer and translator named Denis, with whom she had three sons.

In 2005, Paris and politics plaited these players into a tangled love knot.

Nicolas and François were both nearing their goal of becoming president of France — Nicolas was the head of his party, and François was the head of his — when both decided to visit the offices of Paris Match to be photographed. Valérie was surprised François had not told her of the visit, because he called her so often to give her news. It was not until his press attaché phoned Valérie and informed her that François was ‘‘madly in love with you’’ that Valérie recognized the current of passion that roiled beneath their professional rapport. ‘‘I knew he was attracted to me, we had an undeniable bond, a very special friendship, a bit too close, deliciously borderline at times,’’ she admitted in a memoir last year. ‘‘But love? No. It seemed absurd. Forbidden.’’ They were committed to others — Ségolène and Denis — and they had more than half a dozen children between them, but how could they refuse love’s call? Over crêpes and waffles, Valérie and François confessed their feelings, which led to, she wrote, ‘‘a kiss like no other kiss I’d ever shared with anyone. A kiss that had been held back for nearly 15 years, in the middle of a crossroads.’’

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NE KISS LED to another; and later that year, as Ségolène came to suspect

François’s infidelity, the clever, patriotic, virtuous and now indignant beauty began looking into running for president herself, rather than let him do it. François was the head of the party they both belonged to, but Ségolène had been a deputy in the Assemblée Nationale for ages, and voters liked her. Neither she nor François cared which one of them ran for president, she told the press: ‘‘Whichever one of us is better positioned will run.’’ (They couldn’t both run, given that they were a couple, as far as anyone knew.) And so, when polls showed Ségolène was more popular than François, she geared up for the race.

Not everyone in her party was happy to hear that she was running. She complained that the wicked wolf Dominique compared her debate technique to reading ‘‘recipe cards.’’ (He denied he ever said it.) Others sniped, ‘‘But who will look after the children?’’ and said the presidency wasn't a beauty contest. Nonetheless, in the party primary she trounced her rivals, including the wicked wolf, Dominique. Everyone thought Ségolène’s partner — who was, after all, head of the party — would help her defeat Nicolas (who had won his party’s primary), but François stalled, so it appeared. Could it be that he didn’t want Ségolène to be president? their friends wondered. ‘‘None of this would have happened if you’d just proposed to her,’’ teased one of his advisers.

Indeed, Ségolène told a reporter during the campaign that she would have liked to marry François on a canoe in Tahiti, in 2006, but, hélas, it was not to be. Still, in the end, François did work hard for his partner's campaign.

Ségolène also had backup, a wizard named Beyashel, who gave her magic words to use against Nicolas. Her spokesman told the press that Ségolène was an excellent candidate: ‘‘[She] has only one fault,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s her partner.’’ Since most of France had little inkling of the backstage drama of François’s personal life, the comment was slightly mystifying, but it clearly was not complimentary. Imperfect partner notwithstanding, Ségolène drew upon Beyashel’s incantations

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to tell voters that her rival, Nicolas, embodied ‘‘the threat of the fracture of our republic.’’

Nicolas won all the same, and became president of France in 2007. And while the republic didn’t fracture, his marriage to Cécilia did. Cécilia served as France’s first lady for 152 days, then flew to America, having at last found her heart’s desire, in the form of an international consultant named Richard, whom she married in March of 2008 — one month after Nicolas married his third wife, Carla, who became his second first lady.

And who was this Carla? She was, ça va sans dire, another girl as beautiful as that sunset — tall and slender, with long, dark hair and (quelle merveille!) mysterious ice-blue eyes. Carla was an heiress with an exotic heritage, a storied runway career and a sultry voice. She emanated amour, and often succumbed to it, notably with rock stars and with a smoldering young philosophe named Raphaël, who was the son of Beyashel’s best friend, as well as the husband of Beyashel’s daughter, Justine. Carla wrote a song about Raphaël on a hit album, and had a son with him; Justine wrote a prize-winning roman à clef about him, and fell in love with someone else, with whom she had two children. (Things like that happen a lot in Paris.)

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S LA BELLE Carla

approached the Élysée steps, not long after la belle Cécilia bid them adieu, François was outraged by this public display of presidential domestic disarray. The new leader, he declared, had ‘‘transformed all of us, citizens, public officials, journalists, into voyeurs.’’ François resolved to restore seemliness to the Élysée by running for president in the next election. And so, in 2011, vowing to create an ‘‘exemplary republic,’’ he sought his party’s nomination, having long since unknit himself from la belle Ségolène and moved in with la belle Valérie. Early on, everyone in François’s party had thought wicked-wolf Dominique would be their candidate, but then Dominique got arrested in New York, on charges (later dropped) of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Even though that got cleared up fairly quickly, it didn’t poll well, and so he didn’t run after all. François soon became his party’s candidate. In May of 2012, François beat Nicolas, became president of France and brought Valérie to the Élysée with him as first girlfriend. François’s ‘‘exemplary republic’’ lasted until Jan. 10, 2014, when Parisians woke to a blitz of paparazzi photographs of François, caught on a moped outside the love nest where he had met with Julie, a lovely actress, as beautiful as . . . well you know . . . tall and slender, with long, rustling hair and fine features (and brown eyes, for a change). The apartment, appropriately, was situated on Circus Street (rue du Cirque).

Pauvre Valérie! She had been used to playing Cinderella, but now she was forced into the role of La Traviata! After confronting François in their boudoir, she gulped a scattering of sleeping pills (François, she wrote, kept her from taking too many) and guards escorted her down the staircase and off to the hospital. Two weeks later, trying to make the scandale disappear, François issued an 18-word official decree, publicly dissolving his relationship with Valérie. This behavior prompted Marianne — the woman chosen by France’s mayors to embody the country — to denounce him as a ‘‘goujat’’ (‘‘lout’’); and prompted Valérie (who was by now out of the hospital) to write a tell-all, ‘‘Thank You for This Moment,’’ which laid out her former lover’s dodges, ruses and lovelorn pleadings. (The book came out last fall in France and England, and is already being adapted for film.) ‘‘As if to rub salt into my wounds, François continues to harass me with text messages,’’ she wrote last summer. ‘‘This morning, he said he wanted me back, no matter what price he would have to pay. Sometimes he sends me a dozen texts a day.’’ She claims he once sent her 29 texts in one day alone — this while keeping la belle Ségolène close (in April she became a cabinet minister) and ducking rumors about la belle Julie.

How, you might ask, does the president of France find time to compose digital billets doux while running l'Hexagone? And how does anyone, outside of a fairy tale, succumb on a daily basis to the ravages of devouring passion while functioning, outwardly, as one of the most powerful men in the Western world? And . . . don’t you wish you could? You can, actually, peut-être: but only if you travel to the city of Paris, where affairs of the heart are an affair of state.

‘A KISS LIKE NO OTHER KISS I’D EVER SHARED WITH ANYONE. A KISS THAT HAD BEEN HELD BACK FOR NEARLY 15 YEARS.’

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As fashion continues to demand ever more output and speed, many designers are finding freedom in the artisanal.

Welcome to a season of exposed topstitching, frayed edges, crinkled linen, drawstring burlap and other disciplines of applied art.

THE HUMAN TO

OuCH

J. W. Anderson coat, $1,535, saksfifthavenue.com. Céline shoes (worn throughout), $940, (212) 535-3703.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG MCDEAN STYLED BY JOE MCKENNA

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Victoria Beckham coat, $3,795, victoriabeckham.com. Opposite: CĂŠline top, $5,400, and pants, $1,300.

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Bottega Veneta dress, $14,000, (800) 845-6790. Opposite: Loewe top, $2,250, and skirt, $1,350, Dover Street Market, (646) 837-7750.

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Marni top, $970, pants, $1,120, and belt, $620, (212) 343-3912. Opposite: Giorgio Armani dress, price on request, (212) 988-9191.

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EstĂŠe Lauder eye pencil, $23, esteelauder.com.

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Salvatore Ferragamo jacket, $3,950, and skirt, $1,300, (866) 337-7242. Opposite: Prada coat, $4,380, and top, $740, (212) 334-8888. Model: Rianne van Rompaey/ DNA. Hair by Anthony Turner at Art Partner. Makeup by Linda Cantello at Joe Management for Giorgio Armani Beauty. Set Design by Shona Heath at CLM.

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MANICURIST: MARIAN NEWMAN AT STREETERS. DIGITAL TECH: JAMES NAYLOR. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: SIMON ROBERTS, HUAN DUONG NGUYEN, MARK LINCOLN, LARS BRONSETH. TAILOR: CAROLINE THORPE. STYLIST'S ASSISTANTS: JOHN PASHALIDIS, MATT KING. HAIR ASSISTANT: DAVID HARBOROW. MAKEUP ASSISTANT: MARIA COMPARETTO. SET BUILDER: PETE JENKINS. PROP ASSISTANTS: HATTY ELLIS-COWARD, SCARLET WINTER, CAROLINE BYRNE, HOLLY M C CULLOCH

Philip Johnson’s Not Glass Houses The legendary architect and his companion, the curator David Whitney, spent their weekends in the world’s most famous transparent box. Or did they?

BY ALEXANDRA LANGE PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEAN KAUFMAN

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WHERE THE HEART IS Philip Johnson’s ‘‘Glass House’’ refers ambiguously both to his iconic residence in New Canaan, Conn., and to the 49-acre property which comprised eight other buildings, including this house, called Grainger, which was used as a sitting room.

Opposite: Johnson, left, with his partner, the art curator and collector David Whitney, photographed by Mariana Cook on the Glass House property in 1995.

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NOT SO TRANSPARENT Clockwise from left: the world-famous Glass House, completed in 1949, was not the couple’s sole residence on the property; the Sculpture Gallery, built in 1970, holds works from the likes of Frank Stella and Robert Morris; the postmodern one-room Library, built in 1980, where Johnson often worked; the Gehryesque Da Monsta gatehouse, completed in 1995; the interior of Grainger, the 18th-century farmhouse used mostly for watching TV.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were two:

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HEN PHILIP JOHNSON’S Glass House in New Canaan,

Conn., was featured in Life magazine soon after its completion in 1949, architects and designers downed martinis at the Oyster Bar, pondering the future of the International Style. But that probably wasn’t what most people were thinking about as they looked at the pictures. They likely leaned back in their Barcaloungers and wondered: How could he actually live in a clear box, without walls, without privacy, without any stuff?

The answer was that despite our indelible impression of Johnson, the owlish man in the dapper suit and those spectacles, spending his incredibly long life (he died at age 98 in 2005) in the 1,800-square-foot transparent rectangle, silhouetted against a backdrop of greenery that he called ‘‘expensive wallpaper,’’ he never really did live in the Glass House. At least not in the selfcontained sense in which the rest of us occupy our homes.

Instead, the Glass House was merely the focal point of what eventually grew to be a veritable architectural theme park on 49 meticulously tended acres, comprising 14 structures, in which Johnson and David Whitney, the collector and curator who met him in 1960 and became his life partner, and who died just months after Johnson, enjoyed their impossibly glamorous weekend existence.

From the bunkerlike Brick House where Johnson often slept and the tiny, turreted, postmodern Library where he worked surrounded by architecture books, to Calluna Farms, the 1905 shingled farmhouse and the subterranean art gallery, the collection of buildings formed Johnson’s idea of the perfect deconstructed home. When the Glass House compound, a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, reopens for tours in May after its usual winter break, the public will for the first time be able to visit two additional structures of the 14 — Calluna Farms and Grainger, the cozy 18th-century timberframe house the couple used as a TV room — at last offering a more nuanced picture of what life really was like behind glass.

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the Glass House and the Brick House, both about 50 feet long and finished within months of each other in 1949 on a five-acre plot, with a 90-foot-wide grassy court separating them. History has downplayed the Brick House — from the outside it’s plain and it doesn’t fit well with the people-in-glass-houses narrative — but Johnson always knew it would be impossible to live entirely in the open, so he built a place to get some privacy.

The rest of the buildings came naturally, if gradually. The idea of having a slew of small houses for different activities, moods and seasons, complemented by decorative ‘‘follies,’’ was Johnson’s conception for the site from early on. He called it a ‘‘diary of an eccentric architect,’’ but it was also a sketchbook, an homage to architects past and present, and to friends like the dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein, after whom Johnson named one of

the follies he built on the property, a 30-foot-high tower made of painted concrete blocks.

In contrast to their whirlwind weekday world in Manhattan, Johnson and Whitney saw life in New Canaan as perpetual camping, albeit of a luxurious, minimalist sort. Neither Grainger nor the 380-square-foot Library has a bathroom, though both are air-conditioned, unlike the Glass House, which relies on cross ventilation. It originally had heating pipes in the ceiling and the floor, but the ceiling pipes reportedly froze early on and were never adequately repaired. To compensate, on particularly cold winter days the temperature of the water flowing through the radiant heated floors was turned up to nearly 200 degrees. ‘‘You couldn’t go in there with bare feet,’’ Port Draper, the contractor who maintained the house for many years, recalled in The Times in 2007. Johnson was unbothered by the house’s leaks, a problem endemic to a flat roof. Frank Lloyd Wright once referred to one of his houses as a ‘‘two-bucket house,’’ according to Robert A. M. Stern, to which Johnson gaily replied, ‘‘Oh, that’s nothing, Frank. Mine’s a four-bucket house. One in each corner.’’

While the Glass House was designed with areas for dining, living and sleeping, loosely divided by low cabinetry and a brick cylinder holding the chimney and bathroom, it functioned more as a living space, an occasional office for Johnson and a place to throw parties (lots of them, attended in the early years by a coterie of young Yale architecture students, and later by the likes of Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Fran Lebowitz and Agnes Gund). The house was astonishingly tchotchke-free. ‘‘I don’t think clutter was allowed,’’

the painter Jasper Johns, a friend of both men, once said. ‘‘One was always aware of their ruthless elegance.’’

The Brick House was originally divided into three rooms — with real walls — each with a porthole window. It was intended for guests, but Johnson soon realized the problem with a guest house is you wind up with overnight guests; besides, the sun blasted into the Glass House at sunrise. So in 1953, he remodeled the Brick House, making his first break with modernism by creating a luxurious, cocoonlike master bedroom, with a vaulted ceiling and Fortuny-covered walls and plush carpet, as well as a reading room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The bedroom’s slender columns, and the Pavilion he designed for the pond in 1962, both read as trial runs for the thin, white, shapely architecture of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

Johnson’s homosexuality was an open secret for decades, and some historians have interpreted the Brick House interior as camp, and its exterior as a closet. Once asked whether the Glass House was exhibitionist, Johnson observed, tartly, that as it had no basement, he didn’t have to confine his sex life to below grade.

Given the privacy the property affords, and all those nonglass houses, he hardly needed to.

For Johnson, the landscape — both viewed from inside the Glass House and as he walked briskly from one building to another — was as important as the structures. There are only two pieces of art from Johnson’s collection in the Glass House: an Elie Nadelman sculpture and a landscape from the school of the 17th-century artist Nicolas Poussin, on a stand in the middle of the space. The painting was a great inspiration to Johnson — he removed and trimmed trees on the area around the house to create more orderly views, allowed some grasses to grow tall while others were close-cropped. Richard Kelly, who did the moody lighting for Johnson and Mies van der Rohe’s Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, collaborated with Johnson on lighting the area around the house, ensuring that at night, the outside would come alive.

THE SPARENESS OF the Glass House makes it hard to

think about messy things like eating, but even the wiry Johnson needed sustenance: Whitney, an accomplished

Johnson and Whitney used Post-it notes to update each other on their whereabouts during the day: ‘Gardening up above, love you.’

‘Taking a nap, heart heart heart.’

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amateur chef 33 years younger than Johnson, cooked for them at times in the tiny Glass House kitchen. After Johnson bought Calluna Farms for Whitney in 1981, the couple’s domestic life expanded to the southern edge of the property. Whitney got rid of the suburban pool and tennis court, reduced five bedrooms to two and kept only one bathroom.

Calluna’s kitchen had no dishwasher, and only a modest refrigerator, alongside Whitney’s impressive collection of copper cookware and dozens of well-worn cookbooks. Whitney made a famous fish chowder luncheon every year when his peony and iris garden burst into bloom, and he was as exacting in his housewares as he was in his art and design collections (his estate was sold at Sotheby’s in 2006 to add to the endowment for the property).

By the 1980s, the two men had settled into a cozy routine.

On Saturday mornings Whitney might rise at Calluna Farms, get their beloved keeshonds, Alice and James, and stroll across to find Johnson, already working, either at the dining table in the Glass House or in the Library, built in 1980, with its walls of architecture books, including volumes on Sir Edwin Lutyens, J. J. P. Oud and Peter Eisenman. Whitney would then spend much of the day gardening. On winter afternoons, when the temperature hovered below freezing, Whitney and Johnson would sometimes repair to the Glass House and turn on the fountain in the pond down the hill from the house, for fun. Water, blown by the wind, would cling to the leaves and freeze, providing an instant sparkling winter wonderland.

The two men used Post-it notes to update each other on their whereabouts during the day, often stuck to the leather-top desk in the Glass House, ‘‘almost like an intercom system,’’ says Christy MacLear, the former executive director of the property: ‘‘Gardening up above, love you,’’ and ‘‘Taking a nap, heart heart heart.’’ They usually ate lunch together in New

BURIED TREASURES Clockwise from right: the entrance to the subterranean Painting Gallery; the interior of Calluna Farms with its lace curtains and chairs designed by Prouvé, Le Corbusier and Thonet; Calluna Farms, the shingle-style farmhouse purchased by Johnson in 1981 to serve as Whitney’s residence; the bedroom in the Brick House, designed by Johnson in 1953, features vaulted ceilings, Fortuny-covered walls and a hand-woven carpet; the Lincoln Kirstein Tower, a 30-foot folly on the property that Johnson used to climb; a window by the artist Michael Heizer at the back of Grainger, facing the peony and iris garden.

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Johnson called the property a ‘diary of an eccentric architect,’ but it was also a sketchbook, an homage to architects past and present.

Canaan, where the Bluewater Cafe or Taste of Asia stood in for Johnson’s corner table at the Four Seasons. In the afternoon, they would read or play cards in the Glass House.

Grainger, bought by Whitney in 1990, became the couple’s version of a man cave. He stripped it down to its 18th-century footprint, painted it matte-black and installed a striking Michael Heizer window etched with mysterious lines.

It had an early Pioneer flat-screen TV, but no bathroom. Sitting in coordinated, bodacious plaid chairs designed by Mattia Bonetti, Johnson and Whitney watched Stanley Kubrick films, ‘‘Easy Rider’’ and ‘‘The Graduate,’’ or noodled with custom-made wooden puzzles of artworks, some of which they owned, including a nine-panel portrait by Andy Warhol.

Sometimes, as the light waned, they would end their day with a visit to the Painting or Sculpture Galleries.

Whitney, over his years with Johnson (the two met when the 54-year-old architect gave a lecture at Brown;

21-year-old Whitney came up afterward and was invited on a tour of the Glass House), became an important art advisor and independent curator. By 1965, the couple had acquired so much art that Johnson designed the Painting Gallery to give it room to breathe.

The subterranean gallery is an artwork itself — an earthwork — cut into the hillside above the Glass House. Inside, paintings by Johns, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol, who Whitney talked to regularly on the phone, were displayed on rotating panels, like giant flipbooks. In 1970, Johnson added the Sculpture Gallery at the north end of the property.

DESPITE THE extraordinary

portfolio of buildings he left behind, according to the Glass House director Henry Urbach, Philip Johnson never thought of himself as a master architect. A fair number of critics agree, citing the excesses of the AT&T Building and reminding us that the Glass House itself was derivative of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which Johnson openly acknowledged as an inspiration. But he was undoubtedly one of the greatest curators of the 20th century, bringing together artists, builders, architects and the people with the money, taste and guts to commission works of art made of I-beams, concrete, glass, marble and the occasional leaky roof. ‘‘I guess I can’t be a great architect,’’ Johnson once said. ‘‘Great

architects have a recognizable style. But if every building I did were the same, it would be pretty boring.’’

The Glass House — always wise in the ways of branding, Johnson preferred that the entire compound be referred to as such — may be his supreme achievement in the art of not being boring. A living museum of American style, it’s a monument to his endlessly inquisitive and acquisitive nature.

Johnson and Whitney may not have lived exclusively in the Glass House, but they cherished it, and the Glass House, in all its flawed beauty, returned the favor by securing the architect’s place in the public imagination. After the property was given to the National Trust, MacLear remembers opening a knife drawer in the pantry of Calluna and finding a pair of Johnson’s signature glasses. It was, she recalls, a near-religious moment, and she carefully took them to the estate’s executor, ‘‘like holding a baby bird.’’

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PRODUCTION: BRACHFELD. DIGITAL TECH: EDOUARD MALFETTES. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: ANTONI CIUFO, ALEXANDRE JARAS. STYLIST'S ASSISTANT: CARLOS NAZARIO. HAIR ASSISTANT: ROGER BRYAN KERR

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A LOCAL

It might not be as flashy as Dubai or Qatar — but Sharjah has become a creative hub, thanks to a sheikh with a penchant for botany and his daughter, Hoor Al Qasimi, whose talent lies in gentle transgression.

INTERNATIONAL ART SCENE

BY CAROL KINO PORTRAITS BY BHARAT SIKKA

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OPENING IMAGE: MAIDER LÓPEZ, FOOTBALL FIELD, 2007, INSTALLATION VIEW/ PHOTO BY ALFREDO LOPEZ, IMAGE COURTESY OF SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION

SHEIKHA HOOR AL QASIMI’S presentations

about the Sharjah Biennial, the international art exposition she has overseen since 2003, tend to begin in the same way. ‘‘Let me explain where Sharjah is,’’ she says, pointing to a map of the United Arab Emirates. The only emirate of seven to span the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, Sharjah ranges from desert and mountains in the west to beaches and mangroves in the east. Like the other emirates, it is ruled by a hereditary monarchy; the sheikha is the youngest daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi. But bundled into a big sweater and wearing thick-rimmed glasses, Hoor Al Qasimi resembles not so much a member of royalty as a student of painting, which she once was, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Last December she was back at the Slade for a day of studio visits and to give a lecture, following a month of meetings with artists and curators that had sent her zigzagging through Europe, Jordan and the Persian Gulf.

Like her schedule, Qasimi’s identity traverses continents. Conversant in more than seven languages, including Japanese and Mandarin, she lives the typically hyper-scheduled life of an international curator, ricocheting between time zones in search of local knowledge.

At a time when biennials have dizzyingly proliferated, merging to create an art-starstudded brand of globalism, the Sharjah Biennial — which Qasimi inherited from her father, who founded it in 1993 — has come to be known as a local laboratory, the kind of event to which artists dream of being invited to make work and curators flock to find new talent. It also illustrates the fact — which can sometimes seem a paradox — that great contemporary art can thrive quite nicely within a conservative Islamic state.

In a darkened lecture hall at the Slade, Qasimi projected an image onto the screen: the square outside the Sharjah Art Museum marked up like a soccer field. The 2007 installation by the Spanish artist Maider López was, like much of the art the biennial features, socially engaged, humorous, applying a gentle scrutiny to the art world and its institutions. Another slide, depicting the courtyard of a 19th-century house covered with bloodstains that revealed themselves to be delicately painted crimson flowers — a 2011 installation by the Pakistani neo-miniaturist Imran Qureshi — recalled the Arab Spring’s uprisings, at the time only a few hours’ drive away. ‘‘Everyone says Sharjah is very conservative,’’ Qasimi told her students.

Dress codes are stricter there than in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, and alcohol harder to procure. ‘‘But the performances do push the limits.’’ In 2011, the popular Mauritanian griot Dimi Mint

Abba had sung one of her last concerts in a building overlooking the seaside promenade known as the Corniche before a dancing crowd.

How hard to push limits in Sharjah has at times been a matter of controversy. For now, Qasimi’s message to students was of the importance of creative flexibility, of feeling things out as you go. The biennial’s upcoming edition, organized by the American curator Eungie Joo, she explained, would take place in an abandoned ice factory near the east coast and in a building shaped like a flying saucer, among other locations, but the details would be left open until nearer the opening. ‘‘People always ask, ‘What’s your future plan?’ ’’ she said. ‘‘We always say, ‘We don’t know. We experiment.’ ’’ Of course, it also helps if the place where you’re experimenting is ruled with something of a free spirit. About the flying saucer — a 1970s edifice that was at one point a grocery store, then a Saudi fast-food chain — Qasimi explained that she had recently wondered how it came to be there in the first place. ‘‘So I asked my dad, ‘Who decided to build a flying saucer in the middle of the city?’ ’’ she said.

To her surprise and delight, the sheikh had responded, ‘‘Me.’’ QASIMI’S FATHER, who took the throne in 1972 after his older

CULTURAL CAPITAL Opposite: a 2007 installation by the Spanish artist Maider López that turned the square outside the Sharjah Art Museum into a soccer field.

Below: Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, who in 2003 took over the biennial her father, the ruler of Sharjah, founded in 1993.

brother’s assassination in an attempted coup, is known for his artistic sensibility. While other Emirati rulers focused on business, trade and projects such as building the world’s largest artificial harbor or tallest skyscraper, the sheikh steered his emirate toward culture, which he deemed ‘‘essential to the spirit.’’ A playwright and author with two Ph.D.s, he formed theater companies, founded the U.A.E.’s first coed university and, in 1982, launched an international book fair that still creates traffic jams. In a 1979 speech, he told an audience that it was ‘‘time to stop the ‘concrete revolution’ of civil construction in the country and replace it with a ‘cultural revolution.’ ’’ In 1980, the sheikh backed the formation of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, founded by the U.A.E.’s avant-garde, including conceptual artists such as Hassan Sharif, his protégé Mohammed Kazem and the land artist Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim — providing them with a place to meet and hold classes: an early model, perhaps, for the sort of low-key patronage his daughter’s Sharjah Art Foundation now offers. (Kazem, who joined the society as a teenager, told me that he thought the sheikh knew

‘‘every single person in the city.’’) In 1993, the sheikh began opening museums — of archeology, art, calligraphy — and, in the same year, inspired by a similar enterprise in Cairo, founded the Sharjah Biennial.

When Qasimi is in Sharjah, she often discusses ideas with the sheikh at 4 a.m., when he rises each morning to write. The day after her talk at the Slade, over a coffee near Tate Modern, she spoke proudly of his wildlife preserve and the capital’s Heritage and Arts Area, which now incorporates artists’ studios and newly built exhibition spaces. He is also a poet, she said, which is why ‘‘every time he gives speeches you get chills.’’ He had encouraged his children to pursue their own creative ambitions, perhaps because his dreams of studying botany had been derailed by his brother’s death when, as Qasimi put it, ‘‘he had to come and take his job.’’ (Qasimi’s twin brother, Khalid, runs the U.K.-based men’s wear label Qasimi.)

Reem Fadda, the associate curator of Middle Eastern art for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, calls Sharjah ‘‘a little haven for a lot of artistic practices. Traditional values are important, but it is very open-minded when it comes to cultural production.’’ In practice this has meant that Sharjah’s artistic output has been not radically political but rather formally experimental; Fadda noted that conceptual art, performance art and land art all emerged in the area before they became prominent in the Levant. (Qasimi, who is proud of this history, intends to focus on the country’s early years in the National Pavilion U.A.E. at this year’s Venice Biennale; she is the first Emirati national to curate the show.)

But the Sharjah art scene is often overshadowed by glittery goings-on elsewhere in the U.A.E. and Qatar, its neighbor to the west, even if reports of harsh conditions for migrant workers on building sites have somewhat dimmed their luster. In recent years, the region’s self-reinvention as a cultural destination has included plans for the cultural district of Saadiyat Island, which will hold outposts of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. Meanwhile, Qatar, the world’s richest country by per-capita G.D.P., has a growing number of museums and is home to several megamillion-dollar projects by Western stars such as Richard Serra and Damien Hirst. Activities there are now overseen by the glamorous 31-year-old Her

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SOCIAL EXPERIMENT From top: Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi (center) circa 1985 outside the Emirates Fine Arts Society, the country’s first artists’ association; the artist Walid Al Wawi in his Sharjah Art Foundation studio.

Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, sister to the emir and chair of the Qatar Museums, an organization that collects art so voraciously that it’s been held responsible for inflating the contemporary art market worldwide.

In contrast to that other famous ‘‘art sheikha,’’ Qasimi has offered a more modest support, helping new work by less heralded artists get made and shown. She remembers the moment she was put in charge of the biennial as sudden and mysterious although one suspects that her position as the ruler’s daughter might have had something to do with it. She was 22 and the only woman on the committee. The controversial proposals she put to the board — to seed projects throughout the city, bring in outside curators, incorporate performance and video, make the whole thing more political — were inspired in part by Documenta 11, the huge international exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, which she had visited in 2002, shortly after graduating from the Slade. With the opening of the sixth edition of the biennial only six months away, half of the longtime members quit.

WILLIAM WELLS, the co-founder and executive director of

Townhouse, one of Cairo’s first independent art spaces, visited Qasimi’s first biennial, which opened on April 8, 2003, the day before American troops formally occupied Baghdad. ‘‘We all rushed there to criticize, and we were shocked,’’ he confessed. ‘‘People began to realize that there was an opportunity,’’ he said, ‘‘that these people with influence and money, they were on the same page as us — they actually wanted to show the work we wanted to show.’’

The sheikh’s biennial by all accounts had been a rather staid affair, housed in a convention center with national-pavilion-style areas filled with artists recommended by government ministries, heavy on neomodernist painting and sculpture, the same names repeated each year. Together with the British curator Peter Lewis, who’d been active in the London artist-run DIY gallery movement of the 1990s, Qasimi abolished the national-pavilion model. ‘‘I thought, so many people live in the diaspora now and you can’t really pinpoint where people are from,’’ she explained. Artists helped put the show together. Farhad Moshiri, a Tehran-based artist whose crystal-encrusted paintings have gone on to reach up to nearly $1 million at auction, and his wife worked frantically alongside Qasimi, pasting up labels and sweeping floors until the doors opened.

CENTER IMAGES, LEFT TO RIGHT: COURTESY OF H.H. SHEIKH DR. SULTAN BIN MOHAMMED AL QASIMI; SUSAN HEFUNA, SHARJAH AFAZ DRAWINGS, 2013/2014, INSTALLATION VIEW/PHOTO BY ALFREDO LOPEZ, IMAGE COURTESY OF SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION; ALAIN SAINT-HILAIRE

Qasimi’s decisions since then — to hire an artistic director, the curator Jack Persekian, in 2004; to offer lesser-known artists residencies and commissions; to institute the ‘‘March Meeting,’’ an annual discussion series focusing on the future of art in the Arab world; to establish a foundation in 2009 for year-round projects — have extended the biennial’s purview. Having previously remained in the background, Qasimi has in the last few years become a more visible leader of the operation. On recent visits to Townhouse, Wells observed, she had ‘‘wooed all of our artists over’’ by being ‘‘incredibly personal and charming, without any kind of pretension at all.’’

Talking to Qasimi over several days in London, I got the distinct impression that she had stepped into her role reluctantly. ‘‘I didn’t think this was going to be my job,’’ she told me more than once.

One day, she hoped, she might return to painting. Still, it is clearly a job she relishes. Toward the end of her stay, we visited a Saudi artists’ collective headquartered in a warehouselike space in Southwest London, where she happily chatted in Arabic with Ahmed Mater, one of the founders, and his wife, the artist Arwa Al Neami, both visiting from Saudi Arabia. They were meeting to discuss Mater’s ongoing commission for the Sharjah Art Foundation. ‘‘100 Found Objects’’ chronicles the modern history of Mecca and its transformation into a luxury development, using objects found in the rubble of its building sites: videos, View-Master slides, postcards, a policeman’s whistle. The three had visited the site together and Qasimi was proud to have snuck some old medals out of the country (‘‘with me, nobody suspects’’). Recalling her experience of the holy city, she added, ‘‘People think in the Gulf we all understand each other, but we do not.’’ ‘‘Think global, act local,’’ Mater joked.

QASIMI FAVORS SMALL transgressions over the ‘‘épater le bourgeois’’ kind of revolt that’s usually associated with contemporary art. ‘‘You don’t start a debate by offending someone,’’ she told me once. ‘‘You slowly push the boundaries.’’ We had been discussing the now-infamous installation entitled ‘‘It Has No Importance’’ by the Algerian writer Mustapha Benfodil, featured in the 2011 biennial, which paired religious and explicit sexual references. Placed near a

Qasimi’s first biennial opened on April 8, 2003, the day before American troops formally occupied Baghdad. ‘We all rushed there to criticize,’ said William Wells, who runs the independent art space Townhouse in Cairo, ‘and we were shocked.’

PUSHING BOUNDARIES Clockwise from below: the street sign, pictured in the 1970s, that inspired the slogan of this year’s biennial; ‘‘Sharjah Afaz Drawings,’’ an installation by Susan Hefuna last year; the artist Nasir Nasrallah in his studio in the Arts Area.

minority Shia mosque in Sharjah, it had provoked a public furor, upon which the sheikh had the piece removed and fired Persekian.

For many, the removal of the work constituted a worrying act of censorship. Others suggested that Persekian’s dismissal had been the result of his poor management. Qasimi was adamant that her father had done the right thing. ‘‘It was actually a democratic decision,’’ she said. ‘‘It was the public that asked us to remove it.’’

For Qasimi, the 2011 crisis forced her and the team to reaffirm their commitment to Sharjah, to ask themselves, as she put it, ‘‘Why are we doing this? Is it for the international art crowd or is it for the local crowd?’’ A boundary had been established, but with it came a new community-oriented energy. Audiences to the following biennial in 2013 noticed even more projects made in tandem with local groups, including the mostly Pakistani workers who usually install the exposition. ‘‘Dictums 10:120’’ by the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky was a performance that involved translating fragments of curatorial talks from an earlier biennial into Urdu, and asking those workers to sift through the artspeak for meaningful phrases, which were then set to Sufi devotional music. Thirty musicians and singers, all seated on pale blue cushions lining a narrow alleyway, performed the composition.

As the melody floated through the Heritage Area, people crowded around, straining to see them from nearby rooftops. ‘‘If it’s only for the international art crowd, we can be anywhere in the world,’’ Qasimi said. ‘‘We don’t have to be in Sharjah.’’

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MOSTLY TRUE needed four hours to get it into the notebook.

A few people did read my diary. I could have protected the document with a password or padlocked or hidden the computer, but I didn’t care enough to inconvenience myself. The diary wasn’t a trove of secrets; it was, simply, everything. I might as well have hidden myself from view.

I still don’t care whether anyone reads it.

I reread my diary throughout the day, as if to test whether my life is any better as literature, and then I revise the literature, and then I keep revising it as I keep writing it, as I do with all my work. The diary is the only piece of writing I’ve written — and continue to write — for an audience of zero.

After a decade or so, I began writing only in the present tense. Then the first person pronoun gradually dropped out of the text. For instance, today I wrote ‘‘Work on diary essay.’’ There’s less to remark upon and less to PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS CALCOTT say about that lessness. In 2001 I wrote 60,000 words. In 2014 I wrote 33,000.

Several years ago I realized that since the diary was an account of moments, it wasn’t an account of ongoing N MY LATE TEENS, overburdened by an excess of life, time, and that despite my obsessive work, I’d failed to I built a storage facility for it: a diary. After I wrote record most of my life. In dividing time into moments, things down I could safely forget them. It was the only I had to try to discern the beginnings and ends of them. relief I ever found, and I kept at it. I don’t keep a But the more I wrote, the less convinced I was that there routine, but the diary gets written daily — usually several ever was such a thing as a beginning or an end. Short times daily, even in transit, in hospitals and at parties. In tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer little black books and, as of this year, on my phone. Since did. What interested me was the kind of love to which the 1992 I’ve created a new text file on my computer every person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer New Year’s Day. Whatever I have written gets transcribed remembers quite how it began. Though I try to log only into the file and I throw the draft away. the first time he does yet another A little black book is a beautiful object, extraordinary thing, the diary is now but I don’t care about the objects; mostly about my son. Now I barely I care only about the words in them. exist in the diary anymore, compared A memoirist whose latest work, I meet people who consider to the way I lived in it a decade or two ‘‘Ongoingness: the End of a Diary,’’ forthcoming from Graywolf diary-keeping as virtuous as daily ago, but I keep writing it.

Press in March, is a meditation on the exercise or prayer or charity. ‘‘I’ve Sometimes I reread a passage journal she has kept for 25 years. tried for years,’’ they say. ‘‘I start a from a long time ago and see that I diary every January.’’ Or ‘‘I don’t have understood something perfectly at the discipline.’’ They imagine I have willpower or strength the moment of my first writing about it. And I realize that of character. ‘‘It would be harder for me not to write it,’’ thinking about it for months or years or decades has I try to explain. It doesn’t feel like (in one friend’s words) changed my perception of it, has changed my memory ‘‘a big fat piece of homework.’’ I write the diary instead of of it and has maybe even changed the significance of taking exercise, performing remunerative work or the event itself. volunteering my time to the unlucky. It’s a vice.

Maybe, I sometimes think, the best way to remember I used to harbor a continuous worry that I’d forget anything accurately is to write it down and forget it, and what had happened, that I’d fail to notice what was then, only at the last moment of your life, to recall it — happening. One afternoon I declined a ride from one city like listening to a broken tape by hand-feeding it one last to another with a friend who didn’t survive his 20s. I time through the tape player. During the age of the didn’t think I’d survive the afternoon without spending cassette tape, it seemed that everyone was talking about four hours on the bus back to college thinking and writing doing that. It was always some high romantic tale, the about what had happened during my trip. My memory only live recording of a secret show or the last letter was too full. It was an emergency. I had to empty the from a long-lost friend. I never did it. Maybe everyone reservoir right away. Nothing had happened, but I still was lying. No matter. It’s still a decent metaphor.

Two writers and one artist reflect on the slipperiest of all literary forms: their own diaries.

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STILL LIFES: MARKO METZINGER

Sarah Manguso

AUDIENCE OF ZERO Manguso, whose journals have spanned several laptops, lives in Los Angeles and uses her landlady’s piano as a desk.

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NO FILTER Ulman, pictured at the Hotel on Rivington in New York, learned pole dancing and faked breast augmentation surgery for her Instagram art project.

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S A TEENAGER, I was so shy that I couldn’t

articulate my desires to myself, let alone write them down. My mother used to open my mail, and I had no doubt that she would read anything I hid under the bed. So my diary became a way to pretend I was normal, to edit out the thoughts I didn’t want to be having. Eventually I stopped writing it. Now I just send long, confessional letters to a friend. I need an audience to make me explain myself.

But I’ve always loved reading other people’s diaries.

Growing up I was drawn to the autobiographical novels of the Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, who wrote about her childhood in Japan and China, with some artistic license, in books decorated with images of herself as a girl; she happened to look just like me. And I loved the ‘‘Claudine’’ novels by Colette, written in diary form and loosely based on the author’s life as a sensual young woman. I liked the idea that the artist live whatever she preaches just as later, I would make work by putting myself in strange situations rather than inventing out of nothing.

It’s interesting that one of the forms women have been most encouraged to write was traditionally meant to be kept private. A voyeuristic pleasure of mine is to seek out diaries published online. There are websites that women use to record their experience of fasting — the way, for instance, they become very lucid in the first three days and then fall apart, unable even to hold a pen. There are blogs in which sex workers describe their experiences of particular men in diaries that are at once essential for their colleagues’ safety and surprisingly literary. There are forums for people transitioning genders in which they document the way testosterone changes their perceptions, or how, as they take hormones to transition into women, they become more emotional. One of my week to look for the right hotels to shoot in, buy clothes, favorites is realself.com, where women can chronicle the get into character, take the photographs and return the process of undergoing cosmetic surgery in agonizing clothes. Photoshop can only take you so far; to get my detail, step by step. body into shape, I learned pole dancing.

I’ve always used my iOS photo album as a sketchbook.

I divided the project into episodes, phases in her story.

Making the images public forces me to keep them in In the second, ‘‘Amalia Ulman’’ had a break-up and — of order, and stops them from getting lost course, as all girls do when they split in a jungle of folders that I would from their nice college boyfriends never be able to revisit otherwise.

— went crazy. I staged her relationship Among the still lifes and portraits, with a sugar daddy, her descent into An artist who, for a 2014 project I take selfies — mostly to remind my drugs, the tearful breakdown and then called ‘‘Excellences & Perfections,’’ used Instagram to later self of where I’ve been. But after the apology to followers. I was create a fictional alter ego being contacted by men who seemed interested in the ‘‘fake natural’’ that fooled thousands of followers. to feel that they knew me from my aesthetic — those #nofilter, photographs alone, I began to worry #iwokeuplikethis images that, despite about my online presence, the lack of control I had over it. looking effortless, also happened to reveal people’s And so the performance that I now call ‘‘Excellences & beautiful houses, high-quality white sheets, good skin and Perfections’’ began. I decided to fake an Instagram lives of leisure. I faked her breast augmentation surgery. account to tell the story of a 25-year-old girl who was, in When it came time to post the final sequence of images I many ways, an absolute stereotype. The aesthetic of her had taken — in which the character returns to her loving feed was initially inspired by the Korean girls I saw on family, finds a new man and pulls herself together — Instagram who seemed obsessed with beauty; they liked I was on a meditation retreat. I have never felt a stronger flowers, straightened hair, pale skin. I devoted two days a disjunct between my fictional and real selves.

Since completing the project, I have returned to Facebook as myself, posting the sketchbook images that I didn’t publish during the time I was the fictional ‘‘Amalia Ulman.’’ I post them chronologically but with a lag of four months: pictures of L.A. when I’m in London, for instance, or of spring when it’s winter. It’s a small rebellion — more a confusion, really — but also a way of pointing out the manipulation inherent to social media, the way everyone’s public self, even in the most honest diary, is a fiction.

Amalia Ulman

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focused on what the poet Mary Ruefle calls ‘‘dailiness.’’

I read Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘Moments of Being’’; I read the gossipy journals about the 19th-century French literary scene kept by the Goncourt brothers Jules and Edmond; I read the World War II diary of Marie ‘‘Missie’’ Vassiltchikov. Missie (it is natural to feel, after reading a stranger’s diary, that you are on a first-name basis), a stateless and nearly penniless former Russian aristocrat turned employee of the German Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, was the assistant to a key conspirator in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler. Her diaries are considered one of the most detailed witness accounts of the Allied bombings of Berlin. She writes with detached clarity about hiding in basements and the sounds of people moaning under rubble. Given the risks she and the conspirators were taking, Missie could write about some things but not about others. Her daily survival reports were gripping to read — in spite and because of the fact they cleverly concealed the plot.

I was interested in writing closely and truthfully about things while concealing the plots that might lead to the wrong kind of scrutiny or identification.

I am a fairly private person; I am also more interested in other people’s lives than I am in my own. But I didn’t ODAY I WENT trespassing with children. want anybody (myself included) to feel spied upon Trespassing is a winter weekend activity like or betrayed. The challenge was to write candidly shoveling or starting a burn pile; it is a variety of about dailiness without revealing too much about upkeep. We are keeping up with the lives we are people — to simultaneously expose and protect. Taking not living. We are not living in big houses by the sea. If, my cue from Missie, I wrote a diary in code: not a along with our mittens, we were to have in our pockets a roman à clef but a journal à clef. few million dollars, however, these Recently I met an Italian artist lives could be ours. The houses are not who encases books in white plaster. only empty; they are for sale. So I He provided this service for an Italian reassured the children — we were aristocrat, a married woman who’d A novelist whose autobiographical not trespassers. We were windowhad the same lover for decades work, ‘‘The Folded Clock: a Diary,’’ shoppers. We window-shopped on one and who’d kept a diary about their forthcoming from Doubleday in April, is written in individual entries plot of land I have coveted for years. affair. Now in her 60s, she did not want that mostly begin ‘‘Today I.’’ I visit the house and its beach often. I to risk anyone reading her diary, but never leave without a souvenir. A bone. nor did she want to burn it or throw A rock. Today I made the children stop it away. She asked the artist to hide their screaming (they are convinced the abandoned house her diary in plaster and turn it into an innocuous-seeming contains a murderer) so that they could hear an important sculpture. She displays the plaster diary in her house. announcement. ‘‘Someday I will own this land,’’ I told Its value has shifted. It is an object of universality, a them. It is January 1, an occasion to make wild promises. blank, white book. People look at it and imagine their own Then I came home and tried to write an essay that was secrets in it, not hers. meant to explain why, after many decades of not writing a But a diary — even an encrypted one — inevitably diary, I started to keep one again. At the time, I had exposes the person who keeps it. Who she is can wildly recently escaped a diagnosis that would have rendered shift from day to day, and this is the liberation of a diary me not myself. When faced with the threat of becoming a over, say, the type of novels I have written in the past. different person if my body misbehaved, perhaps I These involved plots; they required concordance and understood that my body could no longer reliably act as a continuity. A diary, meanwhile, is an amalgam of stolen, medium for what it contained. This is (possibly) why mismatched pieces. The variable self that accrues on the I abandoned the elaborate plans I’d had for a novel and page is acquired in the same way I will acquire the land instead began a diary. Each day, whatever I wrote needed I vowed, on January 1, 2015, to own. Over the years, I will never to be bigger than the smallest of its parts. I knew steal it one rock and one bone at a time. from experience how small a diary could be. On March 31, 1978, at the age of 9, I started a diary in which each entry began with ‘‘Today I,’’ as in, ‘‘Today I walked to the gas station and got my bike tires fixed,’’ or ‘‘Today I took a bath and washed my hair.’’ For the next four and a half years, I accounted for every day of my life. On November 28, 1982, I stopped.

Eventually I got married. I got divorced. I got married.

I had children. Then it was 2012. On June 26, I wrote, ‘‘Today I ordered 10 toy stethoscopes from a party supply company.’’ I started reading other diaries, and also books

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Heidi Julavits

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SECRET CODE Julavits at home in New York with an array of notebooks, diaries, photographs and a necklace made from a bone found on a beach in Maine.

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Document

British Pottery A series of paintings by Leanne Shapton from the book ‘Lucie Rie: a Survey of Her Life and Work,’ edited by John Houston, Crafts Council, 1981.

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T: The New York Times Style Magazine

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