The T List: Five Things We Recommend This Week
Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at [email protected].
step by step
Ulla Johnson’s Beauty Regimen
What I’ve learned through working in fashion is that keeping skin healthy is the most important part of any beauty routine. In the morning, I use Joelle Ciocco’s Sensitive Cleansing Milk face wash, followed by Dr. Barbara Sturm’s Glow and Sun Drops. For moisturizer, I like Augustinus Bader’s The Cream or The Rich Cream, depending on the season. I also just started using Crème de la Mer — I like its cold, creamy texture. And I love Retrouvé, they have a great Revitalizing Eye Concentrate. I’m totally obsessed with sheet masks, too; I use SK-II’s Facial Treatment Masks and Joanna Vargas’s Twilight Face Masks. My good friend Romy Soleimani, who’s a makeup artist, gave me the life-changing tip of putting them in the fridge. I’m also a firm believer in face sprays. If I’m in fittings or back-to-back meetings, I use Jurlique’s Rosewater Balancing Mist throughout the day; it’s a wonderful refresher. I don’t really wear a lot of makeup, but sometimes I use a bit of the Bobbi Brown Cosmetics x Ulla Johnson Highlighting Powder in Pink Glow, along with the Extra Lip Tint, which is incredibly moisturizing and has a touch of color — it’s like that one little thing you need before dinner. All of the work we’ve done with Bobbi Brown, which will be available on Nordstrom.com starting August 16th, is focused on getting glowy skin with a light touch. And I’ve finally adopted the eyelash curler — Shu Eumura has an amazing one. When I was a kid, every summer I used to travel to Croatia, where there are lavender fields, and all the markets sell lavender oil, which I still use every night before bed. It’s very calming. I’m a religious perfume wearer, too, but I don’t like scents that are overtly feminine or floral. I prefer something a bit more earthy. My go-to is Ink by Perfumer H, a small perfumery based in London. For my hair, I see Lena Ott at Suite Caroline, and she got me hooked on Reverie’s Milk Anti-Frizz Leave-in Nourishing Treatment. It moisturizes your hair and tames the ends but isn’t heavy. I love that tousled beach look year-round. As far as spa treatments go, the first thing I recommend to anyone coming to New York is the Healing Birch massage at the Shibui Spa in the Greenwich Hotel; it’s like a little slice of Japan in the city.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
When his beloved ceramics class was abruptly canceled last year, Shane Gabier — one half of the sustainability-minded fashion label Creatures of the Wind, along with his partner, Christopher Peters — knew it would be up to him to feed his passion. Leaning on his fashion background and pattern-making skills, Gabier began sketching shapes on paper and cutting out slabs of clay to transform two-dimensional ideas into physical objects: vases, sculptures and plates glazed in earthy tones. Inspired by Brutalist architecture, post-Memphis design and conceptual sculpture from the 1960s and ’70s, Gabier’s pieces are geometric and tactile; some vessels are made of interlocking pieces that can be subtly rearranged, while hand-shaped plates and bowls look nearly stonelike with their natural finish and uniquely tapered edges. Each piece is made from a heavy sculpture clay that “feels really natural and easy” to Gabier, who believes the sturdiness of the substance allows him to build taller without sacrificing the flat clothlike planes that distinguish his work. Gabier is selling his wares through the Portland-based design store Spartan Shop — and is also at work on a lighting collaboration with the furniture company Roman Thomas — but perhaps the best way to peruse them is simply to scroll through his
Instagram, an endless feed of dripping colors and chunky shapes. From $375, spartan-shop.com.
drink This
Taking Wine Pairings to the Next Level
Daniela Vargas Dieppa, Ramya Giangola, Sofia Ajodan and Jessica Flesh don’t just work in fashion; they eat, sleep and breathe it. And after a trip to Baja California’s Valle de Guadalupe winemaking region, they were determined to drink it, too. Thus El Vino was born, a sort of wine-of-the-month club in which painstakingly sourced bottles are beautifully packaged with specially designed labels and paired with objets created by artists and designers. “It’s as much about what’s on the outside of the bottle as it is about the inside,” says Giangola. “For us, aesthetics drive so much of who we are.” Their first release, a Baja rosé made by fourth-generation vintner Lulu Martinez Ojeda, is both crisp and sweet, with floral and fruity notes, and comes adorned with a label painted by Marrakech-based artist LRNCE, who also created a line of ceramics that echo the label’s whimsically biomorphic artwork. This week, El Vino debuts its next wine, which is also meant to go with the LRNCE collection — a summery white that begins with pineapple and ends with a bracing minerality. From $28, elvino.shop.
see This
Alternate History in Berlin
“Redemption Now,” an ambitious solo exhibition of the Israeli-born, Berlin-and-Amsterdam-based feminist artist Yael Bartana, opened earlier this summer in the Daniel Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum in Berlin. For more than two decades, Bartana has been playing with historical narratives and examining ideas of collective identity using photography, installation and video. The centerpiece of the current show, “Malka Germania” (Hebrew for “Queen Germania”), is a 43-minute-long video and sound installation commissioned by the museum. Projected onto three large screens, it presents an alternate vision of Germania — the name Hitler was to rechristen Berlin should he have won the war, planning to raze and remake the city in an image of hypertrophied neo-Classicism complete with a gigantic capitol dome. In Bartana’s reimagining, an androgynous female messiah figure marches with a donkey through a modern-day version of Berlin with street signs in Hebrew. In the climactic scene, the dome explodes out of Wannsee lake (site of the infamous conference at which the details of the Final Solution were hashed out), suggesting a resurgent nationalism and anti-Semitism hiding just beneath the surface. “Redemption Now” is on view at the Jewish Museum Berlin through Nov. 21, jmberlin.de/en.
Triadic, an international creative agency founded by curator Roya Sachs, creative director Mafalda Millies and producer Elizabeth Edelman, specialized in staging collaborative performance art pieces. Then came the pandemic. To continue to foster what Sachs describes as creative “cross-pollination” and “playful interaction,” the trio launched a digital initiative in which artists were invited to submit a still-life image and text that reflected their experiences during lockdown. “We wanted a format that was simple enough for holistic storytelling but broad enough to give people artistic freedom,” says Sachs. The resulting book, “Still Here: Moments in Isolation,” which will be published by the German imprint Distanz on Sept. 21, compiles 127 of these works from contributors such as fine artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Elizabeth Peyton as well as author Chris Kraus and neuroscientist Mendel Kaelen, among others. The artworks range from annotated images of the opera singer Davóne Tines’s workplace to a photograph of snippings from sex anthropologist Betony Vernon’s DIY quarantine haircuts. $55, preorder at distanz.de; 100 percent of Triadic’s share of the profits will go to the New York arts nonprofit Performa.
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