Founding Partners Frederic Dechnik & Laure Heriard Dubreuil

The city of Miami has many faces: Art Basel outpost, Havana-in-exile, the endless stretch of tanned and toned bodies that is South Beach. Now The Webster introduces a new identity: surf mecca. Starting today, the luxury boutique on Collins–best known for its selection of Margiela, Viktor & Rolf, and Balenciaga–transforms its ground floor into “Surf the Webster,” a pop-up shop selling boards, suits, books, and other surf-inspired paraphernalia in an attempt to bring a slice of California to the Atlantic. Ten percent of all proceeds are earmarked for the Surfrider Foundation, an international organization dedicated to stewardship of the planet’s oceans that is a partner in “Surf the Webster.” In this self-proclaimed one-stop shop, boards from Baron Wells and swimwear by Tori Praver sit among prints by pro-surfer–turned–photographer Daniel Fuller. Running through the end of August, the space, decorated with vintage boards and photographs of international surfers, aims to pry Miamians off of their rollerblades on onto the fiberglass. To that end, the Webster is hosting a series of lectures and panels on the sport and its heritage, offering neophytes the chance to catch up on their history. Actual surfing on Miami’s notoriously petite waves, however, is for true believers only.

“Surf the Webster” at the Webster, 1220 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, through August 31

We live in an age of borrowed nostalgia. Nineteenth-century mustaches on every upper lip and pre-Prohibition cocktails on every bar menu. We listen to music from the ’70s and wear clothes from the ’80s. And now, thanks to Tribeca shop Adeline Adeline, we can ride bicycles from ’40s. The shop, which opened on Reade Street last month, offers a variety of De Sica-era rides for the old at heart, ranging from the no-frills Roadster Classic from Linus to the Princess Sovereign from Pashley, which comes complete with skirt guard and wicker basket. Julie Hirschfeld opened Adeline Adeline, named after both of her grandmothers, to fill what she saw as a gap in the New York-market for the rider who is neither the scruffy fixed-gear enthusiast nor the bodysuited weekend racer. New York is a city of tribes, and its cyclists are no different.

Adeline Adeline presents the bicycle as fetishized object, like a Maybach or a Giacometti, each placed on the smooth platform that spans the length of the store, in contrast to the crammed racks that pack most cycling shops. The accessories—a variety of baskets, saddles, bells, headlights, helmets, and panniers—hang from the opposite wall, each perfectly designed item glistening under a spotlight. The bicycles, mostly from Europe—the Abicis in azzuro, crema, and rosso from Italy, the baby/dog/grocery-ready Bakfiets from Holland—are uniformly gorgeous, with clean lines in cheerful colors. The staff will let you take any model out for a spin; there’s nothing like a weekend ride along the neighborhood’s impossibly charming cobblestone streets to seal the deal. These are bicycles for the girls who prefer Lanvin to Lycra, those men you see cycling down Grand Street in a full suit even in August. These are rides your parents would have had: vintage, classic, but completely modern.

Adeline Adeline, 147 Reade Street, 212-227-1150, http://www.adelineadeline.com

Photography Julian Schratter

It is perhaps the ultimate testament to a photographer’s vision when the images they produce become as famous as their subjects, à la Bert Stern’s infamous photographs of Marilyn Monroe. To that end, it’s hard to think of either Björk or Antony Hegarty without instantly recalling one of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s stark, emotive black-and-white portraits. And it’s even harder to believe that it’s been twenty-five years since the Dutch duo first began producing their iconic photographs. From their first collaboration in 1986, the  team have created a wealth of memorable editorials, campaigns, and celebrity portraits that have pushed fashion photography in myriad new directions. Their fashion stories, beginning with a technologically innovative shoot for (now sadly defunct) The Face in 1994, have gone on to help define the look of many contemporary magazines. Their advertisements, for brands as varied as Yves Saint Laurent, Balmain, and Louis Vuitton, have played off the duality between object and desire that is one of the pair’s idées fixes.

Just in time to celebrate their quarter-century mark, the Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam–in the pair’s former hometown before a 1995 relocation to New York–is presenting Pretty Much Everything–Photographs 1985-2010, a comprehensive survey featuring 275 of the duo’s striking, conceptual works. The show, designed by M/M Paris (Inez and Vinoodh’s longtime collaborators, most memorably for their 2001 collage-driven Balenciaga campaign), eschews the chronological set-up of most mid-career surveys, opting instead for an organization that revolves around personal and romantic felicities and coincidences, drawing connections between images that span the pair’s career. To accompany the exhibition, the pair will be releasing their first monograph next spring, a two-volume set containing a momentous 666 photographs. How’s that for a quarter-life crisis?

Pretty Much Everything–Photographs 1985-2010 is on view at the
Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam from June 25 through September 15.

Skaters have Supreme, tennis players have Tretorn, and now surfers have Saturdays. The Soho café–slash–lifestyle store just opened last September, but it’s already a downtown classic. Beginning with coffee from La Colombe, the shop, opened by good friends Morgan Collett, Colin Tunstall, and Josh Rosen—all refugees from the city’s creative industries—has expanded over the winter months to include surfboards, wetsuits, and a perfectly edited selection of surf-inspired wear, from Isaora parkas and Birdwell Beach Britches board shorts to Spring Court sneakers. “Surf culture used to have such a sharp look, and at some point that was lost,” says Rosen, who oversaw the space’s transformation from gallery to surf-shop. The store is just the starting point for what will become a lifestyle brand, with the first capsule collection available in March. “We wanted to design clothes you can wear to head to Montauk, surf, then throw on a button-down and go out,” Rosen explains. “Very classic, nothing too contemporary.” Summer can’t get here fast enough.

Young designer Patrik Ervell has made his mark on men’s fashion by creating a line of perfectly calibrated pieces that mesh sharp modernism with forward-march technology. Windbreakers are constructed from reconstituted parachutes, military parkas are cut from oilcloth, and blazers are elegantly stained with rust. Last Thursday, Ervell brought the same sensibility—classic patterns and futuristic technical fabrics—to the Internet with his new online store.

The online store had been in the works since last July, a gestation period that belies the seeming ease and simplicity of the site itself. The architecture of the shop was the complicated part; the videos—produced entirely in house—were easy in comparison. The difficulties involved with establishing such a deceptively intricate showcase may be one reason why many brands are so reticent to make the move online. There’s a lot of pressure to stand out and get it right, an increasingly onerous task on the overcrowded web.

Visitors to Ervell’s site, which until recently featured a video of his latest show, are now greeted by several images of a model dressed in Ervell’s spring collection. Arranged across the screen in three rows, the looks—actually short videos set on repeat—are a rare opportunity to see the clothes in movement before purchasing. The model picks at his nails, runs his hand through his hair, tugs at his collar, peeks in his pocket, little routines meant to emphasize the naturalness and ease of the pieces. The shop also offers several exclusives, mostly different color and fabric options that brick-and-mortar stores didn’t order, as well as other special items. Most of the items from his current collection are available now—including those rust-stained blazers.

http://patrikervell.com/

The first thing you notice when you step off the small twin-prop airplane in Page, Arizona, is the power plant. Its three smokestacks piercing the vibrant blue sky, the coal-burner sits in otherworldly contrast to the surrounding red desert. Still, it keeps its distance, and after a few days, it becomes just as much a part of the Four Corners landscape as the carved cliffs and endless horizons. Recently, the landscape has gotten a new, beautiful resident, in the form of the Amangiri, the latest luxury hotel from Aman Resorts (a chain of stunning properties scattered across the most beautiful spots in the world) and the second in the United States after a rough-hewn stone lodge in Jackson Hole. As in the other locations, the design is impeccable, the service is outstanding, and the atmosphere—especially in the late winter low season—is unnervingly relaxing. The resort is renowned for its spa services, but they seem almost unnecessary when the crisp desert air itself serves as a decompressor. Until the Amangiri opened just across the border in Utah last autumn, the area, despite its intense natural beauty, was rather short on luxury options, both for dining and accommodation. A drive through Page leads past a Holiday Inn, a Travelodge, and a Super 8 Motel, but within minutes, the town is past and the calm shores of Lake Powell, dotted in houseboats all year long, come into view. Highway 89 passes along high above the water and across the Colorado River on its way north, but it’s not until you turn onto the dirt road leading directly to the Amangiri—just a few minutes past the sign still touting Utah as the home of the 2002 Olympics—that the scenery becomes really breathtaking. Situated in a patch of desert so unknowable and alien that Disney Studios is using the area as a stand-in for Mars, it feels like a spot that is out of both time and place. The infinite desert seems all-encompassing, the perfect escape from anything you need to put aside.

http://www.amanresorts.com/amangiri/home.aspx

Dance on film has more than its fair share of detractors: as with any performance, the artifact often cannot compare to the live experience. Ready to silence the critics, and perhaps bring the feelings around dance documentation to a different place, are New York City Ballet soloists Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi. Their new film, NY Export: Opus Jazz, screened Tuesday evening at Lincoln Center and will air tonight on PBS. Filmed in a variety of iconic locations across the city, from Coney Island to a pre-renovation High Line, Opus Jazz returns Jerome Robbins’ eponymous 1958 ballet to the streets that inspired it. Working to a jazzy score by Robert Prince, Robbins perfected the candid dance language he introduced to America a year earlier with his choreography for West Side Story in the five-movement work that quickly became a modern classic after, appropriately enough, being broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show.

In the new film, which Bar and Suozzi produced with the assistance of directors Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost, the City Ballet dancers look like high-school students out for the summer, leaping and twirling through the streets, fresh-faced exemplars of all-American youth in beat-up sneakers and dusty tank tops. The opening movement finds a group gliding about in McCarren Pool; the last sees a performance on stage at Jersey City’s Loew’s Theatre. You can almost feel the seawater beneath the boardwalk and smell the French fries at the greasy diner where the kids relax. Opus Jazz commits the cardinal sin of filming dance—close-ups that cut off legs and feet—but, in recompense, takes aesthetic cues from the cinéma vérité style so beloved by independent filmmakers today.

Throughout, there’s little sense of the ways New York has changed since the 1950s: teenagers still fight and flirt, August days are still hot and sticky, the sun still sets over New Jersey. Opus Jazz makes a case for New York as a city for the young and the disenchanted, the lolling heads and languid snapping in the choreography a counterpoint to the barely-contained raw energy of youth in revolt.

Photography by Jody Lee Lipes

The environmentalist Edward Abbey once said, “You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light,” but David Nye is out to prove him wrong. In his new book, When the Lights Went Out, Nye traces the 20th-century significance of a blanket of night falling over society. The imposed blackouts during World War II make an appearance as examples of military action. New York City’s 1965 and 1977 blackouts are contrasted to reflect the dissolution in societal bonds in those decades. California’s rolling blackouts in 2000 and the power failure that brought down the northeast in 2003 demonstrate the nation’s increasingly creaky infrastructure. Through causes economic, strategic, environmental, or just plain belligerent, Nye explores the effect of darkness on the American mind, painting a picture of a modern civilization so consumed with life under glowing bulbs that night itself seems unnatural.

NYC Blackout, 2003. Photography by Sergio A. Fernandez
Courtesy +Kris Graves Projects, Brooklyn.
When the Lights Went Out is out in March 2010 from MIT Press