Innholdsfortegnelse for August 31 - September 13, 2020 i New York Magazine

1 For New York’s latest cover story, Olivia Nuzzi went inside President Trump’s chaotic 2020 campaign (“The Most Tremendous Reelection Campaign in American History Ever,” August 17–30). On The Chuck ToddCast podcast, NBC’s Chuck Todd said the story was “one of those pieces like, Wait, I can’t believe that anecdote. I can’t believe that anecdote! The Pennsylvania field stuff is astonishing. Bill Stepien and this weird Chris Christie–Jared Kushner drama. There’s just so much of it.” Writer and editor Adam Banks tweeted, “This @Olivianuzzi portrait of the Trump campaign is dense and light, clever and plain, a meticulous insider brain dump—the kind of gonzo analytical reporting that shows you how things really are as best someone can.” Author-activist Amy Siskind said, “Yikes! If you thought Trump had an ace up…

THE BATTLE OF 1214 DEAN STREET commenced on a warm afternoon in early July. Angie Martinez, a 24-year-old Brooklyn native and barista, returned home to the Crown Heights rowhouse she shared with eight roommates to find her landlords, Gennaro Brooks-Church and his ex-partner, Loretta Gendville, crowding the front door with their three children, two dogs, two handymen, and a mattress. Martinez had been paying them $865 a month via Venmo for a room with one window, no heat, and no working fire alarm. The run-down four-story structure, classified as a single-family home by the City of New York, had been illegally converted and rented out by the room. In March, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, several tenants, including Martinez, had lost their jobs, and in April, many in…

“How can I do my job if I cannot touch someone?”NADÈGE VANHEE-CYBULSKI Artistic director: Women’s ready-to-wear, Hermès Joined: 2014 Publicly traded since: 1993 Consolidated revenue: Est. $7.5B in 2019 Previously: Women’s design director, The Row (2011–14) Confinement can be very difficult for a human being,” Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski asserted when we spoke in June. She was still in the Paris apartment where she’d spent months with her husband and baby. It is a comfortable apartment in shabby Pigalle, but life inside and out took on a considerably smaller dimension when people were forced to stay at home. “We were only allowed to go out for an hour, and anytime you went out you had to bring a form. So there was something quite obstructive about it. Our freedom was gone.” By…

“I’m not really sure of what is real and what isn’t real. It depends on your perspective.”ALESSANDRO MICHELE Creative director: Gucci, since 2015 Joined: 2002 Owned by: Kering Revenue: Est. $10.5B in 2019 In August, I spoke for a second time to Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s phenomenally successful creative director, who was staying at his Umbrian estate about two hours from Rome. Ever since our first conversation over WhatsApp in June, something had gnawed at me. Michele’s approach has been called curatorial, maximal, even excessive. But that’s not the feeling I got during our first meeting. It was innocence. He was so gentle, even dreamy. Although I knew his work well enough, one thing our conversation made abundantly clear was just how much Michele has the support of his CEO, Marco…

Founder and designer: Stella McCartney Founded: 2001 Bought back from: Kering (2018) Brand sales: Est. $320M in 2017 I’m literally in any fucking room where I can get Wi-Fi. It’s the comedy of life here,” Stella McCartney told me in June. She spent the lockdown with her husband and their four children at their country home in Wiltshire. “It’s very scary for everyone. Business is affected dramatically.” In early February, the Boston-based management consultancy Bain & Co. identified sustainability and social responsibility as ideas strengthened by the pandemic and advised luxury brands to take action. This is not news to McCartney. She is the leader in sustainable and traceable fashion, a path she took when she founded her company in London in 2001 and that she has imaginatively widened in…

Previously: Givenchy’s first female artistic director (2017–20) Former creative director: Chloé (2011–17), Pringle of Scotland (2005–11) The English designer Clare Waight Keller is interested in rethinking what, and whom, she’s designing for. “There is a woman who is being left behind. She’s late 30s and up. She doesn’t feel particularly good about walking around in a hoodie or a sweatshirt all the time. As a woman, you sort of evolve your style and you have over the years a collection of pieces. You’re always looking for that one thing—a new coat, a new jacket. You might wear it and then put it away for five years and come back to it and wear it in a different way. Those are the things that are forever and are still relevant. I…

TIP 1 Apply an anti-fog treatment to the lens, says optician James Dawson. These can come in the form of sprays or wipes; they work by preventing condensation from forming on surfaces. TIP 2 Dawson also recommends picking a mask with two horizontal straps—“Try tying the top strap tighter and higher than the ears,” he says. “This will allow your spectacles to sit correctly.” TIP 3 And Deidre Downey, who has worked as a nurse for the past 20 years, says that a good trick is to use tape. “We put medical tape across the top of our mask, along our cheeks and the bridge of the nose, both to keep them on and to help prevent air from heading toward your glasses, which is cooler and will therefore fog…

CHAIN Beaded Eyeglass Chain, $15 at amazon.com Strategist contributor Alison Freer told us that this affordable beaded mask chain was “the single best purchase” she’s made in months. LANYARD Adjustable Face Mask Lanyard, $9 at amazon.com Lanyards adjust to provide a snugger fit around the head. Dentist Rashmi Ambewadikar recommends this one for its adjustable toggle. EAR SAVERS EVGlow Strap, $7 at amazon.com Often composed of silicone, ear savers are strips made with hooks you place at the back of your head and loop your mask’s straps onto. The idea is to eliminate the discomfort of putting the straps behind your ears. MASK-STRAP TOGGLES Abodhu Silicone Toggles, $7 for 50 at amazon.com For anyone whose mask straps have lost elasticity, or whose…

Who is your biggest competitor? I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good basketball player. Those guys are like 26. They should be destroying me. But I’m going to keep it honest with you: I’m pretty much my own competitor. I like your chain. It has a picture of my mother, Robin Holden, in it. She passed away. She was my best friend. How often do you play here? At least three times a week for the past 30 years. Growing up, I lived in the Lower East Side, just a ten-minute walk over. I loved it. I still love it. People come from all over the city to watch, to play. One time, Nate Robinson dunked on a friend of mine. It’s a good…

Detroit 2 . G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam Recordings (9/4) DETROIT RAPPER Big Sean signed to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint in 2007 after impressing his future label boss with an impromptu freestyle in a chance meeting at a local radio station two years earlier. In the 2010s, Sean hit the ground running with a string of increasingly sharp studio albums and guest spots, matching wits with heavyweights like Drake, Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z, and Ariana Grande and shining on solo singles like “Guap” and “Bounce Back”; deep cuts like “Bigger Than Me” and “One Man Can Change the World” balanced the upbeat mood of the singles with heartfelt emotion. Sean has slowed down a bit since doubling up in 2017 with the release of his fourth album, I Decided, and a collaboration…

EVERY WEDNESDAY, Miranda July goes to her old home, a modest two-bedroom in Echo Park she has kept for over 15 years, and stays the night. Initially, she felt more anxious about the arrangement than did her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills, and their 8-year-old, Hopper. Are mothers allowed to do this? But she needed a room of her own. Psychic space just a seven-minute drive away! In this house, there is no cooking. Usually, she’s obsessive-compulsive clean, but she lets that stuff go. Takeout is king. Dirty dishes? Into the fridge. Beds? Unmade. She can be an artist first and not a mom or wife or domestic sex goddess. She puts her phone inside an airtight container with a timer that beeps like a bomb and locks up the…

LAST FALL, the Drawing Center’s director, Laura Hoptman, working with her modest staff, organized the electrifying “The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists,” a show that demonstrated how this once-indispensable organization was roaring back to life after years of dormancy and restaking its claim as one of the best small nonprofit exhibition spaces in the country. Months of good shows followed. Then came lockdown—and this tiny institution seized the moment and rose again. Along with a number of similar spaces, the Drawing Center scrambled and managed not to lay off or furlough a single member of its team, getting generous old-school assistance from organizations like the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Helen Frankenthaler, Milton and Sally Avery Arts, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Cy Twombly foundations—not…

Chief designer and co-CEO: Prada Joined: 1978 Publicly traded since: 2011 Revenue: Est. $3.6B in 2019 The late writer Ingrid Sischy once described Miuccia Prada’s approach to design, or to most anything that interests her, as “sparring and talking.” I’ve had conversations with Prada—before her shows in Milan, a very long lunch interview in 2014—and been aware of how open her mind is. But equally, and with a nice, sweet jab, she can reject an idea. Followers of Prada are familiar with everything she has done over the past three decades—she showed her first collection in 1988 at the age of 39—but to be confronted by her brilliance, even over Zoom, is to again be reminded that fashion is defined less by craft and materials than by well-thrashed ideas. Undeniably,…

“There are so many brands that are stupid, not trying to move with the times.”KERBY JEAN-RAYMOND Founder and creative director: Pyer Moss Founded: 2013 Owned: Independently Annual sales: Undisclosed The fashion industry has never worked for me—like, none of it. The wholesale model, the press model, none of it has worked,” said Kerby Jean-Raymond. “And I don’t know if that’s because of who I am, the kinds of clothes I made, whether or not my company ever understood merchandising, whether our fan base was willing to adhere to the same rules that have worked for legacy brands like Gucci and Saint Laurent.” Jean-Raymond is the 33-year-old founder of Pyer Moss, a men’s and women’s label based in New York City. In 2015, after several years of making contemporary sportswear—jeans, leather…

“I believe in fashion shows, for sure. They’ll come back. People need to collect together and be shoulder to shoulder watching something transcendent. That will happen forever.”RICK OWENS Founder and designer: Rick Owens Founded: 1994 Owned: Independently Revenue: Est. $140M in 2019 I put in a press release that it was one of the best times of my life, and my press office told me, ‘Well, you’d better not say that,’ ” Rick Owens told me. “You have to be so careful about everything you say now, and I’ve always been so unfiltered, and I’ve always made it a point to be so personal about everything that I say. But the world is so different now, and there are so many ways to offend people that I feel like I’m…

COPPER-INFUSED Copper has antiviral properties that can stop the spread of bacteria and viruses. Nufabrx, a biomaterial company, is testing a line of copper masks that last up to 30 washes. VIRUS-KILLING At Northwestern University, Jiaxing Huang, a professor of materials science, is experimenting with ways to enhance masks with antiviral chemicals like copper salt. This way, masks would not only block some virus-containing droplets but deactivate them. Stopping the virus at the source of the spread is incredibly important. “People are still going to release droplets, but this way we can make them less contagious.” SMARTPHONE-CONNECTED Donut Robotics in Japan is developing a smart mask called the C-Face, which will connect to your smartphone and serve as a voice amplifier and translator.…

1 The Co-Branded Permanent Pop-up THE CHEF: Lani Halliday, a gluten-free baker who launched her own catering and events business in 2014 after jobs ranging from a post-cooking-school pastry externship at Castagna in Portland, Oregon, to gigs at BabyCakes and Ovenly. THE MENU: Miso-chocolate-chip cookies; guava-filled, Pop-Tarts-style pastries; seasonal pies; and signature stencil and divorce cakes by special order. CLAIM TO FAME: At a photo shoot, Yoko Ono once declared Halliday’s miso-chocolate-chip cookies to be the best cookies she ever had. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m good. My cookies have basically touched John Lennon’s lips, because time works any way we believe that it works,’” says Halliday. WHY NOW: Halliday had been bouncing around rented kitchen spaces, but increased exposure from a Maison Yaki pop-up and a surge of…

1 The Appointment By Katharina Volckmer (9/1) This novel has a subtitle: “The Story of a Jewish Cock.” That should tell you something about its author’s relationship with cheeky—and, at times, downright sacrosanct—wordplay. Set over the course of one long doctor’s visit, The Appointment is a rant-as-novel, a long-winded list of grievances, questions, and observations, starting with its protagonist’s admission that she occasionally thinks about screwing Hitler. It only gets wilder from there. 2 The Lying Life of Adults By Elena Ferrante (9/1) The author’s first novel after the conclusion of her girlhood-affirming Neapolitan quartet is another bildungsroman of a disenchanted girl on the cusp of womanhood, this time set in the 1990s among the intelligentsia. 3 Daddy By Emma Cline (9/1) Included in Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American…

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, online-publishing platforms have made it easy for users to charge a subscription fee for newsletters. As Facebook, Google, and private equity have laid waste to print media nationwide, these platforms have given rise to a new publishing economy, in which any writer with a dedicated following might be able to make a living. ¶ Of all the platforms out there, Substack, launched in 2017, has become the preferred tool for writers striking out on their own. According to the company, more than 100,000 subscribers now pay for at least one newsletter, and the platform’s top users collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. The question may no longer be whether readers are willing to pay for hyperfocused newsletters but how many are willing to…

“I feel like I still have stories to tell—I don’t know what they’d be right now.”MARC JACOBS Founder and artistic director: Marc Jacobs Founded: 1993 Owned by: LVMH Consolidated retail revenues: Est. $300M in 2018 Previously: Creative director, Louis Vuitton (1997–2014) When I spoke to Marc Jacobs in May, he’d just watched Martin Margiela: In His Own Words. “I thought it was probably the most moving, touching, beautiful documentary I’ve seen on fashion in—forever,” he said. Since moving into the Mercer Hotel, where he lived during the lockdown (he and husband Char Defrancesco’s home in Rye was being renovated when the state halted all construction), Jacobs had been doing a lot of thinking and watching. He’d been posting on Instagram with incandescent resolve—in huge platform shoes, in purple eye shadow,…

“I got rid of fears. Creatively, it really helped me—I stopped being scared of what people will think, what people will say. I became more true to myself.”DEMNA GVASALIA Creative director: Balenciaga Joined: 2015 Owned by: Kering Revenue: Est. $1.2B in 2019 Previously: Head designer, Vetements (2014–19) Demna Gvasalia has been the creative director of Balenciaga since 2015—the first person from the former Soviet Union to achieve such a perch in fashion and the most important designer from that part of the world since Valentina Nicholaevna Sanina Schlee, the New York couturier known simply as Valentina, who, between 1928 and 1957, created clothes of astonishing originality. One was born in Kiev in 1899 and fled during the Revolution; the other was born 82 years later in Sokhumi, on the Black…

Founder and creative director: Comme des Garçons Founded: 1973 Owned: Independently Revenue: Est. $320M in 2018 Few individuals have had more impact on how people dress than Rei Kawakubo, the founder of Comme des Garçons. Her experiments with patternmaking in the early ’80s turned the conventions of tailoring inside out and led to the method known as deconstruction. That broken-looking dress of yours, with the slashed sleeves, can be traced back to her influence. Those pop-up stores? That too was her invention in 2004, though she called hers “guerrilla” stores. Ideas come to her randomly and intuitively—a crumpled piece of paper handed to her team became the basis of a dress that crumpled around the body. One of my favorite collections—of all collections—featured 34 variations of one garment, a skirt.…

Chief artistic officer: Tiffany & Co. Joined: 2017 Pending sale to: LVMH Reported sales: Est. $4.4B in 2019 Previously: Founder and designer, Reed Krakoff (2010–15); executive creative director, Coach (1998–2014) Early in the lockdown, Reed Krakoff got into a routine of watching documentaries. Working from his own list of nearly 100 titles, the 56-year-old chief artistic officer at Tiffany & Co. watched a documentary every night—on Miles Davis, Robert Motherwell, the Agnellis. Anything about geniuses and artisans, and why they made what they made. “It was a really good way to create some sort of design language in my own little world, late at night,” he told me in mid-June from Connecticut, where he was living with his wife and four children. He wanted to keep his mind moving forward…

1 | N95 MASK Approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to filter out 95 percent of airborne particles, N95s are made from nonwoven polypropylene. 2 | SURGICAL MASK The ones used in hospitals protect from respiratory droplets. When it comes to the look-alikes found in drugstores, quality varies. If you can’t blow out a flame with it on, it’s effective. 3 | KN95 MASK These are not certified by NIOSH, but the FDA authorizes certain brands’ KN95 masks for use by health-care workers. Leche, Clinical Supplies, and Cufy sell authentic KN95s. 4 | COTTON MASK A recent study found that respiratory droplets from an unmasked cough spread eight feet. With a mask made from two layers of quilting…

“BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, we were dependent on our hugely popular neon cowboy hat. It supported our small staff of two and paid our rent. And we sold the most during the festival-and-concert season—April to September, from Coachella to Burning Man. In March, everyone started announcing they weren’t going to be having concerts, and when Coachella announced that they were canceling, we realized we had to figure out how to survive. We set up a GoFundMe, because we needed to pay rent, and then we decided to give mask-making a shot. The first was cow print with three layers of fabric. We sold out on the first day. Then we had to hunt down more fabric. It was like toilet paper: There was a mad rush because anyone who could sew…

RASHAD WATSON Server, South Bronx When did you start playing here? Three years ago, I was walking by West 4th in my gym clothes and saw it was packed. I asked Ice, who keeps the list, “Who goes next?” He said, “I dunno.” I was like, “You’re sitting here with the list and you don’t know?” I watched three games go by, and I was like, “Yo, these guys out here are trash.” And he was like, “All right, I’ll put you on.” The rest is history: I killed that first game. Everyone out there calls me Watts. And they call my 2-year-old son Baby Watts. My girlfriend brings him, and he walks around giving people pounds. We have a lounge where everybody chills. Where is the lounge? On the…

THIS SPRING, while I was furloughed from my formerly glamorous job as a professional eater and critic in what was once upon a time the greatest dining city in the world, I tried to create a variety of routines, the way all of us have, to keep myself sane. I drank two cups of coffee each morning starting at precisely 8:30 a.m. I embarked on a reading program (since abandoned) and a diet program (semi-abandoned), and every few days, around lunchtime, I’d make the rounds of the boarded-up, dispirited, mostly empty blocks near our apartment to check up on the old restaurants I’d known and loved, just like a retired ward boss might do in a neighborhood that has fallen on hard times. On one of these rambles, I ran…

Nate Netflix (Date TBD) A SHORT MAN ROARS onstage on a toy-size motorcycle, his black-and-red-checked lumberjack coat swinging open over his bare chest. He spoons up a mouthful of protein powder, spits it out past his enormous Yorkshire-terrier mustache, and lights the resulting dust cloud on fire. Grrrargh! He raises an ax high over his head, but it boinks delicately off a log. After all, inside this guy Nate—a bellowing, grimacing Napoleonic bro—is a very little lady. When I speak to his creator, Natalie Palamides, in her Los Angeles home, she is whatever the polar opposite of Nate is, comfy in a purple maxi dress and yellow-lensed glasses. In normal life, Palamides doesn’t do the chaos-Muppet faces that characterize her comedy, and her ferocious energy is groggy at ten in…

Piranesi Bloomsbury Publishing (9/15) IT WAS NEARLY 20 years ago that a first-time novelist named Susanna Clarke, then 44 years old and earning a living as an editor of cookbooks, finished writing what was perhaps the greatest and most original British work of fantasy published in England since the days of C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her friend the fantasist Neil Gaiman later said that encountering her writing was akin to “watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time, and she plays a sonata.” Spanning nearly 800 footnote-laden pages, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell tells the story of a pair of dueling magicians in Regency England who restore magic to the British Isles some 300 years after its abrupt disappearance. Writing in a voice that…