Italian police recovered stolen Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse paintings. Suspects broke into the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, pulled the three works off the walls, and escaped through the gardens in minutes. The thieves left their pickaxe behind — not unlike the Louvre butterfingers, who dropped a crown in the street. It’s the golden age for museum heists, though not so much for the robbers themselves.

Louis Vuitton made a Porsche. Nicolas Ghesquière worked with restoration house Singer on a one-off 911. The details run from Monogram flowers in the air vents to watch typography on the fuel caps, and each ships with a full capsule of clothes and bags. No word on the gas mileage.

Stop texting, start pigeoning with Carrier Pidge, which sends messages at 110 mph over the real GPS distance between you and a friend. The pigeons aren’t real, but they may as well be — each bird has a 0.2% chance of dying mid-flight and taking your text with it.

Decoy Font protects your written text from being read by AI, scrambling text for machines while keeping it legible to human eyes. If you’re using it, you better be writing from scratch yourself.

Instagram changed its workmark for the first time in a decade. The cursive stays but the serifs are flattened and detached, with the design lead explaining “script reflects individuality, so referencing that felt right.” Individuality, on the app where everyone’s been posting the same “It’s kinda chic to…” photo dumps.

A keto ice cream company filed for bankruptcy after a judge ruled they had intentionally copied Van Leeuwen’s pastel, minimal pint design and ordered them to pay $23.8 million. There are some things you should just never do, like make keto ice cream.

Aesthetic Study · Tray Service

Two generations reached the same tiled room from opposite ends of the block: Millennials spent a decade eating sad BBQ under Edison bulbs and on steel trays. Then Gen Z showed up and demanded the long shared table itself — 90% of them say they like communal seating, against 60% of boomers. Nobody asks if you’ve been here before, nobody folds your napkin, nobody circles back to ask how the first few bites are treating you. You carry your own food to a bolted bench under a light with no dimmer. Millennials love it for its honesty, while Gen Z appreciates the company.

It’s not take out, but it’s not quite dining out either. And delivery already made it possible for a courier to bring you a single Erewhon smoothie or an entire tasting menu, congealing in the back of a Prius. Tray service has the grammar of takeout — a line, a counter, a disposable package — but it still means standing up, leaving the house, and facing strangers instead of another night on the couch. It’s the modern-day shokudo, the works canteen, the Soviet stolovaya. The tray itself is a hand-me-down from the mess hall: the military built cafeterias to feed people fast and cheap, now used by a chef with a tasting-menu résumé, who plates on the same steel that once fed a barracks. That’s the beauty of it — hospitality sold for parts. You keep the room and the strangers, drop the napkin-folding and the circling-back, and just pay for the part you came for — a third space worth showing up in.

• Canteens make an upscale comeback in London

• 90% of Gen Z like communal tables — but why?

• The communal-table gamble

• Why Russians line up for Soviet-style canteens

  ---

Robert Gigliotti is half of the LA duo behind “home decor icks,” the TikTok series where he and Ethan Gaskill rack up millions of views on the design crimes everyone’s committing — grommet curtains, the $12k bubble sofa, the color-coded bookshelf. He learned his eye growing up in Connecticut, where his mom flipped houses and he got sick of every one coming out builder-gray. Two years ago he quit his 9-to-5 to model and make content full time. Currently, he’s decluttering — honing in on things to keep in his next place as per a new rule: every single piece has to be something he truly loves. Here, he talks veneers, vintage denim, and why playing it safe is the only real decorating mistake.

What’s your hot take?

Casual is my default 90% of the time, but if there’s a reason to step it up — a wedding, Coachella, whatever — I’m going all out. Life’s way too short to play it safe when you actually have a reason to dress up. Or throw themed dinner parties with your friends and commit to the bit. It’s the best!! People play it safe too often.

What’s an item you can’t live without?

Vintage denim, I can collect them forever and a new perfect pair always reinvents the way I dress.

Three places you’ve felt inspired by?

The beach, probably because it’s where I clear my mind and think most creatively. Restaurants in Le Marais, Paris, because they’re never overdone. Casual yet fancy, effortless yet chic (LA, take notes). Alias Books in Atwater Village for its amazing selection and simple vibe, just good art, no fuss, and completely authentic.

What’s the worst recommendation you’ve gotten?

A dentist suggested veneers. I could never do veneers. There’s something so charming about an imperfect smile that feels real and lived-in.

Who is your forever inspo?

Nineties David Beckham is my forever inspo, masculine with a feminine touch, always unexpected, and constantly evolving his hair.

Write us a fortune cookie.

What you project is what you attract.

Follow Robert on Cosmos and Instagram.

Object Love · The Fruit Whisperer

Hans Hedberg (1917–2007) rethought apples as stoneware spheres about a foot across, cast from plaster molds rather than thrown, then finished in experimental glazes that pool yellow into red into green until the fruit looks impossibly, wetly ripe. One sits deep red-brown, another bright yellow with an orange blush. The Guardian called his work “a greengrocer’s fantasy cast in clay,” with “a smoothness and brightness beyond any genetic modification.”

Groceries have since become a political stress test. Everyone’s watching the receipt, and fruit is the worst offender. After all, your fruit starts to rot as soon as you buy it. Hedberg’s is the fantasy hiding inside all that anxiety — fruit with the countdown removed, ripe forever and for no one, gorgeous and useless and never once a waste. In a house full of things that expire, a permanent apple is true abundance. And all it costs is about €66k per apple.

Quick Hits

An AI sorority pledge went viral in Nikes that don’t exist.

Move over “girl dinner” — it’s time for “boy kibble.”

Argentina opened a museum for sculptor Lola Mora.

Jony Ive’s electric Ferrari just sold for $40M.

Disney is bringing back Oswald in hand-drawn 2D.

Community Spotlight

What’s your favorite place to dine alone?

Campbell: “Sitting at the bar with a book and befriending the bartender. I went to Berlin by myself in November and sat at Trio for 3 hours over a solo dinner and read Kairos.”

Reply to this email and we’ll share our favorite answers next week.

Yours to the core,

Tania 🍎

The Palais de Tokyo is hunting for a temporary home while its Paris building gets overhauled, and the search has rankled the French art world over who will inherit the foot traffic. NIMBYism, meet the avant-garde.

A colossal 2,500-year-old sculpture just surfaced, leaving UNESCO archaeologists “astounded and a bit perplexed by it.” It literally outlived every empire that stepped on it.

Vogue World is heading to San Francisco in 2027. Their traveling runway-and-culture spectacle has hit New York, London, Paris, and Milan, and will now hit the one city that dresses exclusively in quarter-zips and On Clouds. More proof that fashion follows the money.

Decoy Font protects your written text from being read by AI, scrambling text for machines while keeping it legible to human eyes. If you’re using it, you better be writing from scratch yourself.

SpaceX left its first crater on the Moon, a cast-off piece of an old rocket that floated for a year until gravity pulled it down. Elon promised to leave his mark on the cosmos. Turns out it was more of a pothole.

The 1am job interview is on the rise, all thanks to the fact that the first round is a bot that books whenever you’re free. Nothing says “we value your time” like pitching yourself to a robot in the middle of the night.

Aesthetic Study · Scent Wardrobe

For a little while there, everyone smelled the same. Sniff around and Le Labo’s Santal 33 was everywhere — clouding every coffee shop, every boutique hotel, everywhere someone was working on a MacBook. The scent may be sandalwood, but it started to smell vanilla. So the next wave went niche: Clue Perfumery in Darien, Wisconsin, with a scent called Warm Bulb that smells like a hot dusty lightbulb; Imaginary Authors building fragrances around made-up novels; DedCool, Kismet, Marissa Zappas, Zoologist. These small perfumeries continue to go viral online, where most have to imagine the scent by the description. That’s how you end up with scents like dandelion butter, wet mushroom, empty library.

Of course, Comme des Garçons was mixing perfume to smell like gold back in 1994, or like a flower ripped apart and ironed flat; Demeter has been bottling Dirt, Snow, and Funeral Home since before most of its buyers were born. But the audience is spiking as the next generation would rather smell like a specific afternoon than like good taste in general — a rained-on campfire, their grandmother’s kitchen, something no one at the party could place. After all, each of our signatures is uniquely ours — why should our scents all smell the same?

• The niche market is set to double mass-market growth by 2032

• How Santal 33 became the smell of a decade

• Inside Clue Perfumery’s surreal Wisconsin scent lab

• Demeter’s “representational” scents, from Dirt to Funeral Home

  ---

At fifteen, Szilveszter Makó shot a classmate on a long exposure until she came out translucent. He’d wanted to be a painter, but found it too slow. He works out of Milan now, unsigned, building his sets by hand from cardboard and bedsheets — then placing Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, and Solange inside them for Vogue, GQ Italia, and Numéro Paris. This summer he shot Rihanna for the first time, an eighteen-page story for Edward Enninful’s 72. Here he talks about the brief he ignored, and the one person he still hasn’t photographed.

Three places you’ve felt inspired by.

My primary school in Lillafüred. It sat at the bottom of two mountains, miles from any shops or streets. I remember a river around the grounds and a stone castle to play in. The remote villages of Yunnan. I’ve seen old ladies so elegantly dressed and wrapped in bright scarfs complimented with headpieces, and this is how they dress each day. I was shocked, in the best of ways.” Milan, though I had no intentions to live here. What remained was the city itself, the culture, architecture and presence of history carved into the walls.

What can’t you stop thinking about and why?

Tilda Swinton. I have a visual board of ideas created for her, accumulated over the years. I haven’t had the chance to work with her yet. She is a consistent thought, an idea, in my mind. If I have the chance to work with her, I’d be ready.

What’s the best thing you’ve refused to do?

The brief for my shoot was simple and clean. A suit, black and white. Willem Dafoe in a suit has been done a thousand times before. Months prior I had been in Hungary with my grandma, looking through childhood photographs, and I saw my kindergarten self with a cardboard house on my head. I asked Willem to wear the headpiece and act as if his parents had just sent him to the corner for misbehaving. Three shots in and I had the image.

Who is your forever inspo?

My master, whom I really look up to and admire so much, is Paolo Roversi.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

What doesn’t exist, I create.

Follow Szilveszter on Instagram.

Object Love · Spinning Orb

Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair is a hollow fiberglass sphere on a single swiveling pedestal — big enough to climb inside and pull the world shut behind you. He sketched it in 1963 to solve a plain problem: his family of four had no chair big enough to pile into. His first draft looked, in his words, “like a deformed potato,” but he quickly fixed it with a metal ring, added a red rotary telephone, and the thing was done.

Sixty years on, the shape is reminiscent of the office “focus pod” — you know, the acoustic egg you book for another awkward 1:1 Zoom with your team lead. But Aarnio built his for the living room, a place to hide inside your own home rather than your employer’s. And he also built it to feel out of time — a chair that looks beamed in from ‘70s depictions of the early 2000s, with a clunky rotary handset bolted inside. We’re kind of living in the future now, and we kind of always have been.

Quick Hits

• Thom Bettridge is passing i-D to Steff Yotka.

• Watch a living dress repair itself.

• LEGO fans rebuilt Koons’ Balloon Dog.

• Watch a Greenland iceberg do a somersault.

• Buy Mike Myers’ cursed Cat in the Hat suit.

Puff-Puff,

Tania

A new clothing line makes you invisible to AI. Simon Weckert’s Digital Camouflage reads as an abstract print to you and pure static to a person-detection algorithm. Dress for the surveillance you’re having.

Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has a date: December 11, twenty years after it was announced. It will open on Saadiyat Island, where they’ve also opened a new branch of the Louvre. Abu Dhabi is collecting famous museums the way the rest of us hoard tote bags.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day already made $932M, the second-biggest opening weekend ever. Everyone’s saying superhero movies are over and it’s all about auteur horror… which begs the question: is Marvel now an underdog?

The Met is giving John Galliano a retrospective, only its third for a living designer after Saint Laurent and Comme Des Garçon. “Horizons” promises the warts and all, including the 2011 disgrace that got him fired from Dior. Genius and downfall, all on full display.

Game of Thrones is getting a Royal Shakespeare Company play. The Mad King is a Westeros prequel staged in Stratford, the most prestigious address in theater — though it scrapped its first previews with hours’ notice and no explanation. A show about backroom scheming has its own behind-the-scenes drama.

Google pulled its new Google Earth AI tool in 48 hours. It let anyone paste text-prompt fictions onto real satellite maps — so naturally, someone collapsed the Eiffel Tower and sank the Great Pyramid. Google’s building stronger guardrails, but they should still keep the chaos map online.

Aesthetic Study · Cloud Cover

This year, the fog is outlasting every season. Saint Laurent sent its Summer 2027 menswear through a wall of white mist in June, models surfacing and vanishing for sixteen minutes, the shoes fogging up as they walked. The cloud was rented from Fujiko Nakaya, who at 93 is still making weather — this year she also flooded Tadao Ando’s concrete cylinder at the Bourse de Commerce until you couldn’t see the person three feet ahead of you. She’s been at it since 1970, when she wrapped the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka World’s Fair in the first walkable fog. She called it a negative sculpture, shaped by the wind.

Now the fog won’t lift. Berndnaut Smilde’s indoor clouds last about ten seconds before they fall apart. A.A.Murakami grew mist-filled bubbles out of a monolith for BMW, the disappearing being the point. Iris van Herpen keeps an algae gown alive under glass by misting it. Even Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest tone-poem Her Private Hell sees a mist roll over the city and bring death within. Why the fog now? Is it weather panic, a push back against crystal-clear HD, or something else? Whatever the case, we can’t see a thing.

• Fujiko Nakaya fills Tadao Ando’s rotunda with fog

• Saint Laurent’s Summer 2027 menswear emerges from the fog

• Berndnaut Smilde conjures fleeting nimbus clouds indoors

• Mist-filled bubbles grow at Art Basel

  ---

Richie Talboy shoots the kind of images that don’t obey reality — surreal, cinematic, a little chaotic. Just look at his recent shoots: Amanda Seyfried for British GQ, Role Model for VMan, Emily Ratajkowski for NY Mag. Two years ago he moved to LA, which dredged up a buried memory: at fifteen he’d come there for a talent competition, chasing teen TV stardom, before he dropped it for a camera. Lately he’s been living in the version where he’s turning automatic sketches into photographs and automatic writing into a novella and inventing a character along the way: himself. Here he gets into his alter ego and the life that brought it back.

Three places you’ve felt inspired by.

Idaho of course, Los Angeles, and Burbank. There’s this strip club in Chicago with a lit dancefloor that feels like such a movie set.

What can’t you stop thinking about?

A lot of my latest work has been dealing with fame, specifically how much shame and embarrassment one has to go through to achieve it. I think there’s a lot of tension between public humiliation and public admiration, and a clear pipeline between the two. The road to fame is littered with embarrassment at every turn. Public humiliation is kind of the only path into it – degrading oneself for the entertainment of others until ultimately they remember and recognize you and give you a chance to create something that lasts. You have to be annoying. Cringe.

Who is your forever inspo?

Miles Aldridge

What’s an item you can’t live without?

My sketchbook.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Be cringe. Be free.

Follow Richie on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Riban Vase

The Riban has the round, sugar-glazed heft of a hard candy — cream glass, a thick rolled lip, four dark stripes pulled down the belly by hand and widening as it swells. Ferm Living blew it after exactly that: the striped sweets confectioners used to pull while the batch ran hot. The Copenhagen house has been at this since 2006, when Trine Andersen went looking for the right wallpaper, couldn’t find it, and started a company instead.

There’s something knowing in casting a sweet in glass — fixing the most perishable thing there is in the one material built to outlast the room. The stripes read as pure decoration until you clock what they are: a record of the hand that pulled them, faster than thought, before the glass set. Fill it and they disappear behind the stems. Leave it empty and you’ve got a candy the size of a lamp, sugar frozen mid-pull. A sweet treat at only $49.

Quick Hits

• Christie’s is auctioning a Durand-Ruel Monet.

• Nike made a slide that heats and vibrates your feet.

• A24 mapped 179 NYC movie locations into a book.

• One of Zaha Hadid’s last designs is finally done, a decade on.

• Zendaya is the new face of Prada Paradoxe.

Fogging up,

Tania

Leonardo da Vinci might be on the new euro. The European Central Bank shortlisted him for the €100 note in the currency’s first redesign since 2002, alongside Maria Callas on the €5 and Beethoven on the €10 — and there’s a vote. So it’s kind of like Eurovision, but with a lot more money at stake.

The Colonel Sanders archive is up for auction — briefcase, Bible, bow ties, and a 1964 planner scribbled with spice blends, all preserved by one Kentucky family since 1974. His whole estate is on the block too, including the Victorian hall where he hosted franchisees. Finger-lickin’, with provenance.

A man spent 50 years building a staircase to the stars. Charles Ross, now 88, has been carving “Star Axis” into a New Mexico mesa since 1976. The $10 million project will have 147 steps aligned to the North Star and be done by winter. Hopefully they don’t get hit with snow.

Everyone’s wearing dancing shoes now — jazz and ballet flats have swept the runways from Celine to Miu Miu, and Repetto’s 1970s “Zizi” back from the dead. Meanwhile NYC Ballet’s shoe colorist got a documentary for 15 years spent hand-tinting pointe shoes to match every dancer’s skin. If all the world’s a stage, why not try some fancy footwork?

Coca-Cola reached for nostalgia, grabbed Marlboro. The warm, familiar throwback landed a little closer to a 1960s ad for smoking. No wonder they call these things “fridge cigs.”

Aesthetic Study · All Puffed Up

We have never thought harder about our own dimensions — the size we were, the size we want to be, the size we order. And now, the sizes are exploding, piled on where the body gets scrutinized most — shoulders, hips, thighs, midsection. Where Dior caged the body to force an hourglass, Balenciaga treated the air between fabric and skin as a building material: the balloon jacket in 1953, the sack dress in 1957, weight moved off the waist so the clothes hung like canopies. The sack dress got mocked as an erasure of femininity, then became the blueprint for modern ease. Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo weaponized it in 1997, sewing down pads into gingham slips at the hips and belly, growing tumor-like lumps exactly where the decade wanted a woman flat. Suzy Menkes called it disfigurement; the glossies photographed the pads removed.

The current wave started at the hips — one designer’s cartoon curves two seasons ago — and has since crept across the whole body, into uneven-breast corsets, structured leg sleeves, boxy inflated PVC. The trend arrives while we’re knee deep in the Ozempic years, where shapes and bodies are being scrutinized and edited more than ever before.

• Revisiting Comme des Garçons’ “lumps and bumps”

• Is “flattering” out? The runways think so

• Balenciaga and the architecture of negative space

• Why playful is replacing minimalism in 2026

  ---

Amy Smilovic was asked for years which box Tibi belonged in, bohemian or minimalist or classic. She never had the perfect answer, because she didn’t believe people were any one thing, so she made up her own word for it: Creative Pragmatism, the balance of high-level creative self-expression with grounded, everyday functionality. She’s built her brand around that conviction, keeping Tibi independent since founding it in Hong Kong in 1997. Here she goes deeper on the three places she goes to clear her head, and rearranging people in her mind like a Lego Man.

Do you have any projects coming up you’d like our readers to know about?

So many things are in the works: a new fragrance with Abel, a series of Color Theory books coming in the fall, and a workshop we’re conducting on Sea Island, GA in November for 85 women.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

I step outside the office or my home. I purposely do things I’ve never done before. When I’m sketching, I force myself to use my left hand. There’s something very freeing about making yourself do the unusual, walking the different path, that opens up your eyes and gives you new perspective. It does it for me every time. So simple.

Where do you go to find peace?

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France; Austin, Texas; and my back porch. These are three places where I can clear my head.

Who is your forever inspo?

I don’t have one thing or person. I take people’s attributes: someone’s mind I love, someone’s energy, someone’s heart. I rearrange them and put them together like a Lego man

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Life is happening at you right now.

Follow Amy and Tibi on Instagram, and Tibi on Cosmos.

Object Love · Aperitivo Bowls

Small rounded glass bowls, sized for the shared middle of a table — nuts, chips, pickled things — with Swarovski crystals set into the sides that disappear the moment you fill them. They’re from Sophie Lou Jacobsen, the Brooklyn designer whose Ripple Cup sold out a run of 1,000 as a COVID staple in 2020. These are from her new Disco Aperitivo collection, which she built after a year of aperitivos in Milan and a soft spot for 1970s Italian disco.

The aperitivo is supposed to be a ritual — the slow handoff from day to night. But you know where these items usually end up: full of Froot Loops at 8am, holding your keys by the door, hiding the cigarettes you keep meaning to quit. That’s what makes it a lovable object, and an even better gift — a good bowl doesn’t stay precious long. It gets embedded into the everyday.

Shop the set, or browse the rest of Disco Aperitivo — the plates, the Capri catchall tray, the Roma coupes.

Quick Hits

A streetwear brand just gave UNO a brutal “Black Out” redesign.

A24 and Joya melted Backrooms dread into a candle.

Issey Miyake’s Satoshi Kondo dressed a contemporary ballet.

Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 5 crossed $1B to top the year.

The National Portrait Gallery acquired a portrait of Charli xcx.

Padded out,

Tania

Spain won the World cup and plenty of folks left with an L. Nike lost before the final even kicked off — Argentina’s win over England in the semis left Adidas dressing both finalists. Meanwhile, a World Cup broadcast mixed up Pharrell for A$AP Rocky and Matt Damon for Brad Pitt. Thankfully, they’ve got four years to recover from the embarrassment.

IKEA built a collection for renters who can’t stop moving. There’s a foldable mattress you strap on like a backpack, a side table with a carrying handle, and a polyester shopping bag on wheels. Designers road-tested it by visiting 20-somethings in London who move their lives by Uber and borrowed skateboards.

Netflix paid $587 million for Ben Affleck’s AI startup, InterPositive, a 16-person shop he founded in 2022. Instead of generating video from scratch, it trains only on a film’s raw footage to fix continuity, remove wires, and adjust lighting in post. Think of all the Netflix subscriptions he could buy with that.

A court fight over the Gelman Collection could send Frida Kahlo’s works out of Mexico for good. The 160-piece trove — 18 Kahlos among them — was pledged as collateral on a $150 million loan and is now bound for Spain, testing a 1984 decree that bans her work from leaving the country. Only seven Kahlo paintings sit in Mexican state collections, and Mexico is fighting not to lose the ones it has.

OpenAI’s new merch line is proof that tech bros are stuck in 2022. Supply Co.’s “Good Research Takes Time” tee and Yves Klein blue ribbed socks read like Aimé Leon Dore cosplay that missed its train by a couple of years. You might not see a share of the IPO, but at least you can play with a branded basketball.

The Louvre heist mastermind was disappointed with the €88 million haul, telling his crew “they could have taken more.” The two were hired just days earlier for €15,000, handed floor plans, and dropped Empress Eugénie’s crown out of a bag while escaping. Enough is never enough, not even for criminal masterminds.

Aesthetic Study · Scale Model

Mermaidcore comes in and out like the tides, and this summer it washed up at Chanel. Matthieu Blazy’s first Cruise show landed in Biarritz with clam-shell invites, models in beaded starfish and CC-branded bathing caps, and gowns finished in orange-and-aquamarine scales. In 2016 this was gloriously tacky Tumblr fodder — Katy Perry and Sky Ferreira in seafoam hair, holographic Topshop. A decade before that, it was kids’ TV: H2O: Just Add Water premiered on July 7, 2006, just over twenty years ago, turning three Gold Coast teens into mermaids for 250 million viewers across 120 countries. Aquamarine hit theaters the same year, with talking starfish earrings and a teenage Emma Roberts.

The millennials who watched moon pools after school have luxury budgets now, and the Gen Z crowd that made Aquamarine a cult film (Chappell Roan called her “Casual” video “Aquamarine but like, gay”) is who the campaigns are aimed at. Disney ordered an Aquamarine sequel pilot this June. Of course, the Pucci version runs $1,580 — a fair bit more than a Blockbuster rental and a pack of butterfly clips.

• Twenty years of Phoebe Tonkin

• Why a middling 2006 mermaid movie became a Gen Z cult classic

• Mermaidcore, all grown up: how to wear the siren trend now

  ---

Based in Paris, photographer Ludovic Balay explores still life, interior architecture, fashion, and travel. Formed in the humanities and trained at ENS Louis-Lumière, he has developed a signature approach rooted in soft natural light, precise framing, and timeless color palettes. He regularly shoots for brands and publications such as Tekla, Chanel, Alaïa, Belmond, Toteme, AD magazine or Neptune Papers. Here, he shares the worst advice he’s ever received, where he goes to find peace, and why his forever inspirations span from the minimal lines of John Pawson to the atmospheric sounds of the Cocteau Twins.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

To compromise on details for the sake of speed. Quality requires a certain friction, shortcuts always show in the end.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Perhaps not the most recent, but the one that comes to mind: Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. The story, the unsaid, and that whole final sequence with the music. It really stays with you.

What book have you gifted most?

It’s a tie between Fragments d’un discours amoureux by Roland Barthes and anything by Coco Capitán. It’s either pure emotional dissection or raw, handwritten poetry, depending on how dramatic the friend is.

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life?

A pair of earphones. It’s the easiest way to completely mute the world, escape into another universe, and politely avoid small talk.

Where do you go to find peace?

A table in a good bistro with my closest friends. A bottle of wine, honest food, and company that makes you lose track of time.

Who is your forever inspo?

Too many to name. But consistently: John Pawson and Alvar Aalto for their restraint, Duane Michals for his sequences, and the music of Mazzy Star, Björk, and the Cocteau Twins.

Follow Ludovic on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Pearl Necklace

The Host Necklace is a strand of chunky, irregular freshwater pearls — flat and oil-slick, baroque kind and half-melted — spaced out with little stones and finished with a tiny sterling silver bean off the clasp. It comes from Gohar World, the deadpan tableware label run by sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar, where the dish gloves have lace cuffs and the utensils are carved from mother-of-pearl.

Most pearls are for the guest — dressed up, arriving. These are for the person who set the table. Gohar builds everything around hosting: the cooking, the flowers, the show of feeding people. The necklace brings it all together, which, at a good inner party, is where everything needs to be.

Or, if you’re more of an earring person, the Host Earrings carry the same baroque pearls.

Quick Hits

• Meta’s AI ad tools are turning brand campaigns into gibberish.

• A man going viral for hiding his phone from his wife at the World Cup.

• Stella McCartney reunited with H&M.

• The Met stitched 193 national anthems into one “meta-anthem.”

• The Unicode Consortium revealed nine new emoji for Unicode 18.

Into the deep end,

Tania 🐚

Christopher Nolan is adapting The Odyssey. Homer's epic has survived oral tradition, the printing press, cinema, television, and streaming without ever feeling obsolete. Along the way it became Ulysses, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, Mad Max, and countless others. Three thousand years later, we're still taking the long way home.

Venice’s Borges Labyrinth reopened after a full restoration. The boxwood maze on San Giorgio Maggiore spells out Jorge Luis Borges’ name and hides a cane, a question mark, and a pair of eyes in its hedges. The update includes a tactile map for blind visitors, a nod to the writer who lost his sight at 55. Borges spent his life writing labyrinths. Now you can get lost in one.

Letterboxd, the internet’s favorite movie diary, is courting Hollywood. The 30-million-member app is attending $250 million‑sized meetings with Netflix, Sony, Paramount and private equity, and the comments already read like a preemptive obituary for the app’s indie soul.

Dua Lipa just opened a “banned book” library under Porto’s Livraria Lello. It shelves 100 once-censored titles into neat sections called Control, Voice, Memory, and Power. Is it a brave stance, or just pure vibes when every “banned” book can still arrive on your doorstep by tomorrow night?

World Cup players keep cutting holes in their socks. The theory is that slicing open the calf lets the muscle “breathe” and relieves the compression of form-fitting kit — though sports scientists have found zero evidence it does anything. Let’s see if the hypebeasts follow suit.

Mallorca’s Club de Mar reopened with a 1970s nautical reboot. After a five-and-a-half-year redevelopment, designer Marta de la Rica gave Palma’s historic marina high-gloss lacquered wood, red-blue-yellow signal-flag stripes, and vintage Riva glamour, down to the barometers and diving helmets pulled from the club archive. Turns out beige was never seaworthy.

Aesthetic Study · Hoof Mode

The tabi was fashion’s best-kept secret, except everyone’s in on it now. Nike’s Air Rift revived through a Skims collab, Valentino’s peep-toe Révélé pump, Margiela dupes shipping from Shein in three days. It’s a long way from where it started — a 15th-century Japanese sock split to grip a sandal thong, turned into a rubber-soled work boot by the founders of Bridgestone, then dipped in red paint by Martin Margiela in 1988 so the hoofprints stained his runway. He called it an “invisible” shoe. Everyone else spent the next three decades arguing whether the split toe was chic or just a horse hoof.

The silhouette hasn’t really changed since. Our perception has. What once looked alien has been absorbed into the fashion canon, copied endlessly until the split toe barely registers as strange. And ironically, many of the proudest wearers are the same terminally online crowd forever posting about AI slop, algorithmic sameness, and the death of taste — all walking around in the same weird shoe. A cloven hoof has become less a provocation than a signal that you read the group chat. Part high art, part bovine cosplay. But an inside joke stops working once everyone’s in on it, and the only question left is how much uglier the next so-bad-it’s-good revival will have to be.

• The invisible shoe Margiela built because he couldn’t afford a new one

• 15th-century socks to celebrity staple: the full tabi lineage

• Why 2026 belongs to the ugly, gross, gloriously weird shoe

• How to actually style a divisive split toe

  ---

In 1980, two former design classmates crossed paths on a sidewalk in Toronto, both hunting for studio space. They decided to share one, and a year later George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg founded the interior design studio behind the rooms where taste gets decided: The EDITION Hotels, W Hotels, Bergdorf Goodman, and Aman. They’re partners in work and in life, and their latest project is more personal: Don’t Stop. Stand Up!, a New York exhibition made with UNAIDS on queer history and the unfinished fight against HIV/AIDS. Here they explain why they’ll never specialize, the best investment they’ve ever made, and why their forever inspo is each other.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

Glenn: The beauty of having two of us rather than one is that when someone hits a wall, we can feed off each other.

George: When our designers hit a creative roadblock, particularly during the initial concept phase when we are constructing the narrative framework for a project, they look to platforms like Cosmos to reset their perspective. It acts as a curated repository for evocative imagery, and those specific visuals help articulate and anchor the atmospheric direction of our mood boards.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

Glenn: Instead of confining ourselves to one niche, we expanded across multiple typologies—from hospitality and residential to retail and restaurants—while integrating disciplines like product design, lighting, styling, art consultancy, and branding. While diversifying so broadly wasn’t considered conventional or strategic when we started, it has proven to be infinitely more fulfilling. It allows us to approach environments holistically, ensuring every layer speaks to the same narrative and shapes how the space is ultimately felt.

George: Early in our careers, we attended a summer program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design where the prevailing advice was to specialize and hone a single skill. We chose the exact opposite path.

What book have you gifted most?

Glenn: A Little Life by our dear friend Hanya Yanagihara. It’s a devastatingly beautiful book that explores human connection and the complexities of how men navigate communication with one another.

Who is your forever inspo?

Glenn: George.

George: Glenn.

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Glenn: People. The strength of who we are, both as individuals and as a company, comes down to the community we surround ourselves with, from our employees to our closest friends and family. Building a community and genuinely enjoying the people you surround yourself with is the best investment on earth.

Follow Yabu Pushelberg on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Gore-Tex Fruit Basket

Nicole McLaughlin cut up old Arc’teryx Gore-Tex Pro shells — the kind engineered to keep a climber dry at altitude — and wove the dark brown strips into a fruit basket. It has a single arching handle and the white Arc’teryx bird skeleton stamped on the front, exactly where a summit logo belongs. Inside sits a full still life, each piece hand-sewn from scrap: bananas, grapes, an apple, a pear, an orange — not exactly granola. It was a gift she made for the CEO of Arc’teryx, who, despite his brand’s health goth vibe, couldn’t help but smile.

She’s been the brand’s first-ever design ambassador since 2021, so she gets to make fun of them to their face. Arc’teryx builds jackets as survival equipment — alpine gravitas, a logo that’s literally a fossil. McLaughlin builds volleyballs into shoes, croissants into a bra, chalk bags into sandals, and here takes the most technical fabric on earth and demotes it to pretend produce.

Quick Hits

• Le Labo made a notebook that smells like Santal 26.

• Bottega Veneta opened a boutique in Palm Beach.

• Lego built a World Cup trophy from 1.3 million bricks.

• Aimé Leon Dore and New Balance go running.

• Labubu gets a nine-gallery retrospective in Manhattan.

Saddle up,

Tania 🐎

Taylor Swift married Travis Kelce at MSG. A "garden inside the Garden" for 1,000 black-tie guests, both in Dior, with Adam Sandler officiating and Stevie Nicks performing. The favors were handkerchiefs reading "So it's gonna be forever…" — proof that even a $20,000-a-plate wedding can't resist a Blank Space lyric.

Margiela auctions off his personal archive. One of fashion’s most influential and most invisible designers is selling ~200 pieces in Paris, from ‘80s sketches to his Hermès work, many annotated in his own words. He picked every item himself, from graffiti’d Tabi boots to Barbies he re-sewed during lockdown.

California asked Claude to predict its own future 250 years out. The forecast, sealed in an America 250 time capsule to be opened in 2276, imagines a “Pacific Federation” secession, a half-drowned LA gone vertical, freeways turned to parks, and a Central Valley rewilded by statute. San Francisco survives — still, naturally, the most expensive place to exist in the known world.

Norway reached the World Cup quarterfinals. Is it because their striker eats cow hearts? Erling Haaland knocked out favored Brazil with both goals in a 2-1 win, fueled by a 6,000-calorie “ancestral” diet of heart, liver, fatty steaks and raw milk. Turns out the cheapest cuts at the butcher might be the secret sauce.

Sotheby’s had Europe’s biggest auction night ever. A single London evening cleared $520 million across two sales, led by billionaire Joe Lewis’s $392M collection — inside which a Modigliani nude alone fetched $63.5M, a European auction record. Maybe the art market hasn’t cooled after all, just gotten absurdly expensive.

The Manhattan DA seized dozens of antiquities from the Met. All believed looted or illegally trafficked, June’s haul — a 3,700-year-old Greek jug, a Turkish bronze Hermès — pushes the total pulled from the museum since 2017 past 120 objects and $95 million in value. For the world’s greatest museum, that’s a lot of receipts it couldn’t produce.

Aesthetic Study · Jeweled Mundane

Ornaments used to need occasions. In the smartphone era, every day is one. That means gala-level gems kind of feel right at home anywhere: on a front tooth, on the handle for a mug, the hair tie in a messy bun. Dua Lipa, Kylie Jenner, and Sabrina Carpenter keep turning up in bedazzled nails; toe rings now come set with stones worth more than the sandal. And if the glint in our eyes is to be trusted, it might mark the end of millennial grey.

In 1908, Adolf Loos called ornament on useful objects a crime. Smooth and plain, he believed, meant civilization was moving forward. But history proves bling can’t be repressed. Eddie Plein was carving gold fronts in a Brooklyn basement for a teenage Jay-Z decades ago, remaking one grill three times so his client could close his lips over ten diamonds the size of engagement rocks. From India’s gold to the Black salons that built nail culture, ornament has always found its way back. All the world’s a stage, and it’s our time to shine.

• The architect who called ornament a crime in 1908

• How algorithms flattened taste into a default grey

• The underground history of grillz, from the man who invented the gold front

• Gen Z is using archival maximalism to kill the clean-girl aesthetic

  ---

Melanie Bender built her fragrance house LORE on a philosophy she calls “grounded ambition” — chasing big things in a way that builds you up instead of swallowing you whole, treating scent as joyful creation rather than something to prove. LORE’s next release, Lil Softie, is a cocooning cashmeric musk — pink pepper, cereal milk, ambroxan — warm and addictive and soft in all the right places, launching today. Here she talks creative blocks, Dennis Rodman, and the print newspaper that changed her mornings.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Val, the biopic by and about Val Kilmer. Its rawness, humor and beauty rocked me. First, because the ‘90s identity I had accepted about him was so wrong, or at least so incomplete. Second, because this incredible piece came out of him at a time that the universe was trying to break him. To be staring down the end of his life and yet never more comfortably himself — I found that deeply surprising, deeply moving and deeply beautiful.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

Usually I do something else! The mind and its creativity remain a great mystery to me. Also a great joy. Being in a creative flow state and feeling something unexpected and beautiful taking shape — it’s a wondrous thing. But I don’t feel I control how it works. Some days it flows easily; others it’s tortured. Rather than fight that, I lean in when I find it flowing, and maybe try to see some wit in the world when it’s not. Dark chocolate also helps.

What book have you gifted most?

The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg. It teases out the difference between pursuing passions in a way that tears you down, and going after the same things in a way that builds you up. The difference between playing to win and playing not to lose (mostly it’s fear). For a lot of my career, my goals and passions felt so big that they swallowed me whole. That created distance from the joys in life (there are so very many), caused me to lose sight of myself and my values, and also made me less capable of achieving my goals. This book completely changed my relationship with ambition, centering it around joyful and fearless creation… so I gift Groundedness to each new LORE team member, and have them spend their first day completely offline and out of meetings, reading the book and building their own practices around it.

Where do you go to find peace?

Anywhere outdoors in the sun. It could be the beach in Hawai’i where I grew up, or the grass in my backyard. They both do the same.

Who is your forever inspo?

Dennis Rodman. He was daringly expressive, vibey and fluid at a time when athletes weren’t allowed to be. He was also deeply flawed.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

Follow Melanie on Instagram and Lore on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Gondola Watch

The Gondola is one of 55 one-off watches London jeweler Andrew Grima designed for Omega in 1969. The hands hide behind a slab of cut gemstone set into a cuff of textured gold, so you read the time through the stone, if you can read it at all. Grima sketched these on bar mats and hotel menus, then handed the impossible cuts to craftsmen who’d never tried them.

Fifty years on, the Gondola is still in no rush. While modern timepieces track our macros and steps and feed us emails, this one just feels a little more lost at sea. You could try to guess the time, but it’d only be a ballpark. And that lack of optimization feels like a freshwater breeze.

Quick Hits

• Chanel bought France’s oldest shirtmaker.

• Claude helped a researcher turn an AI chatbot into a backstage‑pass.

• Balenciaga is now sponsoring Substackers.

• Sharon Stone walked her first runway in 30 years, for Vetements.

• Ai Weiwei built imperial flags out of buttons in Manchester.

All that glitters,

Tania

Pharrell built a life-sized crashing wave for Louis Vuitton's Spring 2027 show. Tie-dye, Hawaiian prints, wetsuit knits — a full SoCal daydream in the open-air grounds of the Cité U. The fantasy read almost surreal against reality: a manufactured shoreline rising in the middle of a historic campus, mid-heat wave, during one of Europe’s deadliest droughts in years.

Paris is reopening the Seine for swimming on July 4th. Three supervised sites — Bercy, Louis-Philippe, and Bras de Grenelle — return for a second summer, the legacy of a €1.4 billion cleanup that ended a swimming ban in place since 1923. Last year drew close to 100,000 bathers. Turns out the people love clean water.

Jay-Z is turning New York into a Reasonable Doubt museum. The album turned 30 this week, and Roc Nation opened immersive pop-ups in Brooklyn and Manhattan — cassette archives, his Lexus from the “Dead Presidents” video, a Jay-Z library card via the Brooklyn Public Library. In July, he takes Yankee Stadium for three nights.

USMNT jerseys are selling out across U.S retailers as the team heads into the knockout stage. Dick’s, Fanatics and others are down to scraps, and Nike won’t restock the $100 home shirt until July 1st. Sales have doubled the entire 2022 group-stage haul. Winning has never looked worse on a shelf.

GTA VI opened pre-orders and reportedly cleared $3 billion in 24 hours — all without a physical disc. Rockstar confirmed no boxed copy at launch, just download codes, on a game that cost over $1 billion to make. Thirteen years, no gameplay footage, no disc, and the biggest presale in entertainment history. Somehow, scarcity sells even when the product is infinite.

Martin Parr’s final body of work just opened. “Lacock” is a year-long show at Wiltshire’s Fox Talbot Museum — portraits of village life he shot across 30 visits in 2025, months before his death at 73. Prize-winning potatoes, scarecrow festivals, a vicar draped in Union flags. The guy who built a career on the absurdity of Britain signed off by just openly loving it.

Aesthetic Study · Glacial Decadence

Last week, Europe broke temperature records three days running. You only need to look outside to know we’re in the sweaty thick of it. But this week we’re going way out of season: Lamborghinis on frozen lakes, champagne at 9,000 feet, slingback heels clipped into Lacroix ski bindings. Maria Bogner put Monroe in stretch ski pants in 1952. Slim Aarons spent decades photographing fur-clad countesses sledding St. Moritz. The 1980s turned it all into slapstick — Hot Dog, Better Off Dead, Ski School — and TikTok’s “Winter Bimbo” brought ushankas and miniskirts into snowy forests, a look Polyester Zine has scrutinized for flattening post-Soviet hyper-femininity into a mood board. The camp was always part of the deal.

As with anything that starts as a joke, commitment to the bit has birthed full sincerity. FW26 was drenched in fur and shearling — not as irony, but as texture, weight, drama. Searches for “glacier aesthetic” have climbed all year, driven mostly by people building mood boards from apartments with no AC. The fashion calendar always sells the weather you’re not having, this year the clash of hot and cold is a lot more pronounced.

• A century of slope-to-pavement Alpine chic

• What’s lurking behind the “Slavic Bimbo” aesthetic

• A week at the richest ski resort in the world

• The history of après-ski fashion and how mountain style evolved

  ---

Philip Seerup’s Service Projects borrows from the places where tableware gets pushed to its limits — bistro kitchens, izakaya counters, canteen lines — and builds it for home use instead. Founded in New York in 2022 and now based in Copenhagen, the brand works almost exclusively in stainless steel, aluminum, and porcelain. The Ice Cream Cup, designed with Laura Bilde, holds gelato as naturally as it holds olives. Next up: the Echo Fruit bowl in September and a steak knife next year. Here he talks door handles, corkscrews, and a book about smuggling Gaddafi’s son across the Mexican border.

Do you have any projects coming up you’d like our readers to know about?

We’re launching an Echo Fruit bowl in September — a larger-scale take on our Ice Cream Cup. It’s made for the table, like most of what we design, but fits a kitchen island just as well. We’re also working on a steak knife for the new year. Very excited about the details that go into such a simple object.

What book have you gifted most?

11.11.11 by Mads Brügger — possibly the best book I’ve ever read. It’s a journalistic documentary following a Danish businessman arrested in Mexico City on 11/11/11, accused of trying to smuggle Gaddafi’s son across the border. He spends 533 days in some of Mexico’s worst prisons, insisting he’s innocent. Brügger investigates, but the deeper he goes, the more he realizes nothing about the man’s life adds up, and he starts questioning his own role in the story too.

Where do you go to find peace?

On my runs without any distractions

Who is your forever inspo?

Everyday life, really. Almost all of my inspiration comes from small, ordinary moments — it could be a door handle that suggests the perfect shape for a French press handle (true story), but always with the functionality to match: something that works within a real, everyday context inspires me a lot.

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Founding a company I care about enough that I never question the time I put into it. The work keeps me going and the goals feel worth chasing — I don’t regret a second.

Follow Philip on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Spring Coolers

Moreno Schweikle’s Spring Cooler is a standard stainless steel office water dispenser — blue tap, red tap, “DO NOT DRINK” placard — with one adjustment. Where the drip tray should be, a hand-carved stone basin sits instead: acanthus leaves, scrollwork, the kind of corbel you’d expect under a palazzo cornice. Water streams from both taps into the stone. It reads like a Roman drinking fountain that wandered into a break room and decided to stay.

Schweikle studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and apprenticed at the Campana Brothers’ studio in São Paulo. His practice takes invisible industrial objects — water coolers, park benches, office chairs — and grafts on historical ornament until past and present sit in the same frame. He’s never made a water piece that doesn’t leak. The cooler holds something everyone needs in a form so standardized nobody sees it anymore. The basin doesn’t make the water precious. It reminds you it already was.

Quick Hits

Sotheby’s is auctioning OG Anunoby’s Game 4 tip-in ball.

A 12-year-old designed a lamp at 3 Days of Design.

GapStudio’s Golden Globes pocket tee goes mass for $54.

The Lidl logo is hiding a dog playing piano.

JR built an inflatable cave inside the Pont Neuf.

Diving in,

Tania

Dua Lipa’s wedding was a couture showcase with five designer looks spanning a London town hall ceremony and a three-day celebration in Sicily. The main event dress was Chanel haute couture — 480,000 hand-embroidered beads, 25,000 feathers, 1,155 hours of needlework — making her Matthieu Blazy’s first custom bride.

Sotheby’s is auctioning 1,000 Karl Lagerfeld sketches, with the first lot hitting the block this fall. The drawings span decades of work for Chanel, Fendi, and his own label. They’re estimated to fetch between $200 and $3,000, meaning some of fashion’s most iconic ideas cost less than the clothes they became.

Apple is putting cameras in AirPods for release in 2027. The earbuds are built for spatial awareness, not selfies — though the optics of face-mounted lenses on the subway are worth considering. Somewhere, Google Glass is whispering “I told you so.”

Art Basel’s Unlimited sector opened with a 19-foot Kusama flower sculpture, Tracey Emin’s salvaged Margate hut on a ramshackle pier, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 13-foot phallic obelisk — originally made to promote condom use during the AIDS crisis. If you’re in Switzerland, clear your afternoon. If not, consider booking a flight.

Google buys into A24. Google is putting ~$75M into A24, its first stake in a movie studio, as part of an AI research partnership with DeepMind to build new filmmaking tools. The studio most synonymous with handmade, director-driven cinema is now co-developing generative tools with the company behind Veo. Vibes-based movies, meet prompt-based tech.

Burberry took over Corner Bistro for the World Cup, turning the beloved West Village burger joint into a branded British pub. Daniel Lee, Ella Emhoff, and Myha’la showed up for England’s 4–2 opener. Maybe fashion’s next frontier is the pub.

Aesthetic Study · Zen-X

Before “Japandi” had a name, the ’90s had Zen-X — a full retreat from ’80s excess into bamboo, river stones, and the Japanese concept of ma. John Pawson designed Calvin Klein’s stores as monastic white cubes. The Nature Company built stone archways in suburban malls and piped in rainforest soundscapes. Muji erased logos entirely. Donna Karan launched a line called Urban Zen. The Zen-X playbook was part spiritual practice, part retail concept. Think light wood, negative space, wabi-sabi textures, and borrowed Eastern calm applied to Western consumer life.

Every aesthetic produces its own resistance, and the pushback to minimalism-as-status is popping up in the most optimized corners of consumer life. Take the gym, for example. The matching set and technical fabric of brands like Alo and Lululemon are finally giving way to a new wave of late-’90s workout gear, upcycling fashion from thrift bins. Move over, Zen-X — it’s time for Regen-Z.

• The eight minimalist shows that defined the era

• TrackJapan’s growing influence at Milan Design Week

• Japandi is the style everyone wants in 2026

• Why wabi-sabi won’t go away

  ---

Alexandra Fairweather is a director at the John Chamberlain Estate, where she oversees exhibitions, publications, and archival projects for the sculptor who brought abstract expressionism into three dimensions with crushed automobile metal. Chamberlain cavorted at Max’s Kansas City with Judd, Flavin, and the Warhol Factory crowd, and built a 72-foot studio on Shelter Island before his death in 2011. Today, Alexandra (his stepdaughter) and her mother Prudence maintain the estate’s private museum in a converted horse stable — where she recently launched ON THE COUCH, a filmed interview series shot on Chamberlain’s iconic foam couches with guests like Daniel Arsham, Misha Kahn, and Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro. Here, she talks Marie Kondo, AI workflows, and why Shelter Island is always the answer.

What book have you gifted most?

Assouline’s Living with Chamberlain. It shows what it’s like to actually live with his work.

Where do you go to find peace?

Shelter Island.

Who is your forever inspo?

John Chamberlain. He was authentic, never boxed in by social norms, and had the courage to rethink what was possible. I carry all of that into my own life.

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life

Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Once everything had a place, I had more room to think.

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Being an early adopter of technology, specifically AI. It has completely changed my workflow and created time to explore more creative projects. Chamberlain was also an early adopter of digital image manipulation. In the mid-2000s, he created collaged large-scale prints on canvas composed of his own Widelux photography — stretching, cutting, filtering, and colorizing the images to reshape his world in an entirely new way.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

“It’s all in the fit.” — John Chamberlain

Follow Alexandra on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · HP Spaceball (2003)

Spacetec’s 1991 3D motion controller let you press, twist, and tilt a gray orb to rotate, pan, and zoom a CAD model — six degrees of freedom from a single ball. HP rebranded it, NASA used one to drive the Sojourner rover on Mars, and it kept showing up as a prop in ’90s sci-fi because it already looked like it came from the future.

Looking at it now, it’s beautifully crude — a golf ball on a pedestal with eight buttons and a serial cable. But thirty years from now, someone will almost definitely look at our tools the same way. As such, the Spaceball is a reminder that every generation’s most advanced interface eventually becomes someone else’s Object Love.

Quick Hits

Snap unveiled $2,195 AR glasses called Specs.

Cattelan’s duct-taped banana vanished from Pompidou-Metz.

Midjourney is opening wellness spas with a full-body scanner.

Giacometti opens inside the Met’s Temple of Dendur.

Gustaf Westman made a chubby snack bowl shaped like a stadium.

Floating off,

Tania 🪷

The UK just banned social media for under-16s — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and X are all off-limits. The legislation goes even further than Australia, adding curbs on livestreaming, stranger contact, and even infinite scroll. So much for your Snapchat streak, lads.

Spain is wearing Loewe in the World Cup. Under Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the Spanish house handles the suits players wear arriving at the stadium and in the tunnel. Even the pre-match walkout is a runway.

Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, combining Murdoch’s sports-and-news empire with the streaming platform. Fold in Tubi, which Fox acquired in 2020, and the combined company is the third-largest player in American television. The streaming wars were originally about the content, but owning the remote matters more.

Onitsuka Tiger is splitting off from ASICS into its own company, starting January 2027. Sales are up 34%, there’s a Versace collab on the books, and the new Champs-Élysées flagship looks nothing like a running store. The brand Uma Thurman made iconic in head-to-toe yellow is clearly ready to fight its own battles.

Target named Isaac Mizrahi its first creative director at large — fitting for the designer who first collaborated there in 2003, setting the stage for high-low collabs that are currently running the mall. As an advisor and mentor, here’s hoping he’ll make Target feel like Tarjay again.

Chrome Hearts is suing Nordstrom for selling accessories that rip off their signature cross motifs — filing trademark infringement, counterfeiting, the works. The brand has spent decades building its entire identity on exclusivity and celebrity cosign. But do they really get to own the cross?

Aesthetic Study · New Orange

The Knicks’ blue and orange comes directly from the flag of the Dutch Republic, which flew over Manhattan when the city was still called New Amsterdam (and, briefly, New Orange!). That means it’s a 400-year-old color scheme that goes deeper than the jerseys we see today.

The name “Knickerbocker” comes from 1809, when Washington Irving invented a fictional Dutch historian called Diedrich Knickerbocker and promoted the book by planting fake missing-persons ads in the Evening Post. The name stuck to everything — an Astor hotel, a beer, a steamboat, a literary magazine — and by the time the basketball franchise launched in 1946, sports cartoonist Willard Mullin drew the first logo: a dribbling colonial Dutchman in buckled shoes. The garment — baggy trousers gathered at the knee — was standard sportswear through the early 20th century, and Chloé just put them back on the runway.

Father Knickerbocker was less of a mascot and more like New York personified. From the 1870s on, he appeared in Puck cartoons, city health pamphlets, and sheet music as a walking stand-in for New York itself, the way Uncle Sam represents America. In 1949, a Fordham professor named James J. O’Brien put on a rented periwig and colonial costume — $15 a rental, spectacles done to prescription — and flew around the world for 17 days as the character, promoting the city during World Trade Week. Cities may not have personifications anymore, but 20,000 people at MSG in a 400-year-old Dutch color, cheering for a team named after a literary prank, is a strong pitch to bring them back.

• Washington Irving and the birth of the Knickerbocker

• FIT traces the knickerbocker from sportswear to cycling to the runway

• The NYC Municipal Archives on the “real” Father Knickerbocker

• Taylor Swift and the “Stevie Knicks” effect at the Finals

  ---

Raul Lopez taught himself to design at 12, co-founded Hood By Air at 22, and left to build Luar — a label named after himself, spelled backward — out of the same Brooklyn neighborhoods where he was raised. His Ana bag became a downtown status symbol, earned him the CFDA Award for American Accessory Designer of the Year in 2022 and 2024, and put him on TIME’s Next 100 list. He’s dressed Beyoncé and Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny, and Kendall Jenner and shown at the Met multiple years running. He’s now pushing Luar toward furniture and homeware. Here, he shares what’s on his mind.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

I go to the Dominican Republic and hide out in my grandmother’s home in the country side.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

I rewatched The Color of Pomegranates.

What book have you gifted most?

A book by Dr. Soraya Aracena called The African Americans of Samana.

Who is your forever inspo?

My mom.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Train your subconscious to think positively.

Follow Raul on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · The Grass Wheel (2006)

This grass-lined wheel, built in 2006 by David Gallaugher, Kevin James, Asher deGroot and Jacob Jebailey at the Dalhousie School of Architecture, is exactly what it sounds like — a large circular frame filled with living turf, sized for a single person to walk inside. Step in, and the wheel turns beneath your feet, an endless strip of lawn rotating in place, like a hamster wheel for those of us who need to touch grass.

The Grass Wheel is easy to dismiss as a gag — an overcomplicated solution to a problem that parks already solve. But four architecture students looked at the built environment and decided the most radical intervention they could make was giving someone the feeling of bare ground underfoot. Soil and sod circling slowly under your feet, nothing to tap or swipe, immerse yourself in the grass in motion.

Quick Hits

• StockX auctioned all 48 KidSuper × BAPE World Cup sneakers.

• Phoebe Bridgers announced a massive 2026 tour.

• Sega is rebooting Crazy Taxi.

• Porsche made a Buzz Lightyear 911 for the Toy Story 5 premiere.

• Fritz Hansen and Technics built a Bauhaus lamp and turntable.

Cheering on,

Tania

Gucci is the first luxury house to title-sponsor an F1 team. From 2027, Alpine will race as Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team, swapping its blue-and-pink livery for Gucci's red, green, black and gold. Sure, LVMH sponsors the championship and Louis Vuitton presents the trophy, but now Gucci's got a car.

Raymond Pettibon’s iconic album art hits the gallery. Nervous Breakdown at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen runs through September with 200+ covers from the Stefan Thull collection — Black Flag, Sonic Youth, and more — plus a reprinted 1985 Kim Gordon essay from Artforum.

Everlane’s founder starts a new brand. Days after L Catterton sold the brand to Shein for $100 million, Michael Preysman started a new clothing venture called Still Radical. So far it lives up to its name, promising no venture capital or private equity. But can it outshine Shein?

Martin Parr gets his own skate decks. The Skateroom — the Brussels brand that does artist editions with Basquiat, Koons, and Matisse — just released a Parr collection, one of the last he approved before his death in December at 73. He spent fifty years photographing everyday people, who will now have a second life at the skate park.

Romain Gavras is directing the Louvre heist movie. The hit job took eight minutes last October; seven months and several arrests later, none of the eight crown jewels have come back. And now we have to wait ‘til 2028 for the movie.

Aesthetic Study · Landmine Girls

Jirai kei — “landmine style” — is sweetness wired to explode. It emerged from Tokyo’s Kabukichō nightlife and crystallized during COVID thanks to SuReRo’s viral “psycho girlfriend” makeup challenge. The look: pink and black, oversized bows, Peter Pan collars, platform Mary Janes, twin tails, and the “jirai line” — a heavy under-eye flush that reads as recent crying. Bubbles, Liz Lisa, and Ank Rouge sell it in Japan. In the West it surfaced untranslated — Sandy Liang’s bows, Simone Rocha’s pink-and-black tulle, Shushu/Tong’s frill-and-platform pairings.

Two years of coquette’s bow obsession prepped us for this very moment. After years of “clean girl” and “old money” restraint, something had to break. Jirai uses the same bows to mean the opposite — sweetness with detonation right beneath the surface. After a decade of fashion telling women to look composed, the clothes demonstrate that being a girl can be hard.

• Jirai’s Kabukichō origins

• The full visual taxonomy

• The melancholy at jirai’s core

• Meet the Toyoko Kids of Kabukichō

  ---

Emma Backman edits film with the rhythm and continuity that could only come from her past life as a dancer. Based between Stockholm and Berlin, the filmmaker came up through music videos and commercials before stepping into features with J.M. Harper’s 2024 Sundance documentary As We Speak. She was an additional editor on the BAFTA-nominated Daughters and has a shelf of Ciclope, ADC, and Clio Gold from the commercial side. This June, she’s among the editors on Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, One9’s documentary tracing the musician’s path from her Manhattan childhood to the Broadway stage, closing out the Tribeca Festival. We talked to her about the music she turns to when stuck, the films and books that still hit, and what keeping the body moving actually does for the work.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

I listen to music and try and get to the source of what I want the viewer of the film to feel when they watch my work. For me music is the highest art form. It makes me feel the most. I make a playlist and try and step away from the screen if I have the time.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

I rewatched C’mon C’mon by Mike Mills the other week and it hit me. The film shows humanity and small moments in life in a very poetic way. Simply beautiful.

What’s the last article you sent to a friend?

Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical

Who is your forever inspo?

Erykah Badu, Agnès Varda and Chloe Sevigny.

What book have you gifted most?

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn is a book I gave to at least 5 of my friends. It was years of therapy bottled up in that book for me.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Your best days are yet to come.

Follow Emma on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Television (1963) and Cryptogamme (1969)

In 1963, Téléavia asked Roger Tallon to make a TV that didn’t look like furniture. He gave them the Portavia P111 — an ovoid ABS case on a white pedestal “neck” the sculptor César suggested, with a tinted screen that fades into the body. The tagline: l’esthétique compte aussi — “aesthetics matter too.” Six years later, asked to furnish an unbuilt Grand Palais cafeteria, Tallon designed the Cryptogamme stool — a lacquered polyester base topped with a polyurethane cushion in colors borrowed from Smarties.

Set them next to each other and they’re basically the same object — pedestal and bulb, base and cap, swelling at the top. The P111 now lives at the Centre Pompidou, but it’s fun to imagine kicking back with it at home. It’s the exact kind of setup where you can watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives without sacrificing taste.

Quick Hits

• Bottega Veneta made an AirPods case on a strap.

• Levi’s reissued their 1870s jeans for $600.

• Charli XCX announces Music, Fashion, Film album.

• The 2028 Olympics swapped equestrian for Ninja Warrior.

• Campeggi’s bed-in-a-box unfolds into a guest room.

  ---

Kaboom,

Tania ♡

Martin Scorsese backs an AI startup, signing on as partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, a generative image company. The move is dividing fans who respected him as the “absolute cinema” guy. But if anyone can teach AI about 35mm film grain, it’s him.

Pace Gallery is cutting 50 artists and 50 staff, shrinking its roster from 135 to 85 in the sharpest contraction yet from a mega gallery. It’s a sobering reality check for the art world, and a sign the old art world model is cracking.

A24’s Backrooms is now the studio’s biggest hit, earning $81 million domestically in its opening weekend. The film was built by 20-year old Kane Parsons from his viral YouTube series based on 4chan creepypasta. That’s a lot of attention for a liminal space.

Apple finally upgrades Siri. The solution? Bring Google’s AI models on-device, years after they first promised them. Rather than a total surrender, it feels like a tactical alliance. Apple keeps the local privacy, while Google’s servers handle the thinking.

Does a sport have a sound? The NBA is trying to brand itself with a new composer. Nicholas Britell and Nas are bringing dramatic piano keys and hip-hop to the court. Maybe we’ll see Kendall Roy courtside.

Over 100 Venice Biennale artists are threatening to sue the exhibition for keeping their names on a public award ballot they never agreed to. The Biennale introduced the vote after its prize jury resigned over ICC-related politics, and now artists want out. In the city of sinking buildings, could this be another institution headed under water?

Aesthetic Study · Trompe l’Oeil

When Gerrit Dou painted a curtain in 17th-century Leiden, the goal was for the viewer to try to pull it aside. Trompe l’oeil was the ultimate painterly skill, where a painter’s genius was measured by how easily they could make you confused. Schiaparelli brought the same logic to fashion in 1927 with a knitted bow that looked tied at the chest. For decades the trick held — Gaultier’s printed torsos, Galliano’s layered denim at Dior, Louis Vuitton’s ankle boot hand-painted to look like pumps with a white sock. Deception as craft.

But modern-day trompe l’oeil has become traître l’oeil, or betray the eye. Instead of trying to fool you, the illusion immediately sabotages itself. Loewe sent out a pixelated polo that looked yanked from a loading screen. Prada knitted fake cardigans onto shirts, then Miuccia told the press: “We played with fake, not with fiction.” Acne stamped keychains onto denim. Ottolinger printed a full shirt-and-tie onto a bodysuit. In the era of AI, the most comforting illusion is the one that proudly admits it is a lie.

• Trace a century of fashion illusion

• Follow trompe l’oeil from the ’20s to now

• Gerrit Dou’s virtuosity in Dutch collections

• Menswear’s current surrealist spin

  ---

Mary Royall Wilgis is a Brooklyn-based painter who grew up in the marshes of South Carolina. Hours on the water and in the trees taught her to watch light the way most people listen to music. She calls it “light foraging” — tracking how a window catches sun at a precise hour, translating the passage of time onto color-dense canvases. She’s currently preparing a show with Harsh Collective at the Hamptons Art Fair from July 9 to 12.

What book have you gifted most?

Devotions by Mary Oliver

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life?

My keychain tape measure. It’s AMAZING.

Where do you go to find peace?

Kayaking on the South Carolina marsh with my dad and brother.

Who is your forever inspo?

James Turrell. That man’s writing on light changed my life: “Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.”

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Journals. I have used the exact same type of black, lined, Moleskine notebook since college. I have written through heartbreak, coming out, quitting my job, becoming an artist, family dynamics, health problems, and love.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Be a good neighbor.

Follow Mary on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Tennis Ball Chair

Hugh Hayden’s Tennis Ball Chair binds roughly 300 recycled tennis balls into a hexagonal grid with non-stretch polyester cord. Made around 2008 as part of his FUNATURE series, Hayden — a Dallas-born, Cornell-trained architect turned sculptor — sourced used balls from New York tennis clubs to keep them out of landfills. Packed tight, they become dense, bouncy upholstery that is as funny as it is practical. Better yet, it’s proof that green design doesn’t have to look so green.

Make it “optic yellow” instead. After all, the tennis ball is shorthand for an entire aesthetic now: country clubs and concrete courts, ALD lookbooks and Challengers screenshots, Sunday morning rallies in public parks. Over 300 million get manufactured every year. Almost none biodegrade. They lose their bounce in hours and end up in hoppers, dog parks, garage buckets. Hayden’s chair takes the most disposable thing in the game and makes it worth sitting with — whether you’re playing or just watching.

Quick Hits

Björk opens Echolalia at Iceland’s National Museum.

Someone made the first straight-to-VHS movie in 20 years.

The Obama Presidential Center is an architectural win.

Loro Piana is funding a restoration of Renaissance masterworks.

Why the New York Knicks’ decades-old logo is still a classic.

Through the liminal,

Tania

Gentle Monster is making smart glasses. Google unveiled the collab at I/O — audio glasses with Gemini built in, launching this fall after investing $100 million into the South Korean eyewear brand last year for a 4% stake. They’re making a Warby Parker version too, so every kind of glasses girlie is covered.

The steroid Olympics are here. In Las Vegas, the Enhanced Games pay athletes to use FDA-approved PEDs under doctor “supervision,” chasing million‑dollar records no federation will recognize. It’s truly just for the love of the game. (And for selling products.)

Google is ending traditional search as their homepage will now lead with AI-generated responses instead of search results. It’s part of the search giant’s broader push to put AI into everything. Instead of a single “I’m feeling lucky” button, they’re making it the whole experience.

Comedian Julio Torres made furniture about moving to New York, working with Sabai on All Other Passports — four pieces about arriving in New York, including a room dividerinspired by JFK Terminal 4 and a side table filled with things you dump when you get home. As anyone who’s seen Fantasmas knows, only Torres could dream up housewares this whimsical.

Selldorf Architects won the Louvre commission. STUDIOS Architecture and Selldorf Architects lead the museum’s biggest renovation in 40 years — two underground entrances, a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa, and the moat transformed into a garden.

Aesthetic Study · Biomorphic Core

Before it was design, it could be seen in a sea creature. Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature — a 1904 collection of radiolarian and jellyfish illustrations so precise they look like blueprints — handed designers a visual language they’re still working from. Gaudí built facades from bone structure and root systems. Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge looks like a femur crossed with a spacecraft. Iris van Herpen’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum makes the case that a dress can grow, looking less like clothes and more like coral mid-bloom.

These things look connected because, well, everything is. The brain responds to organic curves differently than it does to right angles. It’s deep in our DNA, having spent most of human history in forests and tide pools rather than office buildings. A chair that looks like a bone, a dress that looks like coral, a building with no corners: they all feel, on some level, like something you already know.

• Gaudí’s genius was transferring nature directly into architecture

• No straight lines: the building that made parametricism click

• Where biomorphic architecture comes from and where it’s going

• The dress that was literally grown from mushrooms

  ---

Fernando Mastrangelo has been making furniture and sculpture out of sand, salt, coffee grounds, and crushed glass since 2006 — the kind of pieces that end up at the Brooklyn Museum and Cooper Hewitt, and on the floors of Dior and Stella McCartney. He runs his studio out of Brooklyn and recently opened his own gallery in Manhattan. This fall he’s back at Cristina Grajales Gallery for his first solo show in over five years, with new work shaped by a quieter chapter upstate. He’s also recently relaunched Design Discord, his podcast about what it actually takes to build a design practice, with the second season already underway. We sat down with Fernando to talk mastery, sleep, and the advice he wishes he’d never heard.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

“Make it more commercial.” If I had followed that advice early on, I never would have poured coffee grounds into a mold and called it furniture. The work only resonates when it feels risky. The moment you design to fit neatly into the market, you lose the tension that makes it interesting.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

One film that’s especially meaningful to me is Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I revisit it every year because I relate to its focus on lifelong mastery and relentless refinement. It reminds me that excellence isn’t a destination, but a continuous process, no matter the field.

Where do you go to find peace?

At home with my wife and dog. We also love to travel to areas steeped in nature. A few days in a beautiful landscape can keep me refreshed and inspired in the studio for months.

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Sleep. I suffered from insomnia for a while, but after 18 months of radically changing my habits, and working diligently with a specialist, I now sleep like a champ and it’s been a game changer.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

“Honor the material, and it will reveal its truth.”

Find Fernando on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Wave UFO installation

Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO shows how people in the late 1990s imagined the future via a pearlescent, teardrop pod that carries three viewers at a time. Inside, electrodes attach to your head like an EEG, and your brainwaves get projected onto the domed ceiling as six colored orbs, two for each hemisphere of each person’s brain. The Japanese artist spent three years building it from fiberglass, Technogel, carbon fiber, and magnesium, inspired by the automobile factories of Turin and the Buddhist principle that all consciousness is interconnected.

What’s striking, watching it now, is how sincere it is. Wave UFO doesn’t joke about UFOs or wink at sci-fi. It takes the shape completely seriously — as a vehicle, literal and spiritual, for an unfamiliar interior experience. You can find all the declassified government UFO files on Cosmos, but as far as we know this is the only one that asks you to lie down inside and look up at your own brain.

Quick Hits

• Bad Bunny and Zara dropped a 150-piece collection.

• Tilda Swinton is performing at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

• London restaurant Sketch is doing a Winnie the Pooh takeover.

• Merrell turned Union Square into an outdoor pop-up.

• Fear of God launched an MLB collection for spring 2026.

  ---

In orbit,

Tania

The Met absorbs Neue Galerie. Ronald Lauder’s museum on Fifth Avenue is merging with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028, in a deal that hands the Lauder family’s collection to the Met. The Klimts are getting a much bigger room.

LVMH is selling Marc Jacobs after nearly three decades of ownership. The brand is being sold to WHP Global, which will make it sibling brands with Vera Wang. It’s the latest move as LVMH tries to recover from its worst quarter in history.

Critics question Le Labo’s Santal 33 as the once-viral scent turns 15. The sandalwood-and-cardamom fragrance went from a cult Lower East Side perfumery to a default for “creatives.” It’s a smell associated with taste, but everyone’s starting to smell the same.

Martha Stewart pivots to AI with her new startup Hint. It watches your home from the cloud, turning maintenance into something as delightful as a tasteful fruit bowl or floral arrangement.

A Vivienne Westwood jewelry exhibition opens in 2027. The retrospective brings four decades of the late designer’s most recognizable pieces, from orb pendants to the safety pins that defined punk’s relationship to royalty. Long live the true queen.

Aesthetic Study · Dirty Dressing

Clean dressing has had surprising staying power, but there’s still something to be said about getting your hands dirty. The Barbican’s Dirty Looks exhibition traced staining, decay, and deliberate mess in fashion from the 1980s through early 2026, landing its sharpest observation on the way out: “In a way, the dirtiest garment is the garment that was never worn.” Danish label Solitude Studios has been submerging undyed wool, cotton, and silk into local woodland bogs since 2020, letting peat-stained water work on the textile for weeks.

Dirty dressing is less a trend than a reorientation — fabrics dyed with iron-rich water, garments that look already broken-in, textures that feel hand-touched rather than processed. Peatlands were always practical: sphagnum moss dressed WWI wounds, peat flavors whisky with the earth it came from, bogs were sacred between-worlds spaces in Irish tradition. The ground was part of daily life before we organized it away, and now fashion, in its own aestheticized way, is trying to let it back in.

• Get to know the designers collaborating with soil

• Discover the mysteries of bog bodies

• Why the UK’s peatland must be conserved

• Recreate iron age looks with Bog Fashion

  ---

Arrow Radisch spent years in medical research before realizing she’d rather build worlds than study them. The New York- and Paris-based photographer and creative director has become known for still lifes so sculptural they practically dare you to reach into the frame — work that’s landed her commissions from Cartier, Chanel, and Saint Laurent, and editorial pages in AD, T Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar. A 2023 residency in the South of France let her push those compositions off the page entirely, into painting and physical sculpture, and now she’s at it again with her first furniture collection. We sat down with Arrow to talk creative blocks, trusting your gut, and the Facebook Marketplace find she’s still thinking about.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

To overcome a creative block, I start by regulating my nervous system, because I can’t access creativity from a dysregulated state. That might look like meditation, a yoga class, or simply allowing myself to rest. From there, I try to understand the block itself by journaling and identifying its root cause, then working through it with reflection, meditation, or mindset shifts. I also find it incredibly helpful to immerse myself in mediums outside of my own practice; stepping into unfamiliar creative worlds takes the pressure off and often sparks unexpected inspiration.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

I thought long and hard about this and honestly couldn’t come up with an answer. I’ve always lived life to the beat of my own drum, so I don’t tend to seek out much advice; when it’s offered unsolicited, I usually let it pass. I’m deeply intuitive, and as long as I keep my nervous system regulated, I trust that my inner guidance will lead me where I need to go. When I’ve been led down the wrong path, it’s almost always been because I was operating from a place of scarcity or fear, rather than true intuition.

Where do you go to find peace?

I find peace in a few simple places: a hot yoga class, a favorite neighborhood coffee shop, my bed for a quiet meditation, or curled up on the couch under my weighted blanket. Each one gives me a different kind of reset, but they all bring me back to myself.

Who is your forever inspo?

Ellsworth Kelly, Tadao Ando, Alicia Keys, Rothko, Barbara Hepworth, Ruth Asawa, and Brâncuși.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Those who see the world abstractly see it most fully.

Find Arrow on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Michael Jackson’s glove

The glove began as a film editor’s tool — a plain white cotton glove worn to handle film without leaving grease marks on the frames. When a 21-year-old Michael Jackson visited a Hollywood production company in 1980, he noticed it, asked a few questions, and left with one. Three years later, costume designer Bill Whitten covered it in 600 to 800 hand-sewn Swarovski crystals, and Jackson debuted it on his left hand during “Billie Jean” at the Motown 25 television special. The left hand specifically because vitiligo had already begun changing his skin there — the most dazzling object in pop history started as a way to cover something up. When asked why he only wore one: “wearing two gloves seemed so ordinary.”

That logic — one is cooler than two, spectacle beats symmetry, the eye goes where you direct it — has held for forty years. Drake reportedly paid $120,000 for an original to anchor the cover of Iceman, marking his milestone of tying Jackson for the most number-one hits. The internet immediately split on whether it was homage or audacity — which is more or less the same conversation people have been having about Jackson for decades. The glove has always had that quality: so precisely engineered to catch light that it becomes difficult to look at anything else.

Quick Hits

Ralph Lauren gets his own postage stamps.

The Swatch x Audemars Piguet collab is finally here.

Shein reportedly buys Everlane for $100M.

John Travolta gets a surprise honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Doja Cat plots a three-year hiatus.

Letting it stain,

Tania

A TikToker wants to buy Spirit Airlines and is currently crowdfunding the $1.75 billion to do so. The plan? Buy the airline, resurrect it, and let the internet run it. It’s an idea so good, we’re surprised Nathan Fielder’s not involved.

Gen Z is reviving Coach and it’s all thanks to the Tabby bag. Parent company Tapestry raised its annual forecasts for the third time this year. Luxury fashion seemed like it was dipping, but it might’ve just been Gen Z developing their own taste.

Issey Miyake opened a new flagship in Manhattan. Architecture studio SO–IL built it inside a 1928 neo-gothic landmark, replacing the brand’s Gehry-designed Tribeca home of 25 years. Titanium from the old store was too difficult to incorporate, so they hung it as sculpture instead.

The Venice Biennale’s most talked-about piece is a toilet. Florentina Holzinger flooded Austria’s pavilion, put a naked performer in a water tank, and connected two portable johns to a filtration system that feeds visitors’ urine into the chamber. The line is enormous.

Pokémon turns 30 this year, and the franchise continues to go all out with immersive events, a concert series, a merch drop, and a “What’s Your Favorite?” campaign that’s basically a global census of childhood loyalty. For our part, one Cosmos team member archived every Pokémon TCG card ever printed. Gotta connect ‘em all.

Becoming an architect just got more expensive. Federal rules reclassified the degree from “professional” to “graduate,” which caps borrowing at $100K and ends the loan that covered tuition. Bad timing, given how many architects we need for housing and climate work.

Aesthetic Study · The Nancy Meyers Fantasy

The Nancy Meyers aesthetic is, technically, a set design. The Hamptons kitchen from Something’s Gotta Give — white cabinets, soapstone counters, copper pots, linen curtains, sand implied just outside the door — is routinely called the most copied kitchen of all time, and it was built on a stage by production designer Jon Hutman, who has worked on every Meyers film since What Women Want in 2000. The inspiration for that kitchen was a single question: where does an educated, sophisticated, successful woman live? As the search term surges on Cosmos, it’s clear everyone’s still looking for an answer.

The look is misinterpreted as ironic ‘coastal grandmother,’ but what we’re actually trying to replicate is the fiction of a life where nothing was bought in a hurry — something Martha Stewart merchandised, Ina Garten romanticized, and Meyers lit like a love scene. Think books that were read, wine that was chosen, cookbooks with cracked spines. The rooms look less decorated and more inhabited by someone with enough time and taste to have earned the place rather than styled it. No amount of white cabinetry will get you there, but that’s probably why you’ll keep trying.

• Nancy Meyers herself on what home means to her

• Architectural Digest sets the Nancy Meyers design rules

• Emily Henderson’s deep dive on how to actually do it

• Go a level deeper with the Hollywood Cottage aesthetic

  ---

Tommy Zung is a New York-based architectural designer and curator whose multidisciplinary practice, Studio Zung, spans architecture, interiors, furniture, and curation. The son of renowned architect Thomas T.K. Zung — a partner of Buckminster Fuller — he carved his own path through fashion and surfing before returning to the family business on his own terms. His latest project, the Manhattan residence of chef Daniel Humm and actress Annabelle Dexter-Jones, is currently featured in ELLE Decor. Here, he talks discipline, surfing, and following his heart.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

Look to other creative disciplines for inspiration — sculpture, music, art, poetry — to unlock spontaneity.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

Anything that suggests not following my heart, or a misalignment of my values.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Paris, Texas.

What’s the last article you sent to a friend?

This piece on the Isamu Noguchi exhibition in New York.

What’s the best investment you’ve made?

Discipline.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Find something that makes you smile today.

Find Tommy on Cosmos and Instagram.

Object Love · The Monorecchio Earring

The Monorecchio is a single aluminum disc, approximately 170mm across, milled to an optical finish that shifts in changing light. It was made in 1965 by Getulio Alviani, an Italian artist and leading figure in arte programmata — the kinetic art movement that put work in MoMA that same year. At the disc’s center is a cutout in the exact shape of an ear, which is how it’s worn: sliding flush against the side of the head.

The name means “single ear,” which tells you what Alviani was actually after. Not jewelry — a device for isolating a body part and presenting it as geometry. The auricle becomes the subject of the disc rather than its wearer — arguing that even our ear can be the center of attention. And we’re listening.

Quick Hits

• The Met Gala raised $42 million for The Met.

• Target’s new shopping cart is built to hold Stanleys and Starbucks.

• The theme of Cannes seems to be France.

• Apple agrees to pay iPhone owners $250 million.

• A $1.3 million Boba Fett action figure is back on the market.

  ---

Listening closely,

Tania

"Costume Art" was the Met Gala theme last night. Nichapat Suphap in custom Robert Wun referencing Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Heidi Klum in custom Mike Marino as a veiled marble sculpture, and Janelle Monáe in wired, mossy Christian Siriano. We dove deeper on the annual event over on our Substack.

Alysa Liu signs with Louis Vuitton as the label’s latest ambassador. The 20-year-old Olympic gold medalist is known for her one-of-a-kind style and infectious smile, making her a perfect fit for Nicolas Ghesquière’s label.

Palantir is getting into fashion. The surveillance and defense AI company — known for its contracts with ICE and military targeting systems — just dropped a chore coat, designed after the French bleu de travail, alongside hoodies, tees, and a previous drop that drew Off-White comparisons. Critics are calling it “tastewashing.”

Disney is selling a $600 animatronic Grogu. The 1:1 scale figure runs on an internal network of motors and sensors, cycling through 250+ animations. There’s no denying it’d make for a great robot pet, but please make sure you can afford it.

Spotify goes anti-AI, less than a year after an AI rock band broke 1 million plays on the platform. The new “Verified by Spotify” badge requires 10K monthly listeners and a social presence. Which means artists without the badge are either AI or just super underground.

LA’s lost sex clubs are memorialized in Dean Sameshima’s 1995–97 series Wonderland, now showing at Soft Opening in London. The show captures bathhouse and club façades in Silver Lake with flat, clinical distance — no people, no signage, no signal of what’s inside. The less they show, the harder they are to ignore.

Aesthetic Study · Blokecore

You might be wondering why you’ve seen people walking around Bushwick dressed in head-to-toe Manchester. Blame blokecore. Or, more specifically, blame Oasis. Their 2025 reunion was one of the year’s defining cultural moments — 14 million people tried to buy tickets, the tour generated £1.06 billion, and bucket hat searches surged 175% year-on-year. What it left behind is blokecore — vintage football shirts, Sambas, baggy jeans, a general willingness to look like you know your footie and how to pour a proper pint.

It’s worth being specific about what that language actually is, because it gets muddled. Blokecore draws from the casuals — the ‘80s football subculture that wore Stone Island, Lacoste, Fila, and Umbro not to stand out, but to pass as one of the lads. Blokecore took the casuals’ codes, stripped out the hooliganism, and handed them to people who found it on TikTok. The authenticity is a myth, but the camaraderie is downright biblical.

• Understand blokecore

• The history of the British football casuals

• How Oasis defined the look of a generation

• Umbro is releasing a Crocs cleat

  ---

Sarah Solis creates spaces that are deeply personal, timeless, and transportive. Classically trained in interior design, fine art, and art history, she founded her Malibu studio in 2017 and in 2024 introduced Galerie Solis, a bespoke furniture collection conceived as an evolution of her practice and rooted in European craftsmanship, heirloom design, and a commitment to sustainability. Her studio is currently engaged in residential projects across the United States. Here, she reflects on trusting intuition in the creative process, finding the emotion and soul of a space, and the importance of building the right team.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

I step away and sink into something tactile and grounding. I’ll take a long walk by the ocean, flip through my collection of antique books, or spend time sketching without an agenda. For me, creativity returns when I give myself permission to be quiet, to observe, and to reconnect with beauty in its simplest form. That reset always brings me back to the work with fresh clarity.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

A timeless favorite I always revisit: the Godfather series, for the incredible set decor. It’s transportive and inspiring.

What book have you gifted most?

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life?

A simple linen-bound notebook. I carry it everywhere — it’s become a place to sketch, jot down passing thoughts, and collect moments of beauty. Something about putting pen to paper slows me down and reconnects me to my intuition.

What’s the best investment you’ve made?

My studio and the people who make it what it is. Surrounding myself with talented, thoughtful collaborators has elevated every project and allowed the work to grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined on my own. Investing in the right team has been transformative — both creatively and personally.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Trust the quiet moments. They always show you where to go next.

Find Sarah on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Perfume Set

L’Orange Variée by Les Parfums de Marcy is a ceramic orange peel, painted and glazed with startling accuracy, holding eight enameled glass bottles shaped like segments, each one a different perfume. The corks fit into the bottoms of the segments, concealed when placed upside-down. Circa 1925, complete sets are so fragile that collectors spend years cobbling them together from separate auctions. Pairs well with your Cosmos citrus collection.

Fragrances continue to have a moment, but this feels like a break from the pretentious sans-serif scents that promise notes of “petrichor” and “volcanic stone.” This orange just seems to tell you what it is. But that’s a misdirect — despite appearances, it contains scents of rose, violet, mimosa, heliotrope, amber, chypre, jessamine, and mayflower. Familiar trickery over 100 years old.

Quick Hits

• Letterboxd is up for sale.

• Ozempic breath is boosting gum sales.

• The Scarface mansion is for sale for $237 million.

• Amomento opens hidden pop-up in a Shanghai garden.

• Japan Airlines is using humanoid robots as baggage handlers.

  ---

Cheers mate,

Tania ⚽️

The arts have always been bankrolled by the ultra-wealthy, but the gala is one of the only annual events that makes taste visible at scale. Once a year, hundreds of people show us theirs on a single carpet, in front of a camera, allowing us all to participate in conversation. The looks pour in. Within minutes, the internet has decided who delivered, who’s chopped, and who missed the assignment. By Tuesday, the discourse has turned into memes, reels, and Substack takes.

The gala was founded in 1948 by publicist Eleanor Lambert as a private fundraiser for the Costume Institute, which had just merged into the Met. For its first three decades, it was a small industry dinner reserved for fashion editors and designers, held off-site. The Met Gala as we remember it in popular culture starts with Anna Wintour, who took over as chair in 1995. In 2003, Tom Ford co-chaired and Gucci sponsored at $3,500 a seat. This year it’s the Bezoses. As Amy Odell put it, “what used to be a closed-door networking event for fashion people is now a big-box clout store for the richest people on the planet.” But the show on the wall isn’t the show on the steps. It’s called Costume Art, and it’s asking more from us than posting about it.

Which should be expected — the brief more conceptual each year. Under Wintour’s chairmanship and Bolton’s curation, themes shifted from designer monographs and national fashion to conceptual provocations. It has gotten harder to just call your stylist and wear something pretty. Bolton names two categories as overlooked: pregnant and aging. From the press preview, the critic Rian Phin noted the show extends further — disabled bodies appear throughout.

This year, the show is foregrounding bodies that fashion has historically refused to design for. Bolton goes on saying, “What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion. It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum… Even the nude is never naked.”

If 2026 matches previous years, we can expect the theme to be treated by some as a homework assignment and by others as a costume suggestion. In 2006, Sarah Jessica Parker arrived at AngloMania in custom Alexander McQueen tartan, with McQueen himself as her date. Rihanna arrived in 2018 in papal Margiela, styled to be revered. Solange’s 2018 Iris van Herpen halo turned the head Catholic. Doja Cat arrived in 2023 transformed into Choupette, Lagerfeld’s cat. Initially treated as a joke, the look held up because it took the theme more literally than anyone else. They got it. Tonight will tell us who else does.

For the first time, the Costume Institute isn’t reaching outside the building — the 200 artworks paired with the 200 garments are pulled directly from the Met’s permanent collection, spanning 5,000 years. This year there are no eras, designers, or countries that divide the garments. Instead, the show organizes them by what kind of body wears them: Naked, Classical, Pregnant, Aging, Anatomical, and Mortal.

The dress code’s stated purpose is to invite guests to “express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Watch for the looks that change in the seeing — the ones that look one way from afar and another up close. Watch for the wearer who is trying to be met by the camera. Watch for the looks that wouldn’t make sense on a hanger, and especially the ones that wouldn’t make sense alone.

Costume Art is the most serious staging of fashion-as-art the Met has produced. As the writer Anu Atluru put it years ago, “fashion design is guided by the same principles as traditional art — line, color, shape, dimension. It too is an important part of culture and society; it can define a time period, can tell stories, can challenge prejudices, can be revolutionary. Fashion is art with both form and function.”

Taste is a function of what you’ve spent time looking at. Nobody ever defines that out loud, but the gala makes it visible. Taste gets built slowly, deliberately, image by image. What was strange to you becomes part of what you know.

See you on the green carpet,

Tania

Grimes is making music again. After the tabloid era, the Elon custody saga, and a questionable detour into AI, she’s back in the studio. She’s also speaking with the kind of candor that made us pay attention in the first place.

Demna staged his first major Gucci exhibition. Gucci Memoria takes over Milan’s Chiostri di San Simpliciano with tapestries spanning 105 years of the house, a Gucci vending machine at the entrance, and a flower garden courtesy of Flora in the courtyard. It’s part retrospective, part theme park, and pure Demna.

IKEA launched a playful new collection called PS 2026. Pieces include a bench/rocking chair hybrid, a three-in-one floor lamp, and an inflatable chair. No one else is doing mass market, maximalist ambition quite like this.

Bottega Veneta gets into the arts with a series fittingly called “Bottega Veneta for the Arts.” Creative director Louise Trotter’s first project is with longtime photographer Peter Fraser. Just about every fashion brand has an art program now, but this one’s a perfect fit.

Y’s Yohji Yamamoto designed new Aesop uniforms for the brand’s unveiling of their first-ever lamp at Milan Design Week. Timeless, oversized black workwear jackets, designed by a true master and built to be worn while explaining hand soap.

David Zaslav is leaving Warner Bros. with a $500 million exit package as part of the Paramount merger. He oversaw $4 billion at the box office in 2025 alone while shelving movies for tax write-offs, gutting TCM, and overseeing thousands of layoffs. Whether he saved the studio or strip-mined it depends on who you ask. Either way, he got paid.

Aesthetic Study · Naked Dressing

Naked dressing is exactly what it sounds like — sheer, transparent, or barely-there clothing that makes the wearer look like she forgot the rest of the outfit. It has a longer history than you’d think. Bob Mackie built a notable dress for Cher in 1974 — a beaded sheer gown she wore to the Met Gala, then wore on the cover of Time. JLo’s green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys literally led to the invention of Google Image Search. By 2026 awards season, Jennifer Lawrence was in sheer Givenchy embroidered with flowers, Jenna Ortega showed everything sideways in Dilara Findikoglu cutouts, and Nicole Kidman wore Schiaparelli like a dare. Even Cannes tried to push back, begging celebrities to wear more clothes. They did not.

Everyone’s going naked, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. In the age of GLP-1s and cosmetic enhancement, is the body the ultimate status symbol? Or is it simply the return of shock value? Are designers making content-friendly clothes that photograph themselves? Or is it a way for women to own perception of their bodies before anyone else? Most likely it’s a bit of everything — there’s endless meaning to be found in the naked form. And that’s probably why we can’t stop putting this trend on (or taking it off).

• Trace the history of the naked dress

• How naked dressing is redefining itself in 2026

• How to wear a naked dress

• Miu Miu pushes back with a naked dressing vibe shift

  ---

Sarah Harrelson founded Cultured magazine in 2012 on a then-rare premise that now feels obvious: art, architecture, design, and fashion are parts of the same conversation. She’d already had that conversation for years — first launching the Miami Herald’s “Home and Design” section, then editing Ocean Drive and Art Basel Magazine while covering Basel’s inaugural Miami Beach edition from the ground. Cultured has since evolved into a compass for everything next. Its latest proof is the third annual CULT100 issue. Set to be celebrated at the Guggenheim this week, the issue boasts 400 pages, 13 covers, and 100 interviews across art, politics, food, and tech. Here, she talks Moleskine journals, walking as therapy, and the women who think independently.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

I loathe when people say, “It will all work out.” It’s not really a recommendation, but it is one of the least helpful things one can say when asking.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Train Dreams

What book have you gifted most?

The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of my Heroes by Mia Kankimäki. It’s about creative, independent, and fearless women who refused to take the expected path.

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life?

Moleskine journals. I use them every day for my to-do lists and journaling.

What’s the last article you sent to a friend?

I send a lot of articles around, arguably too many. The last one was this review of Helen Garner’s newly released collection of short fiction.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Nothing changes… until you do.

Find Sarah on Instagram and Cosmos.

Object Love · Meeting Table

A Paris studio called UNVEIL made a meeting table for their own office out of 12mm solid aluminum. The top is brushed flat, the kind of surface that reflects nothing. Underneath, hidden in the gap between the two panels, is a bas-relief fresco — classical faces half-submerged, bodies dissolving into cloud and wave, horses emerging from the chaos like something off a Greek frieze. Cast in the same metal as the table above it, you’d miss it entirely if you weren’t looking.

The fresco was generated by AI and physically forged, which is either the most interesting thing about it or the most troubling. UNVEIL calls objects like this “image-objects” — things that don’t fully exist until they have weight. This one unfolds in four parts across the table’s length, and lives in a meeting room in the 9th arrondissement.

Quick Hits

• Nike cuts 1,400 jobs.

• Jacob Elordi is the new face of Bleu de Chanel.

• Madonna is releasing a Grindr-exclusive vinyl record.

• A luminous Tiffany window is set for a $2 million sale.

• McDonald’s made a giant Damien Hirst-inspired ball pit.

  ---

See you on the dancefloor,

Tania 💃🏼

Live Nation and Ticketmaster are officially a monopoly after a jury found them liable for breaking antitrust laws. The jury found fans were overcharged on every single ticket with dubious moves like “convenience fees.” For a generation priced out of live music, the ruling is a sigh of relief.

Allbirds fully pivots to AI, ditching its wool sneaker business to rent out GPUs and cloud compute for AI companies instead. The move might seem random, but it’s already paid off with a 600% stock surge. The shoes really were that bad.

Issey Miyake turned waste paper into furniture at Milan Design Week, pressing and marbling discarded sheets into rigid, stone-like surfaces. The studio’s decades-long commitment to sustainable materials is now committed to the page itself.

FKA twigs and Dev Hynes head to the Vatican for a major installation at the 2026 Venice Biennale. They’ll join Brian Eno, Patti Smith, and many others at the event, which kicks off next month. We always knew experimental music was a blessing. The Pope just made it official.

Kodak just released new 65mm film stock. VERITA 200D was developed for Euphoria Season 3. The stock delivers high saturation, deep blacks, and a shorter dynamic range designed to recall golden-age color film. Euphoria is also the first TV production to shoot significant volumes of 65mm — a format typically used for the likes of Oppenheimer, not suburban California.

Aesthetic Study · Illusion bags

The bag-as-object gag has proven surprisingly resilient. We stopped asking “is it cake?” long ago, but luxury fashion keeps circling back to purses that look like other things. Moschino just dropped a leather apple bag, a celery purse, a watermelon clutch, and a bleach bottle. JW Anderson has the pigeon clutch and a Victoria sponge slice. Balenciaga turned a Lays chip bag and a coffee cup into four-figure leather goods. Rihanna carried a Fendi crossbody shaped like an actual loaf of bread to dinner at Carbone. Dauphinette made croissant bags out of real surplus bakery bread, coated in antifungal resin.

The trend reigns because it’s more than just a gimmick. In a market dominated by quiet luxury and indistinguishable leathers, a pigeon clutch is instantly recognizable. In a culture where everything is content, an apple bag photographs itself. And in a moment when everything feels a bit too serious, carrying a broccoli purse is the most disarming thing you can do. The object bag dominates because it makes you look twice at an everyday object. Which is, when you think about it, what fashion is supposed to do.

• Highsnobiety’s full history of designer novelty bags

• A psychologist explains the appeal of novelty bags

• Fun bag godmother Judith Leiber’s full crystal minaudière archive

• The handbags that might trend next

  ---

Zoë Yasemin is a Amsterdam-based art director whose Substack, ART DIRECTION, is one of the internet’s most dependable independent resources on image-making and visual culture. Her freelance work spans campaigns for Adidas, Jimmy Choo, Tommy Hilfiger, and Estrid, and her Strategic Art Direction course typically sells out within weeks of opening. This year she’s making space for personal work — exploring her own visual language after years of adapting to client briefs.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

I usually step away from the screen. I have a large collection of vintage magazines and books, so sometimes I’ll open one at random and see what catches my eye. Looking at images from another time often resets my perspective and reminds me how many different ways there are to approach an idea. I also like going on very long walks with my two dogs and paying attention to the things they notice.

What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?

Someone once told me that if you can do something better yourself, you should just do it yourself. I never agreed with that. The most beautiful part of the creative process is sharing perspectives with others. Creativity grows much more when it moves between people.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola. I had just spent a month in Japan and realized I hadn’t seen it in years, so I watched it again. Experiencing the film after spending time in Tokyo gave it a completely different feeling.

What book have you gifted most?

Zen: The Art of Simple Living by Shunmyo Masuno. It’s a very simple book you can read in one sitting, yet every time I revisit it it takes a bit of stress away.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

Follow your curiosity. It already knows where you belong.

Find Zoë on Cosmos and Instagram.

Object Love · Descent into Limbo

Anish Kapoor cut a hole in the floor and coated it in a pigment so it looks like a shape on the ground, not a gaping void. Descent into Limbo has lived at the Serralves Foundation in Porto since 2018, and Kapoor has never filled it. It’s like Wile E. Coyote’s painted tunnel, but real, and in a museum where several visitors might fall in (and at least one has).

It’s a strange thing to call an object, yet here we are. The hole doesn’t reflect light, hold weight, or occupy space — it just takes. And nothing anchors a collection quite like an absence. Save it to Cosmos and see what else looks right in its orbit.

Quick Hits

• Apple names John Ternus as new CEO.

• IKEA officially released a Swedish meatball lollipop.

• Adidas made a full clothing line for pets.

• Cassette players are getting a luxury reboot.

• The Getty Center is closing for a year-long renovation.

  ---

Into the void,

Tania

The NYT unmasks Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. John Carreyrou used AI-assisted stylometric analysis to narrow 34,000 suspects to one: Adam Back, the cryptographer who invented the proof-of-work system Bitcoin runs on. Back denies it, but if it’s true, he’s been sitting on $170 billion for fifteen years and pretending otherwise.

Harry Styles has impeccable music taste. His curated Meltdown fest lineup is a who’s who of heady artists from the past four decades of fringe music: electronic pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland, jazz legend Mulatu Astatke, ambient great Jon Hopkins sit alongside Dev Hynes and James Murphy. It’s a lineup that’s less pop star, more crate-digger.

LACMA just opened a $724 million extension. The David Geffen Galleries stretch 900 feet across Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, the art is organized not by era but by bodies of water: Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific. After a decade of delays, the building makes a strong case it was worth the wait.

Pedro Pascal is Chanel’s latest ambassador. Their partnership soft-launched at the Oscars, but Monday’s Instagram post made it official. It’s a match made in heaven: Pascal is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors, and under creative director Matthieu Blazy, Chanel is the house that deserves him.

Sotheby’s is selling 300+ vintage Cartier watches at a historic auction. The collection took 25 years to assemble and expects to haul in $15 million. Meanwhile, the modern-day luxury watch market is entering a projected 10-year slump. It’s true of everything, but watches especially — the best things stand the test of time.

Kelly Akashi rebuilt her fire-destroyed chimney in glass for the Whitney Biennial. When the LA-based artist lost her Altadena home in the Eaton Fire in January 2025, the chimney was the only thing left standing. She reconstructed it in luminous cast glass, and reminded us that there’s untold power in rebuilding.

Aesthetic Study · The Blue Zones

The Blue Zones — those five global regions where people routinely live past 100 — went mainstream thanks to a Netflix docuseries. Since then, the longevity data has been picked apart, but nobody talks about what these places actually look like — and why that visual language keeps showing up in design. Stone walls weathered past any single owner. Outdoor tables set for twelve. Sun-cracked skin, terra-cotta, linen on a line.

It feels luxurious, but it’s not luxury. In Ikaria, Sardinia, Okinawa, nothing was designed to be beautiful — it just is, because it was built to last by people who weren’t optimizing for anything. They were just living slowly enough that their beauty became a byproduct. The whitewashed stone, the handmade ceramics, the wood worn smooth by decades of use — none of it was ever meant to be aspirational. Sure, Loewe, Flamingo Estate, Loro Piana on a yacht, a Jacquemus campaign, a Soho House pool deck — they may borrow the aesthetic, but they can never replace the century of patience that made it.

• Ikaria and the art of longevity

• The fight over centenarians and Blue Zones

• Are Blue Zones a mirage?

• The 2012 piece that put Blue Zones on the map

  ---

Oscar Boyson’s filmography doubles as a play list for the best contemporary indie cinema. He collaborated with Noah Baumbach on Frances Ha and Mistress America, and, as co-founder of Elara, produced the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems. His directorial debut, Our Hero, Balthazar — a satirical comedy-drama about gun control — premiered at Tribeca last year and hit theaters in March. Here he talks Lou Reed, sleep masks, and an article about how wars are run like casinos.

What do you do when you hit a creative block?

Come up with a new question to ask.

What’s the last film you watched that moved you deeply?

Straw Dogs (1971)

What book have you gifted most?

Ella Quittner’s Obsessed with the Best.

What’s something you bought under $100 that changed your life?

My Manta sleep mask.

Where do you go to find peace?

Maine.

Who is your forever inspo?

Lou Reed.

What’s the last article you sent to a friend?

“Maybe Turning War into a Casino Was a Bad Idea?” by Charlie Warzel.

What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?

Running, an investment in my wellbeing.

Follow Oscar on Instagram.

Object Love · Pearl Headphones

Over-ear headphones with enormous, pillowy ear cups wrapped in iridescent fabric — like wearing two giant pearls on either side of your head. These are circulating through mood boards and IG dumps (and Cosmos collections), but no one knows what they are. Whenever they emerge, someone’s asking where to buy them, and no one answers because no one knows. We built Cosmos on provenance, on tracing every object to its source, but even we can’t find them. That might be why we can’t stop looking at them.

The closest dupe came was Nova Products, a Munich startup that Kickstarted pearl earrings with wireless speakers hidden inside the stones. They raised €103,703, debuted at CES 2023, went insolvent before most backers got a pair. Then there’s the clam phone in It Follows — a pink shell-shaped e-reader that we’d all own if it existed. But some objects are only perfect because we can never have them. The wanting is the whole point.

Quick Hits

• Gen Z is now the biggest moviegoing demographic.

• Drake teases Iceman album with frozen court-side seats.

• This screenless phone for kids is a literal Tin Can.

• Pamela Anderson makes rattan furniture now.

• Watch your brain rinse itself while you sleep.

  ---

Applying SPF,

Tania ☀️

This post was originally sent out to Cosmos members on 04/14/26.