Why does everyone smell the same?
Santal 33 turns 15. Plus: LVMH offloads Marc Jacobs, and Martha Stewart's AI pivot.
Internet Microdoses
The Met absorbs Neue Galerie. Ronald Lauder’s museum on Fifth Avenue is merging with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2028, in a deal that hands the Lauder family’s collection to the Met. The Klimts are getting a much bigger room.
LVMH is selling Marc Jacobs after nearly three decades of ownership. The brand is being sold to WHP Global, which will make it sibling brands with Vera Wang. It’s the latest move as LVMH tries to recover from its worst quarter in history.
Critics question Le Labo’s Santal 33 as the once-viral scent turns 15. The sandalwood-and-cardamom fragrance went from a cult Lower East Side perfumery to a default for “creatives.” It’s a smell associated with taste, but everyone’s starting to smell the same.
Martha Stewart pivots to AI with her new startup Hint. It watches your home from the cloud, turning maintenance into something as delightful as a tasteful fruit bowl or floral arrangement.
A Vivienne Westwood jewelry exhibition opens in 2027. The retrospective brings four decades of the late designer’s most recognizable pieces, from orb pendants to the safety pins that defined punk’s relationship to royalty. Long live the true queen.
Aesthetic Study · Dirty Dressing
Clean dressing has had surprising staying power, but there’s still something to be said about getting your hands dirty. The Barbican’s Dirty Looks exhibition traced staining, decay, and deliberate mess in fashion from the 1980s through early 2026, landing its sharpest observation on the way out: “In a way, the dirtiest garment is the garment that was never worn.” Danish label Solitude Studios has been submerging undyed wool, cotton, and silk into local woodland bogs since 2020, letting peat-stained water work on the textile for weeks.
Dirty dressing is less a trend than a reorientation — fabrics dyed with iron-rich water, garments that look already broken-in, textures that feel hand-touched rather than processed. Peatlands were always practical: sphagnum moss dressed WWI wounds, peat flavors whisky with the earth it came from, bogs were sacred between-worlds spaces in Irish tradition. The ground was part of daily life before we organized it away, and now fashion, in its own aestheticized way, is trying to let it back in.
Arrow Radisch spent years in medical research before realizing she’d rather build worlds than study them. The New York- and Paris-based photographer and creative director has become known for still lifes so sculptural they practically dare you to reach into the frame — work that’s landed her commissions from Cartier, Chanel, and Saint Laurent, and editorial pages in AD, T Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar. A 2023 residency in the South of France let her push those compositions off the page entirely, into painting and physical sculpture, and now she’s at it again with her first furniture collection. We sat down with Arrow to talk creative blocks, trusting your gut, and the Facebook Marketplace find she’s still thinking about.
What do you do when you hit a creative block?
To overcome a creative block, I start by regulating my nervous system, because I can’t access creativity from a dysregulated state. That might look like meditation, a yoga class, or simply allowing myself to rest. From there, I try to understand the block itself by journaling and identifying its root cause, then working through it with reflection, meditation, or mindset shifts. I also find it incredibly helpful to immerse myself in mediums outside of my own practice; stepping into unfamiliar creative worlds takes the pressure off and often sparks unexpected inspiration.
What’s the worst recommendation someone’s given you?
I thought long and hard about this and honestly couldn’t come up with an answer. I’ve always lived life to the beat of my own drum, so I don’t tend to seek out much advice; when it’s offered unsolicited, I usually let it pass. I’m deeply intuitive, and as long as I keep my nervous system regulated, I trust that my inner guidance will lead me where I need to go. When I’ve been led down the wrong path, it’s almost always been because I was operating from a place of scarcity or fear, rather than true intuition.
Where do you go to find peace?
I find peace in a few simple places: a hot yoga class, a favorite neighborhood coffee shop, my bed for a quiet meditation, or curled up on the couch under my weighted blanket. Each one gives me a different kind of reset, but they all bring me back to myself.
Who is your forever inspo?
Ellsworth Kelly, Tadao Ando, Alicia Keys, Rothko, Barbara Hepworth, Ruth Asawa, and Brâncuși.
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Those who see the world abstractly see it most fully.
Find Arrow on Instagram and Cosmos.
Object Love · Michael Jackson’s glove
The glove began as a film editor’s tool — a plain white cotton glove worn to handle film without leaving grease marks on the frames. When a 21-year-old Michael Jackson visited a Hollywood production company in 1980, he noticed it, asked a few questions, and left with one. Three years later, costume designer Bill Whitten covered it in 600 to 800 hand-sewn Swarovski crystals, and Jackson debuted it on his left hand during “Billie Jean” at the Motown 25 television special. The left hand specifically because vitiligo had already begun changing his skin there — the most dazzling object in pop history started as a way to cover something up. When asked why he only wore one: “wearing two gloves seemed so ordinary.”
That logic — one is cooler than two, spectacle beats symmetry, the eye goes where you direct it — has held for forty years. Drake reportedly paid $120,000 for an original to anchor the cover of Iceman, marking his milestone of tying Jackson for the most number-one hits. The internet immediately split on whether it was homage or audacity — which is more or less the same conversation people have been having about Jackson for decades. The glove has always had that quality: so precisely engineered to catch light that it becomes difficult to look at anything else.
Quick Hits
Ralph Lauren gets his own postage stamps.
The Swatch x Audemars Piguet collab is finally here.
Shein reportedly buys Everlane for $100M.
John Travolta gets a surprise honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Doja Cat plots a three-year hiatus.
Tania