T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

Luxury February – March, 2015

T Emirates : The New York Times Style Magazine

Rami Al Ali and Prêt à Porter

Luxury February – March, 2015

CHILD OF TOMORROW Zakaria Ramhani's Figurative Calligraphic Forms

AED 20

11-Year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis

Table of Contents

Luxury February – March, 2015

Features 58 There’s Something About Quvenzhané

For the world’s biggest 11-year-old movie star, there’s more to life than red carpets, awards ceremonies and A-list friends.

There’s also pizza.

By Nicholas Haramis Photographs by René and Radka 62

Poetic Justice

Long, languid evening dresses paired with flat sandals prove that understatement is the ultimate luxury.

70 How to Do Good Art

Before his exhibition at the new Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the polymath Danish artist Olafur Eliasson explained that art is just one of the ways — along with politics, philanthropy and cooking — he hopes to change the world.

By Ned Beauman Photographs by Nigel Shafran

Photographs by Karim Sadli Styled by Joe McKenna

NIGEL SHAFRAN

ON THE COVER: Photograph by René and Radka. Styled by Julie Vianey.

Quvenzhané Wallis in an Antik Batik top, AED 680, antikbatik.com.

REFLECTIVE SURFACE One of Olafur Eliasson’s hanging sculptures in the studio.

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Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

Table of Contents

Page 35

Lookout Andrew O’Hagan comes around to the idea that, yes, life really is better in the digital age.

Clockwise from top left: Zakaria Rahmani, Om Kalthoum, 2013, oil on canvas; A dress from Rami Al Ali’s orchidthemed ready-to-wear collection; Visitors attend the opening of the Cinecitta World theme park at Castel Romano, south of Rome, on July 10,2014. The park was designed by Oscar- winning production designer Dante Ferretti.

15 This and That

Fornasetti takes on Valentino; Gillian Wearing heads home; London’s new food scene; paint-splatter prints and more.

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On Beauty

Indulging in strips of candy-colored satin as eyeliner at Dior.

19 Market Report

Suede bags get their groove back.

Lookout Emirates 22 Arabian Luxe

A selection of luxury items inspired by a Middle Eastern heritage.

Page 51

26 Sensorial Objects

Emirati designer Khalid Shafar’s UAEinspired designs and use of scent.

27 Scintillating Time

The mood at this year’s Salon Internationale de Haute Horlorgerie was positive despite the recent setbacks in the Swiss Franc.

31 The Immediacy of Prêt

Known for his couture creations, Dubaibased Syrian designer Rami Al Ali takes the next step ventues into ready-to-wear.

35 Hidden Words

The incorporation of Arabic calligraphy in Moroccan artist Zakaria Rahmani’s controversial canvases.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

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T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF ZAKARIA RAHMANI; COURTESY OF RAMI AL ALI, AFP PHOTO / TIZIANA FABI

Page 31

13 Sign of the Times

Table of Contents

Page 70

Page 47

39 The Thing

Cartier’s mesmerizing serpentine cuff.

40 In Fashion

Men’s formal wear returns to its traditional roots.

44 In the Air

A cornucopia of food-inspired art and fashion.

Page 54

Arena 47 Food Matters

To fast or feast? Weighing the options in Germany’s Black Forest.

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On the Verge

Cinecittà, Italy’s famous film studio and the grand setting for ‘‘La Dolce Vita’’ and ‘‘Ben-Hur,’’ has now inspired a theme park. The result is an extravagant mess.

54 By Design

The monastery-meets-laborartory aesthetic of the interior architect and furniture designer Vincenzo de Cotis .

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Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JENS ZIEHE; THIBAULT MONTAMAT; MAX ZAMBELLI/COURTESY OF ELLE DECOR ITALIA (2)

Quality

Clockwise from above: Olafur Eliasson’s ‘‘Your Uncertain Shadow (Colour),’’ 2010; a woman in traditional dress outside the Hotel Bareiss in Germany’s Black Forest; in the bedroom of an apartment in Vienna, a wall of distressed gauze under glass.

Photographed by Mazen Abusrour

www.fashionforward.ae

Salvatore Ferragamo suit, AED 10,982, Vintage shirt.

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Sign of the Times

As technology advances, plenty of nostalgists believe that certain elements of humanity have been lost. One contrarian argues that being attached to one’s iPhone is a godsend.

BY ANDREW O’HAGAN

POURAN JINCHI. DAWN 4. 2009. CHARCOAL AND PENCIL ON CHARTHAM PAPER. COURTESY OF THE THIRD LINE

THE CHILDREN DON’T believe me when I tell

them life used to be hard. They think it’s a routine out of Charles Dickens, a tale of filthy lodgings, stale bread and no Internet, where even the most resourceful among us struggled to survive in a world without teeth-bleaching or Kindle. My daughter rolls her eyes whenever I begin my stories of woe. ‘‘Here he goes,’’ she says. ‘‘Tell the one about how you used to walk to school alone. And the other one, about how you had to remember people’s phone numbers!

And: Watch this. Dad, tell the one about how you used to swim outside, like in a pond or something. With frogs in it!’’ ‘‘You know, darling. It wasn’t so long ago.

And it wasn’t such a hardship either. There was actually something quite pleasant about, say, getting lost as you walked in a city, without immediately resorting to Google Maps.’’ ‘‘As if!’’

And so it goes. No contest. The infant experience of the easy life can only ridicule the idea that patience and effort used to be fine. But I’ve been trying to examine the problem from a new angle, and I keep coming back to the same truth: Life is better. In some nostalgic, carefree, totally invented Mississippi River of the mind, we were always floating downstream in a vessel of our own making, always happy to have nothing, living high on our wits and our basic decencies. But was it nice? Was life as good as it is now? One is almost programmed, if over the age of 35, to say no to this question. One is supposed to stare into the middle distance and recall the superior days of a life less needy, the rich rewards of having to wait and having to try and having to do without. But the actual truth, my friends, is that my childhood would have been greatly, no, infinitely, improved, if only I’d had a smartphone and a dog walker.

To believe in progress is not only to believe in the future: It is also to usher in the possibility that the past wasn’t all that. I now feel — and this is a revelation — that my past was an interesting and quite fallow period spent waiting for the Internet. At home, I’ll continue to cause a festival of eye-rolling with my notion that some values were preserved by the low-tech environment, but, more generally speaking, life

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Sign of the Times

has just gotten better and better. The question is: How far would you go with that? My daughter’s mother goes all the way. ‘‘I can sit in my holiday house in the country,’’ she says, ‘‘and order furniture, clothes, anything really, to come from London and Paris. It’s killed provincialism.

It’s also killed human loneliness.’’ ‘‘That’s shocking,’’ I say. ‘‘Luxury can’t kill loneliness.’’ ‘‘You want to bet?’’

So, I’ve been on the back foot. I didn’t know it when I was young, but maybe we were just waiting for more stuff and ways to save time. Is that right? Were we just waiting for Twitter to come along and show us there were sexy and clever people out there and funny stuff happening all the time in places we’d barely even heard of? I mean, how could I ever pretend life was even half tolerable in the 1970s, when a slow game of Pong or a fast episode of ‘‘Mork & Mindy’’ felt like a glittering revelation of things to come? My God: It took punk, which was basically just a bunch of art students jumping around wearing safety pins, to wake us out of the doldrums. I grew up in a world where people did mental arithmetic just to fill the time.

Then I got over it — and some. I’ve come fully round to time-saving apps. I’ve become addicted to the luxury of clicking through for just about everything I need. Yesterday morning, for example, I realized I needed to know something about a distant relative for a book I’m writing. I’m old enough to remember when one had to pack a bag and take a train; when one had to stand in queues at libraries, complete an application form, then scroll for hours through hard-to-read microfiche and take notes and repeat. I’m not 104, but I wrote a whole book that way, my first, and it took forever and it didn’t add much to most of the paragraphs. Yesterday, I had the information from an archive website in about 20 minutes.

Then I made a list of winter clothes to purchase from Mr. Porter. Then I ordered a car from Uber to take me to King’s College London to teach a class, and I emailed my notes to my office computer from the car and I dealt with a dozen emails and I read a review of a restaurant I was going to that evening and watched part of a video of a ballet I was due to see before dinner.

What has been lost? Nothing. Has something gone out of my experience of life by ordering all the shopping on Ocado rather than by pushing a cart around the aisles of a supermarket for an hour and a half? Yes: A pain in my backside has been relieved. It is all now done by a series of small, familiar flutterings over the keyboard, which I can do at my leisure, any time of day or night, without looking for the car keys or straining my sense of sociability by running into hundreds of people who are being similarly tortured by their own basic needs. I’ve always liked music, the sheer luxury of having a particular recording there when you want to hear it, but nothing in my long years of hunting

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for and buying records can beat Spotify. I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights and measures of their own experience: We value our own story and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country. There’s a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell you the opposite.

Getting better is getting better. Improvement is improving. There will, of course, always be people who feel alienated by a new thing and there might be a compelling argument to suggest all this availability is merely a highspeed way of filling a spiritual gap in our lives.

Yet I can assure you there was no lack of spiritual gap in the lives of people living in small towns in 1982. It was just a lot harder to bridge that gap. We used to wait for years for a particular film to come on television, thinking we might never see it. One had practically to join a cult in order to share a passionate interest. I can still remember Tupperware parties, when — Oh, the good old days! — women would meet at each other’s houses on rain-soaked evenings to try out and buy pastelcolored breakfast bowls. And that was a good night! Communication was usually a stab in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board. And now you can find the love of your life by posting a picture and proving you’ve got a GSOH (great sense of humor). Every day now there’s something new to replace the old way of doing a crucial thing that was hard to do. Is it the middle of the night and you live in Idaho and you want to talk to someone about your roses? Is it Christmas Eve in Rome and you want to know where to hear some music and light a candle?

Physical loneliness can still exist, of course, but you’re never friendless online. Don’t tell me the spiritual life is over. In many ways it’s only just begun. Technology is not doing what the sci-fi writers warned it might — it is not turning us into digits or blank consumers, into people who hate community. Instead, there is evidence that the improvements are making us more democratic, more aware of the planet, more interested in the experience of people who aren’t us, more connected to the mysteries of privacy and surveillance. It’s also pressing us to question what it means to have life so easy, when billions do not. I lived through the age of complacency, before information arrived and the outside world liquified its borders. And now it seems as if the real split in the world will not only be between the fed and the unfed, the healthy and the unhealthy, but between those with smartphones and those without.

Technology changed my character. It didn’t

T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

What a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore. change my parents’. My mother says she wasn’t touched by the moon landing or the Internet, though she admits that having a fridge has made a wonderful difference. She’s not nostalgic for the days when they would place the milk bottles out on the window ledge overnight — that does the trick, in Scotland — though she has a general feeling that life was cozier and friendlier years ago. I must have taken some of that from her, but the more I think of it the more I see it as an affectation. For me, life did not become more complex with technology, it’s became more amenable, and what a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore.

My daughter was right to laugh. Because what she was hearing was a hint of vanity and a note of pride in my stories of the unimproved life. In point of fact, we sat in the past and burned with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn’t to plant a flag on the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but hoping we might like it when we got there. My favorite record when I was a teenager, trapped in a box bedroom in a suburban corner of old Europe, was ‘‘How Soon Is Now?’’ by the Smiths. I had taken a bus and a train and walked for miles to buy the record, and it told a story about giving yourself up to experience. I don’t know where the physical record has gone. It’s probably still in my mother’s attic. But the song is right here at the end of my fingertips as I’m typing, and in the new, constantly improving world around us, it took me just under 15 seconds to locate it.

Would anyone care to dance?

SYLVIE FLEURY, ‘‘YES TO ALL,’’ 2008, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK

Lookout

This and That A Cultural Compendium

ON THE VERGE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS

Jewels Without Gems

NOW BOOKING

A Gilded Getaway Everything about La Réserve, a new Haussmann-style hotel and spa opening soon in the Eighth Arrondissement in Paris, harkens back to the grandeur of the Belle Époque. Like previous collaborations between the interior designer Jacques Garcia and the hotelier and vintner Michel Reybier (La Réserve’s Geneva property and the chateau at Reybier’s 225-acre vineyard in Bordeaux), the secluded 40-room residence is an exercise in effortless glamour, adorned with rare antiques and draped in ghost damask, papal purple and ballet-satin pink. For the full Baudelairian experience, there’s also a smoking parlor and round-the-clock butler service. lareserve-paris.com — DANIEL SCHEFFLER

Instead of mining precious metals and stones to create her one-of-a-kind accessories, the Italian jewelry designer Olivia Monti Arduini makes necklaces and bracelets — and even corsets, capes and vests — out of MODEST RICHES porcelain. There is a From top: the Waterfall necklace, about luminous quality to her AED 8,815; the designer pieces, one of which Olivia Monti Arduini; the Opium necklace, inspired a show of erotic about AED 6,978. jewelry in Madrid last spring, and a lightness of touch that belies her painstaking craft.

Acknowledging that the average necklace takes about 20 hours to make by hand, Monti Arduini says with a laugh, ‘‘While I love the Zen-like concentration, I doubt I will ever find an assistant patient enough to help me.’’ oliviamontiarduini.com — MARELLA CARACCIOLO CHIA

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: FEDERICA CIOCCOLONI (3); JOE OKPAKO/PROJOE PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF FISCHERS; TIM CLINCH; PATRICIA NIVEN

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

The New Marylebone

A FINE MESS Clockwise from above: fried chicken with collard greens and black-eyed peas at the Lockhart; Chiltern Firehouse’s 19th-century facade; butterscotch-drizzled ice cream at Fischer’s.

Far right: grilled sardines and fried cassava at Shuttlecock Inc’s Pan Am-themed dinner event, Mile High.

Since the February opening of André Balazs’s Chiltern Firehouse — and its celebritypacked restaurant — the quiet neighborhood of Marylebone has turned into London’s latest culinary destination. Away from the paparazzi, there’s Fischer’s, a new Viennesestyle cafe from the restaurateurs behind the beloved Wolseley and the just-launched Beaumont Hotel. Nearby, at Beast, diners feast on Norwegian crab and Nebraskan steak around candelabra-topped communal tables set underground. For upscale Southern comfort, the Lockhart serves fried chicken with friggitelli peppers, while Carousel is the new headquarters of Shuttlecock Inc, which stages culinary events with themes like ‘‘Canada Day’’ and ‘‘the golden age of air travel.’’ And next spring, the crew behind Clerkenwell’s eccentric Zetter Townhouse will unveil a second location in the area, with a curiosity-filled lounge serving molecular cocktails and modern bistro fare. chilternfirehouse.com, fischers.co.uk, beastrestaurant.co .uk, lockhartlondon.com, carousellondon.com, thezettertownhouse.com — CHRISTINE AJUDUA

February – March, 2015

Lookout

This and That

Gillian Wearing Goes Home The Turner Prize-winning artist on returning to her roots in her new film.

Paris has recently become a breeding ground for Broadway hopefuls. A new musical based on the rollicking Vincente Minnelli movie ‘‘An American in Paris’’ has just been shown, and is on its way to the Great White Way this spring. The circumstances surrounding its creation have been unusually collaborative. The Théâtre du Châtelet’s general director Jean-Luc Choplin thought it would be fun to mount the musical, which originated as an orchestral work by George Gershwin, but when he contacted the Gershwin estate about obtaining rights, he learned that the veteran Broadway producers Van Kaplan and Stuart Oken had the same idea. They decided to work together, hiring the star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to direct. ‘‘Gershwin worked a lot in Paris in the 1920s, and it’s great to have his music back here,’’ he says. ‘‘But to take it to New York too? That’s the cherry on the cake.’’ chatelet-theatre.com — DANA THOMAS

PECULIAR BEAUTY Clockwise from left: a still from ‘‘We Are Here’’; a still from ‘‘Fear and Loathing,’’ the other film in her ‘‘Everyone’’ show.

BY DESIGN

The Artist Is Seated

ATTENTION TO DETAIL Above: a performance at the University of Milan of Marina Abramovic’s ‘‘Counting the Rice’’ on a wooden prototype of the architect Daniel Libeskind’s table.

Right: the new concrete model.

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T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

Marina Abramovic has joined forces with the architect Daniel Libeskind and the furniture design firm Moroso to create a limited-edition table from her ongoing ‘‘Counting the Rice’’ performance, in which participants are instructed to sit down and separate lentils from rice for at least six hours while keeping a tally. ‘‘During the process, people go through many emotions,’’ Abramovic says. ‘‘They get bored, they get angry and then they have a feeling of timelessness.’’ The futuristic concrete pew recalls the oblique angles often seen in Libeskind’s work while reflecting the austerity of the performance.

Any sense of asceticism, however, ends there — the first of 30 tables, which are being sold at auction, went for roughly $105,053 this fall at Fondation Beyeler in Basel.

Moroso, (212) 334-7222 — TOM DELAVAN

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS; GILLIAN WEARING/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES; GILLIAN WEARING/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS LOS ANGELES, AND MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON; GIANNI ANTONIALI/IKON; SAVERIO LOMBARDI VALLAURI

The stars aligned for the stage debut of a Gershwin classic.

‘‘I’m from the West Midlands, an in-between place near a congested motorway on stilts and fields with horses and a river. There’s all this lovely landscape, but it’s just a place for people to get from A to B. My mother still lives there, and it’s where I shot my new film, ‘We Are Here.’

I’d always wanted to shoot something where I grew up, to go back to that point in my life where I was learning things for the first time.

I have a very specific visual memory of my home. I saw beauty there that no one else could see, and I saw it with a sense of loss and regret, as if from beyond the grave. The film’s title is taken from a little passage in Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology,’ a collection of poems by fictional people who lived in a small town, where one says, ‘And we — we, the memories, stand here for ourselves alone. For no eye marks us, or would know why we are here.’ ’’ ‘‘Everyone,’’ Dec. 13-Jan. 24 in Los Angeles, regenprojects.com

On Beauty

Icing on the Cake At Dior, sugary pastel eyeliner made from strips of satin conjures worlds of romance and solace.

BY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCHOHAJA

ERSATZ SKIN AND ‘‘invisible makeup’’ ruled the runways of spring the creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, 2015, making any exception shine hard. At Raf Simons’s Dior, the requested the same technology be applied in fresh pastels: ‘‘This models came out looking monochrome and very nearly naked-eyed, kind of satin looks a little bit like neoprene’’ — a favorite fabric of until a blink or the flash of a camera revealed a crescent moon of Simons’s — ‘‘and in these very couture, very subtle colors. It’s color above the lash and each artificial glimmer of something you can wear in the daytime.’’ If a Dior pink, peach, lemon or pistachio to be an adhesive strip couture dress is a four-layer cake in the tearoom, a set STUCK ON YOU Backstage at of laser-cut satin. In fewer words: a sticker, albeit one of Dior ‘‘Pastel Eyes’’ multiwear eyeliner patches is Dior’s spring 2015 show, that looks good enough to scratch and sniff. four macarons bought to go. where the creative and image director of Dior Makeup, The illusion first appeared in 2011, when Dior Philips is very convincing on the properties of Peter Philips, created subtle launched a collection of adhesive eyeliners in various atelier satin and ‘‘special’’ adhesive. However, the drama with adhesive strips across the eyelids. shapes of black velvet. For spring 2015, Peter Philips, makeup hasn’t yet launched, and I am on more like a

February – March, 2015

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Lookout

On Beauty

Peter Philips’s makeup recalls a history of artifice and craft that is almost as French as pastels and a little less sweet. were the likeliest survivors were also — by several historical accounts — the likeliest originators of a strategic form of facial decoration known as patchwork. In France and later in England, many women and some men made a daily ritual of snipping silk, velvet or leather into hearts, stars, dots and other shapes, to be applied with a brush and some glue.

By the end of the 18th century, patchwork had become less remedial and even more selfconscious, a marker of style — or status — with or without a pockmark behind it. Even the placing of Jordan almonds budget. Somewhere in my apartment I find a pair patches had attained a little magicky significance: A heart-shaped of either nail or eyebrow scissors, a clean bit of surface at my table patch on the left cheek said you were engaged, while a heart-shaped and a roll of Johnson & Johnson cloth tape I originally bought for a patch on the right said you were married, and a patch on the breast stiletto blister, and after 10 minutes of feeling as domestically was said to be the mark of a murderess. As for a patch by the eye? competent as Catherine Deneuve in ‘‘Repulsion’’ (1965), I surprise my reflection with almost-symmetrical eyeliner in cow’s-milk white. A sign of passion, allegedly.

To count yourself as ‘‘passionate’’ this side of the millennium is My face looks like the ’60s: optimistic. unfashionable enough, and to look passionate is basically It is not very subtle, my version of Philips’s innovation. Nor is it unthinkable. In pistachio or lemon or peach or pink you couldn’t very couture. But in combining a material of solace with the aim of think about it even if you tried, so deeply anti-passionate is any color beauty, I am accidentally repeating a history of artifice and craft that derives its character entirely from being mixed that is almost as French as pastels and a little less with white. Pastels are laced with an attenuated sweet. Because while it’s true that Dior invented the EYES OF THE BEHOLDER strain of cool, a distant femininity: Mia Farrow as patch as a style of eyeliner, it’s also true that 300 Clockwise from top left: a model at Dior with sticker Daisy Buchanan, Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, years earlier, Frenchwomen popularized the patch as eyeliner and ‘‘invisible makeup’’; Paris Hilton as Paris in miniature. Also: princesses, a fix for all kinds of unbeautiful marks. Often, these Dior Pastel Eyes Kingdom of Colors (limited edition), grandmothers. Still there is a kitsch loveliness about marks were left by smallpox, the damage of which $61, available at dior.com the idea of a patch over the lash line to light up a face was intractable even when the disease was cured, from January 2015; the finished and signal a new kind of passion, with a wink. and so the 18th-century upper-class women who look; Philips at work.

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T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

PROP STYLIST: PAUL MORENO. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DELVAUX BAG, (212) 833-2001. MIU MIU BAG, (212) 641-2980. JASON WU BAG, BERGDORFGOODMAN.COM. SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI SLIMANE BAG, (212) 980-2970. HERMÈS BAG, (800) 441-4488. RALPH LAUREN COLLECTION BAG, RALPHLAUREN.COM. LOEWE BAG, LOEWE.COM. PIERRE HARDY BAG, PIERREHARDY.COM

Market Report

Suede Bags

A luxuriously supple carryall, just in time for fashion’s new ’70s groove.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA M C CLURE

Clockwise from top left: Delvaux, AED 7,896.

Miu Miu, AED 6,207 Jason Wu, AED 4,756.

Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane, AED 10,100.

Hermès, AED 29,384. Ralph Lauren Collection,AED 7,162. Loewe, AED 9,880. Pierre Hardy, AED 6,225.

ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE

February – March, 2015

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Market Report

Party Shoes

A festive low stacked heel is a joyfully practical choice for a night on the town.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNA M C CLURE

Clockwise from top left: Miu Miu, AED 3,269.

Rochas, AED 2,479. Nicholas Kirkwood, AED 2,056.

Aquazzura, AED 2,755. Pierre Hardy, AED 4,205.

Michael Kors, AED 2,020. Louis Vuitton, about AED 7,933. Valentino Garavani, AED 4,756.

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T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MIU MIU SHOES, MIUMIU.COM. ROCHAS SANDALS, SIMILAR STYLES AT MODAOPERANDI.COM. NICHOLAS KIRKWOOD SANDALS, SIMILAR STYLES AT NICHOLASKIRKWOOD.COM. AQUAZZURA SANDALS, BERGDORFGOODMAN.COM. PIERRE HARDY SHOES, PIERREHARDY.COM. MICHAEL KORS SANDALS, (866) 709-5677. LOUIS VUITTON SHOES, (866) 884-8866. VALENTINO GARAVANI SANDALS, (212) 355-5811

Lookout

Watch Report

TOP ROW: STYLED BY MALINA JOSEPH GILCHRIST. MODEL: JUN YOUNG AT TRUMP. MAKEUP BY ANNE KOHLHAGEN FOR DIORSKIN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. HAIR BY RO MORGAN AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. MANICURE BY YUKO TSUCHIHASHI FOR DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYC. BOTTOM ROW: STYLED BY JASON RIDER. MODEL: SIGNE RASMUSSEN AT NEXT. MAKEUP BY AKIKO SAKAMOTO USING CHANEL FOR SEE MANAGMENT. HAIR BY RACHEL TOLIN USING ORIBE. MANICURE BY RIEKO OKUSA FOR DIOR VERNIS AT SUSAN PRICE NYC

Dressing Down The new diamond timepieces for evening have an oversize masculinity that makes them fitting even for day.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE ENGMAN

Top left: Chanel Mademoiselle Privé, AED 146,736. Rag & Bone sweater, AED 1,818, rag-bone.com. Calvin Klein Collection pants, AED 5,123.

Top right: Hublot Classic Fusion, AED 45,177, hublot.com. The Row sweater, AED 3,856, neimanmarcus.com. Jil Sander pants, AED 1,873, bergdorfgoodman.com. Bottom right: Baume & Mercier Promesse, AED 25,527, baume-et-mercier.com. Proenza Schouler sweater, AED 4,223. Chloé skirt, AED 6,795, net-a-porter.com. Bottom left: Patek Philippe 5298P Calatrava, AED 425,333. Marc Jacobs cardigan, AED 3,048 Ralph Lauren Collection skirt, AED 5,858, ralphlauren.com.

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Arabian Luxe

From Jaeger-LeCoultre’s new Rendez-Vous Moon to Emirati Shamsa Alabbar’s contemporary jewelry and French fragrance house M. Micallef’s oriental scent Mon Parfum Gold, here is a selection of luxury objects catering to Arabian tastes.

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

Oriental Scent French luxury perfume house M. Micallef has further expanded its presence in the U.A.E. with a new boutique in Al Ain. Founded and run by power couple Martine Micallef and Geoffrey Nejman, the company was established in 1997 in France’s perfume capital, Grasse. But ever since Martine and Geoffrey took a trip to the Middle East and discovered oud in 2002, they became transfixed with the Orient. Since then the couple has opened its first standalone boutique in the U.A.E at Grosvenor House and has launched man.y perfumes incorporating oriental ingredients as part of their composition. One of them is Mon Parfum Gold, a perfume launched in 2014 that combines rose, ylang-ylang, woody notes, amber and incense.

Romantic Gems The dazzling jewelry creations of Tiffany & Co. have always been associated with love and romance. In February, the company is highlighting its iconic array of rings ideal for a proposal as well as a host of its other latest jewelry creations. These include Tiffany T, the company’s design director Francesca Amfitheatrof’s first collection for the brand that exudes modernity and energy. There are also bejeweled hearts from Tiffany Filigree and the iconic Tiffany Keys collections, as well as the startling pink hues on the Tiffany Celebration Rings and enrapturing sapphire rings.

Available at Tiffany’s in Mall of the Emirates and The Dubai Mall and in Abu Dhabi at the Abu Dhabi Mall. Prices on request.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF M.MICALLEF; COURTESY OF TIFFANY & CO

Available exclusively in M.Micallef boutiques in BurJuman Centre and at Grosvenor House and in Al Ain once the store is open in February, at Paris Gallery and the Grosvenor House boutique. Price on request.

Eastern Edge A favorite among celebrities, contemporary jewelry designer Monica Vinader has become known for her ability to bridge accessories with highend jewelry. The designer has now opened her first branded retail space in the Middle East at Boutique 1 in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates. The launch follows the success of the British luxury jewelry brand’s presence at Boutique 1 in both the Mall of the Emirates and on The Walk at Jumeirah Beach Residence, in addition to a soaring online following from fans in the region.

Like her jewelry, the new space will allow shoppers to step into Monica’s eclectic and avant-garde world. Chic bespoke furniture creates an inviting in-store experience as well as provides a stylish backdrop to Monica’s range of iconic friendship bracelets, diamond and color gemstone collections.

Customers will also have the opportunity to personalize their purchases with complimentary engravings in-store at a ‘friendship bar.’ The new store is the first step in establishing fully fledged Monica Vinader stores that the Boutique 1 Group is planning to open within the next 12 to 18 months in the U.A.E.

Mission Accomplished Angela Missoni recently graced Dubai with her presence for the re-opening of the Missoni flagship store in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates. The new space is situated on the second floor of the Mall’s Fashion Dome, with a surface area of over 108 square meters.

The boutique’s design reflects the brand’s Italian aesthetic with colorful touches blended with warm elements including wood, copper metal sheets, wool, and rugs. Neutral colors have also been added in order to create a refined atmosphere inspired by the Missoni style. Also incorporated are references to the Middle East found in black granite flooring which contrasts with a shiny copper metal ceiling. The boutique will offer Missoni’s range of ready-to-wear for men, women and kids, and home furniture and accessories.

The new Missoni Boutique is located in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF MONICA VINADER; COURTESY OF MISSIONI

Available at Boutique 1 in Mall of the Emirates.

Prices upon request.

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Alice in Dubai The delicate melting pot of Eastern and Western cultures in Dubai is something that fascinates British designer Alice Temperley. Recently in town to present a preview of her Spring/Summer 2015 collection, the designer is attracted to Dubai’s energy and entrepreneurship. Her interest in distant lands forms a principal influence in her Spring 2015 collection. The designer was inspired by a photography book she found at Portobello Market featuring the photographs of African portraitist Seydou Keïta. The works, like Temperley’s designs, reveal a fresh character with a graphic look and lots of details, patterning and ornamentation. The collection also incorporates antique Japanese woodblock prints that are decorated with hand-painted moths, butterflies and insects. Also found are Arabian influences — especially the Keffiyah pattern, the Palestinian gender-neutral chequered scarf. Here it is incorporated into dress ensembles, long skirts and scarves.

Available at the Temperley London boutique at The Dubai Mall. Prices on request.

Stella McCartney is the latest international designer to be acquired by BySymphony.com, the e-retailer of the luxury Symphony boutique at The Dubai Mall. The first, and only, regional e-tailer to feature the British brand, the site offers a playful selection of the label’s Resort 2015 fashion collection to cater to the needs of women in the region. Sharp and vibrant, the collection taps into the designer’s signature style of distinctive tailoring and natural poise with a modern and feminine look. Among the edition are tailored trousers and tops from the Superstellaheroes collection as well as a print pleat silk midi skirt and polo neck sweatshirt. The Stella McCartney readyto-wear shoes, bags and mobile accessories will be available for next-day delivery in the U.A.E. and fast delivery across the GCC and worldwide.

Available online at BySymphony.com.

Prices available on request.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF ALICE TEMPERLEY; COURTESY OF SYMPHONY

Stella at Symphony

Emirati Adornments Shamsa Alabbar’s contemporary Arabian-inspired jewelry merges her passion for fine jewelry and graphic design.

Her creations incorporate the delicate and mysterious lines of Arabic calligraphy — not necessarily to symbolize a specific meaning, but rather result in avant-garde yet sophisticated forms that redefine the classic Arab aesthetic. “As a graphic designer I always had a huge interest in typography, especially Arabic,” she says.

“Arabic typography has many rules, and those rules have to be respected. The whole idea behind the collection is to introduce letters as an art form.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF SHAMSA ALABBAR; COURTESY OF JAEGER-LECOULTRE

Available online at www.shamsaalabbar.com. Price on request.

Moon Time Recently released at the Salon Internationale de Haute Horlorgerie in Geneva, JaegerLeCoultre’s Rendez-Vous Moon is an elegant timepiece featuring a beautifully staged moon-phase display. The moon has long been considered to be a symbol of time as well as the hourglass of the ocean tides and the human biological clock. It is also representative of womanhood. Here the brand has created a watch specifically for women who are lured by the beauty of the universe. Available in two models — 36 and 39 mm diameters — they share several characteristics, including the mother-of-pearl moon disc which matches the aesthetic of the moon with its uneven surface. Both versions are studded with constellations and sprinkled with cabochons representing the stars and each is endowed with a blue satin strap.

Available at the Jaeger-LeCoultre boutique in The Dubai Mall and the Jaeger-LeCoultre boutique in Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi. Price on request.

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Sensorial Objects Emirati designer Khalid Shafar incorporates the use of scent within his design approach for 2015.

Above: Khalid Shafar.

From top right: Dubai Journey; Khalid Shafar scented candle; Illusion Pearl.

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ILLUSION PEARL, Arabi Space Divider and Dubai Journey are just some of the titles that Emirati designer Khalid Shafar gives his creations. Each of these designs reflects a specific cultural and often historical link to his homeland. For example, Dubai Journey, based on Carrom, a board game that Shafar played as a child, represents the long journeys taken by early dwellers of the U.A.E. to cross the desert.

“I spent many wonderful hours during my

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childhood playing Carrom with my friends and family,” says Shafar. The veneered story on the face of Dubai Journey’s board is a tribute to his hometown of Dubai. In the center, Arabic calligraphy refers to the famous description of Dubai —“Dubai dar el hay” — meaning “Dubai is the home of the human being.” The phrase, Shafar explains, is a common description of Dubai among the locals.

Also evoking the Gulf’s heritage is Illusion Pearl, a chair laden with 8,856 cultured pearls.

Reflective of the U.A.E.’s pearl industry which has been associated with the Arabian Gulf for decades, the pearls, which are locally produced by the Emirati company RAK Pearls, were used to create 70 meters of chain woven over the chair’s walnut frame. Like all of Shafar’s creations, the object, with its dynamic and modern lines, also refers to contemporary society. “The city of Dubai at night was the original inspiration for Illusion,” explains Shafar.

This year the designer’s vision maintains its contemporary edge and link to the Gulf yet incorporates a new element: smell. “My design approach for 2015 revolves around the five senses — moving beyond a piece of furniture or just an object,” says Shafar. “I have started with the sense of smell by introducing an exclusive scent to the brand.” For nearly nine months Shafar worked closely with olfactory brand Lokum Istanbul in Turkey to capture his culture as an Emirati in the fragrance while also incorporating his brand’s character and its contemporary and quirky feeling. “The result was an amber scent that not only resonates with the older generation of my Emirati grandmothers, but also retains a modern twist for a wider international audience thus creating an enchanting ambience in a space.”

The exclusive scent is available as scented candles, packaged in a crafted, drawer-style box with special matches. Like his other creations, Shafar considers it to be an experience and one that is distinctly Arabian.

Khalid Shafar’s designs are available for order through his website or from KASA, his gallery space in Dubai. www.khalidshafar.com

COURTESY OF DANIEL ALLEN PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF KHALID SHAFAR

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

The site of the opening party for the 25th edition of the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) in Geneva.

Below: The SIHH logo.

Scintillating Time Amidst a rocky financial market, the latest Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie showcased a multitude of mechanical timepieces but with less extravagance.

IMAGES COURTESY OF SALON INTERNATIONAL DE LA HAUTE HORLOGERIE

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

JUST DAYS BEFORE the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, otherwise known as SIHH, opened on January 19th, the Swiss National Bank stunned Swiss export companies, as well as the watch industry, by removing a currency exchange cap it had set in place three years ago against the diminishing Euro. The move caused Richemont shares to drop by 17 percent as investors worried about the impact of the strong franc on Swiss companies that depend on exports. This means that there will be a substantial increase in the cost of watches from Switzerland to other countries, in particular Europe and the US. But the show must go on. This year’s fair, which opened twenty-five years ago when Cartier and several other Swiss watch brands left the industry’s then largest trade fair in Basel to open an alternative fair at Geneva’s Palexpo center, was just as exclusive and luxurious as previous years.

In typical SIHH fashion, this year’s show featured 16 brands,

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One of the major themes this year was a focus on classical and more reserved men’s watches, perhaps forecasting a year of restraint.

Left, from above: Fabienne Lupo, President and Managing Director of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie with Bernard Fornas with Bernard Fornas, co-CEO of Richemont Group; co-CEOs of Richemont Group Bernard Fornas and Richard Lepeu.

Right: Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Calendar with meteorite stone dial in steel.

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including 12 owned by Compagnie Financière Richemont, stationed within the roughly 40,000-square-meter venue, and all sold timepieces upwards of $200,000. This richly appealing and sophisticated venue, which treats its exclusive guest list with great care, is a representation not only of the Richemont group but also of the vision behind the watch brands that initially formed SIHH and of their belief in high-end timepieces.

The benchmark event highlights the industry’s trends for the next year. Much smaller in size to its competitor Baselworld, which opens in March, SIHH decided in 2009 to shift its dates to January so as to give industry professionals a jumpstart on the latest watch news.

One of the major themes this year was a focus on classical and more reserved men’s watches, perhaps forecasting a year of restraint. Vacheron Constantin, one of the oldest names in watchmaking, celebrated its 260th year with Harmony, a line that recalls the brand’s classic wristwatch designs of the 1920s. Initially, there will be seven limited-edition cushion-shaped models in addition to the new Mono-Pusher Chronograph that features the brand’s much-awaited in-house chronograph calibre. The watch is stamped with the Poinçon de Genève quality seal and has the classic doctor’s pulsometer scale around the edge of the dial.

Only 260 pieces of the model will be produced.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: IMAGES COURTESY OF SALON INTERNATIONAL DE LA HAUTE HORLOGERIE; IMAGE COURTESY OF JAEGER-LECOULTRE

The inauguration ceremony during the 2015 edition of Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: IMAGES COURTESY OF ROGER DUBUIS; COURTESY OF MONTBLANC; COURTESY OF PANERAI, COURTESY OF PIAGET; COURTESY OF SALON INTERNATIONALE DE HAUTE HORLOGERIE

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s new Master Calendar is another example of a classical revival in fine watchmaking. The 39-millimeter watch retains the same graceful lines, layout and dimensions as last year’s model, but incorporates a round dial elegantly fashioned from a piece of meteorite that originated in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. “Every meteorite watch is unique because the patterns on each dial are naturally different,” says Stéphane Belmont, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s international creative and marketing director. “It’s like having a piece of infinity on your wrist.” The watch underlines the brand’s obsession with astronomy.

Elsewhere at SIHH were an abundance of skeletonized timepieces allowing the wearer to focus on the watch’s inner world of mechanical prowess. Cartier announced its third Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon since 2010. This year’s model leaves the moving parts exposed inside the 47-millimeter see-through case of 18-carat white gold. Roger Dubuis’ Excalibur Automatic Skeleton is representative of the astral theme the brand celebrates this year. It also introduces the first skeletonized automatic Roger Dubuis movement with micro-rotor. The watch boasts a “spider” design seen through its weblike, dark-colored movements that expand across the dial.

For the ladies, avant-garde watchmaker Richard Mille, renowned for his aesthetic and technically ambitious timepieces, is making exceptional pieces. One that garnered great admiration is the new RM 19-02 Tourbillon Fleur. Inspired by the magnolia flower, the timepiece reveals a gemstone-set magnolia motif and a technically advanced, rhythmically regular flying tourbillon escapement in the lower left corner. Five delicately rendered hand-made magnolia flowers surround it and open and close to reveal the watch’s beating Above, from left to right: Roger Dubuis Excalibur Skeleton; Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum; Panerai Luminor Submersible 1950 Carbotech; Piaget Altiplano Chronograph.

Right, from above: Live cooking peformed by Lenôtre during the cselebration party.

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Differences in pricing are just one of the ploys that Swiss watchmakers are using to attract new customers and, with the recent surge in the Swiss franc, it will be interesting to see the outcome.

Above and right: The singer Ayo during the celebration party.

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IMAGES COURTESY OF SALON INTERNATIONAL DE LA HAUTE HORLOGERIE

heart in a breathtaking motion.

At Piaget the quest for slimness continued. Known for its ultrathin movements, Piaget this year introduced its Altiplano Chronograph, a stunning 4.65 millimeter pink gold watch with a hand-wound movement. Another slim beauty was Vacheron Constantin’s new Harmony Ultra-Thin Grande Complication Chronograph Caliber 3500, a watch featuring a cushion-shaped case and handsome, vintage elements.

This year, IWC celebrates the 75th year of the Portugieser collection. At the brand’s booth, the brand’s CEO Georges Kern touted the new model, the Portugieser Perpetual Calendar Digital Date-Month Edition. Other well-received timepieces in the family included the newly developed Annual Calendar highlighting the month, date and day in three separate, semicircular windows at the 12 o’clock position.

There was also the Portugieser Hand-Wound Eight Days Edition “75th Anniversary” (Ref. 5102), whose design recalls the first Portugieser watches of the late 1930s and early 1940s and pays tribute to the early models of the family.

While prices at IWC continue to rise (the Portugieser collection sells for between $250,000 to upwards of $290,000), those at Montblanc,

amazingly, are falling — but not in value. One of Montblanc’s novelties this year is the Spirit Orbis Terrarum, the brand’s new in-house world timer. It comes in a round 41 millimeter by 12 millimeter case with a sapphire crystal in the center of the dial encompassing the continents. A quick glance allows one to notice that half of the continents are dark while the other half are light.

“The watch shows the innovation of Montblanc in a triptych of technical performance, quality, and value,” says the brand’s CEO, Jerome Lambert.“ It does so to the point that even the function disappears, leaving the emotional depiction of the sky on the watch.” What is astonishing is the price tag: roughly $17,500 for the 18-carat red-gold version. For in-house manufacturing and a superb level of aesthetic quality, this is a watch of real value.

Differences in pricing are just one of the ploys that Swiss watchmakers are using to attract new customers and, with the recent surge in the Swiss franc, it will be interesting to see the outcome. High-end watchmakers will certainly not be going out of business, especially given that growth in Swiss watch exports totaled around $19.4 billion last year, a 2.3 percent increase since 2013. But what is necessary for this year’s market outlook is the need to lower expectations. The grim realities of the marketplace have been set and, while the Swiss watch industry is still very much alive, what needs to be addressed is how to accept the somber reality for market growth.

The Immediacy of Prêt Dubai-based Syrian designer Rami Al Ali is renowned worldwide for his enrapturing couture gowns. He’s now onto his next venture: prêt-a-porter.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF RAMI AL ALI

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

RAMI AL ALI’S SHOWROOM on Dubai’s Al Wasl Road is surprisingly serene. Within a few days the designer will be presenting his seventh consecutive couture collection in Paris.

He enters with a flurry of activity behind him, professing how happy he is for the brief disruption. His brilliant, deftly tailored dresses surround us in enigmatic rays of color and light. For Al Ali, couture has always been the center of his universe, but today we’re discussing something different: his venture into prêt-a-porter. Al Ali has arrived at this stage after years of dressing celebrities for A-list events, on-schedule shows during Roma Alta Moda Fashion Week, and now Paris Fashion Week. Ready-to-wear seems to be the inevitable next step for the man who has provided eveningwear with such irrefutable glamour while also paying heed to the needs of the Middle Eastern woman.

“We wanted to create a collection for the same woman who buys our couture,” he says.

The Rami Al Ali woman is soft, extremely feminine and also strong and determined. The first collection for Spring/Summer 2015 debuted during Paris Fashion Week last year.

For the first time Al Ali offered more accessible garments suitable for everyday wear.

Embellished with brilliant orchid prints, the

Syrrian fashion designer Rami Al Ali.

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Clockwise from left: Rami Al Ali’s first ready-to-wear collection features the orchid print on pastel-colored day and evening ensembles.

collection included long jackets, trousers, A-line dresses and tailored shifts. “The orchid has a strong character and is also feminine,” he explains. “I was interested in simplifying the lines to create the right print as well as adding the necessary layering and a bit of embellishment. We were after a coherent look.”

And while he says the collection garnered a good response from the media and buyers, there will be changes in the second collection.

“We’re dropping daywear and focusing on evening and cocktail dresses because that is what we are known for,” says Al Ali. “The daywear needs more manipulation and experience. The client knows us as a couture and eveningwear brand. I think we will build up

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our daywear in the future but we need more experience.” But more than experience in a different clothing genre, which Al Ali recognizes is a necessity in fashion today as well as for his brand, daywear did not cater to his inherent tastes. As he puts it, “I am apparently not a creature of the day!”

The entire prêt project offers a range of new timelines to meet. Al Ali tells how people loved the print of the first collection as well as the fact that he maintained focus on the same woman as he did on his couture. “They liked that we catered to a woman who is very soft and feminine and yet also modern and this did not really create a big change between the prêt and the couture client,” he says. But while

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the collection was well received, it was not planned well commercially.

“From our side the collection was planned late and we were not aware of what was needed to best communicate the product for the showroom and the buyers because with couture you do that afterwards, while with prêt you do it way before,” he explains. But the learning experience worked to his benefit. For the first season the brand wasn’t overwhelmed by a multitude of purchases. As with the couture line, they were able to focus on quality rather than quantity.

Venturing into prêt-a-porter is also about understanding how to work on different commercial platforms. For the next collection, the Rami Al Ali brand will launch at New York Fashion and at Paris Fashion Week. “We will get two completely different feedbacks from two different types of buyers and from this we will be able to plan a next collection that is even more focused,” he says. After years of exhibiting in Paris, he knows how to show fashion well in the City of Lights. New York will offer the biggest learning curve. “New York is not easy,” he says. “It is difficult because the

‘When you focus on the evening dress you can blend in no matter where — be it at a VIP event in New York, a gala in Paris or a big event in the Middle East — the tastes are the same.’

buyers are more — I don’t want to say aggressive as it is a negative word — they are very particular and this is a good thing. It’s good because it makes you more organized.

You need to be prepared for the American market because they have a very precise system in the packing, delivery type and date of release — especially the big department stores because they work with designers worldwide. If you can’t fit into the system then it won’t work.”

Trials on different commercial platforms are part of the test. So far Al Ali has distributed his prêt-a-porter line in the Middle East at a range of boutiques and department stores. “We’re at Galeries Lafayette, Valleydez and Lati, a boutique in Riyadh which will give us a sense of

what the Saudi market is after,” he says.

“Galeries Lafayette appeals more to the international crowd while Valleydez is more for local Emiratis. These different venues will allow us to do some market research about what sells well and where.” And that’s just for the Middle East. When the brand goes international, tastes will inevitably change — although Al Ali doesn’t seem to think so, especially when it concerns eveningwear.

“When you focus on the evening dress you can blend in no matter where — be it at a VIP event in New York, a gala in Paris or a big event in the Middle East — the tastes are the same,” he says.

Al Ali has already done many red carpet events in the U.S.A. providing him with the knowledge

Clockwise from left: For Rami Al Ali, the orchid flower exudes femininity and strength.

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‘The prêt is more of a math thing. It is like a computer: you put in the information and you get a result. So to get from couture to prêt on a daily basis is very difficult.’

Rami Al Ali’s first ready-to-wear collection features soft color and fabrics which endow day and evening wear with an ultra comfortable feel.

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to know what will work and what won’t.

Al Ali emphasizes that the major difference when it comes to distributing in the Middle East and the West will be the buying. “The sizes and the technicality of the garments will be different; I am not concerned about the style,” he says confidently. “We accept to a certain extent that as long as a dress doesn’t lose the identity or DNA of the fashion house then we can adjust it.”

While a fashion designer is a creative professional, they are also making products that must be sold. Fashion is ultimately a business.

“We are artists but we are also selling a product, so if we are catering to a different market and the market is not speaking the same language then it will be difficult to communicate. We need to find a midpoint.”

A bustle of activity is heard at the door. The day is progressing. Al Ali will soon be going to Paris and then to New York. The challenge with the introduction of a new line of clothing is keeping the right mindset. At present Al Ali has a team of about 50 and produces everything in his villa on Al Wasl Road. “We need to grow more,” he says. “Sometimes I arrive at the studio and I am in the couture mood and then I need to go to the prêt design studio and I need to change modes.” Prêt and couture are, of course, two entirely different genres of clothing. “The couture has more space for freedom — anything is possible,” says Al Ali. “Couture is more handwork. The

technicality of achieving a certain structure or cut is unlimited. The prêt is more of a math thing. It is like a computer: you put in the information and you get a result. So to get from couture to prêt on a daily basis is very difficult. So to have two different places would be great for me!”

When asked to provide a preview of his next prêt-a-porter collection, he smiles. “There is still an element of flowers and a mix of a classical print — the French pied-de-coq,” he says.

“We’ve incorporated this with geometric and soft lines maintaining some of the silhouettes from the last collection and also developing some new ones.” Eager anticipation is felt for the unveiling of this next collection. Future plans are also on his agenda. “A Resort Collection is definitely something we will do in the future because it has good commercial value,” he says.

“But for now, I need to focus on the prêt-a-porter and growing the couture collection globally.”

And with 2015 being a year that many luxury brands are getting ready for — particularly given the unstable market global markets — Al Ali’s determination strides forth. “2015 will be played with different rules that we all need to follow,” he says pensively. “But times such as these are also the best moment for a brand to prove itself. During difficult times people look for strong things to lean on. If you survive then you will be trusted for a long time. 2015 will be good whatever happens.”

Hidden Words Moroccan artist Zakaria Ramhani is known for his large-scale canvases that incorporate Arabic calligraphy as well as subject matter from the Arab world that is often controversial.

Zakaria Rahmani, Faces of Your Other, 2013, oil on linen.

IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ARTSPACE

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR

ZAKARIA RAMHANI’S WARM MOROCCAN ACCENT emanates through the phone. He tells me how he is preparing a coffee for our chat. He’s only said a few words, but I can tell he has a lot to say. Like Ramhani’s inviting demeanor, it is hard not to become transfixed by one of his paintings. Large-scale in size, full of vibrant coloring and presenting a subject matter that offers much to ponder, his works are enrapturing. But they are also controversial for a Middle Eastern audience. During Art Dubai’s sixth edition in 2012, authorities censored Ramhani’s You Were My Only Love displayed at Artspace Gallery for its depiction of the brutality of policemen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, as well as the use of women’s

underwear to comment on the revolution. In the work, Ramhani transformed the image of the “blue bra woman” who had come to symbolize the Egyptian protest against military power and depicted her struggling against gorillas while Vincent Van Gogh looked on disapprovingly from the sidelines. Ramhani considers the censorship an “intellectual mistake” for he did not intend it to be an offensive painting. “I want people to be more open-minded,” he says. “I also want them to be open to different types of cultures and their different stages of development.” Open is what Ramhani’s works require us to be but they do challenge our perception of pivotal events and figures in the Middle East. And that is what he would like.

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Ramhani, now 31, grew up in Tangiers, Morocco in an artistic household. His father was a landscape painter and he often copied his father’s work. Ramhani tells how his father would work in his studio the entire day and then continue working into the night. He was fascinated by his father’s dedication and passion.

“I don’t actually recall a moment in my life when I became an artist,” he says. “There was not one specific moment, but I always felt that I would be a writer or an artist someday — something creative.” But what Ramhani does remember is when he became a professional artist. “It was a very pragmatic decision,” he says with conviction. He did his education in science and pedagogy in Morocco and worked as an art teacher until he won a scholarship at the age of 22 to study at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, making him the youngest Moroccan citizen to be awarded residency from the institution. “That’s when things started to change,” he says. “It was an intense moment in my life because it was then that I decided to give up teaching, my security, and to dedicate myself to my art. I think this is something that many artists have to decide: they need to sacrifice something to do their art.”

While there was certainly some initial hardship, Ramhani laughs about the times when he didn’t have enough money to buy cigarettes. But success came quickly. In 2008 he exhibited his work at ‘Word into ART’, an exhibition organized by the British Museum and staged in Dubai’s DIFC. “The show was crucial for me because it attracted many collectors and artists and also allowed me to evolve my painting to create something more in-depth,” he says. He has since shown his works throughout the Middle East and Europe, including at the Barbican Centre in London, Centre d’Exposition Val-d’Or in Quebec, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Dakar Biennale, the Bahrain National Museum, and the Cairo Biennale. In 2010, Ramhani held one of the top ten highest auction results for artists under 30, with his work now found in the collections of the

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Barjeel Foundation, the Alain-Dominique Perrin Collection, and the Royal family of Morocco. In 2013, Julie Meneret Contemporary Art in New York gave Ramhani his first US exhibition entitled May Allah Forgive Me, Vol. 1 and 2. “Being established at very good prices when you are young is a great thing — it is an honor,” he says. But he also notes how success doesn’t come without hardship.

“Some people don’t want to give up anything. They don’t want to give up their security or take risks and hence don’t get anywhere.”

Ramhani’s introspective and satirical canvases tell of an innate ability to capture contemporary subject matter. And he does this while still offering a warm and inviting color palette comprised of expressionistic brush strokes. This is evident in the artist’s many portraits and self-portraits, a genre that is, however, at odds with the Islamic faith for its representation of the human form. But the calligraphy that Ramhani incorporates to create his figurative representations aims at giving his subjects a meaning that is closer to the tradition in which he grew up. It all started with his father who was commissioned to paint portraits. “He used to pray to God for forgiveness each time he painted human beings for, as Muslims believe, only God should have the power to create a representation of the human form,” he recalls.

The inspiration to imbue his works with calligraphy stems from his father and his fervent need to be pardoned as he painted his portraits. “I wanted to find a new way of painting so that I wouldn’t have the same pressure as my father,” he says. “This began as an innocent project but has now become a bit cynical. I now think a lot about what is ‘haram’ or ‘bad’ — I think a lot about how the representation of a face could be considered to be a way of copying God. However, in Pre-Islamic society human beings were depicted — they were representations of God, a superpower. But I guess it is normal for a religion to try to change the way things were before.”

Ramhani uses laughter and satirical commentary to portray difficult scenes and figures from contemporary society. For example, a triptych positions three American Presidents —Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — next to each other in a moment of laughter. Entitled LOL, the work is an example of Ramhani’s ability to take important individuals and depict them in a situation of

IMAGES COURTESY OF ARTSPACE.

Clockwise from left: Works by Zakaria Rahmani.

Om Kalthoum, 2014, oil on canvas; LOL #1 #2 #3, 2014, oil on canvas; Faces of the Human/Word Allah, 2010, acrylic on canvas.

‘This style, what I have created, reflects many of my ideas regarding the world, society, my relationships and myself.’

part of me — a part that I don’t understand. Hence, the other is always in some way related to us.”

Ramhani wants to talk about the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed in such a satirical manner refers back to our conversation on the representation of the human figure in Islam.

“The event took place because of the idea behind figurative representation in Islam,” he says. “But does Islam truly prohibit representations of the Prophet Mohammed? It is not about whether the representation is good or bad, but the meaning behind it. And the fact that this was not respected points to the cold war between the East and the West.” It’s a silent war between two different cultures that live so closely together in a country such as France — “the other” is accepted into society but not properly understood nor respected, and hence the clash occurs.

Ramhani works to marry these two different worlds in his work.

“I always think that I am creating an icon — but I am also fighting against it,” he says. “The writing is continuous and almost like a therapy that goes on and on and on. My calligraphic movements on canvas are like a dance. I am like the painting. I am close to it and then I need to start over and over again.”

The calligraphic element of Ramhani’s works is a mystery for the onlooker; it literally says nothing in Arabic. “People always want to know what I am writing in my paintings and my answer is always, ‘If you can accept not to know then that is the first step.’” He writes stuff that has no meaning. It is only the image that counts. “My paintings are hyperrealistic — it is the subject and how it is portrayed that is important, not the words,” he explains. The senseless words are but a means to express the subject matter of his canvases. It’s like the differences between East and West, he explains. “Sometimes we don’t need to know everything; sometimes we just need to see.”

For more information, visit www.artspace-dubai.com

Zakaria Rahmani, I’m Sorry Father, 2013, oil on canvas.

The work details the young portraits of three dictators: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Ossam Benladen.

IMAGES COURTESY OF ARTSPACE.

nonchalance and humor. For his debut show in the US, each individual work is rendered with the artist’s vibrant coloring and calligraphic lines.

“I’ve always been fascinated by calligraphy and script,” he says. “But I don’t know any style of classical Arabic calligraphy.” By using such a traditional art in such a personal way to create something new takes it far away from its original function.”This style, what I have created, reflects many of my ideas regarding the world, society, my relationships and myself. I am using the power of the written word to explain the reality around me.

What I do is calligraphy because there is no other way to call it. But what I do is really not calligraphy — it’s my own invention.”

During “Connotation”, the artist’s last show that took place in Dubai during December 2014, Ramhani exhibited I’m Sorry Father, a startling triptych that portrays an intellectual trompe l’oeil effect. It depicts three children — Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden — whose personalities have always been associated with power and terror. The representation of these dictators as children opens up the viewer to an endless stream of pondering and interpretations. “But it is also the calligraphy in the work that gives this piece its tension,” Ramhani explains. “The style allows me to renew my ideas each time and make stronger statements about my subjects.”

Ramhani believes that his strongest portraits are his selfportraits. These come in a variety of colors and portrayals. At times the viewer is faced with Ramhani’s intense gaze while at others the canvas portrays the mirror image of two of the artist’s self-portraits facing each other as if they were studying what was before them.

Faces of Your Other is notable and depicts a series of different selfportraits, some which even show smaller versions of the artist’s face coming out of his mouth. The series explores how the same subject matter — the artist’s face — set within different stances can generate different ways of perceiving it. “This is my other but it is also not readable to me,” says Ramhani. “I can’t explain it but it is

February – March, 2015

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WWW.BOATSHOWDUBAI.COM Dubai International Marine Club, Mina Seyahi

boating

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dubai i n te r n at ion a l b o a t s h ow 3-7

march 2015

A DISCOVERY OF OPPORTUNITIES & EVERLASTING RELATIONSHIPS

fishing

The Thing Ever since Louis Cartier began designing diamond vipers in 1910, the French house has dreamed up a menagerie of lithe creatures, ranging from onyx-studded panthers to gold crocodiles.

Now Cartier has coiled a serpent around an exotic gem to create a one-of-a-kind platinum cuff. Handcrafted in the jeweler’s atelier atop its boutique on the Rue de la Paix in Paris, the piece required seven artisans — one wax sculptor to create the shape, two jewelers, three setters (one just for the center stone) and a polisher — and about 2,000 hours of work. The result is a stunning snake, made up of 1,700 diamonds, tightly clutching its coveted prize: a 53.78-carat cabochon-cut rare emerald from Brazil.

Price upon request, cartier.co. — BROOKE BOBB PHOTOGRAPH BY KATE JACKLING

February – March, 2015

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Quality

In Fashion

Highly Conventional Traditional codes of formal wear suddenly feel right, from ruffle-front shirts and high-waisted pants to velvet suits and tuxedo stripes.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW KRISTALL STYLED BY JASON RIDER

Ralph Lauren Purple Label vest, AED 1,652, shirt, AED 2,185, and pants, AED 3,287, ralphlauren.com.

Dunhill dress studs, AED 679, dunhill.com.

Stephen Einhorn ring (worn throughout), about AED 9,931, stepheneinhorn.com.

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Salvatore Ferragamo suit, AED 10,982, Vintage shirt.

February – March, 2015

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Quality

In Fashion

Tommy Hilfiger jacket, AED 2,567 (for suit), Prada shirt, AED 4,444, and scarf, AED 1,101, prada.com.

Balenciaga pants, AED 2,442.

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MODEL: MARC ANDRÉ TURGEON AT SUPA MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY SHIN ARIMA USING REDKEN FOR FRANK REPS. MAKEUP BY ASAMI TAGUCHI USING NARS COSMETICS FOR FRANK REPS. CASTING BY ARIANNA PRADARELLI. TAILORING BY LEROY GOUGH. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: GASPAR DIETRICH AND MORGAN ASHCOM. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: KELLY HARRIS AND RAYNER REYES

Giorgio Armani jacket, AED 11,661, and pants, AED 4,940.

Charvet shirt, AED 2,020, bergdorfgoodman.com.

Dolce & Gabbana bow tie, AED 1,010, dolcegabbana.com.

February – March, 2015

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Quality

In the Air

Exquisite Feasts From ornate confections to extravagant centerpieces, the mood is decadent, and the table is set.

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

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FOR FORMAL BANQUETS hosted by the Hapsburg monarchy — held to celebrate the emperor’s birthday, for instance, or the imperial wedding of Joseph II to Isabella of Parma — like this rococo coach constructed from crystallized rock sugar by the artist Timothy Horn (4) or Margaret Braun’s chalice (5). René Redzepi’s dessert of flowers from Noma (3) is probably delicious — but could you touch it? Better, perhaps, just to eat a perfect square of William Werner’s vanilla pound cake (1) or fruit tart (6) from the newly opened Craftsman and Wolves bakery in San Francisco.

Giambattista Valli’s gown from fall couture 2014 (2) is fit for fine dining. Go on — take a picture, like Juergen Teller did at the Hotel Il Pellicano, where chef Antonio Guida made soup paintings almost too chic to eat (7).

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: EILEEN WELCH; JASON SCHMIDT/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND P.P.O.W GALLERY, NEW YORK; MARGARET BRAUN; AMPARO RIOS; CSSOURTESY OF THE VENDOME PRESS; JUERGEN TELLER PAGE 25 FROM EATING AT HOTEL II PELLICANO PUBLISHED BY VIOLETTE EDITIONS; GIAMBATTISTA VALLI; DITTE ISAGER/ PHAIDON.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF MIRAMAX; “THE FAT DUCK COOKBOOK” BY HESTON BLUMENTHAL/BLOOMSBURY; IVAN DAY; JOHN STOREY; LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2014; JOSE LUIS LÓPEZ DE ZUBIRIA; GIORGIO ARMANI PRIVÉ; ADAM GOLDBERG; COLLECTION OF GUY DE ROTHSCHILD/C IVAN DAY

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10 AN AUTHENTIC ADORNMENT, the swan pie (9) made by the historian Ivan Day was modeled on a similar one in a 1644 painting by David Teniers the Younger, its pastry gilded, its wings fluffed up.

Preparing a spread for hundreds of guests in honor of Louis XIV at the Château de Chantilly in 1671, the French steward François Vatel, played by Gérard Depardieu in the 2000 film ‘‘Vatel’’(8), was driven to suicide. Lavish cooking and table decoration can get surreal — so, one might imagine, was the picnic at which Nusch and Paul Eluard and Man Ray were photographed by Lee Miller in 1937 (11). Those salad days might have inspired this fiercely precise dessert of kumquat discs, rhubarb threads and dabs of sorrel granita at the newlythree-Michelin-starred Saison in San Francisco or Heston Blumenthal’s infamous snail porridge (10).

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DO YOU DARE to eat a peach? The 1972 16 15

Surrealist Ball at Château de Ferrières featured birdcages, mannequins and haunting table settings (13). For the chartreuse de pêches served to King Edward VII in 1909, sliced fruits were likely colored and set in jelly; the effect is buoyant and very bold (16). The gown and veil for Armani Privé’s fall couture 2014 show (14) was similarly bursting with life.

Circles pop — especially if they are spherified, like the basil marbles fashioned by molecular gastronomist Ferran Adrià (17) or the bubbles made from beets served by his onetime pupil Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz (15).

February – March, 2015

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Food Matters

Famine or Feast

Is it more rewarding to subsist on broth and cold mountain treks at a German clinic for 10 days or to settle into five-course Michelin-starred meals? One writer heads to the Black Forest to weigh the merits of the purge and the binge.

BY CATHY HORYN PHOTOGRAPHS BY THIBAULT MONTAMAT

EATING CLEAN From top: the fruit juice ‘‘lunch’’ served during the 10-day fast at the Buchinger Wilhelmi clinic on Lake Constance; lunch at the three-Michelinstar restaurant Schwarzwaldstube in Baiersbronn includes grilled quail, a Breton lobster and a granite of sour cherries.

February – March, 2015

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BARE ESSENTIALS Clockwise from far left: a visitor at Buchinger Wilhelmi getting a hydro massage; a couple after the sauna; the clinic’s exterior; a meal for nonfasting patients at Buchinger; the clinic’s austere accommodations.

‘For the digestive rest day you will choose from rice, fruit or porridge,’ the concierge said.

‘Just one.’ ‘For every meal?’ I asked.

THE GERMANS HAVE always been goofy about health cures — affusions,

colonics, fasts — and they want a setting that matches the rigor of the treatment. There are thermal spas in the Swiss Alps, and the Mayr clinics in Austria, where they perform deep gut cleanses. Journalists have remarked on the intensity of Mayr — the dry spelt bread, the ritual of chewing each bite 30 to 40 times — while conceding that they look and feel amazing afterward.

I wanted those results, too, but I wanted something more from my purge holiday than a flat belly and brighter skin: I wanted a German experience, whatever that meant. I love certain German writers and artists, have listened to Karl Lagerfeld yak about Little Karl in Hamburg and, like millions of American kids in the ’60s, I savored the dummkopf jokes on ‘‘Hogan’s Heroes,’’ the TV series about a German P.O.W. camp. My ideas about the country were pretty high-low.

In that spirit, I proposed a trip of extremes.

For the first part, I would spend 10 days fasting at Buchinger Wilhelmi, a retreat in southern Germany on the shores of Lake Constance — ‘‘Swabia’s sea’’ in the opening pages of ‘‘The Magic Mountain,’’ Thomas Mann’s novel about a healthy young man who goes to a Swiss sanatorium for a visit and stays seven years.

I wanted a place out of a novel, a hospital of sorts, not fancy but lavish in its authority.

My German friends assured me that Buchinger was strict. Founded in 1953 in the town of Überlingen, it lies near orchards and vineyards, although I would enjoy only a daily glass of juice and a cup of vegetable broth. That’s 250 calories a day. No booze or caffeine. I would occupy a small, cell-like room — to be sure, one with a view of the lake — and I would submit to a routine that included hot liver compresses and enemas. After 10 days, I would not only emerge thinner (this seemed a certainty), but energized from all that discipline. ‘‘If all goes well,’’ Raimund Wilhelmi, Buchinger’s co-director, said, ‘‘you feel you could change the world.’’

The second leg of my trip was to take place in Baiersbronn, a small town in the Black Forest. What was in Baiersbronn? Eight Michelin stars. Somehow,

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in the past decade, it has become a culinary capital, led by two family-run hotels, Bareiss and Traube Tonbach, each with a three-star chef. (The Hotel Sackmann, also in town, has a two-star restaurant.) I intended to spend my post-fast weekend eating some of the best cooking in Germany.

The outcome of this journey of opposites was nothing that I could have foreseen. In mid-July, I landed in Zurich and drove across the plains of BadenWürttemberg, a kingdom of farms, to the clinic and the lake’s alpine-blue sliver. I was new to fasting and had only an omnivore’s sense of pleasure.

But Baiersbronn was just 95 miles from Buchinger. How could I not go and try? I was in Germany, land of kirschen and duck fat.

THE SUN WAS STILL blazing when I pulled up

to Buchinger, its facade a cross between Bauhaus and a ’60s motor lodge. I had pictured a more secluded setting, but, thanks to German prosperity, suburban villas had encircled the clinic. Still, the interior felt private. As a young concierge led me to a terrace, I was pleased to see a wide, sloping lawn broken up by flower beds and a swimming pool where people lay about reading and sunbathing. The place had an objective air of health, emphasized by the low, drab buildings that housed patients’ quarters and therapy rooms.

My room was also a luxury-dampener. It contained a wide single, built-ins and a gleaming bathroom. There was Wi-Fi and TV. It seemed like a good place to be while one is deliberately refusing food and the brain is turbulent with thoughts and emotion. In that state, you don’t want to be looking at prints of King Ludwig.

If the décor were any less humble, you wouldn’t trust the program.

It wouldn’t feel German. ‘‘Fasting is pure, it’s simple,’’ Wilhelmi said when we met. ‘‘The things around you should correspond to your inner state of mind.’’ His grandfather, Otto Buchinger, successfully used fasting to cure his own rheumatic fever after World War I, and his daughter, Maria, opened the clinic based on his holistic methods. Wilhelmi and his wife, Francoise, a

BREAK FAST Clockwise from far left: a woman in traditional German dress looks back at the Hotel Traube Tonbach in Baiersbronn; the Schwarzwaldstube’s dining room at the hotel; a plate of quail with barbecue marinade, tomato compote and mushrooms at Schwarzwaldstube; cows in Baiersbronn.

physician, took over in the mid-’80s. Of the few thousand people who stay at Buchinger each year, he said, two-thirds are fasting — often for two or three weeks. The rest are eating low-calorie vegetarian meals prepared by the chef, Hubert Hohler, who is something of a star in Germany. But the main mission is therapeutic fasting to relieve ailments like stress, obesity and arthritis.

Before the concierge left, he handed me a blue booklet with the corner of page 121 folded down. ‘‘Here, read this,’’ he said. ‘‘It contains important information about your fast.’’ He explained that I would begin with a ‘‘digestive rest day,’’ to ease my system into it. I would also be evaluated by a doctor, who would help me choose therapies from the clinic’s deep roster. ‘‘For the digestive rest day you will choose from rice, fruit or porridge,’’ he said. ‘‘Just one.’’ ‘‘For every meal?’’ I asked. ‘‘Every meal.’’

After he had gone, I glanced at the book and tossed it on the bed. The day was too nice to waste indoors. I walked down to the town, full of people — kids, beer drinkers at cafe tables, old people in Tevas and shorts on bikes. I drank in the delights of a German summer and bought a cheese sandwich. My last. Then I dragged myself up the hill to my new home. That night, I dreamed I was getting married.

The next day at breakfast I met three patients: Sarah Marks, who handles client services for an asset-management firm; and Teresa Carulla and her daughter Julieta, all from London. At any one time about half of the patients are German, French or Swiss, with a smattering of Dutch, Brits, Americans and people from the Middle East. I heard that a member of the Obama administration was at the clinic during my stay. One man had been in residence for a year to confront his obesity. But of all the people I met, I found the attitude of the Carullas the most inspiring.

Teresa, on her fifth visit, described her ordeal with kidney cancer and how fasting had helped her recovery. (Recent studies indicate such a link.) Julieta, a mother of four — slim, pretty, maybe a little skeptical — was on her first fast.

Sarah, picking at her brown rice, commented that it seemed weird to be spending thousands of dollars to deny oneself food. Julieta smiled. ‘‘I know, I had that problem, too,’’ she said, ‘‘even though I saw the benefits to my mother.’’ She then urged us to go on the morning hikes and take the cooking classes. As I was thinking I would never do that, she said, ‘‘You don’t want to miss them.’’

Walking back to our rooms, I asked Sarah why she had come to Buchinger. ‘‘Fasting has been in the press a lot — that was an attraction,’’ she said. ‘‘And I had never been in this part of the world.’’ I told her about Baiersbronn, and she looked startled and then laughed. ‘‘I just want to be able to wear my jeans again without a red mark left by the button.’’

Everything at Buchinger ran like clockwork — the morning checkups, the midday rest periods. One day, Sarah booked herself a Golden Gate Anti-Age facial in the clinic’s beauty salon.

The two-hour treatment boasted a gold finishing mask. She got there early but seeing the facialist’s door closed, took a seat upstairs to wait until she was called.

She heard a scolding voice and looked down the stairs. It was the facialist, hands on her white-clad hips: ‘‘Mrs. Marks, what are you doing sitting on a chair?’’ ‘‘I’m waiting,’’ said Sarah. ‘‘You should be down here! We’ve lost 20 minutes and now you can’t have the golden glow facial.’’

Generally, though, this dependability added to Buchinger’s womblike atmosphere (‘‘cold womblike,’’ in Sarah’s view), where life’s most basic choices are made for you.

On schedule, I went to see my doctor, Dorothe Hebisch, a trim woman of late middle age. Right off, I told her I didn’t have any problems — a problem itself, for then Dr. Hebisch couldn’t propose therapies other than classic massage and foot reflexology. She also suggested I take an art class. Hoping for something more exciting, I said, ‘‘What about Kneipp?’’ A German specialty, it involves being hosed with hot and cold water. Dr. Hebisch agreed

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and concluded by explaining that I would begin the fast in the morning after drinking a solution of Glauber’s salts.

The next day in my room I drank the stuff, and the expected happened. It wasn’t so bad. Around 1 p.m., a nurse entered and said, cheerily, ‘‘I have your hot liver compress.’’ I lay down and, after placing a hot water bottle on my belly, she girdled me in a cloth. It was a very babyish sensation. But by then, my head was throbbing, so I didn’t care. Sarah reported later that she spent the day ‘‘curled up like a dog.’’ Around 6 p.m., when I went up to the main salon for soup, my legs felt very spongy.

The next morning, feeling better, I joined Sarah and 30 others for the daily wanderung. Julieta was right; the walks were the best thing about Buchinger.

Every morning at 6, we’d board a bus at the clinic and in no time were hiking into forests and across meadows, nearly five miles. I missed only one — the morning I got to the lobby at 6:01.

Eventually it was time for my Kneipp water treatment, in the therapy wing. A Mrs. Hoffmann, her blond hair in a bun, led me into a white-tiled room and told me to strip. ‘‘You will stand there,’’ she said, indicating a stall in the corner. ‘‘Is it going to hurt?’’ I said meekly.

Mrs. Hoffmann laughed incredulously. ‘‘Ja!’’ I giggled and danced to the stall. I was glad Mrs. Hoffmann slipped so easily into cahoots, given the setup.

Holding the nozzle of a hose, she told me to stand with my hands pressed against the tile. Then she released a stinging jet of hot water on my skin. It was intense but not unpleasant. I did a full rotation before she lowered the nozzle and said, suddenly, ‘‘Now you can cry.’’ ‘‘What?’’ I asked. ‘‘Now you can cry!’’ she said, grinning. And before I grasped her meaning, an icy blast hit me. I crumpled in a poor imitation of the Venus de Milo as we both screamed with laughter.

I got more restless as time went on. I swam every day, and I was learning new things — maybe above all that I didn’t need much food. I lost 10 pounds.

But the euphoric energy that the Wilhelmis spoke of never materialized.

Some days I could barely move I was so tired. I was surprised at the similarities between Buchinger and the hermetic world conjured by Mann — the pedagogy, the fact that no one was immune from being called a patient, all the talk of moods and weight loss. (Yes, like a nature lover bringing Thoreau to the woods, I brought ‘‘The Magic Mountain’’ to the clinic.) Not understanding at all what time means in such a place, I began to wish the days away, so I could get to Baiersbronn and back to normal life. ‘‘So you want the two extremes?’’ Wilhelmi said with a chuckle when I told him my plan. Francoise, however, was full of cautions when we met on my last day. By then, I was back on regular food. ‘‘Your sense of taste is so refined after a fast that a cherry is like a firework, so the tendency is to eat more,’’ she said. ‘‘Just be very, very attentive at Baiersbronn not to eat dessert. Or have just one bite. And, please, don’t take bread and butter!’’

As I was due for lunch in Baiersbronn, I said my goodbyes early to Sarah.

She, too, was ambivalent about her fasting experience. I mentioned Francoise’s warning about the bread. ‘‘Am I really going to say no to a cute waiter offering seven kinds of bread?’’ I said. Sarah shook her head and added: ‘‘especially if some of the bread is warm.’’

So, a little before 1 p.m., after crossing one forested valley after another, I sat down at Schwarzwaldstube, the domain of the chef Harald Wohlfahrt and one of the most celebrated restaurants in Europe. The occupants of a dozen tables in the small, elegant room were already into their first courses.

I was in heaven. At the suggestion of the maître d’, I ordered the five-course set menu. And as he started translating from the German, my head began to

For a hot liver compress, I lay down and, after placing a hot water bottle on my belly, a nurse girdled me in a cloth.

It was a very babyish sensation. But by then, my head was throbbing from lack of food, so I didn’t care.

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PEAKS AND TROUGHS A sweeping view of Baiersbronn and the Tonbach Valley, where the Hotel Traube Tonbach is located.

swim. ‘‘To start,’’ he said, ‘‘yellowfin tuna and mackerel, the tuna baited in star anise and served with oysters, tips of passe-pierre … then Breton lobster cooked in a crustacean butter and served on green asparagus, with small squids. …’’ I thought of Sarah back at Buchinger, and our cups of broth. ‘‘The main course, quail, charcoal-grilled and served with a mash of tomatoes and artichokes … a slightly smoked marrow … the cheese course and then dessert of cherries from the region, marinated in port wine sherry and filled with a hazelnut stone … served with elderflower ice cream and a granite of sour cherries.’’

It was just as Francoise had predicted — every bite was an explosion in my mouth. Pushing some of the quail and mash onto my fork, I thought, This is pure pleasure. Leo Tolstoy may have said that the refusal of food ‘‘is more than pleasure, it is the joy of the soul,’’ but poor Leo never got to taste Harald Wohlfahrt’s cooking. I ate everything — the portions were small — and drank a split of wine, a delicious white from Karl H. Johner in the Baden region.

When I got up from the table, it was 3:30 p.m. I felt great, not the least bit full. Then I went for a long walk in the valley. The next morning, at breakfast, I stuck to oatmeal, ignoring the big German buffet at the Traube Tonbach.

Later, I headed to the Bareiss for lunch by its three-star chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp. That meal was also sublime, playful in its flavors and colors. And at each hotel, I adored the scene: the returning families, the afternoon cakes on the terrace.

But it is also true that I couldn’t wait to join that other great German tribe — the hikers in the Black Forest. I was up at dawn to walk, and out again in the afternoon. I went five miles. So Francoise needn’t have worried; in the end, Buchinger’s philosophy prevailed. And what was that philosophy?

Cleansing the body of bad toxins? Gaining self-control? Finding inner peace?

Ja-ja-ja. It was all that and something besides — time. If you’re not filling up huge portions of your day with eating — or your brain by thinking about food — then you have more time for other stuff.

You may even discover hidden talents. Shortly after I returned from my trip, I received an email from Miriam Bredella. Miriam is a remarkable woman — chic, German-born, an associate professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School. I met her at Buchinger. She was on her first fast, with her mom. Miriam is actually doing research with fasting volunteers in Boston to study the effect of fasting on different kinds of body fat.

But that’s not why I mention her. Miriam took the art class, among other activities. ‘‘I hadn’t drawn or painted since I was in middle school,’’ she said. ‘‘I just started drawing with charcoal and painting with my fingers.

It was like meditation. It was one of my highlights.’’ And, almost as a token, she attached the paintings for me to see. They were of boats and the sun on Lake Constance.

On the Verge

Hollywood on the Tiber What could be more melancholic, extravagant, alienated, operatic and deeply strange than Italian film?

Try turning Italian film into a theme park.

BY CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANILO SCARPATI

WHEN IN ROME One of the entrances to Cinecittà World, which opened last July. Below: a gate inspired by the 1914 silent film ‘‘Cabiria.’’

IF YOU HAD ASKED ME before I visited Rome to free-associate off the

phrase ‘‘Italian cinema,’’ I probably would have said something like, ‘‘Antonioni-Fellini-Bicycle Thief-little boys-poverty-whore-mother-sexwomen’s mustaches-death.’’ (As the great-granddaughter of Sicilians, jokes about women’s mustaches are something I really can’t get enough of.) I might have further said, thinking of Fellini, that Italian cinema is a cinema of extravagance and fantasy. I might have added, thinking of Pietro Germi, that Italian families are lunatic asylums of which, if they are lucky, the patients will one day become the wardens. I might have further added, thinking of Antonioni, that brooding and alienation and despair are attempts to remake that oppressive familial reality. I might have finally added, remembering Visconti, that the Italians’ imagining of southern Italy as a polluted backwater of mustaches lost in time gave rise to fascinating experiments with depth of field.

Many of these associations have to do with Cinecittà, Rome’s most famous film studio. Before Mussolini founded Cinecittà in 1937, 80 percent of

movies screened in Italy were American. Between 1937 and 1943, the studio produced 279 films (nearly half of which were comedies, perhaps because Il Duce was a known fan of Laurel and Hardy), but after the war, production ceased; the Germans looted the equipment and the studio was used to house refugees. By the early 1950s, American dollars were back. It was cheap to shoot in Italy, and the location was divine: perfect golden light, a short drive to the sea. Besides, it was fun to work in Rome. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton flaunted their affair up and down Via Veneto.

Alongside the Americans, of course, worked Italy’s most famous directors. These were the glorious decades of Italian filmmaking — of Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Visconti, Leone, Pasolini and Fellini, who kept an apartment at Cinecittà. The sheer size of the studio — 86 acres, piazzas and offices and postproduction facilities and a huge backlot to hold thousands of extras — made it perfect for lavish dreamscapes like ‘‘La Dolce Vita’’ as well as big-budget spectacles like ‘‘Ben-Hur’’ and ‘‘Cleopatra.’’ Until the spaghetti western took over, Cinecittà also churned out

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peplum, swords-and-sandals epics that were operatic spectacles of widescreen heroism and full-color romance. They starred bodybuilders and were big at the drive-in.

Extravagance, of course, is what Italy is all about. Extravagance is the Roman Empire and Berlusconi’s bunga bungas and the fashion industry and the papacy. Extravagance is taking all of August off when your country is in a recession. Extravagance is also what Cinecittà, at its height, was all about.

Perhaps the greatest homage to Cinecittà comes in Godard’s ‘‘Contempt,’’ which came out in 1963. Early in that movie, a French screenwriter named Paul arrives at Cinecittà for a meeting with an American producer. The American, whose name is Jerry, is financing a film version of ‘‘The Odyssey,’’ directed by Fritz Lang, who plays himself. Cinecittà, which should be a bustle of set-building and prop-mastering and principals in blue eye shadow, is desolate. ‘‘What’s going on?’’ Paul asks the producer’s assistant, a girl in a mustardcolored sweater. ‘‘Jerry fired nearly everybody,’’ she says. ‘‘Italian cinema is in trouble.’’

One of the jokes here — that Italian cinema couldn’t survive without an almighty checkbook — isn’t funny anymore. The studio has been largely privatized — the state owns only a 20 percent share, plus the land and facilities — and operates at a fraction of its former pace. A few years ago, Cinecittà’s owners decided that the studio’s legacy was more lucrative than investing in the studio itself. So they did the sensible thing: They announced plans to open a luxury compound on the Cinecittà lot and to build a theme park, Cinecittà World, about 30 minutes from Rome’s center. Three months of protests and picketing followed; three workers went on hunger strike.

Cinecittà employees feared that Cinecittà World foretold the end of studio production and, with it, their livelihoods. The problem was that by building a monument to something that wasn’t actually dead, people got the idea that it was. There’s a fine line between celebrating a legacy and burying it alive.

ONE OVERCAST MORNING this past August, I waited in the shadow of Temple of Moloch for the gates of Cinecittà World to open. As the minutes passed, a crowd of perhaps a hundred Italians amassed, all taking pictures of each other. At the stroke of 10, gray fog spumed across the turnstiles. We scanned our tickets beneath the monster’s jagged teeth and crossed over to

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an old-timey set of New York City. An empty stage loomed, suggestively, at the end of the block.

Moments later, gunshots popped and men in trench coats scuttled from doorway to doorway. Music blared. Everyone was taking pictures of everything.

A small gaggle of high ponytails and broad chests bounded onstage, stretching and smiling as Pamela Lacerenza, a contestant on the first season of ‘‘The Voice of Italy,’’ sang triumphantly into a microphone.

The song went something like ‘‘Cinecittà World, I love Cinecittà World, Cinecittà World, yeah!’’

To a certain sensibility, such a scene represents a nightmare of existential alienation. Imagine how Antonioni would shoot it: overcast skies, barren fairground, rides that no one is lined up for. Now imagine what Dino Risi would do: kerchiefed nonnas doing the twist, bachelors leering at any leg in sight.

The truth is that my day at Cinecittà World wasn’t like either. It was more mundane. It was like this one reel that Cinecittà made to advertise itself in the 1930s, in which a gust of wind blows down the set walls and four actresses who had been sipping afternoon tea out of china cups suddenly find themselves in the middle of an unremarkable empty field with the fallen remnants of their make-believe world lying inert around them.

I wandered. Tucked next to the kids’ zone, at a long tent, a woman was holding a clipboard with one hand and handing out olivegreen helmets with the other.

She explained to me, mostly with gestures, that this was Aquila IV, a World War IIthemed attraction. Ah, I said to myself. This must be a ride based on a classic Italian war film that I have never seen!

How interesting! I took a helmet and joined the group inside what turned out to be a submarine. An actor in a white T-shirt and a shaved SURREALIST CINEMA From top: fake film crews roam a western-themed ‘‘set’’ at head shuffled us into a line Cinecittà World; Anita Ekberg and Lex Barker and yelled, ordering us to at a press conference in ‘‘La Dolce Vita’’; bend over and touch our toes: Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 epic ‘‘Cleopatra.’’ ‘‘Up. Down. Up. Down.

Faster!’’ We were naval recruits. We moved through the submarine, and in each hold, a new scene unfolded.

We marched. I was commanded to turn a wheel. ‘‘Faster, faster!’’ We said, ‘‘Sì, signore.’’ At the end, the captain shook a toilet-paper roll in our faces. Something had happened in the bathroom.

FROM MIDDLE RIGHT: PIER LUIGI/RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE/ALAMY; SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS

I wasn’t so naïve as to think a theme park would have the glamour of ‘Cleopatra,’ but I did expect it to have the excess.

Whatever the theme-park equivalent of a 10-tier wedding cake or a 60-room palazzo is, this, I assumed, would be it.

FROM MIDDLE LEFT: AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY; EMBASSY PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

Italian cinema has always been an art of beauty.

Not style — beauty. Pure beauty, rotten beauty, corrupt beauty, lavish beauty.

I was confused. Was the purpose of this attraction to pretend to be a member of the Italian navy in World War II? This seemed an unfestive and politically unpalatable activity for a family park. It wasn’t something that the Germans would do, for example. It wasn’t until I met up with my guide, Cynthia, that I got an explanation. Aquila IV is indeed a World War II attraction, but the point is not for guests to imagine themselves as fascist seamen.

The Aquila IV submarine is from the set of ‘‘U-571’’ (2000), an American movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Jon Bon Jovi, which was filmed at Cinecittà.

Aquila IV is an exception. By and large, most of the attractions and rides of Cinecittà World don’t directly reference specific films.

There’s no ‘‘Rome Open City’’ reenactment, no ‘‘8 1/2’’-themed Tunnel of Love. This is because Cinecittà doesn’t own the rights to most of the movies that have been shot on its grounds. So unlike Universal Studios, with its Transformers 3-D and Simpsons and E. T. rides, all the attractions at Cinecittà World are generic. Cynthia used the word ‘‘homage’’ a lot. The drop tower called Erawan, for example, is decorated with a giant elephant. This, she said, is ‘‘an homage to Bollywood.’’

Most of Cinecittà World’s sets were painstakingly designed by Dante Ferretti, who worked on Martin Scorsese’s ‘‘Gangs of New York,’’ also filmed at Cinecittá. Besides a New York set at the park, there’s Ancient Rome, anchored by the Roman Aqueduct and a self-serve cafeteria, and the western-themed ‘‘Ennio’s Creek,’’ named for the composer Ennio Morricone.

Authentic Morricone music plays on that street, but it’s hard to hear over one of those rides often found outside grocery stores, where a kid sits on a horse and spins around while ‘‘Dixie’’ tinkles.

Giulia, a Venetian teenager, was crestfallen at the lack of ‘‘spectacles.’’ She warned me off the show ‘‘Audition,’’ and I took her advice. Instead I attended ‘‘Enigma’’ (the ‘‘e’’ is backwards), the park’s marquee STRANGE ENCOUNTERS From top: event. Dancers in skintight suits an alien-themed roller coaster at did tricks with giant boxes to a Cinecittà World; Matthew McConaughey in ‘‘U-571,’’ the submarine thriller pulsing electronic soundtrack. shot at Cinecittà; Brigitte Bardot and A vague plot took shape. We Jack Palance cruise along in ‘‘Contempt.’’ traveled to ancient Rome, the Wild West and outer space. A doll came to life and grew 40 feet tall and sang an aria. A video projection of an elephant charged. ‘‘The End?’’ the screen asked.

An actor in a white suit draped a red scarf around his neck and took a seat in a director’s chair, his back to the audience. A man behind me caught the reference. ‘‘Fellini,’’ he murmured, audibly. ‘‘Enigma’’ had taken place in one of the former studios of

megaproducer Dino de Laurentiis. This is because Cinecittà World is located on what used to be the grounds of Cinecittà’s rival, a studio de Laurentiis opened in 1964 called — seriously — Dinocittà. One of the first films shot there was John Huston’s ‘‘The Bible,’’ which called for the construction of five separate arks.

Cinecittà World does not suffer from too little aspiration to art. It is Rome’s first movie theme park, and Cynthia took care to point out the faux crumbling rocks and electric-blue googly eyes on the kiddie boats. The same painstaking attention to aesthetic detail that defined the best of Italian cinema has now been used to paint roller coasters. I wasn’t so naïve as to think a theme park would have the glamour of ‘‘Cleopatra,’’ but I did expect it to have the excess.

That’s what I imagined: excess. Extravagance. Something over the top.

Whatever the theme-park equivalent of a 10-tier wedding cake or a 60-room palazzo is, this, I assumed, would be it. Without extravagance, the park is just ugly. And this, it must be said, is unforgivable. Aesthetics are the one thing Cinecittà World should have gotten right. For whether you say Italian cinema is an art of dreams or an art of family life or an art of ennui, it has always, in every case, been an art of beauty. Not style — beauty. Pure beauty, rotten beauty, corrupt beauty, lavish beauty.

Cinecittà World will close or it won’t; either way, films will continue to be made. And the only place to find movie history will be, as it always has been, at the movies. The scene at the beginning of ‘‘Contempt’’ continues with the French screenwriter and the girl in the mustard sweater trudging towards the green door of Cinecittà’s Teatro 6. They find Jerry, the American producer, exiting the studio, shielding his eyes against the sun. Jack Palance plays it to high stormy heaven. He is in a tragic mood. ‘‘Only yesterday there were kings here,’’ he says. ‘‘Kings and queens, liars and lovers’’ — his voice rises to a crescendo now — ‘‘all kinds of real human beings’’ — here it breaks — ‘‘feeling all the real human emotions. Yesterday I sold this land. And now they’re gonna build a five- and ten-cent store . . . on this, my lost kingdom!’’ ‘‘It’s the end of cinema,’’ the girl translates. ‘‘I think cinema will live on,’’ Paul says.

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RAW APPEAL Vintage furniture and custom pieces

by Vincenzo de Cotiis in his former office in Brescia, originally a sock factory from the ’40s. Below: de Cotiis in his furniture gallery, Progetto Domestico.

By Design

Industrial Elegance

The interior architect Vincenzo de Cotiis — sought after in his native Italy for the dynamic monastery-meets-laboratory approach he brings to designing furniture, homes and hotels — deserves our attention.

ON A PARTICULARLY HOT DAY IN MILAN,

the Italian designer, interior architect and sculptor of sorts Vincenzo de Cotiis, 56, perched himself on an industrial-style work stool in his gallery near Corso Como. The stool, which looked like an anvil looted from a futuristic construction site, was made out of solid aluminum, but while it was being forged, de Cotiis covered it in a webbed net, which gave it a surprisingly soft texture, a bit like fabric. ‘‘I’m not sure where the idea came from,’’ he told me. ‘‘I always start with the material and adjust the shape to fit. The shape comes second.’’

The primacy of material over form gives de

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Cotiis’s pieces a kind of organic intrigue. Some seem almost to grow out of the floor, or to take on anthropomorphic dimensions: armchairs that smile; oxidized-brass suspension lamps that bend and twist, interrogating the spaces they illuminate. Because he uses recycled materials — salvaged wood, reclaimed leather, fiberglass sourced from shipyards — and crafts most of his pieces himself, each is incredibly rare, often produced in a series of no more than 10. He has collaborated with Italian furniture companies like Ceccotti Collezioni, Rossana Orlandi and Busnelli but prefers to work alone. ‘‘This may sound a bit undemocratic,’’ he said, ‘‘but I don’t like

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TOP: MAX ZAMBELLI/COURTESY OF ELLE DECOR ITALIA

BY STEPHEN HEYMAN PORTRAIT BY FEDERICO CIAMEI

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: IVAN TERESTCHENKO (2); MAX ZAMBELLI/COURTESY OF ELLE DECOR ITALIA (2)

‘This may sound a bit undemocratic, but I don’t like designing mass-produced pieces.’

designing mass-produced pieces.’’

De Cotiis divides his work life between this gallery-quality furniture collection, Progetto Domestico, and his much more lucrative interior architecture practice. In Milan, he has helped pioneer the monastery-meetslaboratory aesthetic of the city’s most luxurious multibrand stores, such as Antonia in Brera and Excelsior Milano, converted from an old cinema near the Duomo. De Cotiis decorated both these spaces as temples to fashion — dramatically lit, a little clinical, with massive cement-block displays, exposed stone walls or archways, gleaming marble floors and translucent shelves on which bags and shoes are displayed like research specimens.

In his residential commissions, he places his rigorous, high-design furniture in spaces that are by turns lavish and spare. He has decorated homes with walls so raw they look like the basement from ‘‘Fight Club,’’ but has also created rich, warm, family-friendly residences. The apartment he made for one client is filled with many of de Cotiis’s signatures: framed panels of weathered aluminum, swervy desks, suspended cabinets of brushed recycled wood and an improbably long and narrow dining room table. There’s the

DRAMATIC EXPRESSION Clockwise from top left: a 17th-century mirror over a polished marble sink in a Milan apartment; the desk and wall-hung cabinets in the study, made by de Cotiis from reclaimed timber; a dining room in an 18th-century house in Salò; the bedroom, featuring a wall covered with a collage of torn gauze.

same blend of smooth and rough — in the walls of oxidized mirror or bare concrete, and in the split-personality bathroom, with its vanity mirror encased in a rusticated wooden pilaster above an almost comically luxurious black and white marble floor.

De Cotiis is currently at work on a boutique hotel in Shenzhen, China — part of a $3.2 billion commercial and residential complex master-planned by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Marissa Morelli, the supervising architect in his office, spends much of her time trying to focus his

considerable energies. ‘‘It’s never linear. It’s not an architect’s way of designing,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s closer to art.’’ For many years, Morelli said, de Cotiis didn’t bother to photograph his work, not even his cult-fashion collection, Haute, from the mid-2000s, which featured torn and washed silk and cashmere, antique lace and glass. Sometimes he dissolved 1980s fabrics in acid and used the leftover materials as a kind of ghostly shroud. It was painstaking, poetic, intellectually daring work. ‘‘And he has almost no pictures of it — nothing,’’ she said. ‘‘I think for him the process of designing is

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By Design

generations of Italian visionaries including Giò Ponti and Achille Castiglioni.

The first space he designed after graduating was a friend’s boutique in Brescia.

The store was starkly minimalist: all white, two sofas, two tables. ‘‘The clothes were only presented on mannequins, no racks,’’ he recalled. ‘‘The mannequins had Japanese features.’’ Sergio Gandini, a former partner and chairman of Flos, an Italian lighting firm, was so impressed that he opened a studio for de Cotiis, launching his career.

In Milan, de Cotiis took on the décor for a restaurant in the space that currently houses Excelsior. ‘‘It was very new for Milan: the first place to serve Mexican, Thai and Japanese food.’’ The project, he said, was so radical that ‘‘people didn’t understand what it was.’’ He describes the space: ‘‘There were two rooms: one completely red — floors, walls, everything — the other completely white. Very minimal.

Probably too minimal.’’ In the past several years, de Cotiis has been branching out of shop design. ‘‘Now fashion has become very

SPARE VISION Clockwise from above: in the bedroom of an apartment in Vienna, a wall of distressed gauze under glass; a former laboratory turned elegant residence with de Cotiisdesigned black leather sofas; a Progetto Domestico desk in brass and wood; T’a Milano, a chocolate shop and bistro in Milan.

much more interesting than the end product.’’

Which is not to say de Cotiis doesn’t care about the details. Near the gallery, he has eight designers and architects working in a cramped studio so laden with art tomes that it’s often mistaken for a bookstore by passersby. When I asked them whether de Cotiis is a demanding boss, they lowered their eyes and giggled nervously, as if to say, You have no idea. De Cotiis will often submit sketches to his staff — little line drawings of, say, a curvy armchair — opposite photos of leather

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handbags from the 1950s. (He has a huge archive of inspirational bric-a-brac in the basement of the studio.) ‘‘Sometimes it’s hard to see the connection,’’ Morelli said.

De Cotiis remembers sketching from a very early age. ‘‘Whatever I saw around me, I copied: famous paintings, historical movements in art, the Impressionists, anything.’’ He spent a year studying art in Venice (which he deemed ‘‘too classical’’) before enrolling in the architecture department of Milan’s famous Politecnico, the elite engineering and design school that trained

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business,’’ he said. ‘‘Everything is so calculated. There’s no risk.’’

De Cotiis usually spends half the week in his two workshops in the countryside, which he calls his ‘‘laboratories.’’ In recent years, he has created everything from industrial-size, weathered-brass kitchen islands to giant tableaux of incandescent filmstrips covered in resin, which he frames like paintings. ‘‘I’ve been quite emotional in my choices,’’ de Cotiis told me, trying to explain what drives his creative decisions. ‘‘Everything is always evolving around you, you have to absorb these changes, but I have tried to maintain my way of doing things. There is often no reason, no why, in these things.’’

CLOCKWISE FROM MIDDLE LEFT: MAX ZAMBELLI/COURTESY OF ELLE DECOR ITALIA (2); FEDERICO ZOTTI; MAX ROMMEL

The primacy of material over form gives de Cotiis’s pieces a kind of organic intrigue. Some seem almost to grow out of the floor, or to take on anthropomorphic dimensions.

February – March, 2015

HAPPY TIMES

The Movie-Star Life of Quvenzhané Wallis Page 58 Easy Dresses for Evening Page 62

FROM TOP: RENÉ & RADKA; KARIM SADLI; NIGEL SHAFRAN

How to Do Good Art Page 70

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Roller skates, pizza, math class and an Oscar nomination: the life of an 11-year-old movie star.

BY NICHOLAS HARAMIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENÉ AND RADKA

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THE AIRLINE SKATE CENTER, next to the Jefferson Gun Outlet on a dusty

strip of highway in suburban New Orleans, is Quvenzhané Wallis’s favorite place to hang out. They serve her favorite food (pizza) and she can listen to her favorite song (Ariana Grande’s ‘‘Break Free’’) while indulging in her favorite pastime (roller skating). And on this sticky afternoon in October she never once complains — not even 50 laps in — about feeling dizzy or nauseous or the least bit achy in the calves. Like most sixth graders, Wallis could swerve and spin and twirl around to a soundtrack of Pharrell and Justin Bieber all day long with only occasional pit stops to fuel up on orange soda. Unlike most sixth graders, she has to slow down every now and again to answer questions from a breathless journalist about how it feels to be the youngest Oscar nominee ever. ‘‘I’m not gonna name names,’’ she says, ‘‘but sometimes when reporters are talking it gets a little boring because I don’t have any jokes to tell because the questions are so serious.’’

Inquiries into inspiration and motivation elicit eye rolls. At one point, while discussing the director and co-stars of her new film, ‘‘Annie’’ — Will Gluck is a ‘‘really nice man,’’ Jamie Foxx is ‘‘a really nice guy’’ and Cameron Diaz is ‘‘really nice’’ — she lets out an exasperated yawn. Then she gets up in her pink Nike hightops and sparkly pink top (her favorite colors are turquoise and pink). ‘‘Why doesn’t a bike stand up on its own?’’ she asks. Even on her tiptoes, the 5-foot-2 actress looks very much like a young girl. ‘‘I’ve got it!’’ I find myself yelling, apparently desperate to make an 11-yearold think I’m cool. ‘‘Because it’s two-tired!’’ Despite my better judgment, I go in for a needy high-five.

Wallis’s precocious, at times petulant charm — littered with as much toilet humor as schoolyard sagacity — is her secret weapon, and it’s what makes her stand out from all the pretween beauty queens who’ve been trained to follow a script. She couldn’t even read one when she went to an open audition in her hometown of Houma, La., for the part of Hushpuppy, a girl struggling to care for her dying father, in the filmmaker Benh Zeitlin’s magical-realist odyssey ‘‘Beasts of the Southern Wild.’’

She delighted viewers during the 2013 movie awards season, when she consistently appeared with puppy-shaped handbags slung over her shoulder, in large part because her affect so easily swings between wide-eyed sweetness and sniffy ennui. While she’s undeniably natural when bringing the inner life of a child to the screen, it’s a little early to tell if that’s because she is a child.

Recalling why he cast Wallis in ‘‘Beasts,’’ Zeitlin says, ‘‘It was just the feeling behind her eyes.’’

That way of ‘‘showing emotion without using words’’ convinced the director Will Gluck that she had what it took to play the world’s most famous orphan (or, in this version, foster child) in ‘‘Annie,’’ with Jamie Foxx as the Daddy Warbucks character and Cameron Diaz as the mean-spirited foster mother Miss Hannigan. ‘‘There were certain moments when I read the script with her, when she’s supposed to be optimistic, and she was able to do it on her face without being like, ‘I’m optimistic!’ ’’ Gluck says. ‘‘I was really concerned about not casting Broadway kids. We didn’t want anyone who knew how to emote to the back of the house.’’

While some critics interpreted ‘‘Beasts’’ as a post-Katrina parable, the ‘‘Annie’’ remake, Gluck insists, isn’t trying to make any sort of socioeconomic statement. ‘‘Every character in this movie really was cast race-blind,’’ Gluck

says, explaining that his main goal was to introduce Annie’s story to a new generation of moviegoers. ‘‘It’s funny, because adults always call this a rags-to-riches movie, but when kids see it, that’s the last thing they think.

Annie hates Miss Hannigan, she hates her experience, but she never complains about being poor. All she cares about is finding her family.’’

Right now, all Wallis cares about is finding the two tokens she needs to play a new round of Hoop Fever, which she’s infuriatingly good at (basketball, she says, is also a favorite). When I swear under my breath after losing yet another game, she holds out her hand. ‘‘You owe me a dollar,’’ she says. Her mother, Qulyndreia, adds, laughing, ‘‘She made a killing on the ‘Annie’ set.’’

Wallis, the youngest of four siblings raised by a schoolteacher mother and a truck-driver father, could reportedly earn up to one and a half million dollars for the movie, which had her singing and dancing and sun-will-come-out-ing her way through Manhattan over about 60 days. ‘‘I was so impressed with her,’’ says Foxx, who spent a lot of time on set with Wallis and his two daughters. Diaz helped Wallis with her homework when they weren’t shooting, and was equally charmed. Asked about the pressure that might have come with reviving such an iconic character, Diaz says, ‘‘I’m not certain that a girl that age has that kind of awareness. I don’t think Q did, anyhow.’’

Between scenes, Wallis and the other child actors were taught by ‘‘a real teacher who doesn’t care about movies,’’ Gluck says. ‘‘They’d be like, ‘Ugh, we have math,’ and I’d say, ‘Good, because math is going to serve you much better than this nonsense.’ ’’ But things are only going to get more nonsensical for Wallis, who has two new films coming out (one of them a drama costarring Russell Crowe, Jane Fonda and Octavia Spencer) and a lucrative contract as the first celebrity face of Armani Junior. (Giorgio Armani says that he ‘‘immediately realized that we were looking at the debut of a true star of American cinema’’ in Wallis, who told Piers Morgan last year that she was wearing ‘‘Amour Junior’’ at the Oscars.)

Despite all this, things at home haven’t much changed. She has two dogs, Sammy and Sugar, who play-fight (‘‘not punch-punch, fight-fight’’) in the backyard. She loves watching ‘‘Frozen,’’ and is reading Roald Dahl books (‘‘The Witches’’ is her favorite). Her classmates are somewhat curious when she returns from a shoot, but only briefly. ‘‘Of course, when strangers see me they’re star-struck because of who I am, but my friends take me as a friend because I’m their friend — not because I’m a movie star.’’

I try to get a few more details about what it’s like to balance homework and Hollywood fame. ‘‘How about three more questions?’’ she says. ‘‘Make them big so I can answer them big.’’ Her pursed lips and unwavering stare are both an invitation and a challenge. Has she ever, um, broken any bones? ‘‘No,’’ she says incredulously. ‘‘I’m scared to but I also kind of want to.’’

What’s her favorite way to introduce herself to people? ‘‘Hi, people call me Quvenzhané. But you can call me tonight.’’ I rack my brain for another, but I’m too slow. ‘‘We’re done now,’’ she says. Perhaps she’d like another slice of pizza? ‘‘No more pizza! I’m only 11 and a quarter. Two slices is all I can eat.’’

Wallis is spraying digital bullets at drug dealers and terrorists when her mom comes over, a little concerned about the violence of the video game.

But seeing how well her daughter is doing, she lifts a line directly from ‘‘Beasts’’: ‘‘Who da man?’’ she says. Without breaking concentration, Wallis screams, ‘‘I’m da man!’’

‘When I come back from shooting my friends are like, ‘‘Where have you gone?’’

And I’m like, ‘‘Blah blah blah.’’ Sometimes they’ll say, ‘‘Ooh, there goes that movie star!’’ But it’s not like they think of me as their movie-star friend.’

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PROP STYLIST: LAUREN NIKROOZ

Bonpoint sweater, AED 1,267. Lanvin Petite dress, AED 4,223. Styled by Julie Vianey. Hair by Robbi Rogers. Makeup

by Stefanie Willmann at See Management for Chanel.

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Document

POETIC

Finally for evening, a mood of natural elegance with loose, unadorned dresses and flat sandals.

JUSTIcE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARIM SADLI STYLED BY JOE M C KENNA

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Balenciaga coat, AED 10,266. The Row dress, AED 12,451. Lanvin scarf, AED 1,414. Pearl River slippers (worn throughout), AED 15, pearlriver.com.

Opposite: Agnona vest, AED 25,692.

Repossi cuff, price on request, Barneys New York.

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Chloé dress, AED 8,264.

The Row belt.

Opposite: Céline dress, price on request. Lanvin scarf, AED 1,414.

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Valentino dress, AED 25,674 Repossi cuff, price on request.

Opposite: Giorgio Armani top, AED 29,365.

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PRODUCTION: BRACHFELD PARIS. SET DESIGNER: ALEXANDER BOCK. MANICURIST: ELSA DURRENS AT ARTLIST PARIS. TAILOR: WILLIAM GUILLOCHIN. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: ANTONIO CIUFO, LAURENT CHOUARD. DIGITAL TECH: EDOUARD MALFETTES. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: CARLOS NAZARIO, ALEX TUDELA. HAIR ASSISTANT: SOPHIE ANDERSON. MAKEUP ASSISTANT: MAYUMI ODA

Haider Ackermann jumpsuit, AED 4,172, net-a-porter.com.

Repossi cuff, price on request.

Opposite: Ralph Lauren Collection dress, AED 13,204, ralphlauren.com. Repossi cuff , price on request. Model: Julia Bergshoeff at DNA Model Management. Hair by Malcolm Edwards at Art Partner. Makeup

by Christelle Cocquet at Calliste.

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IN PROGRESS Unfinished wooden sculptures at Studio Olafur Eliasson, which occupies a converted brewery in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Opposite: at the studio, two of the 90 staff members who assist the artist.

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HOW To DO GOOD ART Prior to his exhibition at the new Fondation Louis Vuitton, Olafur Eliasson discusses his work — which includes a school, an architecture practice, a charity, a cookbook and a herd of Icelandic sheep, and which is meant to make the world a better place. Really.

BY NED BEAUMAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIGEL SHAFRAN

‘‘IRONY OR NOT?’’ said Olafur Eliasson, looking around

the meeting table. At his studio in Berlin, the answer is almost invariably ‘‘not,” but perhaps here an exception could be made. Eliasson and a few of his staff were finalizing the title of a new book chronicling the five-year history of the Institut für Raumexperimente, a small art school that Eliasson ran until February. The title under consideration was ‘‘How to Make the Best Art School in the World.’’ ‘‘It would be nice to piss off the very academic art schools,’’ Eliasson said. ‘‘I do think we had the best students in the world. But is irony really the economy I want to support?’’ In the end, Eliasson and his staff agreed that such good-natured braggadocio was pretty harmless in irony terms, although the cover would be designed so that at first glance the book would appear to be titled simply ‘‘How to Make.’’ Eliasson had also ensured that the book would include a photograph of a puppy that one of the students had met on a field trip. ‘‘Every book should have a picture of a puppy in it,’’ he told me, ‘‘because it just makes you so happy.’’

If, like me, you operate under the assumption that irony is automatically more sophisticated than earnestness, it is confounding to enter Eliasson’s world.

One of the most extensive private holdings of his work belongs to the advertising executive Christian Boros, whose appointment-only museum in the Mitte district, the Boros Collection, was originally built as a Nazi airraid shelter but over the years has also functioned as a banana warehouse and a notoriously debauched techno club. This is the nature of Berlin, where things cascade with contradictory meanings, where ‘‘post-’’ is a ubiquitous prefix, where hipsters chase oblivion in the ruins of old dogmas. Irony is almost always a safe bet here, not least in the expat art scene. So you arrive at Studio Olafur Eliasson with certain expectations, and when you find that, on the contrary, it is one of the most

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SHOW AND TELL From top: ‘‘Inside the Horizon,’’ a recently completed installation at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; cooking using the Studio Olafur Eliasson cookbook; an advertisement for the ‘‘Little Sun,’’ a solarpowered LED lamp distributed worldwide; ‘‘Your wave is,’’ a three-dimensional mesh of light-emitting cables hung over the Palazzo Grassi on Venice’s Grand Canal in 2006.

LEFT COLUMN, FROM TOP: IWAN BAAN; FG | ARCHITEKTUR & INDECHS; MADDALENA VALERI; SANTI CALECA. MIDDLE COLUMN, FROM TOP: JULIENNE SCHAER/COURTESY PUBLIC ART FUND; IAN REEVES/COURTESY OF SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART; MATTHEW SEPTIMUS; STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON. RIGHT COLUMN, FROM TOP: STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON; ANDREW DUNKLEY & MARCUS LEITH; OLE HEIN PEDERSEN

earnest places you have ever been, you start looking around for the cracks.

Eliasson was born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents in 1967. His most celebrated work to date is 2003’s ‘‘The weather project,’’ for which the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern was converted into a gigantic, artificial solarium, attracting over the course of six months two million visitors, who often felt compelled to lie down on the floor, spelling out political messages with their bodies or just gazing at themselves and each other in the mirror on the ceiling. My own favorite work of Eliasson’s is ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ an installation at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City last year that consisted of several chunks of ice, detached by seasonal melting from an Icelandic glacier, that had been fished out of a lake, shipped to New York and installed in the refrigerated gallery. There they sat for nearly four months, crystalline but also surprisingly grimy, stout as rock but also frail enough to need their own microclimate — individual and real and lost.

A lot of Eliasson’s works are like this: irruptions of the elemental into a museum setting, as if the building had sprung some mythic leak. Others are harder to convey in a high-concept pitch.

When I visited the studio, Eliasson was working on a commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a major new museum that opened in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris last month. In addition to taking over the ground floor for the Fondation’s inaugural temporary show, he would be constructing a permanent ‘‘grotto’’ from which the Frank Gehrydesigned building could be flatteringly viewed.

Although Eliasson showed me plenty of sketches and models for the exhibition, I never quite formed a clear idea of what he was planning to do, apart from that it involved mirrors and curves and tinted glass. This side of Eliasson’s practice takes the form of a highly refined fun house, subjecting you to experiments in human perception that don’t sound like much until you see them firsthand. The intended effect often seems to be a pre-intellectual wonder, so that you will have basically the same experience as the 5-year-old next to you. There’s a reason why Eliasson feels an imperative to appeal to the broadest possible audience. He believes that in normal life we have a tendency to hurry along on autopilot, seldom questioning our deeper assumptions. Art, by goosing the senses, can make us more conscious of our positions in time, space, hierarchy, society, culture, the planet. In the long run, this heightened consciousness will result in change for the better — emotionally, socially, politically.

In other words, Eliasson has a faith in the improving power of art that has been out of fashion since Victorian times. But his ambitions aren’t bounded by his studio.

He is on friendly terms with Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Michael Bloomberg, and regularly attends the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss public policy with the people who make it. ‘‘I don’t go there to meet world leaders,’’ he joked. ‘‘I go to become a world leader!’’

In fact, he already talks like a politician much of the time, with a habit of disappearing into a haze of generalities and wonk-speak and anecdotes of uncertain relevance.

The concepts he draws on — inclusivity and engagement and trust and so on — seem to have been filtered to ensure that you could no more be offended by his

BRIGHT FUTURE Clockwise from top left: Brooklyn Bridge as seen during Eliasson’s ‘‘The New York City Waterfalls’’ project in 2008; from the ‘‘Grey Sheep’’ series, 2013, featuring Eliasson’s own herd of Icelandic sheep, bred to rehabilitate the Icelandic economy; ‘‘The weather project’’ of 2003, which drew more than two million visitors to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern; ‘‘Your rainbow panorama,’’ built on top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2007; an interior view; ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ 2013, for which chunks of ice were transported from Iceland’s largest glacier into MoMA’s PS1 gallery; ‘‘One-way colour tunnel’’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007.

statements than you could be offended by the colored lights he puts in museums. Yes, he has given a TED talk.

And yet the longer I spent with Eliasson, the harder I found it to cling to my cynicism, because he’s such a good advertisement for sincerity. One of Eliasson’s friends, the author Jonathan Safran Foer, told me over the phone that he found spending time with Eliasson ‘‘overwhelming, whether overwhelming in the sense of at times feeling almost too much, or overwhelming in the sense of being really moving. You sit down with Olafur for a meal and he picks up the fork and stares at it for a moment and you think, Oh my god, he’s either inventing a new fork or wondering how to get forks to people who don’t have forks. ’’ He added: ‘‘After I’ve spent an hour with him I feel like I need a nap, but it’s because he has more curiosity than anyone I’ve ever met, and a greater belief in a person’s ability to be useful and to change things.

Somehow he lives his entire life with the urgency of someone who just walked out of the doctor’s office with a dire prognosis.’’

Eliasson has 90 people working for him. Few of them have job titles. Four days a week they all eat a healthy vegetarian lunch together in the light-filled canteen upstairs, with a rotating schedule for washing the dishes afterward. Initially, I found the atmosphere at the studio rather too good to be true, like a hippie cult before night falls. But when I joined Eliasson for lunch on my second day at the studio, I sat there eating my roasted carrots and enviously contemplating how much better my life would be if I, too, received that bounty of vegetables and sunlight and intelligent chatter. Sebastian Behmann, who heads Eliasson’s architecture practice, told me that you can track how long someone has worked at Studio Olafur Eliasson by how much healthier they look every year (and indeed many people have stayed on for a decade or more). Last year, Studio Olafur Eliasson published its own 368-page cookbook of sustainable vegetarian recipes.

This is just one of the unpredictable byproducts of the studio, which often resembles a sort of ongoing Apollo project. Others have included the art school, a full-scale architecture practice, a series of publications, a charity and a herd of Icelandic sheep. As motley as these pursuits may sound, Eliasson would argue that they all emerge from a single mind-set, and that they’ve all been made viable by his years of practical experience as an artist. ‘‘If you can make a show in Venice, which is the most difficult damned thing one can do, not just because working with Italians is a mess, but also because you’re in a city on water in the middle of nowhere and getting a hammer and a nail is impossible . . . you can make a show on the moon,’’ he told me. ‘‘So as an artist, you become an entrepreneur by definition. . . . The art world underestimates its own relevance when it insists on always staying inside the art world. Maybe one can take some of the tools, methodologies, and see if one can apply them to something outside the art world.’’

For instance, sheep. ‘‘It started with the financial crisis,’’ Eliasson told me when I asked about his herd. ‘‘Björk said everybody must think innovatively. So we started buying up lambs to rescue the Icelandic economy

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‘You sit down with Olafur for a meal,’ says Jonathan Safran Foer, ‘and he picks up the fork and stares at it for a moment and you think, Oh my god, he’s either inventing a new fork or wondering how to get forks to people who don’t have forks. ’

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— but I think we ended up burdening it! My mistake was I wanted to turn it into an art project. Still, it was a nice excuse to go to the countryside and drink vodka and play with the sheep.’’ Eliasson began breeding lambs whose meat would be particularly well-suited to Moroccan tagines, with the intention of selling diced, marinated lamb to delis in Iceland. ‘‘I just couldn’t convince my partners that people in Iceland would eat tagine.’’ In the end, the lambs were slaughtered, their meat frozen and their wool knitted into 20 ‘‘secular prayer mats.’’

Other ventures have been less quixotic. After they adopted two children from Addis Ababa, Eliasson and his wife, the art historian Marianne Krogh Jensen, started 121Ethiopia, a project that works to improve the lives of children in Ethiopian orphanages. 121Ethiopia operates on a modest scale. Little Sun, Eliasson’s other philanthropic enterprise, does not. Developed with the Danish engineer Frederik Ottesen, the Little Sun is a very efficient solarpowered LED lamp, cheerful in design and lightweight enough to wear around the neck on a lanyard. Since the lamp’s debut in 2012, more than 200,000 have been distributed, over a third of them to regions in Africa with no electricity, the rest at venues like Tate Modern or Coachella. While Eliasson was still discussing the Institut für Raumexperimente book, I was taken upstairs to the Little Sun workshop to meet Felix Tristan Hallwachs, who heads the project. ‘‘We’re not going to solve the Ukraine crisis, we’re not going to solve IS [Islamic State],’’ he said. ‘‘But in theory if everyone has a light at home and can study, then you have less chaos in the world, probably.’’

If there isn’t much irony at Studio Olafur Eliasson, I came to feel, it’s not because irony is proscribed. Irony doesn’t offend anyone and it doesn’t go over anyone’s head. Irony is simply not required, because the things you can achieve with crusading sincerity are self-evidently so much better. At worst, you could argue that Little Sun makes Eliasson’s talk about the power of museum art look a bit vaporous by comparison. But at Studio Olafur Eliasson the distinction between art and direct intervention is barely even recognized. Hallwachs told me: ‘‘Olafur’s work uses media from photography to oil paint to all kinds of installations and architecture. Now business is part of the range of media as well.’’ Eliasson told me that he was hoping to present a work at the next G7 conference that would evaluate the German public’s degree of trust in Chancellor Angela Merkel and perhaps in the process inspire a renewal of the European relationship with Africa. I asked him whether, in order to achieve such an ambitious and specific political objective he would need to make a new type of work, something more targeted, more explicit. Possibly, he replied — but he would be just as likely to bring along something like ‘‘Riverbed,’’ which consists of a riparian landscape constructed inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen from 180 tons of Icelandic bluestone.

For Eliasson, art need never be marginal, and art need never be just a carrier for a message. Art can change the world with the sheer intensity of its art-ness. Or, perhaps, by helping to get the artist in a room with the energy minister of Nigeria.

If Eliasson had his way, the same ‘‘everyone’s invited!’’ quality that makes his work so appealing to institutions might sometimes be pushed to extremes that would leave even those institutions flustered. Before I left the studio, I related to Eliasson something that happened to me in July last year at Warm Up, the Saturday afternoon dance

REFLECTIVE SURFACE Above: one of Eliasson’s hanging sculptures in the studio. Opposite: the artist at work.

party held in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. It was oppressively hot and muggy on the outdoor dance floor, and halfway through the afternoon I had the idea of going inside to spend a few minutes with ‘‘Your waste of time,’’ the piece with the chunks of ice, to cool off.

Arriving at the gallery, however, my friends and I found that it had been locked for the duration of the event, so we could do no more than press ourselves against the chilly door. When I told Eliasson this story, he looked genuinely pained. ‘‘What a pity!’’ he kept saying. ‘‘What a pity! I would have left that door open.’’ But would he really have wanted drunken revelers slithering over this ancient ice that he’d imported from thousands of miles away? ‘‘If the ice melts and disappears — well, maybe it’s beautiful that there was once an iceberg, and then there was a party and now the iceberg is gone.’’ He pointed out that this would have been an excellent metaphor for man-made climate change. ‘‘People underestimate how robust art is.’’ He added: ‘‘If we don’t believe that creativity as a language can be as powerful as the language of the politicians, we would be very sad — and I would have failed. I am convinced that creativity is a fierce weapon.’’ ‘‘Inside the Horizon,’’ a specially commissioned grotto by Olafur Eliasson, is now on view at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. An exhibition of Eliasson’s work, the inaugural show at the Fondation, runs until Feb. 16, 2015.

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Document

9 Wallpaper Studies From museums, stately homes and National Trust houses in England.

BY LEANNE SHAPTON

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THE WEST TURRET BEDROOM, Blickling Hall, Norfolk

EDWARD III TOILET, Newstead Abbey, Nottingham

STOREROOM, Calke Abbey, Derby

SITTING ROOM, Carlyle’s House, London

THE KING’S ROOM, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire

BEDROOM, Lanhydrock Estate, Cornwall

SITTING ROOM, Charles Dickens Museum, London

DINING ROOM, Charleston House, East Sussex

ATTIC PASSAGE, Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk

T Emirates: The New York Times Style Magazine