Author: NY TIMES

As a trillion-dollar global industry, fashion is hardly the magic factory sometimes depicted in the press. Yet it does produce wizards. One such is the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, whose announcement this week that he would be hanging up his smock and retiring after 40 years at his namesake label occasioned an outpouring of reminiscences, particularly from fashion pros like the men’s wear experts interviewed below.Michel Gaubert, sound director: “I did all the Dries shows from 1999 to 2005, and what I admired is that his was a very strong voice of independence. He wasn’t owned by a big…

The Montana Club, a celebrated bar, dining room and gathering place in Helena that was founded by frontier movers and shakers in 1885 — four years before Montana became a state — will close its doors after one final toast on March 29.The club, which also holds a notable place in Black history, has been in financial straits in recent years, leading to a bankruptcy filing in November. (The club is not associated with the Montana Club restaurant chain.)Before it reorganized in 2018 as a cooperative open to the public, the private club attracted an elite membership that would be…

Redditors howled at these changes — and Mr. Wong’s successor as C.E.O., Ellen Pao, was chased out by a horde of angry users — but the company’s pivot to respectability was an undeniable success. Reddit’s image has gradually improved under a co-founder, Steve Huffman, who came back in 2015 to run the site as chief executive, and Reddit was able to build the ad-based business model that sustains it today.In particular, I want to single out three steps Reddit took to clean up its platform, all of which were instrumental in paving the way for the company’s public debut.First, the…

Black henbane has been found at archaeological sites in the Netherlands that date back to the Neolithic Period. But because it is a wild plant that readily grows in the disturbed soil near settlements, experts have been unable to ascertain whether it was used by people or was just part of the environment.In 2008, for example, archaeologists found a Roman-Era ceramic beaker in Voorburg that had been filled with dirt over time. In the dirt, they found one black henbane seed along with 26 hazelnuts and a single grain each of corn, barley, wheat and various other seeds. “The overall…

The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Turandot” is one of the most lavish and intricate in the company’s repertoire, a spectacle that includes an imperial palace, a glittering throne room and expansive gardens.But on Wednesday evening, audience members had to make do without the opera’s usual visual delights. A jam in the Met’s main lift backstage forced the company to put on a semi-staged version at the last minute, with the cast and chorus singing from an improvised set instead.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, walked onstage before the show to explain the situation.“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to say…

The United States has submitted a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council calling for “an immediate cease-fire tied to the release of hostages” in Gaza, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, during his latest trip to the region to broker a diplomatic resolution to the war between Israel and Hamas.Biden administration officials have grown more forceful in recent weeks in their push for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict, as the humanitarian conditions in Gaza have reached crisis levels and political pressures mount for international action.In an interview with Al Hadath, a Saudi-run…

The sun-soaked Algarve region on Portugal’s Southern coast is a place where guitar-strumming backpackers gather by fragrant orange trees and digital nomads hunt for laid-back vibes. It is not exactly what comes to mind when one envisions a stronghold of far-right political sentiment.But it is in the Algarve region where the anti-establishment Chega party finished first in national elections this month, both unsettling Portuguese politics and injecting new anxiety throughout the European establishment. Nationwide, Chega received 18 percent of the vote.“It’s a strong signal for Europe and for the world,” said João Paulo da Silva Graça, a freshly elected Chega…

“I hope you don’t mind — I’ll have a coterie of boys coming in all night,” Alan Cumming joked as he sidled into a banquette at an Upper West Side wine bar last week. A director had messaged him on Instagram, hoping to get Mr. Cumming to act in his short film, and they’d agreed to meet directly after this interview.Already that day, the 59-year-old Scottish actor had filmed a television appearance in the Meatpacking District, posed for two photo sessions and gone for a swim. Later, he was seeing the comedian Alex Edelman’s one-man show at the Beacon Theater…

Defying boundaries of taste and time, Martin Greenfield made suits for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the gangster Meyer Lansky, Leonardo DiCaprio and LeBron James. Men skilled in the arts of power projection — along with fashion writers and designers — considered him the nation’s greatest men’s tailor.For years, none of them knew the origins of his expertise: a beating in Auschwitz.As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s…

The internet has not been kind to Condé Nast, the publisher of starry magazines, like Vogue and Vanity Fair, whose fortunes and influence have waned in the digital age.But while the web taketh, it occasionally giveth, too.The Newhouse family, the media dynasty that controls Condé Nast through its holding company, Advance Publications, is set to reap a windfall of roughly $1.4 billion on Thursday when the social site Reddit is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Condé Nast acquired Reddit for a mere $10 million in 2006, later spinning it out into a stand-alone company.With its anarchic culture of…