CA

Catherine Avery

129 articles

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The Bauhaus Legacy You Sit On Every Day
Culture

The Bauhaus Legacy You Sit On Every Day

The chair you are probably sitting on right now owes its existence to decisions made in Dessau, Germany, between 1925 and 1932.

2024-09-27

Why Analog Hobbies Make You More Creative
Culture

Why Analog Hobbies Make You More Creative

Neuroscience research from the University of California, San Francisco has demonstrated that activities involving hand-eye coordination — woodworking, drawing, pottery, model building — activate the brain's sensorimotor cortex in patterns that digital work does not replicate.

2024-09-24

The Case for Attending Live Theater
Culture

The Case for Attending Live Theater

When a performance of Death of a Salesman reaches the scene where Willy Loman's sons realise their father has been lying to them for decades, something happens in a theatre that cannot happen on a screen: the audience becomes complicit.

2024-09-21

How to Talk About Art Without Sounding Pretentious
Culture

How to Talk About Art Without Sounding Pretentious

The fear of sounding pretentious about art is itself pretentious — it assumes that your opinion requires a credential.

2024-09-16

How to Develop Taste in Wine, Art, and Everything Else
Culture

How to Develop Taste in Wine, Art, and Everything Else

Taste is not innate — it is trained, and the training follows a remarkably consistent pattern regardless of the domain.

2024-09-14

Why Jazz Still Matters in the Age of Streaming
Culture

Why Jazz Still Matters in the Age of Streaming

When Spotify's algorithm serves you a jazz playlist, it typically defaults to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue or Dave Brubeck's Take Five — monuments that deserve their status but represent a fraction of the genre's living pulse.

2024-09-09

The Films That Defined Modern Masculinity
Culture

The Films That Defined Modern Masculinity

The cinematic models of masculinity available to men born after 1980 differ radically from those their fathers inherited.

2024-09-08

What Cary Grant Understood About Modern Elegance
Culture

What Cary Grant Understood About Modern Elegance

Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, in 1904, the son of a garment presser.

2024-09-03

What Brideshead Revisited Teaches About Living Well
Culture

What Brideshead Revisited Teaches About Living Well

Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, is a lament for a vanishing world.

2024-08-29

Why Blade Runner 2049 Deserves a Second Look
Culture

Why Blade Runner 2049 Deserves a Second Look

Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel to Ridley Scott's landmark science fiction film was a commercial disappointment and a critical triumph.

2024-08-24

Donegal Tweed and the Men Who Still Swear By It
Style

Donegal Tweed and the Men Who Still Swear By It

Donegal tweed takes its name from County Donegal in the northwest corner of Ireland, where it has been handwoven since the eighteenth century.

2024-08-22

The Cardigan's Long Journey from Cricket Pitch to Corner Office
Style

The Cardigan's Long Journey from Cricket Pitch to Corner Office

Lord Cardigan, the British cavalry commander who led the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, lent his name to a knitted jacket he wore for warmth during the Crimean War.

2024-08-20

Dressing for the Gallery Opening You Didn't Know You'd Attend
Style

Dressing for the Gallery Opening You Didn't Know You'd Attend

The gallery opening is the modern man's sartorial pop quiz.

2024-08-08

How Neapolitan Tailors Reinvented the Shoulder
Style

How Neapolitan Tailors Reinvented the Shoulder

Walk into any Savile Row fitting room and the shoulder is a fortress: padded, roped, and defined with architectural precision.

2024-08-07

The Minimalist's Approach to a Full Wardrobe
Style

The Minimalist's Approach to a Full Wardrobe

A wardrobe of thirty carefully chosen items outperforms one of a hundred careless purchases.

2024-07-30

How to Wear a Sport Coat With Jeans
Style

How to Wear a Sport Coat With Jeans

The sport coat and jeans combination is the great balancing act of modern menswear.

2024-07-25

What the Best-Dressed Men in Film Got Right
Style

What the Best-Dressed Men in Film Got Right

When costume designer Milena Canonero dressed the cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel, she understood that clothing in cinema does not merely cover characters.

2024-07-24

The Case for a Signature Uniform
Style

The Case for a Signature Uniform

Steve Jobs had his black mock turtleneck.

2024-07-21

How to Dress for a Creative Office
Style

How to Dress for a Creative Office

Creative offices—advertising agencies, design studios, media companies, tech startups—operate under an unwritten dress code that rewards individuality while punishing both corporate stiffness and outright sloppiness.

2024-07-15

Why Garment Construction Matters More Than Labels
Style

Why Garment Construction Matters More Than Labels

The label inside a garment tells you who designed it and where it was assembled.

2024-07-12