T Magazine Spring Men's 2010

The New York Times Style Magazine

true grit

MEN’S FASHION SPRING 2010 The actor Josh Brolin

in good company.

we teamed up with a handful of tried and true brands and a few legends in the making whose quality and authenticity can’t be beat. simply put, they’re our design heroes. get the full story at jcrew.com.

Two-button seersucker jacket.

Silk and linen T-shirt.

Cotton gabardine trousers.

Goatskin loafers.

1-800-441-4488 Hermes.com

prada.com

Still taken from ‘First Spring ‘ a film by Yang Fudong

654 Madison Avenue, New York

calvinklein.com Saks Fifth Avenue

MARCHON EYEWEAR INC. 1 800 544 1336 Style 7761S

www.giorgioarmani.com

h t o o Sm

O P E R A T O R

5TH AVE AT 54TH ST 375 BLEECKER ST 372 WEST BROADWAY 69 MAIN ST, EAST HAMPTON

MARIANO RIVERA wears the new Kei Jacket

212 767 0205 - newyork@canali.it - www.canali.it

1

JACKVICTOR.COM

Water and Windproof, Breathable Shell

Saks Fifth Avenue - Orvis -

www.rainforest.com

Neiman Marcus and other ďŹ ne stores

CONTENTS Men’s Fashion Spring 2010

T 39 REMIX

69 STRIP

It’s all about . . . John Lennon, scuba wear, off-the-wall rooms, dropcrotch pants, biomorphic lamps, rodent bow ties, rock-band T-shirts and the everlasting allure of classic cars.

It’s all in the jeans — and the khakis. Photographs by KT Auleta

51 GET

imaginarium, where sleight of hand is the house specialty. By Pilar Viladas. 80 Object Lesson. By Alice Rawsthorn. 82 The musician Matthew Herbert can make you dance to the sound of slaughtered chickens. By Jonathan Wing field. 84 Biblio File. By Holly Brubach.

86 Watches turn back the clock — to the ’80s. By David Colman.

The must-haves: a bag that’s going places, watches that glow with the flow, paisley mania, striped shirts. The Trophy: Zegna’s anniversary suit. The Takeaway: untailored tailoring. The New Collectibles. Style Map: Cape Town.

30

75 TALK 76 Crosscurrents. By Suzy Menkes. 78 Inside Daniel Arsham’s

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

blow a kiss. see where it lands.

LIVE IN CHINO

SHOP BananaRepublic.com 1.888.BRSTYLE

ямВy domestic.

LIVE IN CHINO

CONTENTS

MAGAZINE.COM Go to nytimes.com/tmagazine for the online T experience. Once you’re there, click on THE MOMENT, T’s blog spanning the universe of fashion, design, style and travel.

WEB EXCLUSIVE • ‘THE ORIGINALS’ A celebration of present-day icons of individuality, ‘‘The Originals’’ moves onto the Web this month, with portraits of the set designer Gary Card (above) and the stripperturned-screenwriter Diablo Cody, among others.

89 THE STITCHING POST Designed by Hermès

90 THE CHIC OF ARABY

WEB EXCLUSIVE • HORSEPLAY What? You’ve never wanted to play dress-up with a jockey, the owner of a Chicago auction house and a closet full of Hermès? Watch ‘‘Horsing Around With Hermès’’ right now online.

Looking for fashion’s new frontier? Go east, young man. Photographs by David Slijper

98 TOUGH ENOUGH Who knew Josh Brolin had a sensitive side?

Interview by Lynn Hirschberg. Photographs by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

102 PROFILE IN STYLE Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’ artistic director, is making the venerable French house more relevant than ever. By Armand Limnander

104 SAY IT IN FRENCH The actor Gaspard Ulliel channels the season’s Nouvelle Vague look.

Photographs by Paolo Roversi

110 RETRO MODERN Marc Newson’s new London home is part chalet, part spaceship. By William Shaw.

Photographs by Adrian Gaut.

WEB EXCLUSIVE • BUYING TIME A connoisseur’s guide to investment-grade watches that covers haggling, maintenance and how to make a horological pilgrimage to Geneva.

116 TIMELESS For Miguel Adrover, getting dressed is a sociological experiment.

On the cover • Photograph by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Fashion editor: Michael Philouze. Calvin Klein Underwear T-shirt, $30 (for a package of three). Go to cku.com.

Fashion assistant: Jorden Bickham. Hair by Christiaan using Kiehl’s. Grooming by Lisa Butler for NARS Cosmetics. Manicure by Deborah Lippmann for deborahlippmann.com at the Wall Group.

34

800-797-5489

CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR IN CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR ONL INE DIRECTOR

INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE AND VINOODH MATADIN The Dutch husband-and-wife duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have become the gold standard in fashion photography. In the past year, they’ve shot cover stories for Interview (Bjork), Paris Vogue (Kate Moss), V’s infamous ‘‘Size Issue’’ (Gabourey Sidibe) and now for yours truly (Josh Brolin, Page 98). Appearing before the camera for Lanvin Homme’s recent ad campaign, van Lamsweerde, covered in blood-red body paint, appears to be eating her husband’s face.

Their work gets its first retrospective this summer at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam.

EDITOR AT L A RG E

FASHION

FASHION DIRECTOR / M EN FA S H I O N DIRECTOR / WO M E N BE AUTY / STYLE DIRECTOR FASHION MARKET / ACCE SSORIE S EDITOR ASSOCIATE FA S H I O N EDITOR FASHION ASSIST ANTS

Armand Limnander Bruce Pask Anne Christensen Sandra Ballentine Melissa Ventosa Martin Bifen Xu Lindsey Gathright, Jason Rider

ART CRE AT IVE DIRECTOR SENIOR AR T DIRECTOR

DE SIGNERS PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

JONATHAN WINGFIELD In a sweaty Parisian boîte, circa 2000, Jonathan Wingfield first enountered the D.J.-provocateur Matthew Herbert (‘‘Bring In da Noise,’’ Page 82). ‘‘He had about 20 television sets onstage,’’ Wingfield recalls, ‘‘and at the end of the set he smashed them up, ripping his hands to shreds.’’

Wingfield once considered himself a ‘‘British hack,’’ but he’s now the features director of Numéro in Paris and also the founder of the ‘‘art and erotica’’ magazine Paradis, which recently printed Juergen Teller’s photos of Charlotte Rampling and Raquel Zimmermann, nude, in the Louvre. That curious coup took ‘‘months, and months, and months’’ of negotiations with the French bureaucracy. Encore!

SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

David Sebbah Christopher Martinez Natalie Do Nicole Huganir, Julie Mattei-Benn Kathy Ryan Judith Puckett-Rinella Scott Hall Natasha Lunn Rory Walsh

DESIGN DE SIGN EDITOR DEPUTY DE SIGN EDITOR MARKET EDITOR

Pilar Viladas Alix Browne Andreas Kokkino

TRAVEL T RAVEL EDITOR DEPUTY T RAVEL EDITOR

Maura Egan Jeffries Blackerby

FEATURES C O PY EDITORS

RE S E A RC H EDITORS

FE A T U RE S ASSOCIATE S

Ethan Hauser, Anita Gates, Eric Grode Joy Dietrich, John Cochran, Andrew Gensler, Andrew Gillings Adam Kepler, Stephen Heyman

PRODUCTION

KT AULETA In the eighth grade, the photographer KT Auleta put on a stonewashed Levi’s jean jacket, and it became a second skin. ‘‘I wear it for all seasons,’’ says the New York-based Auleta, 34. ‘‘In the winter, even under wool coats.’’

For this issue’s offhanded romp (‘‘The Casuals,’’ Page 69), Auleta documented the season’s answer to her American original — denim jackets

by Acne, April77 and Diesel. A self-taught fashion photographer (‘‘Someone just gave me a Yashica’’), Auleta’s pictures appear routinely in V, AnOther Man and Russian Vogue. She just completed ‘‘Runaround’’ (right), a short film about ‘‘a slutty American girl growing up in a small town,’’ which she’s now submitting to film festivals.

PRODUCTION MANAGER PRODUCTION EDITORS

Alison Colby Trina Robinson, Julia Röhl

ONLINE DEPUTY ONL INE DIRECTOR PRODUCERS

PHOTO P RO D U C E R WE B DE SIGNER

Christine Muhlke Joseph Plambeck, Seth Carlson, Sylvia Rupani-Smith Dangi Chu Francesco Bertelli

MAGAZINE.COM Go to nytimes.com/tmagazine for the online T experience, including ‘‘The Park,’’ our original Web film series. Once you’re there, click on THE MOMENT, T’s blog spanning the universe of fashion, design, style and travel.

BRUCE PASK In 1985, Bruce Pask, T’s men’s fashion director, left his home in Yuma, Ariz., to attend the ‘‘superpreppy’’ College of William & Mary, in Virginia. ‘‘I came from the desert,’’ he says. ‘‘What did I know from a duck boot?’’

Before a nearly 10-year stint at GQ, Pask was briefly a grad student (medieval studies) and a stock boy at Paul Smith. He has dreamed up fashion stories with photo giants like Nan Goldin (far left) and Paolo Roversi. In this issue, Pask discovered ‘‘the grittier side of Nouvelle Vague’’ in Prada’s cinematic, multilayered mesh, worn by the French actor Gaspard Ulliel (‘‘Say It in French,’’ Page 104). STEPHEN HEYMAN

WEB EXCLUSIVE • SCREEN TESTS Lynn Hirschberg, T’s editor at large, has a one-on-one chat with the actor Josh Brolin.

FROM TOP: MELANIE WARD; INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE AND VINOODH MATADIN, © INTERVIEW MAGAZINE; FROM JONATHAN WINGFIELD; © PARADIS MAGAZINE; FROM KT AULETA (2); PORTRAIT BY SCOTT SCHUMAN; NAN GOLDIN.

ISSUE EDITOR

SENIOR DE SIGNER

36

Stefano Tonchi Andy Port George Gene Gustines Horacio Silva Lynn Hirschberg

1.888.721.7219 - VERSACE.COM

REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

IT S ALL ABOUT...

John Lennon . . . Scuba Suits . . . Off-the-Wall Rooms . . . Drop-Crotch Pants . . . Hamster Lamps.

John Lennon, photographed in 1967 during the Magical Mystery Tour.

39

All You Need Is Luxe

M

idway through ‘‘Imagine: John Lennon,’’ the 1988 documentary, Lennon and his new bride, Yoko Ono, are seen prancing through a London airport clad in matching white pantsuits. As ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’’ plays in the background — the tune in which Lennon bemoans that he and Ono are criticized for looking like “two gurus in drag’’ — viewers get a glimpse of a media-savvy peacock.

The world’s constant gaze was clearly wearying for Lennon, but that was O.K. because he didn’t always take himself seriously. He knew how to have a good time and how to work a look. ‘‘He embodied the idea that the personal is political and demonstrated a fearless commitment to his ever-changing vision,’’ says the music journalist Alan Light. ‘‘He was willing to look silly, to reveal himself, to be guided by passion. He wore glasses.’’

Nearly 30 years after his death, ‘‘the ultimate, uncompromising pop artist’’ as Light describes him, is still everywhere. In Sam Taylor-Wood’s hotly anticipated new biopic, ‘‘Nowhere Boy,’’ a very young Lennon is seen trying out Buddy Holly glasses and defining the style that would inspire a million mod mop-tops, not to mention pointy black boots.

Thom Browne used the title song from 1968’s ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ (which will soon get a Robert Zemeckis big-screen remake) in the soundtrack of his spring show. Dries Van Noten had vibrant, Easterninspired prints that brought to mind Lennon’s global nomad period.

And his boho ’70s shag haircut and vintage army jackets continue to resonate with aspiring rock stars — cue Liam Gallagher, the Oasis singer whose line of parkas and urban gear made its debut last year.

It would be nice to think that the current fascination with Lennon is something more than a fleeting infatuation with his aesthetic. In a

1

Style peacocks John Lennon and Yoko Ono strut through a London airport after their honeymoon in 1969.

culture obsessed with irony and hollow celebrity, Lennon’s talent and earnestness — not to mention his strident political views and penchant for grand gestures, like taking out ads for peace — make him a figure worthy of being celebrated, even copied. Still, one can picture Lennon amused by a discussion of his fashion legacy. Not only was he at one time the most famous person in the world (sorry, Jesus), but he was also the weirdest. ‘‘I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything,’’ Lennon once announced. ‘‘I’ve always been a freak.’’

Imagine that. T. COLE RACHEL

2

3

1. Spring 2010 looks from Dries Van Noten, left, and Thom Browne. 2. Artwork from the Beatles’ ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ 1968. 3. Lennon and Ono in the 1970s. 4. Liam Gallagher of Oasis, performing in 2008.

40

4

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; CSU ARCHIVES/EVERETT COLLECTION/REX USA; EVERETT COLLECTION; DON ASHBY (2).

Nothing’s too good for a Working Class Hero.

TOM FORD EYEWEAR. 845 MADISON AVENUE NEW YORK AND SELECT OPTICAL STORES. WWW.TOMFORD.COM

A year after ‘‘Goldfinger,’’ James Bond reprised the scuba motif in 1965’s ‘‘Thunderball.’’

As scuba diving became a mainstream pursuit, Playboy dove into the trend with this 1971 cover.

RETURN ENGAGEMENT

Jacques Cousteau became the world’s most famous scuba diver with his ’60s TV show ‘‘The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.’’

For the man who has everything, Viktor & Rolf neoprene boots.

At Dsquared, colorful neoprene life vests became cool accessories.

Corey Glover, the lead singer of the band Living Colour, wore Body Glove neon scuba suits onstage.

GUCCI channeled ‘‘The Deep’’ with its scuba-inspired spring collection.

NOW WEARING • FASHION VICTIMS Fashion doesn’t get more vividly macabre than RP/Encore’s line of taxidermy accessories (rpencore.com). The artist Reid Peppard makes ghoulish bow ties and pendants from an assortment of rodents and birds collected from the London streets by her cat, Panasonic, and other eagle-eyed friends. ‘‘I get texts saying: ‘I’ve just found a dead pigeon on Old Street,’ ’’ says the 23 year-old Californian, whose beastly collections have names like Vermin, Park and Pet. ‘‘It takes chutzpah to wear my work, so most of my customers are men.’’ Still, her creations have been commissioned for Lady Gaga, and the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière has posted her work on his Facebook page. So next time you’re on the checkout line, wear a bow tie with a dead mouse and watch the crowds part — it casts a whole new light on the term ‘‘killer accessory.’’ AIMEE FARRELL

42

In the 1964 film ‘‘Goldfinger,’’ James Bond emerges from the sea and removes his scuba suit, only to reveal a party-perfect tuxedo underneath. This spring, Bond could simply wear his neoprene to the casino. Gucci translated the scuba look into leather vests and jackets, Dsquared showed neoprene life vests, and Italo Zucchelli at Calvin Klein transformed the utilitarian wet suit into modern outerwear.

The story of scuba diving began during World War II, when the French navy diver Jacques Cousteau co-invented the first successful aqualung, liberating the diver from connecting hoses; then, in 1952, the physicist Hugh Bradner followed up with the neoprene wet suit. A year later, the twins Bob and Bill Meistrell began their own wet-suit production, first under the name Dive N’ Surf Thermocline and later as Body Glove — a label that crossed over into fashion in 1985 with neon-colored swim- and sportswear.

More recently, Helmut Lang deconstructed the scuba look with colorful straps and zippers for his spring 2003 line; in the years since, Burberry has even shown Day-Glo neoprene trench coats. Meanwhile, fashion-forward men have stepped into neoprene boots and fluorescent sneakers from Raf Simons — a far easier sell than last year’s scuba shrugs.

For the less adventurous, a range of neoprene covers have become everyday accessories for Kindles, laptops and cellphones.

But don’t stop there. Many fetish enthusiasts have traded leather (so last century) for a full range of neoprene bondage wear; Roddenberry Dive Team even offers a range of ‘‘Star Trek’’-inspired wet suits. Clad as Captain Kirk in authentic ‘‘command yellow,’’ you could be the ultimate master of your own private universe. ROBERT E . BRYAN

TOP, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: PLAYBOY ARCHIVE/CORBIS; DON ASHBY; GETTY IMAGES; DON ASHBY; LIVIO MANCINELLI; AFP/GETTY IMAGES; EVERETT COLLECTION. BOTTOM: JENS MORTENSEN.

SCUBA-DO!

HUGO BOSS FASHIONS INC. Phone +1 212 940 0600 BOSS 0293/S BOSS Black

HUGO BOSS Online Store – coming soon w w w. h u g o b o s s . c o m

THE FUTURE’S SO BRIGHT...

3 ●

6 ● 4 ●

2 ●

5 ●

7 ●

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

Coming soon to a saloon (or brasserie) near you.

1. You might expect something out of ‘‘Tron’’ from a name like Man vs. Machine. But aside from a reflective silver trench coat, this New York label keeps things relatively low-key with 3-D appliqué T-shirts, treated denim and chromefinished leather. Go to manvsmachinenyc.com.

2. South Korea is becoming a new player in the fashion world, and partial credit goes to the General Idea founder Bumsuk Choi, who was the youngest designer to join Seoul fashion week.

Choi now shows his laser-sharp, graphics-laden, mostly black collections in New York. At Oak. 3. Blazers with matching shorts might conjure images of accountants on golf courses, but in the hands of the German-born, New York-based Siki Im, the look feels modern. His all-black minimalism may have something to do with his stints with Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Lang. At Project No. 8.

4. Johanna Bloomfield calls her utilitarian line Johannes Faktotum, which loosely means ‘‘jackof-all-trades’’ in German. This season she went

LEE CARTER

fishing, using muted and watery colors for her light parkas, cable-knit sweaters and steel-toed galoshes. Go to johannesfaktotum.com.

One day, genetic researchers may be able to manipulate cow cells into growing cruelty-free in-vitro leather, or even magical disembodied hamburgers. But in the meantime, they’ve been teaching Joris Laarman — the science-obsessed Dutch designer whose computer-generated Bone Chair caused a frenzy among collectors in 2007 — how to put their experiments to good use. Laarman’s new biomorphic furniture, on view now at the New York gallery Friedman Benda, includes a lamp coated in genetically modified hamster cells that have been engineered to light up like those inside a firefly (below). Housed in a glass dome ‘‘fed’’ liquid nutrients and an enzyme, the lamp glows without electricity. ‘‘If products can be grown in a lab, we won’t have to use natural resources,’’ Laarman says. ‘‘It’s the most perfect production method there is.’’ Granted, the lamp’s cells run according to their own biorhythm, ‘‘charging’’ during the day and emitting light at night — so there’s no on and off switch. But hey, anything’s better than compact fluorescents. MONICA KHEMSUROV

5. For his Petrou\Man label, the Central Saint Martins graduate Nicolas Petrou takes vests, pants and blazers and puts them into a kind of sartorial blender. The results are suits shredded within an inch of their lives. Go to petrouman.com.

6. Ben and Lee Copperwheat, cousins, are doing it for themselves. Their London-to-NewYork Copperwheat line merges Ben’s printmaking know-how with Lee’s expertise in English tailoring. The results include Scottish ‘‘tartan’’ made out of New York Post articles.

Go to copperwheat.us.

7. The Canadian brothers Doug and Ben Burkman, of Burkman Bros, make relaxed, beach-worthy, Indian-meets-Hawaiian basics. Think chinos, vaguely exotic madras shirts, ikat shorts and shell buttons. Go to burkmanbros.com.

Clean Your Plate Piero Fornasetti famously adorned his dinnerware with more than 350 variations of a single face: that of the 19th-century singer Lina Cavalieri, known as opera’s greatest beauty. On the other hand, should you set your table with a new MexICON Platter from the design studio DFC Mexico City, you might discover a slightly more startling sight — the face of the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, say, or the eyepatch-wearing ’70s soap star Catalina Creel, who resembles ‘‘an old woman turning into a fly,’’ according to the DFC co-founder Tony Moxham. He and Mauricio Paniagua, known for trippy creations like their three-foot-tall table in the shape of a grasshopper, conceived the series as homage to Fornasetti while introducing the world to their hometown heroes. The rest of the cast includes the poet Pita Amor, the architect Luis Barragán (left) and — the lookers of the bunch — the actors Andrés García and Verónica Castro. The group originally included Diego Luna and Salma Hayek, Moxham says, ‘‘but we took them out because they’re not as legendary.’’ Available at thefutureperfect.com. MONICA KHEMSUROV

44

1. FROM MAN VS. MACHINE; 2. RANDY BROOKE; 3. ISABEL ASHA PENZLIEN; 4. JEFFREY COHEN; 5. FROM PETROU\MAN; 6. JASON MICKLE; 7. ROLAND BELLO. ILLUSTRATION BY DEANNE CHEUK. LAMP: JORIS LAARMAN STUDIO; PLATE: TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES.

1 ●

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

DHOTI

HAREM

ZOUAVE

SAMURAI

With its moderately dropped crotch, the dhoti is the default style for fans of the genre. It first appeared on the Indian subcontinent during the first millennium B.C. as a long piece of cloth, wrapped and tucked at the waist, resembling nothing more than a baggy diaper. Riccardo Tisci has championed the style at Givenchy; for his current men’s collection, he gave it an Arab homeboy spin by cutting it from kaffiyeh-print jersey cloth.

MC Hammer fans will remember his fondness for a full leg, but the harem’s history stretches back hundreds of years, deriving its form from South Asia’s salwar pant.

The harem’s modern incarnation is extremely baggy, with a tapered, often elasticized hem. John Galliano sent out a cropped, shimmering, gold-adorned pair, perfect for global-minded fashion peacocks.

The Zouave battalions of the French Army’s North African front were recruited from the Algerian tribe of Berbers known as the Zouaoua, for whom the Zouave pant is named.

Considering the desert climate in which they lived, the dropped crotch was a comfy fit, allowing soldiers to fight without feeling constricted.

Issey Miyake’s Dai Fujiwara adapted the style, which features an elongated crotch that stops just shy of the samurai’s extremes.

The wide-legged Japanese hakama pant is traditionally the warrior’s outfit of choice, but Nicolas Ghesquière revisited a variation at Balenciaga that technically doesn’t even have a crotch to drop — the bottom seam of the pant is of uniform length, like the bottom of a triangle, with a cutout on each side for the feet to come through. This is the trend at its most extreme.

OFF THE WALL Blank space is a blank canvas for Ji Lee. ‘‘I’m interested in exploring areas like the back of business cards and ceilings — why are they left empty?’’ says the renegade graphic designer, who is currently working as creative director of Google’s branding and marketing unit, the Creative Lab. To fill the void above, Lee creates miniature upside-down interiors that he calls ‘‘parallel worlds,’’ placing them on domestic ceilings (on commission) and corporate offices (on the sly). ‘‘Decorating ceilings was a common art form that somehow got lost through the reductionism of modernism,’’ he says. The Lilliputian lairs are meticulously furnished with objects that tell a story about the ‘‘room’’ and its imaginary owner.

One installation shows the apartment of a rocker, complete with a guitar, amp, microphone and Jimi Hendrix poster. Another, installed in a home with two small children, features a petit bourgeois living room with velvet sofas and tiny glass cabinets filled with strange furry objects made of cat hair. ‘‘The kids love it,’’ Lee says. ‘‘That’s the greatest compliment.’’ Go to pleaseenjoy.com. JOHANNA LENANDER 46

RUNWAY FROM LEFT: GORUNWAY.COM (3); FROM BALENCIAGA; MC HAMMER: HENRY DILTZ/CORBIS; ROOM: PARALLEL WORLD: ROCKER’S ROOM FROM JI LEE.

The dropped crotch is shaping up as the new decade’s most influential trouser trend. But as pant fronts fall, even dedicated followers of fashion are hard pressed to describe the differences between dhoti, samurai, Zouave and harem pants. Some critics claim the dropped crotch screams fashion victim, but in fact it owes its exaggerated form to utility. Designed for easy movement and comfort in hot climates, it’s an unexpectedly practical wardrobe addition.

And you never have to worry about a wedgie. SAMEER REDDY

TO BE ONE OF A KIND

BRIONI.COM

Start Your Engines

LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE BOYS FOUR WHO’VE DESIGNED FOR WOMEN CROSS OVER. WILL IT WORK?

Tee Time

In the introduction to “Ripped: T-Shirts From the Underground” (Universe, $30), the no-wave diva Lydia Lunch traces the history of the T-shirt from its silver screen progenitors (Marlon Brando and James Dean) to a London clothing shop called Sex. It was there, circa 1975, that the promoter Malcolm McLaren and the fashion visionary Vivienne Westwood transformed ‘‘four juvenile delinquents who had been caught on numerous occasions pilfering overpriced T-shirts’’ into the Sex Pistols.

Thirty-five years on, the D.I.Y. iconography of underground music endures, so much so that the 200 vintage tees in ‘‘Ripped’’ — from acts like Gary Numan, Dead Kennedys, Talking Heads and Plasmatics — look oddly familiar, no doubt thanks to what the book calls ‘‘the onset of ironic consumerism.’’

In addition to the tees, which come from the New York vintage impresario Cesar Padilla’s treasure trove, the book collects memories from post-punk figures like Kid Congo Powers, whose Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds T-shirt reminds him of a 1986 stint with the band in Berlin: ‘‘You can see the yellow junkie sweat stains in the armpits.’’ Those aren’t available at Urban Outfitters — yet. STEPHEN HEYMAN 48

1 ●

2 ●

3 ●

4 ●

1. Lars Nilsson, who has headed Bill Blass, Nina Ricci and Gianfranco Ferré, introduced Mr Nils, featuring houndstooth suits, graphic knits and cool parkas lined in Swedish curly lamb. When conceiving the line, Nilsson checked his women’s ideas at the door. ‘‘The osmosis works from men’s into women’s,’’ he says. ‘‘But the other way round almost always results in ridicule.’’ Available in July at Project No. 8b.

2. Roland Mouret might disagree. Ever heard of a men’s shirt with a draped collar? Mouret says it will do away with the yellowing that normal collars get from dry cleaning. His dark colors and strong shoulders suggest a French attitude with Savile Row influences, and the line is available in half sizes, as part of Mouret’s commitment to fit.

Available at Bergdorf Goodman.

3. Matthew Williamson’s first capsule collection for men, which he based on items he wanted for his own wardrobe, consists of his brightly colored sweaters, patterned scarves and handbeaded T-shirts. The clothes are actually kind of perfect for a beach party — as long as your girlfriend isn’t wearing the same thing. Go to matthewwilliamson.com.

4. Maria Cornejo is the only one of the bunch who can’t wear her new cowl-neck coats and drop-crotch trousers. ‘‘I’ve applied the same principles of simplicity and directness to the way I cut both my men’s and women’s,’’ she says. ‘‘My husband and especially my son, who is completely obsessed with his look, were the inspiration.’’ Available now at Zero + Maria Cornejo. JOSH PESKOWITZ

TOP: FROM THE HIGH MUSEUM OF ART; BOTTOM LEFT: JENS MORTENSEN; BOTTOM RIGHT: 1. MD70/MR NILS; 2. FROM ROLAND MOURET; 3. JAMES KELLY; 4. RODRIGO PEREDA.

Despite their 29-year age gap, Clark Gable and Steve McQueen had a few things in common — rural Midwestern upbringings, motorcycle obsessions, nicknames beginning with ‘‘King of ’’ — but their cars weren’t one of them. Gable had a rather big, lavish 1935 Duesenberg JN with a boxy nose and external side pipes, while McQueen’s favored status symbol was a sleek 1957 Jaguar XK-SS Roadster (right). Blame World War II: ‘‘After the war, these little sporty European cars seemed much more appealing,’’ says Ronald Labaco, co-curator of ‘‘The Allure of the Automobile,’’ which opens March 21 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. In addition to putting visitors within spitting distance of both stars’ former rides, the show traces the cultural and political influences on car design from the ’30s to the mid-’60s — considered the golden age of auto craftsmanship. Among the Mercedes-Benzes and Porsches that seemed ahead of their time, there are cars from long-defunct companies like Duesenberg and Tucker, which, despite their glamour, found themselves drowning under the excesses of bygone eras. Sound familiar? MONICA KHEMSUROV

Take the Macy’s Fashion Challenge and win the Daily Prize.

To learn how, visit macys.com/ fashiondirector

THE TRENCH COAT

BY DKNY Belted 3/4-length styling. $325.

Advertised item may not be at your local Macy’s. For store locations and hours, log on to macys.com

he best brands– that’s the magic of Macy’s

MAC Y ’S BY APPOINTMENT Call Linda Lee and her personal shoppers for our free service.

Call 1-800-343-0121.

NEW YORK LOS ANGELES CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO 877 463 3198 COLEHAAN.COM

WEEKEND WARRIOR A bag that’s going places. Photographs by Ilan Rubin Bottega Veneta duffel bag, $4,600. Go to bottegaveneta.com.

51

1

2

6

5

3

GO WITH THE GLOW Six ways to brighten up your nights.

4

52

1. Omega Seamaster Ploprof 1200M watch, $9,000. Go to omegawatches.com. 2. Panerai Luminor Base watch, $5,100.

Go to panerai.com. 3. Hublot Big Bang Evolution watch, $12,300.

Go to hublot.com. 4. Oris Ruf CTR3 Chronograph Limited Edition watch, $3,850. Go to oriswatches.com. 5. Breitling Blackbird watch, $5,950. Go to breitling.com. 6. Blancpain 500 Fathoms GMT watch, $25,900. Go to blancpain.com.

LIVING VIRTUALLY OR VIRTUALLY LIVING?

GET ONLINE. SHARING IS WEARING @

KENNETHCOLE.COM

ROCKEFELLER CENTER GRAND CENTRAL BROADWAY & HOUSTON 57TH & LEXINGTON AVE 17TH & FIFTH AVE 77TH & COLUMBUS AVE (WOMEN’S ONLY)

•

FACEBOOK

•

TWITTER

1

4

2

3

LINEBACKERS Tackle the future in Technicolor.

1. Ike Behar shirt, $165. Go to ikebehar.com. 2. Robert Graham shirt, $198. Go to robertgraham.us. 3. Gitman Vintage shirt, $165. Go to barneys.com. 4. Polo Ralph Lauren shirt, $125. Go to ralphlauren.com.

54

3

2

1

4

GIVE IT A SWIRL Let’s hear it for Indian-inspired paisleys.

1. Brioni shirt, $725. Go to brioni.com.

2. Ermenegildo Zegna pocket square, $90. Go to zegna.com. 3. Isaia jacket, $2,715. Call (888) 996-7555. 4. Brioni tie, $195. Go to brioni.com. 5. Tom Ford pants, $990. Go to tomford.com.

Fashion assistant: Jason Rider. Set styling

by Brenda Barr.

56

5

www.originalpenguin.com

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Newport Beach

5. The jacket is slowly put together. Before and after each operation, every piece of the garment is meticulously checked and repeatedly ironed. The factory’s most skilled tailors attach the sleeves and the collar, which is the most delicate part of the process.

In contrast to the majority of ready-to-wear suits, buttonholes are sewn by hand, as are the labels and their distinctive arrow-stitch design. The last of the suit’s 33,000 stitches is a single ‘‘stemholder’’ stitch behind the lapel.

6. Available at more than 550 stores, Zegna is one of the only vertically integrated men’s-wear brands, controlling the entire process from raw product to retail. While keeping the mill facilities in Trivero (above), the company opened a new corporate headquarters, an 86,000-square-foot space with its own dedicated catwalk theater, on Milan’s Via Savona in January 2008. Managed by the fourth generation of the family — pictured at left are Anna, the image director; Paolo, the chairman; and Ermenegildo, the C.E.O. — the brand had sales of more than 870 million euros in 2008.

4. After being cut to size at Zegna’s factory in Stabio, Switzerland, the fabric arrives in six core pieces at the brand’s ‘‘couture’’ factory in Padua, Italy. The 140-part construction process begins with stitching the inner canvas (made of four layers of horsehair, goat hair and flannel) to the front of the jacket. Each piece is then worked by hand, first with temporary white ‘‘basting’’ stitches and then with permanent ones. The only automated machine in the factory is used to cut out the winglets for the chest pocket.

SPUN GOLD the world, you first need the finest wool. Hence Ermenegildo Zegna’s Vellus Aureum award, an annual contest organized by the storied Italian suit-making family to find the highest-quality merino wool on the planet. (Vellus Aureum means ‘‘Golden Fleece’’ in Latin; the prize-winning wool grower receives its fleece’s equivalent weight in gold.) Now celebrating its 100-year anniversary, Zegna has woven together samples of the competition’s top fleeces since 2002 to create one of the lightest fabrics ever worn: the lot’s fibers measure 11.1 microns on average, while a human hair averages a whopping 100 microns. Obviously limited by supply (only about 200 feet of cloth is produced) to an edition of 20 and retailing at $22,500, each made-to-order Centennial Vellus Aureum suit takes 18-plus hours to create and passes through more than 330 pairs of hands. ‘‘Is this the ultimate in men’s-wear luxury?’’ Anna Zegna, the image director of the brand, asks rhetorically. ‘‘Oh, we certainly think so.’’ GLENN WALDRON

3. The yarn is woven into fabric on one of the factory’s 70 looms.

Each piece of fabric is then washed, felted, steamed, teased and brushed by hand in a process known as nobilitazione. ‘‘This gives the fabric its soul,’’ says Amedeo Beretta, who works at the mill.

2. Inside the mill, the prizewinning Vellus Aureum wool is spun, separated and then recombined as yarn in a process that has changed very little since the 18th century. After being dyed to specification, it is stored in battered beech trunks that date back to the early 1900s.

58

1. Founded as a fabric mill by Ermenegildo Zegna in 1910, the company moved into men’s wear in the 1960s under the direction of Ermenegildo’s sons, Angelo and Aldo. Located alongside the Zegna family home, the company still runs its original wool mill in the small town of Trivero, in the Italian Alps.

P H O T O G R A P H S BY T O N I M E N E G UZ Z O

EXECUTIVES AND ARCHIVAL IMAGES: FROM ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA.

THE TROPHY • ZEGNA ANNIVERSARY SUIT To make the finest suit in

NEW YORK | TOKYO | LONDON | GENEVA | SWISSARMY.COM

MAKERS OF THE ORIGINAL SWISS ARMY KNIFE

12 Be

ac

h

Rd

Ma

t or

.

Rd

Table Bay

P

in R

3

d.

Table Bay Harbour

High Leve l Rd .

E a s t e rn

B lv d.

Du

nc

2W

at

St

er k

ra

nd

6 ale St .

t.

Table Bay Blvd.

1

arin O ld M

g

St .

.

St .

Bu ite nk an tS t.

Ple in

Bu i

Rd .

5

eD

r.

8 Albert R

Sir Lowry Rd.

Ke

iz e

rs g

9

d.

Victo

ria R

ra c

d.

ht

Kl

oo fS

an

tS

St

t.

4

an

11

Lo n

te n

gr a

ch tS t.

W

10

3. One&Only Cape Town Though many of its 131 rooms are perched on an island, and the hotel could be a wee bit closer to the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, the One&Only is the comfiest place in town. Its spa is Balinese in scale. And the Gordon Ramsay restaurant, as well as Africa’s first Nobu, lure deep-pocketed Afrigarchs. from across the continent Dock Road, Victoria & Alfred Waterfront; 011-27-21-431-5888; oneandonlycapetown.com.

Victoria & Alfred Waterfront

7

.

.

Rd

2. Loading Bay With an adjacent cafe that’s a model hangout, Loading Bay stocks cultish Dutch brands like Blue Blood and Scotch & Soda. Upstairs, Biblioteq offers cool art and design tomes. 30 Hudson Street, De Waterkant; 011-27-21-4256320; loadingbay.co.za.

erg nb ne on Fritz S

1. The Pan-African Market This three-story Victorian warehouse is crammed with Kenyan textiles, colorful West African colon figurines, pressed paper bowls and carved antiques. Expect to bargain hard, and don’t miss the top-floor art galleries, where up-and-comers present their work. 76 Long Street; 011-27-21-426-4478.

Mill St.

TALK OF THE TOWN STYLE MAP • CAPE TOWN All eyes will be on South Africa this June when it hosts the FIFA World Cup, which is coming to Africa for the first time ever.

More than 60 matches will be held nationwide during the four-week event, including eight in Cape Town. There, new hotels and a revamped stadium will greet the throngs of sports fans, along with some of the Southern Hemisphere’s best fashion, design and food. DAVID KAUFMAN

4. A Store There are capsule collections from Adidas, Puma and Feiyue, but the real finds are groovy graphic tees by Mingo Lamberti and sweatshirts by 2Bop. Shop 2, 34 Kloof Street; 011-27-21-4222888; astoreisgood.com.

5. Planet Champagne and Cocktail Bar This futuristic watering hole brings 21stcentury cool to the Mount Nelson Hotel, known for its Art Deco décor. The menu is light and bubbly —think oysters and Champagne. 76 Orange Street; 011-2721-483-1000; mountnelson.co.za.

6. & Union Head to this beer ‘‘salon’’ for handmade brews paired with artisanal cheeses, sausages and pâtés before checking out Bree Street’s jewelry shops and midcentury furniture. 110 Bree Street; 011-27-21-422-2770; andunion.com.

7. National Sea Rescue Institute Shop This tiny shop stocks the nautical designs of the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI), South Africa’s volunteer search and rescue organization. Pop by for knit hats, cotton polos and heavyweight T-shirts in bold navy and orange, all emblazoned with the institute’s clean, cool logo. Quay 4, Victoria and Alfred Waterfront; 011-27-21-418-8302.

60

P H O T O G R A P H S BY F R A N C E S JA N I S C H

8. Superette Cape Town’s Woodstock district attracts hipsters like Justin Rhodes and Cameron Munro, the owners of Superette, a stylish cafe with furniture made by local designers and menus sourced from Neighbourgoods Market, which Rhodes and Munro also opened. The duo owns the cutting-edge Whatiftheworld gallery next door. 218 Albert Road; 011-27-21-802-5525; superette.co.za.

WEB EXCLUSIVE STYLE MAPS 9 10 11 12 For additional locations in Cape Town, go to nytimes .com/tmagazine. While you’re there, travel around the world with our interactive Style Maps. Plan where to visit, what to see and where to stay, shop and dine.

ANDREW MACPHERSON

A Conversation About Music Go behind the scenes of today’s worldwide modern music industry with multiple-Grammy-winning musician and songwriter Rob Thomas.

Hear the winner of the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame’s ďŹ rst-ever Satellite Award discuss his inspiration and his work with Matchbox Twenty, on his own, and his collaborations with iconic artists like Santana, Mick Jagger and Willie Nelson.

Thursday, April 8, 2010 7 – 8:30 PM TheTimesCenter 242 West 41st Street New York City Tickets: TimesTalks.com or call (888) NYT-1870 General admission: $30 Sign up for The New York Times events newsletter at TimesTalks.com.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

No refunds. Service fees apply. Seating is limited and on a ďŹ rst-come-ďŹ rst-served basis. TimesTalks programs and speakers are subject to change. For e-mail updates, visit TimesTalks.com and register.

Sight Line Balmain’s Christophe Decarnin collaborated with Oliver Peoples on the house’s first eyewear design. The frames cost $595 at Bergdorf Goodman.

Smoke Signals Substitute one habit for another with these jade, diamond and 18k-white-gold cuff links.

They’re $3,600 at Anna Hu Haute Joaillerie, the Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue, Suite GC16. Call (212) 826-1116.

Trunk Show Dunhill’s aluminum case is guaranteed to turn heads at the airport. Price on request. Call (800) 776-4053.

THE NEW COLLECTIBLES To have and to hold on to. By Sandra Ballentine

Thorny Subject More sexy than studly, Scosha’s rose-gold necklace is about $280 at kabiri.co.uk.

Dance Hall Days Statement footwear is a trend this season.

The sequin-paillette-embroidered lace-ups shown here are about $1,070 at louisvuitton.com.

Perfect Shell Leave it to Thom Browne to create a briefcase that’s worth so many clams.

Price on request. Call (212) 633-1197.

62

P H O T O G R A P H S BY J E N S M O RT E N S E N

Creative Loafing This leather slip-on is bound to put a little spring in your step. The pair costs about $690 at Paul Smith, 142 Greene Street, or call (646) 613-3060.

Launching Frédérique Constant Junior: Why wait?

Give him his first Swiss Watch now. With personal engraving celebrating his first graduation or Bar-Mitsvah.

Design a Frédérique Constant Junior at junior.frederique-constant.com

Frédérique Constant USA For information and to order a catalogue, please contact: 1-877-61-WATCH or info@usa.frederique-constant.com www.frederique-constant.com

Junior Automatic

Take it easy J. Crew jacket, $248. Go to jcrew.com.

Steven Alan shirt, $148.

Go to stevenalan.com. Dries Van Noten pants, $496.

Go to driesvannoten.be.

Tallia Orange tie. A.P.C. shoes.

Fashion editor: Bruce Pask.

Casual Thursdays Below: Polo Ralph Lauren jacket, $375, and vest, $198. Go to ralphlauren.com. Gitman Vintage shirt, $155, and tie.

Go to gitmanvintage.com.

Bottom: Façonnable jacket, $595. Go to faconnable.com.

Comme des Garçons Homme Deux shirt, $490. At Comme des Garçons, 520 West 22nd Street. Lanvin pants, $730, and belt. Go to barneys.com.

LIGHTEN UP THE TAKEAWAY Yes, we’re painfully aware of how important it is to maintain structure in our lives, especially these days. But what about the boredom that comes with it? Fortunately, loosening up doesn’t mean you have to look like a slob; this spring’s tailoring is refreshingly, well, untailored.

With a half-lining and no padding or facing, these jackets are weightless and casual, yet perfectly suited for work or play. Throw one on, take a deep breath and relax — you’ve earned it. ARMAND LIMNANDER 64

P H O T O G R A P H S BY PAU L W E T H E R E L L

Dressed-down dress-up Canali jacket, $1,295, and pocket square. Go to canali.it. Zilli shirt, $630.

Go to zilli.fr. Banana Republic pants, $70. Go to banana republic.com. Saks Fifth Avenue Men’s Collection tie.

Light is right Tallia Orange jacket, $325. Go to macys.com. Weatherproof vest, $200. Go to weatherproof garment.com. Loro Piana shirt, $595. Go to loropiana.com. A.P.C. pants, $240.

Go to apc.fr. Salvatore Ferragamo tie.

Fashion assistant: Jason Rider. Grooming

by Holli Smith at Community NYC for Redken. Tailoring by Olena Pleteneska.

Model: Matt Egan.

66

Chillax Brunello Cucinelli jacket, $1,895, and pants, $500. Go to brunello cucinelli.com. Brooks Brothers cardigan, $90. Go to brooksbrothers.com.

J. Crew shirt, $60. Go to jcrew.com.

Canali pocket square. Dries Van Noten belt. Church’s shoes.

Williams, seating system design: Rodolfo Dordoni

Minotti S.p.A. 20036 MEDA (MI) ITALIA via Indipendenza, 152 Tel. +39 0362 343499 www.minotti.com - info@minotti.it

THE CASUALS It’s all in the jeans — and the khakis. Photographs by KT Auleta

From left: 1. Band of Outsiders shirt, $240, and tie. A.P.C. pants, $180, and belt.

2. April77 jacket, $175. Steven Alan shirt, $188. J. Crew jeans, $98. 3. Diesel jacket, $200. Gant shirt, $115. Perry Ellis trunks, $60.

Fashion editor: Bifen Xu.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

69

From left: 1. Rainforest jacket, $150. Vince pullover, $148. Generra tank, $55. Loden Dager shorts, $270. 2. Reiss shirt, $175, and shorts, $120. Victorinox pullover, price on request. Shwood sunglasses. 3. Rachel Comey blouse. J. Crew pants. Giles & Brother bracelets.

From left: 1. Elizabeth and James shirt, $105. Lacoste yellow trunks, $95. Yigal Azrouel shorts, $320. Adam Kimmel sunglasses. LemLem scarf. Mary Kate Steinmiller bracelets (worn throughout). 2. Rachel Comey jumpsuit. Loeffler Randall swimsuit. Billykirk belt. 3. Nicholas K shirt, $205. Marc by Marc Jacobs yellow tank, $158. American Apparel tank, $19. Loden Dager pants, $290. 4. Tory Burch sweater. 5. Hilfiger Denim shirt, $85. A.P.C. top, $110. Lacoste jacket (around waist), $165. Burkman Bros shorts, $180. Nooka watch.

70

From left: 1. KZO shirt, $170. Steven Alan trunks, $158. 2. Topman top, $80. Kenneth Cole New York jeans, $70. J. Crew trunks (worn underneath). 3. Gap shirt, $50.

Elizabeth and James shorts, $225. Jack Spade belt. Swatch watch.

From left: 1. Acne sweatshirt, $169. Robert Geller T-shirt, $191. Levi’s jeans, $80. 2. Generra tank, $55. Urban Spectacles for Wooyoungmi sunglasses. 3. Acne jacket, $299.

Original Penguin pullover, $98. Fashion assistant: Jason Rider. Makeup by Pep Gay for Dior Beauty at Streeters. Hair by Bok-Hee for TresemmĂŠ at Streeters. Set design by Matthew Mazzucca for Stefan Beckman Studio. Models: Rel Dade, Shih-Han Hsiao, Dennis Johnson, Kristina K, Chris Pulliam, Adam Trodd.

72

MENTERTAINING

/ ment’ r tān ing / v. (used with object) / The act of men having guests; providing food, lodging, etc.; showing hospitality to, as in,

‘‘I’ve never been one for mentertaining, but I’ve become the host with the most since I ponied up for a tricked-out bar cart and Makassar Ping-Pong table.’’

CROTCH

/ kräch / n. / A forking or place of forking between the legs [see also ‘‘drop-crotch’’]; the part of a pair of trousers or pants formed by the joining of the legs — also known as the new fashion hot spot, with designers sending out enough dhotis, genie pants and pants on the ground to rival an M C Hammer concert, e.g.,

‘‘Poor models — everyone is crotchwatching them in those low-hanging suits.’’

TECHO

/ tek’ ō / adj. / An almagam of ‘‘tech’’ and ‘‘eco’’ and a fitting Newspeak modifier for the fusion of lab-born textiles and back-to-nature neo-traditionalism, e.g.,

‘‘My three-piece techo suit looks like hemp, but it’s actually a NASA-designed fabric that repels stains, blocks out UV rays, raises my sperm count and charges my iPad.’’ Doubleplusgood.

HORACIO SILVA

75

CROSSCURRENTS: SUZY MENKES

Back to the Futurists

I

have always been intrigued by the work of Fernand Léger. His tubular, mechanical paintings from the early 1920s captured his fascination with Futurism yet also his fear of new machines.

My feelings about the current techno revolution must be much like Léger’s uneasy embrace. He faced the brutal industrial changes in his era, when artists felt threatened by photography and machines were taking over from humans. Yet a fantastic, high-speed world was also opening up.

I love technology’s fast pace and energy, from business communications to social networking. But I don’t feel the same emotional attachment to a nonwrinkle jacket as I do to friendly, traditional cashmere — and I would hate to think that the new might beat out the old.

Looking at fashion for this season, there seems to be a polarization between designers who make technology work for them and those who turn their backs on it.

Men’s clothes either suggest a yearning for green pastures or a passion for anything techno. Wrapped in a down jacket, his pockets filled with gadgets and his sunglasses a triumph of high tech, Mr. Cool is an urban fixture.

Yet there is that other guy (or maybe it’s the same man in a different mood), whose clothes echo forest and hillside. His spring sweater has the texture of tree bark and his fair-trade cotton pants seem to reflect a greener world.

The contrast between techno and eco seemed even more dramatic when I took a peek ahead in Italy for men’s wear next fall.

The winter look was either a hefty, long Ferré coat, moleskin Hackett pants and gardeners’ boots from Hogan — or a short, shiny puffer jacket worn over Zegna’s sharp suit treated to repel stains. Among advanced fabrics, there were knits toughened up with metal to make them indestructible, which seemed a long way from biodegradable fashion.

I thought again about Léger’s paintings, which have a kind of nuts-and-bolts graphism, and how he and the Futurists struggled to depict the new streamlined modernity.

Even back then there was a counterpoint

76

Artistic license Clockwise from top: Moncler Gamme Bleu, fall 2010; a 1924 oil painting

by Fernand Léger; Alexander McQueen, fall 2010; an 1875 ‘‘Acanthus’’ wallpaper by William Morris.

to the artistic vision of Cubism and Léger’s so-called tubism. The earlier Arts and Crafts movement developed from a desire, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace in the Victorian era, to link to a kinder, gentler past.

Yet when Futurism took hold, the Arts and Crafts movement retreated. And in the same way, I can’t help thinking that in our own fashion times technology is winning. When I get out of the city, all those romantic country clothes for men — tweeds speckled like a thrush’s wings and ribs of corduroy like a plowed field — never beat out stonewashed denim and a nylon blouson jacket. For either sex, nylon is just so much lighter, more packable and easier to look after than the Old World wool or cotton blazer.

So why is my personal instinct still for the traditional? Because it seems more comforting, because I know exactly what it is and how the textiles will perform.

Of course, techno fabrics have been much transformed since that first generation of sweaty, wrinkle-free shirts and stiff-as-a-board trousers that men understandably rejected.

Now, a Zegna suit can look and feel like classic C.E.O. wear, even when it has built-in technology to deflect the sun’s rays if you step outside an air-conditioned comfort zone.

Perhaps the answer for men’s wear is a fusion of traditional and contemporary, which in the case of Hogan boots — when the leather is treated to look like an old-fashioned waxed finish — is quite literal. Or when Thom Browne melds classic wool tailoring with nylon at Moncler.

That mix has been apparent for a long time, ever since stretch was built into suit jackets to make them more comfortable and sneakers went from tennis shoes to high-tech footwear. I remember Marc Newson showing me extruded shoes inspired by Russian cosmonauts that he had developed for Nike in 2004, and Zaha Hadid molding space-age footwear for Lacoste in more recent years.

Significantly, both of these examples are of contemporary designers, who are more comfortable with technology than fashion people are. Artists at the turn of the century were also up for the new, as when the Fauvists picked up on all those weird new synthetic colors and dabbed them onto traditional landscapes. Even Léger’s more futuristic paintings had classical proportions — they were just articulated in an industrial aesthetic.

Who in fashion is getting the mix? I like the way Calvin Klein’s designer Italo Zucchelli uses 21st-century fabrics for simple, streamlined clothes. I always have the feeling that Christopher Bailey of Burberry must have done something to the fabrics to refresh those trench coats.

Perhaps the answer is that techno treatments should not scream their presence in the way of fluorescent colors and scuba-diving materials. With designer artistry, technology should fit right into a fashion frame. ■

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: DON ASHBY; CNAC/MNAM/DIST. RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, NY. © 2010 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/ADAGP, PARIS; DON ASHBY; THE STAPLETON COLLECTION/ART RESOURCE, NY.

Techno versus eco? Déjà vu all over again.

The Imaginarium Of Mr. Arsham Sleight of hand is the specialty of the house.

Pilar Viladas meets the wizard.

I

n Daniel Arsham’s world, nothing is what it seems. A smooth wall suddenly looks as if it is being stretched like fabric. A solid white cube gives the impression that it’s been eaten away. An Arcadian landscape populated only by a kangaroo is invaded by a rectangular slab that hovers in midair. A gouache rendering of Le Corbusier’s modernist monastery La Tourette is pictured inside a cave. Arsham’s work blurs the lines between art, architecture and performance, and explores issues of natural versus manufactured or intention versus happenstance. It has attracted impressive collaborators — Merce Cunningham, the choreographer Jonah Bokaer and the fashion designer Hedi Slimane — as well as the art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin.

Arsham’s third solo exhibition at Perrotin’s Paris gallery, ‘‘Animal Architecture,’’ opens on March 20. And to think, he’s only 29.

Arsham works out of a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The front room is a nitty-gritty workshop, but in the back there’s a serene space with desks for Arsham and Alex Mustonen, an architect. The two founded Snarkitecture, their ‘‘collaborative practice,’’ in 2007 to do architectural projects like the commission they recently won for a commemorative marker at the new Florida Marlins ballpark in Miami.

The studio’s electrical outlets and wires have been relocated to be out of reach of Arsham’s pet rabbit, Oliver.

On a recent visit, the front room contained large, carved blocks of EPS architectural foam, which Arsham likes for its ‘‘kind of fake density.’’ The blocks are descendants of a dressing room that Slimane asked Arsham to design for the Dior Homme store in Los Angeles in 2005. There, he seamlessly inserted carved foam into existing walls to make them look as if they had eroded. ‘‘A wall is meant to approximate a solid form,’’ Arsham explained. ‘‘A lot of these works dismember that quality. They make architecture do things it’s not supposed to do.’’

On a large worktable, Arsham has been building studies for the ‘‘Pixel Clouds’’ that will also be in the show. Inspired by photographs of clouds that Arsham took with his iPhone and enlarged until they became arrangements of multicolored pixels, the pieces in the exhibition will be 10 to 15 feet across, requiring a total of 21,000 balls, each of which will be hand-dipped in paints that Arsham mixes himself to mimic the shades in the photographs. And if all that isn’t enough, ‘‘Replica,’’ the 2009 performance piece choreographed by Bokaer and Judith Sánchez Ruíz, for which Arsham designed the set — and in which he performs — will make its Paris debut at the Théâtre de Vanves on March 23. In ‘‘Replica,’’ Arsham breaks through the walls of the set, a plaster and foam cube, carrying chunks of it offstage, which allows the dancer to move in and out of the cube, becoming alternately visible and invisible in a piece that is about memory and experience.

How we see and experience architecture and space is a question that was brought vividly home to Arsham at an early age. When he was 12, Hurricane Andrew forced him and his family into a closet in their Miami home, where ‘‘the drywall was moving in and out,’’ Arsham recalled, ‘‘like it was breathing.’’ Seeing what was behind the walls — the house

78

P H O T O G R A P H BY R AY M O N D M E I E R

A man of many talents Daniel Arsham in his Brooklyn work space.

collapsed and the ruins were covered in pink insulation foam — would eventually inform ‘‘my idea of the slow manipulation of architectural form.’’ Indeed.

Before graduating from Cooper Union in 2003, Arsham spent some time in Miami, where he was involved with the House, an alternative art space. Arsham’s work was included in a 2001 show of Miami artists organized by Bonnie Clearwater, the executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Later, in 2007, she gave him his first solo show, and when Merce Cunningham was looking for artist-collaborators for his 2007 piece ‘‘eyeSpace,’’ Clearwater gave him Arsham’s name. ‘‘I had no experience with the stage before,’’ Arsham recalled. It was a baptism by fire. Cunningham’s only direction — ‘‘make sure it doesn’t injure my dancers’’ — resulted in a set depicting a Deco-style theater that had been sliced in half horizontally; the top half looked as if it were sinking into the stage, while the bottom half — the part that had already ‘‘sunk’’ — seemed to be descending from above. Arsham had imagined the vertical version of a ‘‘crossover,’’ in which dancers exit on one side of the stage, cross over backstage and enter from the opposite side.

Arsham’s collaborations with Bokaer — a former Cunningham dancer with a multidisciplinary approach to choreography — could not be more different. ‘‘We work much more closely together,’’ Arsham said. ‘‘At many points our works not only intersected, but they braided together and fused.’’ In their latest project, ‘‘Why Patterns,’’ which was shown in Rotterdam last month, 10,000 Ping-Pong balls cascade onto the stage.

Snarkitecture, meanwhile, is working on several projects, including the renovation of a warehouse for the Miami nonprofit LegalArt. For the Marlins ballpark, the partners have recreated the sign on the old Miami Orange Bowl, taking the 10-foot-tall letters and scattering them around the stadium’s pedestrian plaza, turning the destruction of the Bowl into ‘‘a creative act.’’ The very name of the firm, with its proto-gonzo literary connotations, ‘‘undermines the historical weight of architecture,’’ Arsham noted. ‘‘We have a somewhat more playful attitude toward what spaces can be.’’ ■

OBJECT LESSON: ALICE RAWSTHORN

Google’s Doodles

I

magine that you and a fellow Stanford computer science grad have just been given a $100,000 check to bankroll a new business. The Burning Man festival is coming up, and you both want to go.

What do you do? If you’re Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, you make a rough sketch of the wooden effigy that’s burned at the festival, add it to your Web site as an as an ‘‘Out of Office’’ sign and set off for the Nevada desert.

That was 1998, when the two moguls were just starting Google. Since then, dozens of ‘‘doodles’’ have popped up on the home page to celebrate everything from Thanksgiving and Halloween to the birthdays of Charles Darwin and Andy Warhol, World Water Day, the launch of the Large Hadron Collider and the opening of the Olympic Games. Each doodle is an illustrated version of Google’s everyday logo. It appears on the relevant day, then disappears.

Like all corporate symbols, Google’s doodles are intended to tell us something about the company. So, what is it trying to say? That it’s into art, science, sports and the environment but isn’t too snooty for Halloween? Spot on.

Whether or not we believe what a company is telling us usually depends on the skill with which it says it. But not Google. The odd thing about its corporate identity is that it looks anything but skillful; in fact, it seems downright clumsy, and it’s the clumsiness that makes it work. Not that there’s anything wrong Etch a sketch For Jackson Pollock’s birthday, a Pollock-inspired logo.

80

with a company being artsy, sporty and eco-savvy, but I can’t be alone in cringing at the idea of a corporation trying to tell me that it is.

That’s only part of the problem. Not one of us likes to think that we can be taken in, especially by a successful giant and its army of expensive advisers. That’s why corporate identities so rarely work. Not only are we deeply suspicious of them, but we’re also increasingly expert at deconstructing them. The more sophisticated they are, the more skeptical we’re likely to be.

Google’s logo doesn’t look at all sophisticated, with or without the doodles. The everyday logo is based on one knocked out by Brin in 1998. It was modified in 1999 by Ruth Kedar, a designer that Brin and Page had met at Stanford. She kept the same bright colors for each letter, chose a similar but slimmer typeface and lost the exclamation mark at the end. The result is sleeker than Brin’s original yet shares its playful amateurism. ‘‘It looks like desktop publishing at its most basic,’’ said the graphic designer and artist Peter Saville. ‘‘Everything about it is childlike: the colors, the typeface, even the name.’’

The same can be said of Google’s doodles, most of which are in the cutesy style of illustration that design purists loathe. That’s its strength. How can someone be trying to con you by commemorating the birthday of Isaac Newton with an animated apple falling off a tree, or Jackson Pollock’s with ‘‘Google’’ scrawled in a ‘‘drip painting’’? It’s so gauche that it must be guileless. ‘‘Sometimes those doodles are downright corny,’’ said Michael

Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group. ‘‘But they’re also surprising, charming and memorable. Like any holiday gift, it’s the thought that counts.’’

The result is a masterpiece of 21st-century corporate iconography. It’s worth noting that another great contemporary logo, Apple’s, sends many of the same messages but conforms to 20th-century design conventions by a) doing so implicitly and b) always looking the same.

Let’s deal with a) first. Apple’s apple symbol is a tribute to Isaac Newton, and hence to science and innovation. It has been bitten on one side, bringing to mind the computer byte and the sexual frisson of Adam and Eve succumbing to temptation by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Does everyone get all of that? Probably not. Google’s doodles say similar things (minus the sex) but so clearly that more of us notice.

Now, b). Whereas Apple’s consistency reeks of old-school corporate control, Google’s ephemeral symbols seem timelier.

Whether by accident or design, they’re one of a new wave of constantly changing ‘‘dynamic identities’’ that feel right for our frenzied, febrile era. If dynamic identities are too slick, like AOL’s, they risk appearing formulaic — but Google’s clumsiness makes it look sincere, even to its critics. ‘‘For a long time, I hated that logo,’’ Saville admitted. ‘‘But now that Google is so ridiculously powerful, it seems so wrong that I’m starting to quite like it.’’ ■

COURTESY OF GOOGLE

How the most amateurish logo became a masterpiece of corporate iconography.

Bring In da Noise Matthew Herbert can make you dance to the tune of asthma inhalers and slaughtered chickens. Jonathan Wingfield listens up.

A

lthough Matthew Herbert’s music has never even dented the pop charts, he plays sold-out performances in places as diverse as the Sydney Opera House and the Hollywood Bowl. His music has been described as ‘‘fluffy electronica,’’ ‘‘smooth Glenn Miller big-band fun’’ and ‘‘wicked chilled-out vibes,’’ but his compositions include the sounds of human bodies being cremated, chickens being slaughtered and a hundred powerful people saying the word ‘‘yes.’’

Conversely, most of Herbert’s big-band fan base has no idea that he also D.J.’s ear-splitting minimal techno to crowds of sweaty teenagers throughout Eastern Europe; and it’s safe to say that the Day-Glo clubbers in Ibiza, Spain, who dance to Herbert’s house tracks are totally unaware that he’s currently remixing Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon. Herbert’s interstitial music for last year’s Eurovision Song Contest was heard by more than 100 million people, but he says that some samples in one of the songs were so subversive that they could trigger international unrest of ‘‘Dr. Strangelove’’ proportions if their origins were revealed.

Much of the confusion surrounding Herbert, a 38-year-old Briton, is, of course, selforchestrated. Ever since his debut in 1995, when he released a track on the compilation album ‘‘The Theory of Evolution’’ under the alias Wishmountain, Herbert has recorded hugely diverse styles of music under such names as Radio Boy, Doctor Rockit, Transformer, Mr. Vertigo, Herbert, the Matthew Herbert Big Band and, more recently, Matthew Herbert. He has taken his big band on sold-out world tours, even though he avoids flying, for ecological reasons. He is responsible for catwalk tracks for the Paris-based fashion designer Gaspard Yurkievich and has 82

P O RT R A I T BY C H R I S BR O O K S

scored more than a dozen film soundtracks.

Last November in London, he created a spontaneous, live soundtrack during a Phillips de Pury auction of music-related artworks, and he recently wrote a film about sound that he hopes will feature a thousand-piece orchestra.

But Herbert can certainly do commercial.

He has worked with popular artists like Bjork and Antony and the Johnsons, and remixed superstars like R.E.M. and Quincy Jones.

Elements of his creative output could, at a push, simulate an ‘‘American Idol’’ track — yet his blend of politics and musical avant-garde have made him a sort of Brian Eno for the 21st century. When Antony Hegarty approached him to create a dancier version of Antony and the Johnsons’ 2009 ‘‘Crying Light’’ album, Hegarty witnessed firsthand Herbert’s radical nature: ‘‘He seemed to tear apart the songs with his teeth, with no regard for harmonic structure.’’ A current Facebook group calls itself ‘‘I Agree to Donate My Ears to Matthew Herbert for Experimentation.’’

Herbert believes he has his DNA to thank for his eccentric contributions to the musical canon. His father was an engineer at the BBC (‘‘At home we had the most unbelievably mystical hi-fi system, which is why I’ve never been scared of technology’’), and his mother’s father was a conscientious objector during the Second World War (‘‘The lumps on his arms were from where he’d been beaten; people put excrement through his letter box’’). He grew up middle class in southern England, where his Methodist parents forbade toy guns and television. His was a childhood of violin and piano practice, drama school and local Greenpeace protests.

Fortunately, studying drama at Exeter University gave Herbert the liberal framework in which to grow both creatively and politically.

RIGHT: ED ALCOCK

The art of noise Matthew Herbert vents his frustration with capitalism by destroying a television at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

By chance, southwest England in the early ’90s was the epicenter of musical anarchy.

Underground clans like Spiral Tribe were staging huge, spontaneous gatherings that revolved around vast sound systems and dodging the police. Herbert, meanwhile, had started experimenting with musical Dadaism by recording the sounds made by random household objects. Thus, in the mid-1990s, Herbert tracks like ‘‘Pepper Pot,’’ ‘‘Salad Tosser’’ and ‘‘Asthma Inhaler’’ started popping up in clubs and record shops.

By 2000, he had established a personal manifesto, which has become the basis for all his work and is often compared to the filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95. ‘‘The Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (Incorporating the Manifest of Mistakes)’’ railed against all the shortcuts afforded by modern recording (drum machines, using other people’s beats or sampling pre-existing sounds). For example, his 2001 release ‘‘Bodily Functions’’ is lifted from the body itself. The sounds of teeth, bones, lungs, skin and eyes (undergoing laser surgery) all scratch against a jazzy house backdrop.

While Herbert felt the thrill of creative liberation, some critics suggested that his music was becoming little more than a series of cleverly constructed politicized anecdotes.

Herbert argues that music throughout much of the 20th century addressed the social issues of the time — be it race, religion, war, women’s rights or the Great Depression — whereas you’d be hard pressed to find any sociopolitical merit in, say, Lady Gaga’s latest offering. ‘‘If you took the top 50 news stories of the past decade — 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide bombings, global warming — and you compared that list with the top 50 albums, I’d be very surprised if there was any crossover at all,’’ he says. ‘‘I feel like mine is the only music that’s trying to reflect what it’s like to be alive today.’’

This fall Herbert will release ‘‘One Pig,’’ which records the birth and life cycle of a pig on a local farm. Before the animal’s slaughter, he is currently toying with having it swallow a microphone that would subsequently record Radiohead’s Thom Yorke singing live in the pig pen; once the pig has gone under the knife, Herbert wants to ‘‘make bacon, ask an artist to paint with the blood, ask Heston Blumenthal to make ice cream with the pig fat, record the sound of a toothbrush made with the bristles, ask Bjork to play a flute made from the bones, ask Vivienne Westwood or Hedi Slimane to make a coat or shoes from the skin, ask Will Self to write a story from the perspective of the pig. . . . ’’ The list, seemingly, is endless.

As is, one presumes, Herbert’s future. ■ N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

83

BIBLIO FILE: HOLLY BRUBACH

It’s a Guy Thing Pity the poor woman who overestimates the size of a man’s corpus callosum.

G

uys, we’ve got your playbook.

All this time, we’ve been operating under the mistaken assumption that you were choosing to get all belligerent every time our college boyfriend called, or to tune us out as your eyes became glued to the waitress’s breasts showcased in a T-shirt two sizes too small. It stood to reason, we thought, that you could simply choose otherwise, provided, of course, that you wanted to. Now, however, thanks to Louann Brizendine, M.D., author of ‘‘The Male Brain’’ (Broadway Books), we understand that choosing otherwise isn’t an option, because evolution has outfitted you with a brain that is, biologically speaking, not the same model as the one we were issued.

(Brizendine’s ‘‘Female Brain’’ was published in 2006, should you ever get the urge to consult it.)

The epic bouts of road rage, the narcolepsy after sex, the fanatical fixation on the Big East standings, the hunger for movies full of gunfire and explosions — finally, we get it.

Brizendine fills us in on the male brain’s larger areas devoted to muscular action, aggression and sex, formed before birth and modulated throughout life by an exquisitely calibrated blend of testosterone, Müllerian inhibiting substance, androstenedione, vasopressin and other hormones that alter perceptions and lay the groundwork for specific behaviors.

Hormones, in Brizendine’s telling, seem to account for just about everything, leading the reader to wonder where biology leaves off and personal responsibility — to say nothing of blame — begins. If testosterone were beer, she estimates that a 9-year-old boy would get the equivalent of about a cup a day; by the time he turns 15, he’s getting two gallons, setting in motion feelings of defiance, dominance, lust, invincibility, recklessness and detachment.

Teenage boys aren’t feigning boredom just to be cool, she assures us. They are bored, because the adolescent male brain’s pleasure center is practically numb to any stimulus that isn’t cranked to the max. Victory and sex, however, deliver a rush as addictive as cocaine.

Who knew that a French kiss is in fact a

84

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY L O S T I N S PAC E

brain’’ — a prospect you guys will undoubtedly find alarming, though it gives your wives and girlfriends something to look forward to.

In what amounts to a companion volume, ‘‘The Male Factor: The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace,’’ by Shaunti Feldhahn

‘‘taste test,’’ an exchange of genetic information encoded in our saliva, sending a shot of the man’s bioactive testosterone to the woman’s brain to boost her sexual arousal? ‘‘The female brain wants the hope of love and commitment before having sex,’’ Brizendine writes, ‘‘but for men, sex often comes first.’’

News bulletin: Scientists Discover What Any Woman in a Bar Could Have Told Them.

Still, this book is full of surprises, and the reader comes away with more respect for nature in all its intricate wisdom and intelligence. Take, for instance, the changes that the father-to-be undergoes during the last trimester of a woman’s pregnancy: a 20 percent rise in prolactin and a 33 percent drop in testosterone, which scientists speculate may be triggered by airborne pheromones emitted by her skin and sweat glands, conspiring to make him better able to respond to and care for a baby. Even monogamy may have some basis that’s genetic and hormonal.

To the extent that the minds of men and women ever meet, the conditions would seem to be most favorable during andropause, when testosterone and vasopressin declines, and a man’s estrogen and oxytocin potentially exert a stronger influence, increasing his capacity for empathy and intimacy. In Brizendine’s words, ‘‘Hormonally the mature male brain is becoming more like the mature female

(Broadway Books), draws on neurological and psychological research as well as surveys and interviews she conducted with more than 3,000 men. Feldhahn attributes many of the differences in men’s and women’s behavior on the job to the corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s right and left hemispheres.

According to one study, it’s 25 percent smaller in men, with more isolated gray matter, which facilitates compartmentalizing. In women, a greater concentration of white matter relays more thoughts across various areas of the brain and makes for more efficient multitasking.

Where men build a wall in their minds between ‘‘work world’’ and ‘‘personal world,’’ Feldhahn urges us to build one, too, if we want to get ahead. Men, she says, view emotion at the office as disruptive and irrational, owing to the male brain’s predisposition to engage in a single activity, either thinking or feeling — but not both at the same time. Women’s brains permit us to think while we feel, but she stops short of suggesting that we try to convince you of that. Instead, she advises us to ‘‘edit’’ our emotions.

Men and women have always seemed incompatible, but mostly the misunderstandings have been the stuff of stand-up comedy and country songs. Reading Feldhahn and Brizendine, any thinking person is forced to conclude that the situation is even worse than we imagined. Still, it remains to be seen what impact all this insight into your minds will have on how we talk to you and how we listen. At the very least, it ought to grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. Next time we burst into tears over some new humiliation, you’ll do what your brain structure tells you to and respond with a detailed plan of action. In the past we thought, Not even a hug or a shoulder to cry on? But now we know better. Fine. Be that way. ■

Merchants Since 1934

Free Delivery in NY State on orders over $75!

Over 6,000 Wines, Spirits and Accessories to choose from.

Domaine Ott “Chateau Romassan’’ RosĂŠ 2008 $31.95

Cloudy Bay Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2008 $21.99

Lafite Reserve Speciale (Medoc) 2006 $18.95

Sherry-Lehmann official wine and spirits retailer of

www.Sherry-Lehmann.com

URGES & ACQUISITIONS

Good Timing Watches turn back the clock — to the ’80s. David Colman reports.

I

n the dizzying run-up of watch technology of the last 10 or 15 years, the size of watch cases, the number of diamonds on them and the staggering intricacy of their complications were matched only by the astronomical sums the timepieces commanded. It was in the midst of this spinning tourbillon of activity that a few people tried something a lot simpler, a lot cheaper and a lot more colorful. With neonbright hues, stretchy silicone bands and novel faces, the new ’80s-inspired watches could have been worn by bands like the Thompson Twins or the Human League. They all but sing, ‘‘Don’t you want me, baby?’’

Their timing couldn’t be better. The newwave style of the early ’80s (which was itself a mash-up of ’50s kitsch and fluorescent color) has influenced not just fashion runways but also indie-pop singers like La Roux and Little Boots. One new brand, RumbaTime, has priced its colorful rubbery bangles at just $20, so even an armful of them won’t break the bank.

Not surprisingly, Swatch, which made watch history in 1983, is capitalizing on the

trend. In its first four years, Swatch produced 10 million watches priced at just $35; by 2006, the number was 333 million. Though Swatch, like its fellow ’80s icon Benetton, lost touch with its hipster following in the 1990s and 2000s, its ’80s styles are looking good again — and they’re back on the market, thanks to Swatch’s new Color Codes collection, which makes reference to its early glory days.

But it’s interesting that this time around Swatch is following suit, not leading the pack. In 2005, Marco Mavilla, a high-end watch collector and dealer, decided to make an inexpensive watch based on the Rolex Submariner, but with a clear plastic bezel and band. ToyWatch was born. ‘‘It was just a toy.

That’s how it got its name,’’ Mavilla said. ‘‘I started for fun. I just wanted some nice way to express my personality.’’ But when his initial batch of 300 watches sold almost instantly, he realized his business was no joke; in 2009, he sold 260,000 of the cheery, cheeky watches. ‘‘I was 14 in 1980,’’ he said. ‘‘There was a real joy for life, and people were reacting against the system in a different way. Maybe that’s what I’m doing, trying to recreate that spirit.’’

Nooka’s founder, Matthew Waldman, also fell into watch design by accident. A Web designer in the 1990s, he began playing around with new ways to represent time.

Ultimately, he designed a few watches with time bars (reminiscent of computer progress bars) instead of hands. He added an irreverent color and design scheme that recalls his adolescence in New York City. ‘‘Those were my formative years,’’ he said. ‘‘Places like Fiorucci were allowing guys to have more fun dressing up.’’

Of course, the 1980s weren’t all about new wave. Those who would like to revisit that decade’s other key trend — gold — are in luck.

Rado has reissued its 1986 Integral watch, which dazzles with ‘‘contemporary’’ appeal, while classicists will find the perfect croc-andgold-logo watch at Bulgari. What’s more ’80s than that?

And anyone who wants to have his cake and eat it too will be thrilled to hear that the high-end Swiss watchmaker Hublot has big status-symbol watches that sparkle with jewels (diamonds, sapphires, amethysts and topazes) and come with croc-stamped rubber bands in matching colors. Lest anyone think they’re disposable, they retail for $20,000 to $33,000.

It’s a hefty sum, but hey — the ’80s revival looks as if it has a long way to go. The Hublot comes with a chronograph, so you can time it. ■

3 7

5

OLDIES BUT GOODIES

1. ToyWatch Plasteramic watch, $195. Go to toywatchusa.com.

2. Nooka Hyper Space Zen H watch, $195.

Go to nooka.com.

3. Hublot Big Bang watch, $23,300. Go to hublot.com. 4. Alessi Daytimer watch, $120.

Go to alessi.com.

5. Bulgari 42mm watch, $12,800. Go to bulgari .com. 6. Rado Integral watch, $2,100. Go to rado.com. 7. Swatch Set Square watch, $55.

Go to store.swatch.com.

1

6 2 4

86

P H O T O G R A P H BY S T E P H E N L E W I S

To think Indian is to uphold a justice system older than any government.

ALAN WAUKAU, 21 years old Criminal Justice major College of Menominee Nation, WI Bear Clan member and guardian of his reservation.

HELP TRIBAL COLLEGE STUDENTS PRESERVE THEIR WAY OF THINKING. 1-800-776-FUND

AMERICAN INDIAN COLLEGE FUND thinkindian.org

The Fund gives more than 5,000 scholarships yearly.

The New York Times Style Magazine

SPRING 2010

THE STITCHING POST T DESIGNED BY HERMÈS. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN LEWIS.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

89

THE CHIC OF

RABY LOOKING FOR FASHION’S NEW FRONTIER? GO EAST, YOUNG MAN. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID SLIJPER

DUNE BUDDIES POLO RALPH LAUREN SUIT, $1,350. GO TO RALPHLAUREN.COM. YOHJI YAMAMOTO SHIRT, $470. GO TO BARNEYS.COM. VINTAGE CAFTAN (ON GROUND), ABOUT $2,642.

GO TO GIACOMOMANOUKIAN.IT. ANN DEMEULEMEESTER MEN BELT. POLO RALPH LAUREN SUIT, $1,595. GO TO RALPHLAUREN. COM. MUJI SCARF. HERMÈS BELT. ARIAT BOOTS. FASHION EDITOR: ROBERT RABENSTEINER.

MR. SANDMAN BANANA REPUBLIC SHIRT, $45. GO TO BANANAREPUBLIC.COM. ALEXANDER M C QUEEN PANTS, $765. GO TO ALEXANDER MCQUEEN.COM. HERMÈS SCARF. RAF SIMONS BELT. OPPOSITE: VINTAGE CAFTAN, ABOUT $2,642. GO TO GIACOMOMANOUKIAN.IT. TOMMY HILFIGER JACKET, $598.

CALL (212) 223-1824. LANVIN PANTS, $765. GO TO LANVIN. COM. THE ELDER STATESMAN SCARF (WORN AROUND HEAD). MARC JACOBS SANDALS.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M O N T H T K 0 0, 2 0 1 0

93

TO AQABA! VERSACE SHIRT, $1,220, AND PANTS, $785.

CALL (888) 721-7219. THE ELDER STATESMAN SCARF (WORN AROUND HEAD AND SHOULDERS). A PEACE TREATY SCARF (WORN AS HEADBAND). ANN DEMEULEMEESTER MEN BELT. OPPOSITE: LANVIN SHIRT, $760, AND PANTS, $765.

GO TO LANVIN.COM. MARC JACOBS SANDALS. VINTAGE CAFTAN, STYLIST’S OWN (WORN THROUGHOUT).

LANVIN SHIRT, $760, PANTS, $765, AND SANDALS. GO TO LANVIN.COM. MUJI SCARF (WORN AROUND HEAD).

EAST MEETS WEST GIORGIO ARMANI JACKET, $1,475, AND PANTS, $650.

CALL (212) 339-5950. HERMÈS BELT. ARIAT BOOTS. OPPOSITE: JOHN GALLIANO JACKET, $3,800. GO TO JOHNGALLIANO.COM. LES HOMMES PANTS, ABOUT $946. GO TO LESHOMMES FASHION.COM. RAF SIMONS BELT. TOM FORD BOOTS. FASHION ASSISTANT: JASON RIDER. HAIR AND MAKEUP

BY JAMAL HAMMADI FOR HAMADI BEAUTY AT THE MAGNET AGENCY. PRODUCTION

BY DAVID ZICKL. MODELS: GERHARD FREIDL AND THOMAS HOEFNAGELS. 96

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M O N T H T K 0 0, 2 0 1 0

97

TOUGH ENOUGH

h

JOSH BROLIN GETS IN TOUCH WITH HIS SENSITIVE SIDE. INTERVIEW BY LYNN HIRSCHBERG PHOTOGRAPHS BY INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE & VINOODH MATADIN

98

In the next few months, you will be starring in three movies: in ‘‘Jonah Hex,’’ out June 18, you play a western antihero with a tragic past; in ‘‘Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps,’’ you are a Gordon Gekko-like villain; and in Woody Allen’s new movie, ‘‘You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger,’’ you play . . .

Woody Allen. I play a failed writer who is . . . Woody Allen. It’s funny how he gets you to do that. This is my second Woody Allen film — I worked four days in ‘‘Melinda and Melinda.’’ Two years ago, Woody saw me in ‘‘W.,’’ where I played George W. Bush, and he sent me an e-mail that I have framed, that read, basically, ‘‘I don’t know if you remember me from ‘Melinda and Melinda.’ I was the director.’’ I don’t

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

99

A MAN OF MANY FACES PREVIOUS SPREAD: TOM FORD SHIRT, $545. CALL (212) 359-0300. GUCCI TIE. OPPOSITE: VINTAGE ADIDAS JACKET (PART OF SUIT), $550. AT RESURRECTION, 217 MOTT STREET. TOM FORD SHIRT, $545. GUCCI TIE. FASHION EDITOR: MICHAEL PHILOUZE. FASHION ASSISTANT: JORDEN BICKHAM. HAIR BY CHRISTIAAN USING KIEHL’S. GROOMING BY LISA BUTLER FOR NARS COSMETICS. MANICURE BY DEBORAH LIPPMANN FOR DEBORAHLIPPMANN.COM AT THE WALL GROUP.

But you started young — you starred in your first movie, ‘‘The Goonies,’’ when you were 16.

That’s true. ‘‘The Goonies’’ has kind of a cult following. And the movie I did after that, which is called ‘‘Thrashin’,’’ also has a cultlike following. It’s a skateboard movie, and when I went to the premiere, I was crushed. I thought my acting was horrendous. It was the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life. I moved to New York after that. And I devoted myself to the theater.

You kind of disappeared from movies until ‘‘Flirting With Disaster,’’ in which you and Richard Jenkins played a couple.

Yeah. He’s my lover. I’m even blushing now.

We had a kissing scene.

know to this day whether Woody was serious or not. So he sent me this script, and I said, ‘‘I’m not going to make the mistake everyone makes and try to play you.’’ My first suggestion was that my character be in a wheelchair. Woody’s response to me was simply, ‘‘No.’’ That was it.

Do you prefer playing villains, as you did in ‘‘Milk,’’ where you portrayed Dan White, who murdered Harvey Milk and George R. Moscone, or as you did in ‘‘W.’’?

You just called George Bush a villain. That’s great. [Laughs] To me, when I look at a character, what makes it interesting for me is: What’s the redeeming value of who the person is, and how far did they have to jump to do the awful thing that they’ve done? I’d heard the confession of Dan White, which was recorded an hour and a half after he killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. He remembered that his fingertips were very hot. I thought that was an interesting thing.

I think you’re the only person who has portrayed a president while he was still in office. Before or after filming, did you ever meet George Bush?

No, but somebody came up to me during the ‘‘Milk’’ premiere and said, ‘‘W’s seen ‘W.’— George has seen your movie.’’ Then Oliver Stone, the director of ‘‘W.,’’ ran into Bill Clinton in China. Clinton told Oliver that he 100

had loaned Bush his DVD copy of ‘‘W.’’ He said W liked it very much. He said W thought there were sad moments.

You’re neither Southern nor Texan, but again and again, you’re great at playing Southern characters. Why is that?

I spent a lot of time in the South because of my mother. My mother didn’t fly — she only drove.

She would get up in the middle of the night and say: ‘‘Get up! Get in the car.’’ And we’d drive to Texas from California. Or we’d go to New Orleans. She loved the road, and so do I. She was small — 5-foot-3, 110 pounds — but she sounded like she was 9-foot-2 and 920 pounds.

Her CB handle was Cat Woman.

Was she an actress?

No, she was an assistant casting director for the ‘‘Batman’’ series. That’s where she met my father [James Brolin, the actor]. She was a great, great character that people still talk about today. When I met Brando, he told me stories about my mom from the ’50s. But she thought acting was a soft profession. She liked what I did with it, but she was never impressed with acting as a job. I used to be embarrassed saying that I was an actor, because of my mom’s whole idea of the profession.

And, now, in ‘‘Jonah Hex,’’ you have your firstever nude sex scene, with Megan Fox. Richard is much more attractive to me than Megan Fox! Was I nude in ‘‘Jonah Hex’’? I guess it was my first nude sex scene. Megan was very nervous. I was nervous. The sex scene is pretty risqué and nerve-racking. It’s hard to act when you’re naked.

I’ve always wondered if it’s harder to do a scene where you die or a scene where you kill someone.

I don’t like killing. When I shot Sean Penn’s character in ‘‘Milk,’’ there was a lot of joking going on at the moment because we couldn’t deal with the intensity of it. Recently, it dawned on me that I’d killed two dogs in two movies back to back. Some animal activist was riding me, saying he was going to turn me in. In real life, I would never kill a dog. In ‘‘No Country for Old Men,’’ the dog was chasing my character, trying to kill me. He was a huge pit bull named Scooby. I had to put his toy in my pants so he would follow me. Scooby is a sweet dog. I still have his toy. And he is a very good actor: I’d like to think I could die as well as Scooby.

You once had a mohawk. What was that like?

I did. A peacock — which is a very high mohawk. And I bleached the top of it, which burned my head. I was in a fairly well-known punk band called R.K.L. [Rich Kids on LSD].

That’s when I had a white mohawk. Back in the ’80s, we weren’t so ecologically worried, and I just used a lot of hair spray. It would stay all day. ■

JOSH BROLIN TALKS TO LYNN HIRSCHBERG ABOUT HIS LOVE OF THE OPEN ROAD AND MORE AT NYTIMES.COM/TMAGAZINE.

PROFILE IN STYLE

PIERRE-ALEXIS DUMAS

Hermès’ artistic

FAMILY GUY Despite the fact that his surname is practically synonymous with a Gallic sense of understated elegance, Pierre-Alexis Dumas (left), the artistic director of one of the oldest and most prestigious family-owned companies in France, doesn’t have much patience for most people’s idea of ‘‘luxury.’’ ‘‘When you start to use that word, you’re pretty desperate,’’ he says. ‘‘I have seen so-called luxury products that have failed miserably after three weeks. We are a quality manufacturer. My concern in life is, What does quality mean and how do you achieve it?’’ It’s a question that Dumas, 43, has been tackling all his life, though it was only in 2006 that he took over the creative reins of Hermès from his father, Jean-Louis. ‘‘I grew up in Hermès, so I always relate it to family and home, something that’s very natural and intimate,’’ Dumas says. ‘‘For me, Hermès is about the mystery and miracle of life.’’

A PICTURE OF PIERREALEXIS DUMAS IN HIS FATHER’S BOOK ‘‘PHOTOGRAPHER.’’ BELOW: ÉMILEMAURICE HERMÈS, A HEAD OF THE COMPANY, AT THE FLAGSHIP IN PARIS.

ABOVE: CLASSIC HERMÈS SADDLES. RIGHT: BOLTS OF FABRIC.

LEFT: A PORTRAIT OF JEAN-LOUIS DUMAS IN 1986.

RIGHT: THE COVETABLE ‘‘SAC À DÉPÊCHES’’ BRIEFCASE. A VINTAGE CATALOG.

BELOW: TWO LOOKS FROM SPRING 2010; INTERIOR OF THE HERMÈS IN MUSEUM IN PARIS. M

ABOVE: THE HERMÈS FOUNDER, THIERRY HERMÈS. LEFT: LOSANGE SCARVES FROM SPRING 2010.

102

director is making that venerable French house more relevant than ever.

TEXT BY ARMAND LIMNANDER

LEFT: THE HERMÈS H BOX. RIGHT: PIERRE-ALEXIS DUMAS SURVEYS A RANGE OF SCARVES.

ABOVE: THE BUGATTI VEYRON CUSTOMIZED

BY HERMÈS; BELOW: VOYAGE D’HERMÈS, A NEW FRAGRANCE. ABOVE: THE COVER AND A SPREAD FROM LE MONDE D’HERMÈS, THE COMPANY’S BIANNUAL PUBLICATION.

THE VISIONARY THING

ABOV A RENDERING OF ABOVE: THE WH WHY (WALLY HERMÈS YACHTS) DREAM BOAT. BELOW: THE BOAT’S INTERIOR, COMPLETE WITH STAIRCASE AND TREE.

Though Hermès stands for heritage, innovation and collaboration are in the brand’s DNA. (Alberto Giacometti and Jean-Michel Frank were two early partners.) Aside from creating interiors for a helicopter as well as for Bugatti and Smart cars, Dumas is proud of the H Box, a mobile art room that can be installed in museums all over the world to show contemporary video art.

He would like to develop a furniture line in the near future, and he’s also teamed up with Wally yachts to design a (still unrealized) solar-powered, extra-wide boat that would feel like a house on the water, complete with planted trees inside. But that’s just for starters. ‘‘I have a dream to take Hermès into the sky, but not in an airplane,’’ says Dumas, who believes that slowing down and appreciating the environment will be a key theme in this century. ‘‘I think that balloons are going to come back in a big way.’’

I’ll take one with an equestrian foulard print and a crocodile basket.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, CHLOË SEVIGNY, RICK OWENS AND OTHERS GET THE ‘‘PROFILE IN STYLE’’ TREATMENT AT NYTIMES.COM/TMAGAZINE.

THE SMART CAR CUSTOMIZED BY HERMÈS.

POLISHING THE BIG APPLE Dumas recently oversaw the opening of a new Manhattan men’s store, the only one in the world devoted exclusively to the guys. Dumas, whose mother used to design all the Hermès boutiques, knew that he wanted to give a ‘‘dressing room’’ feeling to the four-story, 2,450-square-foot building on Madison Avenue. The intimate rooms house all of the designer Véronique Nichanian’s men’s wear, as well as Hermès’ famed leather bags and suitcases; but the pièce de résistance is the made-to-measure salon where clients can select customized ties in a seemingly endless array of colors, order tailor-made suits and explore a treasure trove of crocodile skins for the ultimate rock-star jacket. That’s without mentioning the limited-edition products created exclusively for New York, like sneakers in the same red tones as the store’s facade or (Yankees fans, take note) an extra-supple baseball mitt. ‘‘Parisians are going to be very jealous,’’ Dumas says. ‘‘There’s nothing like this in Paris.’’

ABOVE: THE SNEAKERS AND GLOVE MADE FOR THE NEW YORK STORE. RIGHT: THE STORE’S INTERIOR. BELOW: THE FACADE.

PIERRE-ALEXIS DUMAS PORTRAIT: ESTELLE HANANIA; ARCHIVAL SADDLES, HORSE CATALOG AND THIERRY HERMÈS: FROM PH. D.R. ARCHIVES HERMÈS; FABRICS: JÉRÔME GALLAND; BRIEFCASE: QUENTIN BERTOUX; HERMÈS MUSEUM: GUY LUCAS DE PESLOUAN; RUNWAY (2): JEAN FRANCOIS JOSE; SCARVES: STUDIO DES FLEURS; ÉMILE-MAURICE HERMÈS: ROGER SCHALL/ ARCHIVES HERMÈS; BOOK AND CATALOG: TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES; JEAN-LOUIS DUMAS: JOHN VINK/MAGNUM PHOTOS; BUGATTI: BRUNO CLERGUE; H BOX: ANDREW DUNKLEY © TATE; PIERRE FROM ABOVE: BENOIT PEVERELLI; SMART CAR: STUDIO DES FLEURS; HERMÈS STORE (2): FRANK OUDEMAN; ALL OTHER IMAGES FROM HERMÈS.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

103

say it in french

THE ACTOR GASPARD ULLIEL DOES A ONE-MAN SHOW, PILING ON THE BEST OF THE SEASON’S NOUVELLE VAGUE LOOKS.

Photographs by Paolo Roversi

104

BURBERRY PRORSUM TRENCH COAT, $3,095. GO TO BURBERRY.COM. SALVATORE FERRAGAMO JACKET, $2,200 (SOLD AS SUIT). CALL (212) 759-3822. BOTTEGA VENETA SHIRT, $470.

GO TO BOTTEGAVENETA.COM. DOLCE & GABBANA TIE. OPPOSITE: LOUIS VUITTON TRENCH COAT, $1,960, AND CARDIGAN, $690. GO TO LOUISVUITTON.COM. DRIES VAN NOTEN PANTS,$647.

GO TO BARNEYS.COM. FASHION EDITOR: BRUCE PASK.

105

CHARACTER STUDY Gaspard Ulliel’s only American production so far is the 2007 film ‘‘Hannibal Rising,’’ but the 25-year-old won the 2005 César award for most promising newcomer; has starred alongside leading ladies like Isabelle Huppert, Audrey Tautou and Vera Farmiga; and recently filmed Bertrand Tavernier’s medieval love story, ‘‘La Princesse de Montpensier.’’ He strayed from acting last year, to appear in a Longchamp campaign with Kate Moss, but don’t expect to see him on the runways anytime soon. ‘‘I’m not really a model,’’ he says. ‘‘When I’m doing a photo shoot, I’m not playing a part. I’m just trying to be myself.’’

The actor found Paolo Roversi’s way of shooting this story, using digital video and then selecting still images, a stimulating challenge. ‘‘When you’re posing, usually you change your attitude when you hear the shutter click,’’ he says. ‘‘Here I never really knew when the picture was taken. It was odd but fun.’’ Though he professes fashion ignorance, Ulliel’s mother is a stylist, and his father is a former fashion designer. ‘‘I credit my parents with my sensitivity to art and creativity,’’ he explains.

A more recent influence on his style is the custom-built Mecatwin motorcycle he bought two years ago. Since then, everything he wears must pass the bike test: ‘‘Your clothes must match your lifestyle.’’ Enough said.

ALEXANDRA MARSHALL

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 0 9 106

13

PRADA VEST, $725, VEST (WORN UNDERNEATH), $630, SHIRT, $370, PANTS, $595, AND TIE. GO TO PRADA.COM. OPPOSITE: MARC JACOBS TRENCH COAT, $1,995.

GO TO MARCJACOBS .COM. Z ZEGNA DOUBLE-LAYERED JACKET, $1,795. GO TO ZEGNA.COM. 3.1 PHILLIP LIM PANTS, $295.

CALL (212) 334-1160.

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

107

108

HERMÈS JACKET, $2,900, AND VESTS, $1,025 EACH. GO TO HERMES.COM. DRIES VAN NOTEN PANTS, $616, AND SHOES. GO TO BARNEYS.COM. JOHN VARVATOS HAT. OPPOSITE: CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION JACKET, $550, JACKET (WORN UNDERNEATH), $795, AND PANTS, $350. CALL (877) 256-7373. 3.1 PHILLIP LIM TANK TOP, $175.

FASHION ASSISTANT: JASON RIDER. HAIR BY MATT MULHALL AT CAREN. GROOMING BY MARIE DUHART. SET DESIGN BY GARY CARD AT CLM.

109

RETRO MODERN PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY WILLIAM SHAW

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW THIS PAGE: THE PANELS IN THE LIBRARY COME FROM A BRITISH ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE COMPANY. OPPOSITE: AN ALIGHIERO BOETTI ARTWORK HANGS OVER NEWSON’S VORONOI SHELVES; THE SKULL IS

BY DUSTIN YELLIN.

Marc Newson’s NEW LONDON HOME IS PART CHALET, PART SPACESHIP.

111

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: THE CURVED STAIRS LEAD TO THE MASTER BEDROOM; THE BATHTUB IS FROM DRUMMONDS; THE ROCKS IN THE LIVING ROOM CAME FROM NOVA SCOTIA; THE SINK AND WORK SURFACE IN THE PALE GREEN KITCHEN WERE HEWN FROM A SINGLE PIECE OF MARBLE.

112

IRST THINGS FIRST. Marc Newson goes to the fridge of his newly designed kitchen. ‘‘Do you want a drink?’’ he asks, and pulls out a lager.

It’s 7 p.m. His wife, the stylist Charlotte Stockdale, is just putting their 2-year-old to bed. He’s unwinding. Tomorrow morning he flies to Italy to finish work on the speedboat he’s designing for Riva.

In the flesh, with the beer, his T-shirt and his thin beard, he comes across as three parts Aussie, one part designer. Despite his reputation as a design guru for the likes of Jaeger-LeCoultre, Qantas, Dom Pérignon and Ikepod, he exudes the kind of boyish charm that runs throughout his work, from the iconic Lockheed Lounge seat he made in 1986, whose riveted aluminum gave it an elusive ‘‘is it a plane? is it a chair?’’ look, right up to his pale green prototype for a Smeg range.

Pale green? Boyish? Well, yes, kind of. Newson, 45, who has always been fascinated with pale green, read how a couple of scientists had determined (incorrectly, it turns out) that this was the real shade of the universe. He had his vintage Aston Martin DB4 painted in that hue. ‘‘We were going to have it everywhere, but Charlotte put her foot down,’’ he says, sitting on the mad green print of a Josef Frank sofa.

Is it easy to put your foot down about décor if you live with Marc Newson? ‘‘Yeah,’’ he says with a shrug. ‘‘Because she was kind of right.

And I must say, she was pretty forgiving throughout the entire process.’’

That entire process, through which one of the world’s most successful designers built his own London apartment, took around a year and a half.

When Newson discovered the place, close to Victoria Station, it was the second floor of an empty but massive Edwardian depot used to sort mail.

The arrival of a daughter had made them realize that their former house in Pimlico was a little cramped for a toddler, so they were on the lookout for something much more spacious. ‘‘But what we didn’t want was a loft,’’ Newson says. ‘‘They’re large and cold. We’re not big art collectors, so we don’t like big white walls. I’m not into that New York gallery thing. . . .’’ He pauses. ‘‘I shouldn’t say that.’’ He counts Larry Gagosian among his good friends, and in September Gagosian is putting on his third show of Newson’s work — this time his designs and prototypes for all sorts of fast-moving, boyish things, including the Riva speedboat, his Ford 021c concept car, his Kelvin 40 concept jet and his design for the EADS Astrium space plane. ‘‘The first time I came in here,’’ Newson says, ‘‘I immediately had visions of ‘North by Northwest’ — you know, the fantastic Frank Lloyd Wright-ish thing in the Hitchcock film, with the large spaces and the chalet feeling?’’ That house became a reference point; not that the Newson aesthetic, with its smoothly lacquered surfaces and cool curves, ever really departs from retro-modern. ‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ he says. ‘‘Absolutely. It’s very much about having grown up in the ’60s and ’70s with that sense of

optimism about the future and technology.’’

The chalet theme inspired the living room’s river rock wall (‘‘I had to import the rock from Nova Scotia — I searched the Internet for months and months’’) and also the antler chandelier he’d picked up at an auction house in Austria (‘‘full-on Tyrolean’’). Elsewhere there are hints of a Japanese influence. Large lacquered screens divide the living room, and there’s a small room for a toilet reminiscent of something you’d see in Tokyo — also a Newson design. His parents moved to Japan when he was a teenager, and you can see where he got his love for simplicity and quirkiness. ‘‘It’s interesting that you picked up on that,’’ he says. ‘‘Japan’s just about my favorite place.’’

The apartment is dotted with Newson’s most iconic pieces. His daughter has one of his Plastic Orgone Chairs to clamber over in her room; the kitchen table is his, as are the Diode lamps scattered throughout. ‘‘It’s just a few bits,’’ he says. ‘‘On a professional level it’s like having your own showroom, and I’ve never had that.’’

If there’s another theme in the apartment, it’s Newson’s love of craft. Part of the reason that the remodeling was ‘‘a nightmare, all of it,’’ in Newson’s words, was his exasperation at the current standard of craftsmanship — though he found the right people in the end.

The walls are, he points out, all beautifully covered in polished plaster. Aside from the Newson-designed Voronoi bookshelf in the living room, all of the marble used, including the kitchen sink and worktop as well as the bathroom floor and walls, is from Carrara, Italy. Newson worked with a factory there that has its own quarry. ‘‘Those guys can do the most extraordinary things,’’ he says. ‘‘Whenever I identify a material that is worked by unbelievable craftspeople, I’m attracted to it.’’

So imagine the shock, after all that, when you enter the library and find, instead of cool curves and sleek lacquered surfaces, an oak-paneled room with a zebra-skin rug on the floor — a Stockdale family heirloom. This is where Charlotte had her way. ‘‘It’s very, very much her,’’ he agrees. ‘‘I never grew up in a house with a library — certainly not in Australia.’’ He laughs. ‘‘But she did. So it’s very typical for her.’’ (Stockdale is the daughter of the English baronet Sir Thomas Stockdale.) ‘‘She loves books and reading.’’

And he’s in no way sorry: ‘‘I thought it was such a wacky thing to do.’’ Still, all is not claret and crystal. Press a button on the remote and a large oak panel slides quietly down and a large-screen plasma TV emerges, Bond-like, from above the fireplace. ‘‘That,’’ Newson says, ‘‘was me.’’ ■

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

113

!"#$% % $# % # % $% % % % $% % $#% # $% % % !! % $% % % #$ $ % % #$ % # % " #

NY3.14.10

Bellawood Brazilian Cherry

N Y T I M E S.C O M / T M AG A Z I N E • M A R C H 14, 2 0 1 0

115

TIMELESS

Multi-Culti

For the designer Miguel Adrover, getting dressed is a sociological experiment.

I grew up in a tiny village of 200 inhabitants in Spain, but I’ve always been interested in how different kinds of clothing can open doors or create problems for people. I find it fascinating that when I visit Egypt and wear this galabia, which was handmade for me by a tailor there, I become more integrated into society, while in the West it attracts a lot of unwanted attention. It’s also intriguing that in the Middle East, where there is so much discrimination, men

116

P H O T O G R A P H BY J E N S M O RT E N S E N

essentially walk around in dresses, which is still something that’s considered inherently gay in other parts of the world.

I used to wear this on the plane when I traveled to New York, but now that’s become almost forbidden. I still put it on when I’m in town, though; I love how it feels, and not having to think about what to wear. Plus, I make friends with all the Middle Eastern taxi drivers — they always have a good reaction when they see me. ■