The Edith Piaf impersonator was belting out “La Vie En Rose” as an ice sculpture of the divine Greek stallion Pegasus slowly melted between two seafood towers. Potted orchids dotted the draped tables alongside standing ice buckets filled with bottles of champagne, in a nod to a more mid-century kind of evening decor. What had…
Over the summer, a Bengal cat appeared on our back porch. (Bengals are an expensive breed of domestic cat that resemble tiny leopards.) It was meowing urgently and was much too thin. I could see its ribs. It had no identification, so I fed it a can of salmon because it wasn’t clear whether anyone…
I first learned about fashion rental services through the classic yet divisive 2008 film, Sex and the City: The Movie. Jennifer Hudson’s Louise (from St. Louis) dropped the deets on her designer bag with the oft-quoted line, “It’s rented; Bag Borrow or Steal—it’s like Netflix for purses.” Nearly 15 years have passed since the movie…
John Fetterman has a new suit. On Jan. 3, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, whose penchant for Carhartt sweatshirts, Dickies and baggy shorts was as much a part of his political brand as any stump speech, was sworn in as part of the 118th Congress wearing a relatively tailored, previously unseen light gray two-button number.…
Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. There’s a memorable photo of Dame Vivienne Westwood, her towering platform heels edging their way out of a gilded frame, a painting come to life. It was a promotional stunt for the designer’s Swatch collaboration in 1992—and it feels like the…
Then I went to Elizabeth Street to get a second piercing in my right earlobe. I had the idea for months, and it nagged at me up until the clock was running out on 2022. I suppose I wanted a physical token of the year to take into the next, a memento that wasn’t a…
LONDON — With soaring fuel prices, a sagging economy, disruptive strikes, and lengthy waits in hospital emergency rooms, Britons could use a vivid distraction from what is shaping up as an otherwise dreary new year. And it has come from a reliable source: Harry and Meghan. This time, it was Prince Harry airing yet more…
DAKAR, Senegal — The clash of cranes and bulldozers and the abundance of concrete and pipes as one walks through the streets signal where Dakar is headed and what it lacks. The atmosphere is not quite chaos. But it is quietly chaotic. As Dakar, the capital of Senegal, has transformed, it has emerged as a…
“German is a very ‘spank me’ language,” she tells a Melbourne woman struggling pronounce a porcelain manufacturer’s name. “Königliche,” the woman coughs. Standing beside a handwritten chart of tableware terminology, Ms. Ho trills with delight: “You got it! See? You think ‘spank me,’ immediately you got it.” Ms. Ho speaks with the astonishingly posh, vaguely…
In 1938, researchers at Harvard set out to learn what makes a person thrive. They recruited 724 participants, a combination of students at Harvard College and low-income teenage boys in Boston. All were willing to let the researchers track their lives, from childhood troubles to first loves to final days. Every five years, the researchers…