Step By Step

Interview by Caitie Kelly

I begin the day with Biologique Recherche Lotion P50 1970. I’ve been using that for like 20 years, twice a day every day. After I use Crème de la Mer mixed with Costa Brazil Óleo Para a Face — I find the cream goes on much easier when mixed with the oil. If I’m in the sun I use Supergoop Glow Stick SPF 50. I don’t wear a lot of makeup, but my biggest thing is lipstick. I’ve used MAC Lip Pencil in Spice forever and clear NARS Afterglow Lip Shine Gloss on top. I use NARS The Multiple Cream Blush, Lip and Eye Stick in Maui on my face and eyelids and, if I’m really pale, the Bronzing Powder in Casino. I love the Jones Road Oil Stick, too — it’s so easy to swipe over my face and I look so glowy after. Once a week I wash my hair with Kérastase Chroma Absolu shampoo and conditioner, and once a week I’ll get a blowout. For a cut, I see Orlando Pita.

I shower at night and use the original Dove Beauty Bar. I don’t really wash my face, I just use a washcloth in the shower. I got a facial with Joanna Czech about five years ago and she was horrified that I essentially did nothing to my skin. She got me started on this routine from Biologique Recherche — nighttime is when I do all the work. If I am wearing makeup I’ll use Bioderma Sensibio H20 Micellar Makeup Remover to take everything off. Then, I use three Biologique Recherche serums — VG Tensil, Colostrum VG and ISO-Placenta — and the Crème Masque Vernix. In the summer, if I’m feeling dry, I use Valmont Primary Pomade. On my body, Environ Derma-Lac Lotion mixed with their Body Oil Forte has totally fixed the scaliness that I would get on my legs. If I’m using a scent, I mix Jo Malone French Lime Blossom with Rodin Olio Lusso — both are discontinued and I have bought them in bulk so my medicine cabinet looks pretty funny.

Watch This

By Arden Fanning Andrews

In the introduction to her 2017 oral history, “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman describes the New York she experienced in the aughts when her friends in the band the Strokes were on the rise. At that time in the city, she writes, “every choice, from what you wear to how you walk to which street you turn down next is a potential portal to another level.” Goodman goes on to chronicle the rebirth of underground music at the turn of the 21st century when sharing platforms like Napster threatened the industry’s status quo and mainstream pop swept MTV. Following the book’s success, directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, who collaborated on documentaries featuring Blur in “No Distance Left to Run” (2010) and LCD Soundsystem in “Shut Up and Play the Hits” (2012), have turned “Meet Me in the Bathroom” into their latest film. In its opening scenes, footage of the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village and the Mercury Lounge on the Lower East Side is interlaced with Interpol and the Moldy Peaches performances, Karen O sitting on a front stoop introducing her band as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Julian Casablancas swinging from subway bars in a blazer and tie. Casablancas defined an indie rock aesthetic that the designer Hedi Slimane reinforced while dressing many of the moment’s frontmen during his years at Dior Homme. To mark the film’s national theatrical release, Slimane, now Celine’s creative director, was asked to design a poster featuring his original images from the time. Like Goodman’s firsthand account of the city’s underground music revival, Slimane’s photo diary offers a chronological glimpse of youth culture via black-and-white close-ups of drum sets, cigarettes, disco balls, American flags and era-defining bands. “Meet Me in the Bathroom” will be released nationally in theaters on Nov. 8.

Visit This

By Gisela Williams

One of the most noteworthy exhibitions taking place during Miami Art Week is a solo show of work — more than 40 figurative paintings and drawings, as well as a monumental sculpture — from the Philadelphia-based artist Didier William, called “Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè” (“We’ve Left That All Behind”) at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. After immigrating to the United States from Haiti with his family as a young child, William grew up near the museum, but he doesn’t call this a homecoming. “Within the context of immigration, I don’t know that a homecoming is possible,” he said. “The idea of home means less to me. It gives me a nervous itch.” But the experience of being a queer Haitian immigrant in Miami has inspired his work, from the architecture of his youth — in one painting, a rendering of his childhood home is buoyed up by several abstract bodies — to more conceptual questions. How, William wondered, could he take the “racist idea of an ‘alien’ and turn it into a superpower. How would it evolve and take shape? That was the simple premise.” That idea is possibly most evident in William’s site-specific totem-like sculpture: a 12-foot male body cut out of wood that stretches from floor to ceiling. “Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè” is on view from Nov. 2 to Apr. 16, 2023, mocanomi.org.

Wear This

By Jameson Montgomery

Genderless designs, once unheard-of on sales floors, have now become commonplace across categories for retailers the world over. In jewelry, a trio of designers are taking this approach to heart in their respective practices, creating pieces intended for everyone. Presley Oldham (the nephew of fashion designer Todd Oldham), made jewelry while working in film as a way to use his hands after long days on set, and turned it into a business when the pandemic paused productions. He now has a studio in Hudson, N.Y., and has focused his work on pearls with the aim of divorcing them from their historic connotations as feminine and elite. His Compost series uses multicolored pearls Oldham has collected on travels to places like Santa Fe, N.M., and Milan, resulting in magpie-like assemblages highlighting the gems’ organic imperfections. Marco Panconesi studied at Polimoda in Florence, Italy, gradually drifting toward jewelry making from his studies in knitwear. Now based in Paris, his multimedia work involves careful color selection informed by Panconesi’s mood of the moment. His Synth Rocks series consists of brushed and brilliantly hand-painted enamel beads that the designer thinks of as trompe l’oeil mineral formations. Darius Khonsary grew up within the Persian community of Los Angeles with a grandmother who spoke often about the magical qualities of gemstones and precious metals. Khonsary views her practice, under the name Darius, as a way to reconnect with her ancestry. She works primarily with gold and hand-cut stones, focusing on enduring materials that will live on for generations. Creating beyond the bounds of a gender binary is only natural, she says: “The idea of applying a gendered orientation for jewelry objects that will outlive human memory is, to me, misguided and shortsighted.”

See This

By Wei Tchou

“There’s this view that we’re either destroying the earth or we can save the earth, but I see us as much more an interwoven part of the systems of earth,” the photographer Daniel Cheek said, when asked about his philosophy of the natural world, his primary artistic fascination. In Cheek’s expansive black-and-white images, nature is depicted with exuberance. There is an obsessive quality to his compositions, where trees and desert rocks appear meticulously positioned within the frame. At the same time, Cheek is devoted to what is beyond one’s control: Paths are overgrown; figures dart through landscapes, captured in quiet, unreachable contemplation. Cheek’s pictures are on display now in the artist’s home of Tucson, Ariz. He originally moved there for graduate school, where he studied with the photographer Frank Gohlke, a prominent member of the New Topographics movement. Robert Adams, another New Topographer, was one of Cheek’s mentors. Both artists created eerie industrial landscapes to underscore the erosion of nature by people. Cheek sees his own work as an elaboration of that lineage, albeit more romantic, emotional and insistent on exploring the complexity of our entanglements with what is nonhuman. “The scary nature of the problems of what we have done to our world are so huge that they’re easy to ignore,” Cheek said. “It’s the artist’s job to make us feel about that. … Trying to just didactically point at destruction doesn’t make us feel as much as embracing our connection.” “Where We Go” is on view through Dec. 3, andrewsmithgallery.com.

From T’s Instagram