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One of the pleasures of cultural curiosity is watching references migrate between disciplines. In a thoughtful interpretation of Byronic Hero, Haloscope’s Bekah Waalkes connected the fragrance’s gasoline note to the motorbike in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, an escape vehicle for Maurice and his lover from stuffy Cambridge into the countryside. She also drew a line between its jammy rose and the novel’s dark gardens, where “scents were everywhere that night, despite the cold.”
Speaking of beauty, David Hockney assembled more than 400 works from across seven decades for a vast exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Paintings from international, institutional, and private collections sat alongside works from the artist’s own studio and Foundation. The sheer scale feels like a reminder that a body of work is rarely legible through a single masterpiece; taste deepens through accumulation.
Lately, Il Trittico, composed by Giacomo Puccini, has been playing over the speakers at Serviette’s headquarters. It is a collection of three one-act operas that Puccini conceived to be an inseparable whole, intended to showcase three contrasting tones—tragic, lyrical, and comic—in a single night. Perhaps a stand-in for the prevailing moods one finds oneself in these days.