BEST OF NEW YORK SPRING 2015

The Swedish winter can be brutal; it’s dark, cold, and wet. Or, as the singer Mapei sees it, the perfect background for writing and producing upbeat pop music.

Born in Rhode Island, but raised in Stockholm, Mapei got her start as a rapper. The 2009 DJ Mehdi-produced Cocoa Butter Diaries EP offered a glimpse into what she was capable of, but it wasn’t until 2013, when she released her unmissable hit “Don’t Wait” that everything changed. “I felt it. I was like, This is a banger,” she says. Written off a tweet by her cousin—“a friend indeed”—the track was originally meant to be a Ying Yang Twins-style snap song. The soulful single now opens Mapei’s début album, Hey, Hey, out today.

As the founder of BalletCollective, the young choreographer and dancer Troy Schumacher is no stranger to the art of working together. His cross-disciplinary explorations for his company, dance pieces informed as much by his collaborators’ poems and music as by his own steps, have served to establish him as an exciting new talent on New York’s ballet scene since he started creating in 2010. This week, he steps out largely on his own, as his first work for his home company, New York City Ballet, premieres tomorrow night as part of the Fall Gala alongside new pieces by Justin Peck and Liam Scarlett.

In collaboration with the award-winning, London-based retail design agency Campaign, 3.1 Phillip Lim has unveiled a brand-new New York City flagship boutique to house the designer’s entire women’s, men’s, and accessories collections.

Located on 48 Great Jones Street in the NoHo district of Manhattan, the newly developed retail concept store, which opened last week with a stunning performance by Banks, defines pragmatic luxury. An extension of Lim’s own design studio, the space is both contemporary and classic, featuring unexpected materials, layered geometric forms, and vintage furniture personally chosen by the designer himself.

There are few fashion luminaries whose legacies cast quite as long as a shadow as Yves Saint Laurent’s, which makes it all the more impressive that Hedi Slimane has, in the just two short years as Saint Laurent’s new creative director, managed to leave such a strong mark of his own. He notches another historic milestone this fall, when he becomes the first designer to exhibit at the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris with a show of his iconic black-and-white studio portraits of musicians produced over the past fifteen years. Slimane, who now works out of his Los Angeles studio rather than the house’s Parisian headquarters, has always had a driving passion for rock-and-roll, especially the vibrant scenes of London and Southern California, are documented in his richly introspective images, which capture both young upstarts and luminaries such as Keith Richards, Amy Winehouse, and Lou Reed, who adorns the poster with an expression both timeworn and timeless. An accompanying video installation, which contrasts Slimane’s British work from 2004 to 2007 with his time on the West Coast since, will bridge the divide between generations, much as the designer does himself in his day job.

Another New York Fashion Week has come and gone and, with it, another party to celebrate our latest issue, this time our lucky thirteenth with a glowing Andreea Diaconu on the cover shot by Jeff Burton. We toasted the last night of the week with many of our closest friends, who gathered together on a […]

“When I said one memory was ‘pencils,’ he had his finger pointed to the ceiling with his eyes and said, ‘Aha! Cedar wood!’ and knew which compounds would achieve this.”

Archie Moore—an Aboriginal, multidisciplinary artist based in Queensland, Australia—is recounting his meetings with Jonathon Midgley of Damask Perfumery, a stranger-turned-collaborator and epicurean of smells. Moore describes Midgley as wizard-like in his olfactory observations, a man who could sniff one’s ‘stuff’ (concepts, memories) and translate them into something fantastically ephemeral: precise and complex aromas that climb up one’s nostrils and move around the brain, somewhere near the limbic system. As the two worked together, Midgley talked like a winemaker: he spoke of base and high notes and detected hints of cherry.

Husband-and-wife team Max Snow and Vanessa Traina capture a serene Martha Hunt for our Fall 2014 issue, available now in New York City and online.

In a new music series titled ‘Drool’, Cara Stricker offers an intimate exploration of the collaborative process between artists. A new series of accompanying films, debuting exclusively here, are the latest installment in a multimedia series called ‘Make Love to the World’ released earlier this year.

The combination isn’t new—take one part sultry vocalist singing heart-wrenching lyrics and combine it with haunting downtempo beats. The result? Instant Internet success—something LA-based songstress Banks has been riding since BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe played “Before I Ever Met You” off a Soundcloud rip last February. And while Banks has penned lyrics for the better part of ten years, her sound is undeniably of-the-moment, in no small part thanks to the trendy producers she has worked with at a time when electronic music is at the height of its popularity.