Last week, the Earth slid between the moon and sun, inciting a heady lunar eclipse that transformed our usual relationship with the sky. It’s almost cosmic timing for 

, a stunning midcentury home turned design center that’s nestled between a granite quarry and a mossy slope in upstate New York. Just two days before the eclipse, the space’s doors opened for its latest exhibition, “

” (through November 14). Fittingly, the first piece visitors encounter is the Eclipse Ceiling Lamp, designed by the contemporary Italian studio 

 in 2016, which casts new, entrancing light on its surroundings.

Presented by Manitoga in collaboration with 

, the show ingeniously pairs the 1962 home, conceived by the late American industrial designer Russel Wright (who named the house, studio, and its surroundings Dragon’s Rock), with the work of Formafantasma, a creative collaboration between designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. As Formafantasma’s organic vessels and glowing, tensile fixtures balance within Wright’s glass-and-stone home, common ground between the two design entities becomes clear: Both believe that design can powerfully deepen our relationship with the natural world. “Although separated by almost a century,” says Allison Cross, Manitoga’s executive director, “the work of both addresses environmental concerns and asks if design can be a steward of nature and our future.”

Wright indeed conceived his home and adjacent studio as a paean to their lush surroundings. Exterior architecture braids into the densely wooded landscape through cascading terraces and uninterrupted glass expanses, while inside, imaginative material experiments further blur design with nature: Sprays of hemlock needles embed into deep green walls, while butterflies create abstract patterns between translucent panels. While Wright had always infused his popular postwar dinnerware and furniture with a reverence for nature, the upstate property redoubled his interest in enhancing the connection of design and the great outdoors. As Jean Rosenwald, an early Manitoga employee, 

 in 1991, “In order to have respect for nature, [Wright] believed you really had to sense it, have a sensual experience with it.”

It’s a fitting context for Formafantasma’s work, which strives to increase people’s awareness of our built and natural worlds.  Works from several of the studio’s series—including 

 (2015)—position thoughtfully through the interiors. While these share Wright’s high regard for the Earth’s phenomena, they also inject distinctly contemporary, critical questions about the rapport between nature and human production. “In our own work, there is much more of a concern with the downsides of industrialization—intensive farming, in the case of these materials,” the duo wrote in a recent statement. “There is more of a critical voice.”

In Wright’s studio, three of Formafantasma’s gourd-like Botanica vessels, which the designers forged from a range of age-old plant-based plastics (as opposed to mass-produced, chemically created plastics that glut oceans) rest in front of a large glass window, fusing the contemporary objects with the historic interior and primordial landscape beyond. It’s a visual timeline that extends from from past to future, subtly connecting our contemporary creations with long-term consequences.

In the main house, Formafantasma’s New Reflector Floor (2016) likewise blurs distinctions between the built and the natural, and between the contemporary and the historic, acting as a time-and-space-bending portal. Its delicate spotlight illuminates a reflective brass plate on the stone floor that siphons reflections of treetops into the home, inverting ground and sky. Nearby, a series of semi-transparent, bulbous vessels created from organic materials—bladders and bones discarded from the food industry—line shelves, exploring organic, zero-waste alternatives to industrially produced materials.

the fixture situated not far from the front door, that most powerfully engages with Manitoga. Assembled from gently overlapping discs of polished gilded brass and travertine strung from gilded guitar strings, it casts an ethereal glow on the deep green wall behind it, which Wright embedded with hemlock needles from the property. It’s a simultaneously deeply intimate and expansively universal moment, connecting something as small and seemingly insignificant as a pine needle to a force as cosmic as an eclipse.

An Exhibition Posits How Design Can Be a Steward of Nature and the Future

’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their scents seeping into pores and penetrating nostrils. Take “Immigrant Caucus,” a 2017 work by the Seoul-born, New York–based artist (who was the guest on 

), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter ants with sweat samples from Manhattan’s Chinatown and Koreatown. Paired with a metal mesh gate, it’s an incisive meditation on Asian American identity, exploitative labor, and intolerance.

This sociopolitical fragrance finds a particularly potent home in its most recent installation at the entrance of “

”—a word conceived by Yi that points to her abiding interest in the relationship between technology (meta) and living organisms (spore)—Yi’s most comprehensive exhibition to date, on view through July 24 at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, a cavernous former factory that once churned out trains, farm equipment, and, during World War I, military aircrafts. It’s a fitting gateway for a show that explores the past 12 years of Yi’s practice—one that rigorously examines what she calls the “biopolitics of the senses.”

Created using a range of materials including shape-shifting bacteria, animatronic insects, and electrochemical sensors, the more than 20 works assembled animate in various ways: Some emit heady smells or ooze unidentifiable goo. Others cultivate ecosystems that metabolize the world around us, with all its emotional, political, and technological complexities. Among them is “Skype Sweater,” an early piece from 2010, which consumes one corner of the space with a billowing military parachute that looks more like a giant lung or a makeshift encampment than a tool of war. Three translucent sculptures encircle the heaving form, enhancing its connection to the corporeal: a clear Longchamp bag that encases cow’s entrails suspended in gel, a Mylar envelope cloaked in crispy tempura batter, and a mass of transparent glycerin that mummifies razor blades surrounded by red stains. All drive home themes of disembodiment and displacement in our globalized, tech-saturated society.

Elsewhere, Yi’s interest in the microbial explores the timely connection between viral spread and human migration and interaction. In the center of the room is Yi’s 2015 series of five transparent PVC sheds, all emblazoned with bright, abstracted biological hazard symbols and containing unexpected combinations of objects. Those inside one shed, “Your Hand Feels Like a Pillow That’s Been Microwaved” (2015), include steel pipes, beeswax, dried shrimp, and hair gel. Each is visible, but inaccessible. Yi conceived the idea for the installation in response to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, as she describes in the exhibition materials, as a reflection on the “societal violence I observed through my own version of ‘quarantine tents,’ containers that restrict air exchange, but also the movement and interaction of living beings.”

While seemingly impermeable, these structures diffuse a pungent scent that penetrates their vinyl walls and fills the surrounding space. Formulated with an M.I.T.–trained synthetic biologist (Yi often collaborates with scientists and technologists) for a 2015 presentation at the New York experimental art space The Kitchen, the fragrance mingles the bacterial samples of 100 women, all socially connected to Yi. The metaphor is clear: Joined together, this collective network of women is breaking free from walled confines. It also reminds viewers of bacteria’s more positive qualities—while they may help cultivate viruses, they also connote human connectivity.

Recent works in the show more actively address the time to come—in particular, the rapidly mutating relationship between organisms and technology. The most powerful of these is “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), a site-specific installation adapted from Yi’s 

. Here, seven rectangular glass vitrines, resembling ant farms and lush abstractions, hang from the ceiling. Each structure contains a rich micro-ecosystem of soil bacteria and algae connected to a network of artificial intelligence that tracks the microbial activity within it, and adjusts the climate to temperatures that encourage growth. In this case, the installation’s title emphasizes Yi’s interest in interspecies, multi-organism interaction, and hybridization—a near future where the lines between plant, animal, human, and machine blur, permeating and learning from one other.

A Potent Anicka Yi Exhibition in Italy Features Bacteria, Artificial Intelligence, and Dried Shrimp

The enduring relevance of jewelry in society and culture stems, in part, from its adaptability, but also from its intimate relationship with the body. Its form and function offer fertile grounds for innovation that can transcend personal ornamentation, such as the thick golden armlets worn by 7th-century women to fend off dishonorable men, or the 19th-century mourning rings worn as a tribute to lost loved ones.

, an institution supported by the French jewelry house Van Cleef & Arpels, opened in Paris with the goal of passing on this rich body of knowledge—largely through a hands-on approach—to a global audience. In addition to exhibitions, publications, research projects, and public events, L’École offers a range of courses led by experts in the field. Some teach students the fine-tuned art of jewelry-making, working with materials ranging from age-old gems to contemporary plastics; others explore the history of adornment and its many cultural and political reverberations. To reach those outside France, the school added a second campus in Hong Kong, in 2019, and regularly takes its efforts to other countries in the form of talks and classes. (Our co-founder, Spencer Bailey, sits on the school’s New York honorary committee, which has helped shape its programming and projects in the U.S.; in the past, he has conducted several live talks with the organization, two of them with the jewelry artist 

This year, as L’École celebrates its first decade, the school is launching some of its most ambitious—and curiosity piquing—developments to date. These include the opening of a third facility, in Shanghai, and a second Paris space, in the historic Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau, which will feature a public library of roughly 6,500 reference works on jewelry and gems. At its current Paris space, in the Hôtel de Ségur, L’École will open a 

, a gem library, that contains some 1,200 stones for visitors to view and even handle. The school will also introduce new courses, including ones on diamond grading, pearls, and jade; publish eight books; and mount multiple exhibitions around the world.

Tying all of these pursuits together is L’École’s abiding dedication to exploring the making and history of jewelry in inclusive, tactile ways. We recently spoke with the school’s longtime president, Marie Vallanet-Delhom, about the role of touch in jewelry, and the pedagogy that’s propelling L’École into the future.

Why is it important to teach people about jewelry and gems?

Working with metal for adornment and using stones for their symbolic power and beauty are integral to being human. It’s important that there is a place dedicated exclusively to learning [these skills]. Did you know that during the Middle Ages goldsmiths were paid more than other artists because they touched what was most precious?

Since the beginning, our goal has been to share knowledge with the general public about human adornment, which is certainly one of the earliest, if not 

 earliest, ways in which humans express themselves artistically—maybe even earlier than wall paintings on caves! We wanted to encourage understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of jewelry-making arts and techniques through hands-on experience. To educate the hand and the eye.	

 and library help L’École reach a wider audience?

Our students and friends must be able to consult carefully curated, reliable, up-to-date, and ever-richer primary sources for learning: books and, of course, stones. Both the 

 and library will deepen the public’s understanding of jewelry culture [by] giving them ever-better tools to develop their knowledge and, above all, their enjoyment of stones and jewelry, which means they must have access to look as well as touch.

Tell me more about the role of touch in the school’s approach.

Touch is right at the core of our teaching strategy and philosophy. It’s more or less essential for all three types of courses we offer. Touch is the absolute sine qua non of our Gemology program, where stones are handled, examined, and investigated with scientific tools in a small group advised by expert gemologist teachers. In our Savoir-Faire courses, the student dons the jeweler’s coat, picks up the tools, and works side by side with elite jewelers, setters, lacquer artists, enamellers, and mock-up makers. And in Jewelry History, we are on a constant curatorial acquisition quest to augment our collection of museum-quality, antique jewels. These are used to bring the museum into the classroom, where we remove glass vitrines between the students and the jewelry, and provide magnifying glasses for them to better engage with the antique jewels. Though in this last case, with preservation in mind, students don’t literally touch the objects.

Outside the classroom, what can people learn, or communicate, by putting on or handling a piece of jewelry?

Handling stones generates feelings, emotions, and visceral connections. That tactile experience is essential to both understanding the jewelry arts and to having a pleasant, positive experience. Our eyes and our fingers observe, and then relay to the brain what becomes knowledge, bringing a heightened level of awareness and enjoyment. When people gather around the gemology table, pass gemstones around, and comment, they experience a level of bonding and a kind of osmosis.

It sounds like you’re saying that jewelry can act as a portal to connecting with others, as well as with ourselves.

We can literally learn all about human history—from its very dawn, through different eras, across the planet—through jewelry. Stones, in particular, have always interested me because of the emotions they evoke, and the ways in which they reflect our nature, and even the evolution and development of our culture—our 

How a Parisian Jewelry School Has Opened Up Access to a Rarefied World

Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), has wrangled subjects as mesmerizingly niche as 1960s Bay Area psychedelic rock posters and high-fashion fabrics by textile designer Jacqueline Groag into inventive yet approachable shows. “One of the things I try to accomplish anytime we present design is to make it as accessible as possible,” says Alfred, who joined the institution in 2007. “We’re not just speaking to a design or architecture community. We want to remind the general public that they’re designers themselves—that they design their lives on a day-to-day basis.”

These days, Alfred is pursuing this mission on a new-and-improved platform. Working with architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, he recently oversaw the expansion of DAM’s architecture and design galleries from a narrow hallway into a spacious, 11,000-square-foot space inside the museum’s newly restored and expanded North Building, originally completed in 1971 and designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti. The wing-spreading move is part of a massive effort to rearrange DAM’s collection—in which the design department boasts the largest number of objects—in ways that engage and resonate with 21st-century audiences. Alfred has anointed the updated galleries with “

Gio Ponti: Designer of a Thousand Talents

” (on view through Dec. 2022), an exhibition featuring the iconoclastic modernist’s graphics and smaller objects, from geometric flatware to aerodynamic armchairs. The presentation simultaneously connects to the surrounding building while reminding viewers that we cradle design as we butter our morning toast.

Alfred is currently in the process of pulling together a show exploring biophilia—specifically, how contemporary architects, designers, and artists are reemphasizing the emotional-psychological bond between humans and the natural world. As he looks ahead to DAM’s future—one filled with exhibitions that affirm design’s egalitarian and wildly nuanced components—Alfred constantly consumes podcasts, books, and other media that inform his multifaceted work and help him refuel. He tells us about some of them here.

I like to take my time in the morning. I usually wake up and read 

 newsletter, to find out what’s going on in the world. Then it usually involves making coffee and turning on music, which is a huge part of my life—there’s always something on in the background at home—and maybe doing some sketching. It’s usually on the instrumental side, like 

Well, yes. Later in the morning, I get my daily horoscope reading. I use this app called 

—a very personalized astrology app. It goes deeper than most, based on all the different facets of my sign; it also compares my reading to those of my friends on the app.

We collect magazines at the museum—in particular, 

 magazines—so it’s a bit of an obsession of mine. I have a ton of subscriptions for work, but the one I probably spend the most time with is the Italian design publication 

, because it covers all of the design practices, from architecture to furniture to environmental design. Interestingly, it was also founded by Gio Ponti.

I’m also really drawn to some newer magazines, for not only their content but also their unique graphic design. There’s one called 

, an online publication that also has an annual print edition. It focuses on ecology and culture. 

 is a contributor. He’s a cultural ecologist and philosopher and the founder of the 

. Overall, it really connects with the biophilia research I’ve been doing. Another that’s relatively new and also beautifully designed is 

, which documents Black life and culture. 

has been on my rotation, too. It’s such a beautifully crafted print publication focusing on Scandinavian interiors, design, and art. [

Editor’s note: Hanna Nova Beatrice, founder and editor-in-chief of 

 most days. And if there’s another that I return to regularly, it’s 

, which consists of conversations that the host has with artists and musicians about their creative process. My brother, 

, is the one conducting the interviews. The more you listen, the more you see connections between how artists of different mediums work—and end up making connections to your own life, too.

Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History

It collects a number of essays, primarily written by women, about women in the graphic design field. There’s a very enlightening text by Linda M. Waggoner about the work of a Native American Ho-Chunk artist named 

, a 1907 compilation of art and stories from different tribal nations. De Cora created the title pages for each nation, including decorative lettering inspired by their specific artistic practices. The DAM has a rather significant Indigenous Arts of North America collection, so to be able to draw connections between De Cora’s design practice and work across museum collections was really interesting to me.

I also recently finished historian Nicholas Syrett’s 

, a family story about the relationship between Robert and John Gregg Allerton. They were companions for about four decades, starting in the early 1920s. In the 1960s, Allerton, who was in his nineties by then, adopted Gregg. It’s a fascinating story that places Robert and John within their queer companions, exploring the history of queer culture and the idea of adoption as a way to legalize queer relationships at the time.

I’m all over the map, but one I finished recently is 

, a docuseries about [Bhagwan Shree] Rajneesh, an Indian guru who built his idea of a utopian community in the Oregon wilderness. It ends up chronicling the conflict that arises between Rajneesh’s growing community, and the Oregon town that existed there before—along with the U.S. government’s case against the organization. It’s just such an interesting look at the separation between church and state in this country.

What are you watching or reading for fun?

I recently had some dental work done, and while I was recovering I was looking for something easy to watch and started 

I absolutely love it. It’s so fun and uplifting, and given that I haven’t been able to travel as much because of the pandemic, it’s been nice to drop into Paris through the show.

This isn’t necessarily a guilty pleasure, but I love seeing music live—and it’s been so rare these last two years. As things have started opening up, the shows I’ve seen were really powerful—the connection between the performer and the audience was stronger than I’ve ever experienced. Right after we finished the museum renovation, I celebrated by going to the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco with friends. I also saw Khruangbin at 

, which is such a remarkable venue. Next on the list are 

 festival in Barcelona this June. I’ve been buying tickets for so many shows; I can’t wait to experience that energy again. It feels really unique to this period of time.

The Media Helping Curator Darrin Alfred Make Connections Between Art and Life

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to its end, and you’ll find words like 

 reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, this big tree acts as a delightfully uncategorizable introduction to “

David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic

a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

The show gathers a selection of works from three groups of Byrne’s drawings: tree diagrams from the early 2000s, chairs from 2004–07, and dingbats, a series of amusing, somewhat surrealistic interpretations of everyday life he’s been making since the pandemic began. The latter, which riffs on the typographic symbols used to break up or replace text, also features in the book of 

 (Phaidon), out in March, alongside Byrne’s poetic, philosophy-inflected writings on shared human experiences.

Like the lyrics Byrne famously spun for the body-shaking anthems of the Talking Heads, the rock band he performed in as the lead singer and guitarist (and whose songs he performs in the current Broadway show 

), his drawings pare down and synthesize everyday elements into unexpected, iconic forms. At their best, they subvert logic to help us see the world in new ways; when that doesn’t happen, they will likely induce a sudden, much-needed laugh.

Beyond the mural that fills the exhibition’s opening wall, other pieces are intimately scaled, clocking in at around the size of a standard sheet of paper. Viewing them up close reveals deft, hand-drawn ink illustrations, including the existential, deeply funny “Who’s a Pretty Boy Then” (2021), which depicts a pigeon gazing into a mirror while a reflection of a shocked man stares back; and “Miniaturization Is the Future!” (2021), in which a giant finger attempts to maneuver a Lilliputian phone—a big-tech–skewering fool’s errand. Their playfulness and size belie their strength; each drawing taps powerfully into the collective consciousness.

“Humor sometimes allows us to say the unspeakable. To diffuse the nightmare and yet still somehow view it face on,” 

 in a statement about his dingbats diagrams. He views them, he continued, “as being somewhat hopeful—the rise of the collective is what might save us.” His words—and all of Byrne’s drawings, for that matter—hark back to that tree that opens the show. It’s titled “Human Content,” a playful dissection of what people are made of—the stuff that roots us and draws us together.

David Byrne’s Drawings Reflect on the Absurdities of Life That Connect Us All

’s hands, fermented cherry and plum blossoms become leavening agents for bread, soil from their backyard transforms into clay for encasing a baked chicken, and leftovers from past meals turn into turmeric, charcoal, and purple sweet-potato crackers. While Boakye’s 

 of these culinary experiments is mesmerizing, their focus on food is about much more than aesthetics: It’s centered on unpacking the deep, abundant relationships between the processes, systems, and life forms that shape what we eat. 

“I first became fascinated by sourdough as a living thing,” Boakye says, from their home in Portland, Oregon. “That opened an interest in all the living things that go into my food—beginning with tiny organisms, like wild yeast, to the people growing and picking my food.” In the last year, Boakye has devoted much of their time to researching how food is made—an activity they’ve 

 “multispecies collaboration”—and reflecting on their findings by making dishes that incorporate subjects including racist anti-foraging laws, ancient writings on plant partnerships, age-old fermentation techniques, and mycophilia. 

Kombucha scobies currently grow in Boakye’s cupboards, interacting with infusions of herbs either cultivated on their balcony, found in the wild, or traded at the local farmers market. In other investigations, their fascination with meals based on residue and preservation has led to eclectic experiments with broths (such as an aromatic version concocted from lion’s mane mushrooms, celery tops, and garlic-chive flowers) and research into the foraging rituals of ancestral Black and Indigenous communities.

Not all of Boakye’s creations are made to be eaten, though. They transform flowers and fronds that have been rendered inedible by contaminated land into bioplastics, or sustainable alternatives to traditional petrochemical plastics, and recently started to apply renewable practices to their digital presence, too: Inspired by the work of California designer and developer Megumi Tanaka, Boakye is in the process of reshaping their website into a hand-coded 

, an online notebook that constantly grows, changes, and is meant to be cultivated over time.

While Boakye’s work takes many forms, it remains bound together by a central, altruistic ethos: food as ritual for communal healing and understanding. “I just love feeding people—especially nourishing food, which means free of chemicals and really nutrient-dense,” they say. “I like the idea of caring for organisms as they care for me.”

Meech Boakye Explores the “Multispecies Collaboration” That Produces Our Food

There is something universally comforting—deeply intoxicating, even—about petting a soft, warm coat, deep with pile. Maybe it’s the velvety hair of a newborn; a well-worn sweater, woven loosely with feathery fibers that soothe skin; or the silken pelt of a resident cat. Novelist and author Haruki Murakami described the latter in a 2001 short story titled 

 ( “fuzzy,” in Japanese): “I reach out to touch the fluffy, soft fur, gently run my hand over the broad nape of the neck, the chill rounded sides of the ears, until finally the cat starts to purr. So nice to hear.”

The essay is one of many inspired inclusions in the new book 

 (Thames & Hudson), a luscious deep dive into the history and imaginative output of the Tokyo-based textile house Nuno, which got its start creating avant-garde bolts of fabric with the likes of fashion designers Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto in the early ’80s. Founded by Junichi Arai in 1984 and led by managing director Reiko Sudo since 1987, Nuno (a Japanese word for cloth) has since crafted some of the world’s most innovative materials, honoring both the age-old traditions of Japanese textile workshops and new production methods.

Written by Sudo and edited by Naomi Pollock, an American architect who writes about Japanese architecture and design, the nearly 400-page book goes to great lengths to capture the Nuno team’s synapse-firing imagination and the deeply sensory creations that result. “For Nuno, standard weaving structures are meant to be reconfigured; the behavior of fibers, natural or artificial, is to be exploited; and just about anything, be it a rusty nail, dinner fork, or rubber band, can be a design tool,” Pollock writes in the introduction.

Each section that follows focuses on a specific type of Nuno textile, all named after an onomatopoeic term, and is enhanced with writings on the theme by creative luminaries and mesmerizing high-definition close-ups of various cloths. 

, the book reveals in its first chapter, is also the title of a gauzy, cloud-like textile family developed by Nuno with artisans across Japan over four decades and counting. Alongside Murakami’s essay, Sudo dissects the company’s numerous lightweight fabrics and tells intricate origin stories about their designs, often tying fabrics to the traditions—and even the fungi—of Japan. She explains that Shii Tree, a textile from 1997 with a plush red warp and seismic waves of black weft, was inspired by the tiger stripe–like wood grain of the tree it’s named for and the shiitake mushrooms that often sprout from the plant’s trunk; and that the 1993 textile Ice House riffs on 

gauze, an ethereal fabric historically used to make summer kimonos

by plumping it with alternating strands of wool yarn and cotton tape. Other chapters include 

 (wrinkled), with an essay by designer Kenya Hara; 

 (noisy), with four poems by musician Arto Lindsay; and 

 (sheer), with an essay by architect Toyo Ito.

Some of the book’s most delectable glimpses into Nuno’s process arrive subtly in captions for the images. Readers learn that the 2006 fabric Baby Hairs, for example, is forged from fibers primarily used for safety devices and laced with phosphorescent pigments that store sunlight to glow in the dark. Hairball, a chunky sportswear pile knit developed last year, is steamed, trimmed, shaved, and brushed multiple times “until the fur comes alive.” And the industry-changing Jellyfish—a puckering, semi-translucent polyester organdy from 1993—is created by screen-printing areas with special adhesive, then flash-heating them to cause shriveling where adhered.

(ragged), Nuno’s collection of fabrics that have been cooked on burners, dissolved with acid, boiled, stewed, or shredded as a means of celebrating the beauty of a well-worn material. The chapter demonstrates Nuno’s commitment to renewable textiles—and the innovative, delightfully puckish ways it works to achieve it. Fabric scraps from Nuno’s workshops, as well as waste from other industries (the tough outer surface of silkworm cocoons or feathers discarded by poultry farms, for instance), become fodder for the line. “We’ve burnt out felted years of wear and tear into new cloth. We’ve affixed bits of newsprint and shredded remnants to imprint the past onto the present,” Sudo writes of its designs. “Like threadbare heirlooms you just can’t throw away, [these] textiles tug at our hearts with a mysterious emotional warmth.” The same can be said of the book that tells Nuno’s rich, intricately layered story.

How Japan’s Most Important Textile House Weaves the Past and Present into Its Fabrics

The beginnings of Julia Momosé’s deeply patient, intentional bartending practice can be traced back to one fateful night in Kyoto, Japan. It was her first time in a cocktail bar, which she entered via a concrete staircase swathed in soft, bright moss. Inside, away from the bustling city streets, a bartender in a white suit jacket methodically crafted her martini. “When he poured the cocktail into the glass, the sight was like a moonstone melting into its setting,” Momosé writes in her new book, 

The Way of the Cocktail: Japanese Traditions, Techniques, and Recipes

(Clarkson Potter), which she co-wrote with food-and-drink writer Emma Janzen. “With a flourish, lemon oils were expressed over the glistening jewel. […] It was then I knew I wanted to be a bartender. I wanted to provide that experience for other people.”

Momosé’s book elaborates on her upbringing in Japan and illustrious bartending career—one guided by the considered ethos of Japanese cocktail culture and manifested in her award-winning Chicago bars, 

 (the latter of which is currently on hiatus). Inspired by the 24 micro-seasons (

) that guide Japanese life and daily rituals, recipes for drinks—including the herbaceous, nectar-laden Ichigo Sour and lemongrass shōchū-laced Opal Martini—are intertwined with details about Japan’s history, culture, and reverence for process. We recently spoke with Momosé about the ingredients and flavors that feature in Japanese cocktail culture, and some of the purposeful steps that lead to an exquisite, distinctively memorable (and quaffable) final form.

This is your first book. What prompted you to write it?

I really wanted to show that there’s more to Japanese cocktails than just the ingredients and recipes—that there’s a much deeper interconnectedness between Japanese culture and what so many [people] are learning to love about Japanese cocktails. Writing this was about more than recipes: It’s a deep dive into the traditions around eating and drinking in Japan, and also the history of how [they have] been influenced by the West, embraced these influences, and then very much made them their own—which, I believe, gives Japanese cocktails the right to have a title that denotes them as something from this particular country.

How does that play out in the bar? What defines Japanese cocktail culture for you?

 into a cocktail doesn’t necessarily make it Japanese. It’s more the intent and thought behind every element. This is very much why I wanted to call the book 

, because it is a journey and a process, and each step along the way is so very important: from when you first start training, learning, and falling in love with the ingredients to perfecting the techniques. These all build on each other to make the best drink possible for a given person in a given moment. Sometimes that person is yourself, just at home, and sometimes, as a professional bartender, it’s the guest across from you at the bar. Whatever the case, I like to think of everything as being interconnected, and that’s very much the Japanese way of eating and drinking.

Another thing that sets Japanese cocktail culture apart, especially in the professional bar setting, is that it’s not entirely about speed, getting as many drinks out as possible, or flair and flashes. When you’re in a cocktail bar in America, there’s often a constant sense of urgency that’s palpable. People are double shaking, or stirring and shaking at the same time—there’s this intensity—whereas in Japan, the focus is placed on one single drink at a time. There’s an overall sense of patience that stands out.

Does that approach apply to technique, too?

One technique that’s very, very Japanese is [used to make] the highball. It’s actually the very first recipe—well, a recipe and also a non-recipe—that I share in the book. I call it the Momosé method: a series of steps I developed from watching masters at the craft and from my own studies of how I like to make my highball. I think it leads to the best version of such a seemingly simple drink—one that can be so much more than the sum of its parts.

The steps are: Select the perfect glass, chill it with ice, then pour off any melted water before adding your chilled spirit. Next, pour the sparkling component so that it doesn’t hit the ice, or even the glass, directly; it will lose effervescence when it hits a different surface. Rather, aim it right into the pool of whiskey, so that it can swoop in and integrate. Instead of stirring, it’s a very gentle muscle that lifts the ice from underneath, so that the club soda and whiskey can come together as crisp and bubbly and refreshing as possible. It’s another example of patience and time and technique, but at the end of the day, it’s also just a highball. I love that about it—the Japanese way of taking everyday things and making them really beautiful.

Hot cocktails also stand out. While they aren’t entirely unique, there are hot drinks pretty much everywhere in Japan when the weather is cold. There’s one bar in particular, called Bar Charleston, that really stands out to me. There, it’s actually in the design of the bar: They place spotlights right above the workstation so you can see the bartender mixing, but when they make hot cocktails, they turn off the spotlight just at the moment when they set the alcohol on fire. There’s a light switch right under the bar station, so it’s a seamless movement where, all of a sudden, the light goes dim and you see them creating this gorgeous hot drink. It’s such a beautiful display, and implemented in a space that has been specifically planned for it, long in advance.

What about ingredients and flavors? Are there any that are particularly distinct?

Interestingly, in the really traditional cocktail bars, you actually see more Scotch than Japanese whisky. They [also] have Tanqueray and Gordon’s Gin and, of course, Campari and vermouth—very recognizable, very Western brands and names. While a large part of the focus of flavor in Japanese cocktails is simply on dedicating oneself or one’s bar to a particular process, there is a new set of Japanese cocktail bars that are reaching for local and native ingredients such as 

—whatever citrus is really amazing in the market at the moment.

On an even smaller scale, there’s a style of bar that can be attributed to a specific area of Tokyo called Ginza. A focus of the Ginza cocktail style is fresh fruit, and in some bars—I love one called Bar Orchard—their entire menu is just a platter of very carefully selected fruit, whatever is best in the season. You choose your fruit, and the drink is based on that. This also speaks to how we are impacted by the seasons so greatly and embrace the changing seasons [in Japan]—and why the book is laid out in the twenty-four micro-seasons.

Fresh fruit is very, very popular and what’s interesting—and another difference to Western cocktail culture—is that [Japan] rarely processes these ingredients before using them. It’s more common to see an apple with the skin on, rather than being peeled and processed, whether mashed or juiced à la minute for the drink. In America, that apple probably would have been made into a juice, a syrup, or some kind of infusion. That’s another way of showcasing this notion of patience at the cocktail bar in Japan, where I’m more than happy to watch [bartenders] work their magic with a whole piece of fruit, even though it takes much longer to receive the final drink.

Do you have any other guidance for those who are reading your book or are new to Japanese cocktail culture?

One small thing—just a fun suggestion—is that they don’t necessarily have to start at the beginning of the book’s recipe section. Rather, I would invite them to flip through to find the season [that coincides with the current one] wherever they may be in the world. Whether it’s the first frost or the first snowfall—or a little later in the year, when the cherry blossoms are starting to bloom—try making a drink in that season, and see how much fun it can be to highlight, and to live in, that season for a moment.

The Slow, Intentional Art of a Japanese Cocktail

Based in the Bay Area, Alexxa is a writer and historian specializing in stories about art, food, creative labor, and the spaces in which they overlap. Her work has been featured in 

, and her research centers on the forces that have inspired and sustained women artists throughout history.

Alexxa Gotthardt

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