Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i New York Magazine

IT’S A LITTLE PAST MIDNIGHT at HSN headquarters, and Serena Williams is nine minutes into a disquisition on a piece of fabric she's called "Convertible A-line Top With Scarf," available to you, the home shopper, for $39.95 or three "flexpays" of $13.32. "It's like one huge circle that has a lot of style in it," she says, not without conviction, fiddling with the bottom of the one she is wearing ("This is, um, mustard"), flapping it like a fan, rubbing one hand on her arm, and smoothing her hair. She forgets the names of colors, misstates a price. There with the right number and the right name is HSN savant Bobbi Ray Carter, sheathed in a hot-pink Convertible A-line Top With Scarf and raccooned in black eyeliner, filling in her…

1. THE SKETCH "I found an old fake-leather bag in the archives that had actually, technically, rotted. I traced the lines where it had cracked off the leather, and this very abstract shape came out. I said to my assistant, ‘I think this is the bag!' " 2. THE LEATHER The origami-like shape of the bag lends itself to color-mixing. "One of the things I've noticed in Spain is that women really go for it color-wise, and I love that." 3. THE FACTORY "Once I'd figured out the shape, I rang up the factory in Madrid and said, ‘So … we're going to need to work on functionality.' " Loewe had not produced a new bag shape since the 1980s. 4. THE PATTERN "We've moved the ready-to-wear team to Paris,…

RACHEL FEINSTEIN LOVES FAIRY TALES. Her thesis at Columbia was on Bruno Bettelheim and a sinister early version of "Sleeping Beauty." Years later, motherhood inspired the artist to hunt for her favorite editions of "Thumbelina" to read to her kids. On eBay she dug up the trippy, Technicolor Shiba Productions versions of the stories. Her children weren't interested, but she was inspired by the hyperreal color plates. For the project, we paired her with author Michael Cunningham, whose latest book, a collection of rewritten fairy tales called Wild Swan and Other Stories, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this fall. Together they imagined the "seven ages of woman," a story based on a 16th-century painting by Hans Baldung, as a dark and beautiful exploration of femininity and motherhood.…

WHEN AN ACTOR has a breakout performance, as Oscar Isaac did in 2013's Inside Llewyn Davis, you suddenly expect to see him everywhere. Isaac's great accomplishment, however, has been that we never see him doing the same thing twice. He ended 2014 with A Most Violent Year, in which he played a struggling heating-oil entrepreneur in '80s New York—about as far from Llewyn Davis, the '60s folksinger, as you can imagine. His jam-packed 2015 has included a scene-stealing role as a tech billionaire in Ex Machina and, now, Show Me a Hero, a six-hour HBO miniseries from The Wire's David Simon, which premieres August 16 and in which Isaac plays Nick Wasicsko, the onetime real-life mayor of Yonkers, embroiled in a fight over segregated housing. And, oh, by the way,…

ART Stamina : Film Premiere and 24-Hour Party Thursday, August 20–Friday, August 21 Become a Guggenheim member and receive free admission to artist Agathe Snow’s party featuring live music and a dance floor in the museum’s iconic rotunda. See the premiere of Snow’s 24-hour film Stamina (2015), which documents a 2005 party she hosted to celebrate the resilience of underground downtown culture in post-9/11 New York. guggenheim.org/stamina FILM Here She Is, Mistress America From the team behind indie hit Frances Ha comes a smart screwball comedy about female friendship and getting what you want (or trying to) in New York City. Mistress America is directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Greta Gerwig & Baumbach. The film stars Lola Kirke as a disenchanted college student and Greta Gerwig as the…

TWITTER IS A MESS—everybody says so. Twitter is mostly nonsense. You can't find what you need on Twitter. Twitter is all haystack and no needles, all static and no signal. By the lights of many investors, Twitter is floundering. Its longtime CEO (five years is long in internet time), Dick Costolo, jumped or was pushed in June; the board is scrambling to find a replacement; and Wall Street is sounding the alarm. The company's revenue barely doubled last year, rising to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Its stock has hit an all-time low. Advice is flowing in torrents: "How Twitter Can Be Fixed"; "Reimagining Twitter." A Washington Post column explains "How to Fix Twitter, As Told via Tweets." Twitter must pivot, must be transformed, must…

“I GAVE BIRTH TO TWO PREMATURE KIDS,” said California's Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor last week, during the debate over cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Boxer sounded impatient, irritated. "I just don't like lectures by men about what it's like." Her comment came in response to the furious fight that has erupted over the undercover videos, made by an anti-abortion outfit calling itself the Center for Medical Progress, purporting to show that Planned Parenthood is profiting illegally from the sale of aborted fetal tissue to medical-research companies. So far, the heavily edited videos have offered no clear evidence of wrongdoing but have shown Planned Parenthood doctors and administrators in frank conversations about specific protocols and ethical concerns involved in the donation of fetal tissue, for which consent is…

LUCKY BLUE, WHO IS NOT A RACEHORSE, AS HIS NAME MIGHT SUGGEST, BUT RATHER A SIX-FOOTTHREE, 17-YEAR-OLD MODEL, IS LEARNING how to dance. Basic moves. The grapevine. A decent step-touch. "Just remember when you're step-touching to lead with this." Here, Danny, the male dance instructor leading this private lesson at a small Los Angeles studio, pats the side of Lucky's butt. This makes Lucky blush. He buries his hands in the pockets of his skintight black jeans. Today's lesson is worst-case-scenario prep for Lucky Blue's upcoming appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show the following week, in case DeGeneres requests a short boogie from her guest, as she often does. Lucky can't seem to find the rhythm. His step-touch has a jitteriness that makes it look like he's tiptoeing around dog…

GRANNY GLAMOUR 1 THE MAGPIES Layered thick. 2 BIG FUR COLLARS Full up top, nipped at the waist. “This is a quintessentially British-eccentric look. I am from London, so this is something I really connect with. I’d rather feel odd than sexy any day.” TALI LENNOX 22, Painter POWER DRESSING 3 PANT - SUITS It's election 4 TWEEDS Perfect for an inauguration. “Women in suits are intimidating for some people. I don’t know if it’s because they’re traditionally a masculine thing, or if it’s because they’re not ‘sexy.’ I would take Claire Underwood’s wardrobe in a second.” JOSIE DUFFY 28, Racial-Justice Lawyer and Writer THE CIRTUOUS VICTOR!AN 5 L ACY AND (MOSTLY) MODEST Ever-so-slightly repressed. 6 VELVET DRESSES The Victorian go-to. “There…

COMMUNAL, MESSY, AND SEASONAL: The seafood boil is a regional nautical tradition that's taken up residence here, with restaurants looking to drum up summer-doldrums business and those stuck in town trying to pretend otherwise—by donning bibs and gloves and smashing spiced crabs over newspapers. Here, a look at some of the city's various boils, from large-format prix fixe feasts to scaled-down à la carte options. But hurry up: Many have a Labor Day expiration date. MISS LILY’S 7A’S JERK CRAB BOIL 109 Ave. A, at 7th St.; 212-812-1482. Mondays through Labor Day (make a reservation); $38 per person. The fixed-price menu buys you a couple of ears of corn (fresh and juicy, the best on this list—others tasted frozen); boiled potatoes; charred-pineapple slaw; and festivals, funnel-cake-like cornmeal fritters useful for…

BURNING MAN MAY be perched on the precipice of turning into a Club Med for start-up dudes, but attendees still expect the festival to live up to its synapse-scrambling legacy. Beginning in 1998, photographer NK Guy, whose work is collected in the new book Art of Burning Man (Taschen), has braved the Black Rock desert to document the trippy and massive art installations, which are often wryer than the (literally) fiery images so associated with the rumpus. (This year's edition kicks off August 30.) "Many of the artists there don't come from the mainstream," explains Guy. "It's not stuff you'd see in a traditional gallery." Or anywhere else.…

IN THE DELICIOUSLY tangy-and-bitter comedy Ricki and the Flash, Meryl Streep tears up the screen as Ricki Rendazzo, a singer in a covers band (the Flash) working out of a bar in Tarzana, California. Under black vinyl, chains, and a sheet of blonde hair braided at the side, she burns through songs by Tom Petty, U2, and Bruce Springsteen in a voice that's not world class but powerful—she has great chest tones. She's what you'd call an ornery old gal. She voted twice for George W. Bush, hates Obama, and thinks gays choose their predilections. The regulars adore her, although she doesn't make enough to quit her day job as a cashier at an obvious stand-in for Whole Foods, catering to crunchy types with more money than she'll ever have.…

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NEW YORK CITY Football Club, the $100 million baby born from the union of Manchester City and the Yankees, hopes to bring its fans joy with its newly imported triumvirate: the superstars David Villa (from Spain), Andrea Pirlo (Italy), and Frank Lampard (England). So far, Villa has contributed more than a dozen of his apparently effortless goals, in which the ball seems to pick up speed after it rockets off his instep. Pirlo, at 36, can still see into the future, dropping a pass exactly where his teammate will be when it lands. Lampard has yet to show off his high-octane midfield game: A calf injury delayed his debut until August 1, when he trotted out in the 69th minute to try in vain to rescue his new team from…

THE THING PEOPLE ALWAYS TALK ABOUT FIRST, WHEN THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT NET-A-PORTER, IS THE PACKAGING. FOR A COMPANY KNOWN FOR BEING ON THE LEADING EDGE OF ONLINE FASHION, IT IS SURPRISINGLY anachronistic: The black, beribboned bags that arrive, brimming with tissue paper and the promise of a life-changing ensemble, could just as easily have been delivered by uniformed footman to Eloise's Plaza as summoned via the internet into the one inhabited by Russian oligarchs. "It's like getting a present," the company's president, Natalie Massenet, likes to say, which sounds whimsical but isn't. Elaborate packaging is integral to the Net-a-Porter brand. It was central to Massenet's vision when she started the company in her apartment in 1999, on the premise that good old-fashioned luxury and the utilitarian promise of the…

ACT I SHADOWS ARRIVE and vanish.Whenever the shadows return, they have reimagined themselves. ACT II THE INFANT'S 12-year-old sister has had just enough time to sell the baby before their mother returns. As the girl se their mother approac ing from across the par she is already strick with remorse—she u derstood, even as t money changed han that she could have ask for more, much more. ACT III WHEN THE woman bought the baby, she meant to take it to the police. What sort of mother leaves a 12-year-old alone, even briefly, in a park with an infant? As the woman walks out of the park, the baby coos and murmurs in her arms.The woman has no children of her own. The men were wrong, or the time was…

At Lupulo, the ambitious Portuguese-inspired cooking is almost too good for the casual beer-bar setting. Lupulo 835 Sixth Ave., at 29th St. 212-290-7600 lupulonyc.com MUCH HAS HAPPENED in the dining world since George Mendes opened his discreet, Michelin-starred restaurant, Aldea, in the big city six long years ago, and you can tell that his newest venture, Lupulo, has been designed, for better or worse, to keep up with these rapidly changing times. There are no linens on the little café-size tables (they're covered in white ceramic tiles) at the new restaurant, which opened several months ago adjacent to the Eventi Hotel, just below Herald Square. The name Lupulo means "hop" in Portuguese, and the corner space is dominated by a long, three-sided bar. In accordance with the standard doctrine of…

THE HULU SERIES Difficult People could've been called People With Impulse Control Problems, or maybe just Assholes. That's a compliment, incredibly. A lot of post-Seinfeld sitcoms tried to borrow that classic show's id-blast humor, but except for HBO's currently dormant Curb Your Enthusiasm and the amazing Veep—which is overseen by Armando Iannucci, the master of invective—not too many are willing to really, truly commit to creating unpleasant characters whom you ultimately like because they're funny and make an art of going too far. I went into Difficult People with arms folded, mainly because its central characters— Billy on the Street star Billy Eichner and comic, onetime Vulture contributor, and show creator Julie Klausner—are playing versions of themselves, and I'm not convinced TV needs another show where comedians play versions of…

POP 1.Go to The Billboard Hot 100 Fest Pop-stravaganza. Jones Beach, August 23 and 24. With performances from the Weeknd, Fetty Wap, and Jason Derulo, this year's Fest should be like a real-time song-of-the-summer duke-out. Bonus: Skrillex and Justin Bieber are on the bill, making a performance of their surprisingly great "Where Are Ü Now" all but inevitable. LINDSAY ZOLADZ MOVIES 2. See The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Hit-’em-up style. In theaters August 14. His awful Sherlock Holmes–does–kung fu movies notwithstanding, Guy Ritchie is capable of good, syncopated action filmmaking, and there's potential in this big-budget remake of TV's Bond ripoff. Two dullish studs (Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer) are Napoleon Solo and his KGB counterpart, Illya Kuryakin, but the great Alicia Vikander can make things interesting. DAVID EDELSTEIN THEATER 3.…