Pharrell builds a wave while Europe melts.
A California daydream in a Parisian courtyard, Jay-Z's 30-year museum, and GTA VI's $3B presale on a game with no disc.
Internet Microdoses
Pharrell built a life-sized crashing wave for Louis Vuitton's Spring 2027 show. Tie-dye, Hawaiian prints, wetsuit knits — a full SoCal daydream in the open-air grounds of the Cité U. The fantasy read almost surreal against reality: a manufactured shoreline rising in the middle of a historic campus, mid-heat wave, during one of Europe’s deadliest droughts in years.
Paris is reopening the Seine for swimming on July 4th. Three supervised sites — Bercy, Louis-Philippe, and Bras de Grenelle — return for a second summer, the legacy of a €1.4 billion cleanup that ended a swimming ban in place since 1923. Last year drew close to 100,000 bathers. Turns out the people love clean water.
Jay-Z is turning New York into a Reasonable Doubt museum. The album turned 30 this week, and Roc Nation opened immersive pop-ups in Brooklyn and Manhattan — cassette archives, his Lexus from the “Dead Presidents” video, a Jay-Z library card via the Brooklyn Public Library. In July, he takes Yankee Stadium for three nights.
USMNT jerseys are selling out across U.S retailers as the team heads into the knockout stage. Dick’s, Fanatics and others are down to scraps, and Nike won’t restock the $100 home shirt until July 1st. Sales have doubled the entire 2022 group-stage haul. Winning has never looked worse on a shelf.
GTA VI opened pre-orders and reportedly cleared $3 billion in 24 hours — all without a physical disc. Rockstar confirmed no boxed copy at launch, just download codes, on a game that cost over $1 billion to make. Thirteen years, no gameplay footage, no disc, and the biggest presale in entertainment history. Somehow, scarcity sells even when the product is infinite.
Martin Parr’s final body of work just opened. “Lacock” is a year-long show at Wiltshire’s Fox Talbot Museum — portraits of village life he shot across 30 visits in 2025, months before his death at 73. Prize-winning potatoes, scarecrow festivals, a vicar draped in Union flags. The guy who built a career on the absurdity of Britain signed off by just openly loving it.
Aesthetic Study · Glacial Decadence
Last week, Europe broke temperature records three days running. You only need to look outside to know we’re in the sweaty thick of it. But this week we’re going way out of season: Lamborghinis on frozen lakes, champagne at 9,000 feet, slingback heels clipped into Lacroix ski bindings. Maria Bogner put Monroe in stretch ski pants in 1952. Slim Aarons spent decades photographing fur-clad countesses sledding St. Moritz. The 1980s turned it all into slapstick — Hot Dog, Better Off Dead, Ski School — and TikTok’s “Winter Bimbo” brought ushankas and miniskirts into snowy forests, a look Polyester Zine has scrutinized for flattening post-Soviet hyper-femininity into a mood board. The camp was always part of the deal.
As with anything that starts as a joke, commitment to the bit has birthed full sincerity. FW26 was drenched in fur and shearling — not as irony, but as texture, weight, drama. Searches for “glacier aesthetic” have climbed all year, driven mostly by people building mood boards from apartments with no AC. The fashion calendar always sells the weather you’re not having, this year the clash of hot and cold is a lot more pronounced.
Philip Seerup’s Service Projects borrows from the places where tableware gets pushed to its limits — bistro kitchens, izakaya counters, canteen lines — and builds it for home use instead. Founded in New York in 2022 and now based in Copenhagen, the brand works almost exclusively in stainless steel, aluminum, and porcelain. The Ice Cream Cup, designed with Laura Bilde, holds gelato as naturally as it holds olives. Next up: the Echo Fruit bowl in September and a steak knife next year. Here he talks door handles, corkscrews, and a book about smuggling Gaddafi’s son across the Mexican border.
Do you have any projects coming up you’d like our readers to know about?
We’re launching an Echo Fruit bowl in September — a larger-scale take on our Ice Cream Cup. It’s made for the table, like most of what we design, but fits a kitchen island just as well. We’re also working on a steak knife for the new year. Very excited about the details that go into such a simple object.
What book have you gifted most?
11.11.11 by Mads Brügger — possibly the best book I’ve ever read. It’s a journalistic documentary following a Danish businessman arrested in Mexico City on 11/11/11, accused of trying to smuggle Gaddafi’s son across the border. He spends 533 days in some of Mexico’s worst prisons, insisting he’s innocent. Brügger investigates, but the deeper he goes, the more he realizes nothing about the man’s life adds up, and he starts questioning his own role in the story too.
Where do you go to find peace?
On my runs without any distractions
Who is your forever inspo?
Everyday life, really. Almost all of my inspiration comes from small, ordinary moments — it could be a door handle that suggests the perfect shape for a French press handle (true story), but always with the functionality to match: something that works within a real, everyday context inspires me a lot.
What’s the best investment (money, time, habit) you’ve made?
Founding a company I care about enough that I never question the time I put into it. The work keeps me going and the goals feel worth chasing — I don’t regret a second.
Follow Philip on Instagram and Cosmos.
Object Love · Spring Coolers
Moreno Schweikle’s Spring Cooler is a standard stainless steel office water dispenser — blue tap, red tap, “DO NOT DRINK” placard — with one adjustment. Where the drip tray should be, a hand-carved stone basin sits instead: acanthus leaves, scrollwork, the kind of corbel you’d expect under a palazzo cornice. Water streams from both taps into the stone. It reads like a Roman drinking fountain that wandered into a break room and decided to stay.
Schweikle studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and apprenticed at the Campana Brothers’ studio in São Paulo. His practice takes invisible industrial objects — water coolers, park benches, office chairs — and grafts on historical ornament until past and present sit in the same frame. He’s never made a water piece that doesn’t leak. The cooler holds something everyone needs in a form so standardized nobody sees it anymore. The basin doesn’t make the water precious. It reminds you it already was.
Quick Hits
Sotheby’s is auctioning OG Anunoby’s Game 4 tip-in ball.
A 12-year-old designed a lamp at 3 Days of Design.
GapStudio’s Golden Globes pocket tee goes mass for $54.
The Lidl logo is hiding a dog playing piano.
JR built an inflatable cave inside the Pont Neuf.
Tania