José Miranda, the co-founder of Isotope Watches, remembers the first time he ever saw Johanna Nordblad. It was in the 2016 film “Johanna,” directed by the British filmmaker Ian Derry. The short movie showed the world-ranked free diver swimming, mermaid-like, under the ice on a lake in her native Finland, at times peering up through…
There often is a subtle difference between the way men and women collect things. Many men tend to take a systematic approach, choosing pieces that mesh with the rest of their possessions, be they stamps, cars or watches. A woman, however, may have a hundred pairs of shoes, but whether or not they amount to…
That the death of Iris Apfel, the geriatric influencer whose idiosyncratic sense of personal style made her a fashion star when she was well into her 80s, happened smack in the middle of Paris Fashion Week was both startling and oddly fitting. All the appreciations of her life and outfits have been adding up to…
In vitro fertilization creates life, in the most literal sense. The procedure offers a chance to make a baby, with eggs that are fertilized and develop into embryos in a lab. I.V.F. has helped countless people have children, including couples struggling with infertility and an increasing number of L.G.B.T.Q. parents. In a sense, it’s the…
The Los Angeles Clippers have struggled for years to shed their reputation as one of the N.B.A.’s most woebegone franchises. Operating in a perennial shadow cast by the Lakers, the Clippers actually have a decent team this season, with hopes of winning their first championship. But the job of transforming their image has been no…
At some point in the past few years, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, everyone’s pants started to look wrong. For an improbably long time, the “right” pants — meaning those that conveyed some socially agreed-upon, base-line level of stylishness — had been, in a word, small. Snug through the thighs, throttled…
In late January, when a friend emailed to alert me that her favorite brow person was doing a residency uptown not far from where I lived. I laughed. “I have no brows,” I responded. “I belong to the great Carolyn Bessette disappearing eyebrow generation!” I arrived in New York, young and impressionable, not long after…
In 2017 Reuben Schoots spotted his friend’s Seiko SKX007 dive watch and became fascinated with how it was made. He had no idea that seven years later he would be creating his own watches in the garage-turned-atelier of his home in Canberra, Australia. “As I was leaving school, I really felt that I wanted to…
Claude Folmer was about 40 years old the first time he visited the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in the French Alps. He remembers enjoying the panoramic view from the observation platform, then taking a short hike down to the ice, where he toured the ice cave that’s carved into the glacier’s surface. Four…
Fashion designers have spent the last few weeks presenting their new collections, focused on styles for fall. But many also have been introducing new looks for some of the most recognizable names in watchmaking. On Feb. 2, a week before the start of New York Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham gathered the likes of Helena Christensen,…