Bright Tiles Inspired by Cities Around the World

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Men’s Shirts for All Occasions, From the Mexico City Fashion Brand Chava

Five years ago, Olivia Villanti established her Mexico City-based fashion brand, Chava, with six shirts made in collaboration with Gilly e Hijos, a three-decade-old importer of fine European fabrics, owned by Villanti’s in-laws. Although the line has expanded, it’s always been designed with women in mind — until this week, when Villanti introduced six shirts specifically for men. The new pieces were inspired by the guys (mostly partners of her female clients) who’d already started requesting and customizing their own items when they visited the Chava showroom, as well as Villanti’s creative male friends in town — chefs, architects, artists — whom she noticed were wearing their shirts longer, looser and less buttoned-up than they might’ve before the pandemic. Made with cotton, denim and linen from two European mills (Switzerland’s Alumo and Italy’s Ibieffe), the garments all possess the same blend of structure and ease that’s come to define Villanti’s work, with details like sturdy interlining at the collars and cuffs alongside unexpected touches like a tuxedo bib on black linen or an oversize chest pocket with contrast stitching on dark blue denim. “Each shirt has all these things that feel intrinsic to tailoring but is cut in a way that feels relaxed,” Villanti says. “You can wear that to a wedding, or just on the street with track shorts.” From $430, chavastudio.com.

— Kurt Soller

Eat This

Inventive Ice Cream Flavors From Small-Batch Makers

For Madison Colantonio, the founder of the Holliston, Mass.-based ice cream company Caracara, developing a new flavor requires striking a balance between commercial and weird, he says. Since launching the label earlier this year, he’s offered pints both traditional (coffee toffee, mint chip) and unusual (miso and gochujang, vanilla oolong with salted chocolate). One of his all-time favorite flavors — a crisp, fresh Meyer lemon with chunks of lavender macaron — was inspired by soap. Hilary Yip, who makes ice cream under the name Clingy Wrap in London, began churning in 2023 after a neighbor offered her his old, yellowing Magimix machine. Her Laughing Cow cheese and sweet corn ice cream, one of three exclusive flavors produced for the South London restaurant Lai Rai, is inspired by the Vietnamese street food bắp xào. Clingy Wrap’s current best seller, fish sauce caramel, derives from kho tộ, a style of braising popular in Southern Vietnam. Yip says her culinary goal is to preserve good things — ingredients, memories, textures. “Make it into ice cream and enjoy it later,” she says. Jane Brendlinger also draws on nostalgia for the ice cream flavors offered by her year-old company, Nun Left, based in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. To make one called smoky s’more, she burns wood chips in a grill and infuses the cream with the smoke. Her Thai tea brownie flavor features cubes of fudgy brownie and a mellow Thai tea base that owes its silky sweetness to condensed milk.

— Adrea Piazza

Covet This

Louis Vuitton’s New Beauty Line Includes a Lipstick Trunk

Before fashion month kicks off in New York, the veteran makeup artist Pat McGrath packs carefully. “I often travel with four or five dozen trunks — each meticulously organized,” she says. This September, she’s adding another piece of luggage to the count: the Lipstick Trunk, a four-tiered kit that Louis Vuitton is introducing alongside its new makeup line. McGrath, the creative director of cosmetics for La Beauté Louis Vuitton, has fine-tuned the 55 lipsticks and 10 balms packed in the case, which is covered in Vuitton’s Monogram pattern and unfolds into a mirrored vanity. (She singles out the matte shade Vuittonite, a “grounded, sun-touched nude,” as a way to evoke the last days of summer vacation.) Louis Vuitton has long made custom luggage for the most precious of belongings, including Greta Garbo’s shoes, the well-dressed dolls that belonged to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret of England, and the regal wardrobe of André Leon Talley, whose suitcases are currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Lipstick Trunk’s contents deliver nourishment (with shea butter and hyaluronic acid) in refillable tubes adorned with the house’s four-petal motif. To have the full lineup in one trunk is like having a “mobile atelier,” says McGrath. For minimalists, the brand also offers a zippered pouch that fits a single lipstick. Available Aug. 29 at select Louis Vuitton stores, price on request, louisvuitton.com.

— Laura Regensdorf

Neighborhood Guide

Where to Go in Athens for Art Deco Architecture and Charming All-Day Cafes

Kypseli, Athens, a neighborhood just north of the city center, began as an upscale community in the 1920s and ’30s. Today, it remains a walkable museum of Eclectic, Art Deco and Modernist architecture, with gems from the previous century interspersed among Athens’s typical apartment blocks. (For a concentration of historic homes, stroll Drosopoulo Street.) Over the past three decades, the area has become home to immigrants and creative types. In 2014, Snehta Residency began inviting artists to live and work in Kypseli temporarily, and some never left. After her two-month residency ended in 2016, the printmaker Eleanor Lines made the neighborhood her home and opened Kypseli Print Studio, which offers workshops. Now the author of the book “Doors of Kypseli,” she stayed because she fell for the architecture — and for the people who lived in it. “There’s a faded grandeur that gradually reveals itself as you wander the streets,” Lines says. One of the longest of those is Fokionos Negri, lined with cafes like Foivos that serve everything from coffee to cocktails; restaurants including Bakalogatos, a haven for mezes whose name means “grocery store cat”; and cultural spaces such as the 1937 Municipal Market, or Dimotiki Agora Kypselis, which was revamped two years ago. A Sunday flea market there is full of artists and vendors selling everything from prints to jewelry, handmade soap, secondhand clothes and local honey; the space hosts workshops and performances on other days of the week. Smaller pedestrian streets hold their own, too; as of this year, tiny Komna Traka is home to a 1930s patisserie turned all-day cafe with an Art Deco bar. And on Agias Zonis you’ll find Ntylan (pronounced “Dylan,” as in Bob and Thomas), where an open kitchen serves eight plates that change daily. Kypseli is also home to airy plazas, including St. George Square, where, if you’re lucky or persistent, you’ll find a seat at It’s a Vilatz, an almost-decade-old cafe that morphs at night into what many call one of the best bars in Athens, often with a DJ spinning.

— Eleni N. Gage

Consider This

Colorful Concrete Tiles Designed to Be Mixed and Matched

The Austin-based interior designer Annie Downing has an affinity for bold concrete tiles, which she’s installed on bathroom walls and kitchen islands in her clients’ homes. “I like that they’re imperfect,” she says. “They patina and age over time.” In 2022, she proposed a collaboration with the concrete tile maker Popham Design; she visited the brand’s studio in Marrakesh, Morocco, two years later. This week, Downing is releasing her first tile collection with Popham, featuring four designs — of dots, circles, waves and bars — available in five vibrant colorways that are intended to be mixed and matched to create a variety of patterns. (Some of the tile motifs echo Downing’s wallpaper collection, which debuted last fall.) “The shapes are all basically sketches on napkins from my travels,” Downing says. The palette is also inspired by her trips: The bright pinks are a nod to Mexico City, the greens an ode to Marrakesh. The blues come from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, and the yellows recall mango lassi in Jaipur. “I want people to embrace color,” she says. From $250 for a box of 18 tiles (five-box minimum), shop.anniedowning.com.

— Jinnie Lee

Go Here

A Wave of New Bakeries in New York’s East Village

New York’s East Village is suddenly awash with bakeries riffing on classic pastries. Among the newest arrivals is Spirals, which opened earlier this month and specializes in buns, including savory options (like the pistachio pesto burrata roll) and sweet ones (a braided challah cinnamon roll). It joins Sunday Morning, another cinnamon roll shop that launched in January with creations like a seasonal strawberry Earl Grey roll. In March, the Taiwanese-American bakery and cafe Win Son opened a new location on Second Avenue, serving baked goods that have become staples in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighborhood, like a salted millet mochi doughnut and golden pine nut sun cookie. Last fall, the culinary couple Miro and Shilpa Uskokovic — he’s a former pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern; she’s an editor at Bon Appétit — opened Hani’s in Cooper Square, with a playful menu that includes a PB&J-inspired cake layered with blueberry compote and rich peanut buttercream. More cakes are a few blocks away at From Lucie, where the baker Lucie Franc de Ferriere opened her shop two years ago and varies her flavors depending on what’s in season at the Union Square farmer’s market. (One current option is a vegan citrus sponge cake layered with elderflower icing and strawberry jam.) The neighborhood’s been particularly welcoming, she says. One next-door shop owner closes for 15 minutes each day just to eat a Lucie lemon bar.

— Mackenzie Oster

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