What’s Happening: An overnight pop culture phenomenon, the murderous doll’s meticulously constructed wardrobe and tech-inflected slasher tendencies make for essential viewing for fashion enthusiasts, AI fatalists, and fans of campy horror films.

The Download: We’ve seen our fair share of science-gone-amok flicks (Frankenstein, Jurassic Park) and murderous doll slashers (Child’s Play, The Conjuring), but never something that mashes those two genres together quite like the Gerard Johnstone–directed M3gan, the sci-fi horror whose titular vengeful doll has become an overnight pop culture sensation. The uncanny spectacle of her character—an impeccably dressed, four-foot-tall robot girl whose name is short for Model 3 Generative Android—is suddenly everywhere. An army of M3gans in drag mimicked the doll’s noodling dance moves atop the Empire State Building before going viral on TikTok; some joined star Alison Williams on her press junket.

That’s a function of stellar marketing and giant budgets, but M3gan had us by the throat since her trailer. In the film, type-A roboticist Gemma (Alison Williams) devises the dead-in-the-eyes doll in secret from her overbearing boss at a big Seattle toy company. Struggling to care for her young niece, Cady, after her parents die in a car accident, the career-minded Gemma engineers M3gan to become a child’s best friend and a parent’s best ally. That is until a glitch turns M3gan into a “Terminator-esque killing machine,” made all the more menacing thanks to the jerky gestures of animatronics, puppetry, VFX, and child actor Amie Donald.

The film tackles timely topics of parental care and the rise of AI, but screenwriter Akela Cooper—who penned the script five years ago—insists it wasn’t intentional. The idea arose when Judson Scott, an executive at production company Atomic Monster, was browsing an American Doll store and imagined one killing people. They already produced Annabelle and its sequel and sought a fresher idea, so the AI narrative came naturally. “It’s more prescient than we thought,” Cooper told Vogue. “We were thinking about, could you have Alexa babysit your child if you took that and put it in the body of a robot?”

From the start, it’s clear M3gan is no American Girl. She arrives in cutting-edge style, a convincing embodiment of buttoned-up feminine authority wrapped in a Burberry-esque shift dress, silk twill pussy-bow scarf, white stockings, and shiny black Mary Janes. (She’s a foil to Cady’s oversize puffer jackets and casual dresses.) Her preppy look, envisioned by costume designers Daniel Cruden and Lizzy Gardiner, was both a stylistic and practical choice. “M3gan has to move quickly and unencumbered,” Johnstone explained. “She’s got to run on all fours. She’s going to attack people.” The designers produced 25 versions of the dress, scrapping numerous alternatives.

M3gan’s outfit complements her uncanny demeanor, made extra spine-tingling thanks to the doll’s human realism and the unseen forces—i.e. the algorithm—fueling her violent rampages. “If there’s a guy with a chainsaw chasing people, you know what the threat is,” psychologist Frank McAndrew said about why M3gan comes off as so discomforting. “These doll movies are more creepy than horror movies because they start off with this innocent-looking thing, but something is a bit off. The viewer goes through this period of time where they’re not sure if there’s something to be afraid of or not.”

Ditto for the hot topic of AI. As more is uncovered about the capabilities of systems like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E, the debate about their potential impact continues to flare. Some proclaim the “death of art” and fear analog workers will lose their jobs; others theorize AI will spark an explosion of innovation if used correctly. In that regard, M3gan stands as a cautionary tale—the innovation at first seems too good to be true, relieving the burden of everyday parental tasks like reminding your kid once again to flush. But there’s a lesson to heed: “You can’t pawn off human beings onto technology.”

In Their Own Words: “From the start, we wanted to do something practical that didn’t rely on CG,” Johnstone tells Variety, noting his team made seven different puppets capable of doing different things, some even computerized. “That’s just more fun. And I wanted the actors to have a real thing they can interact with. It was the gift that kept on giving.”

Surface Says: Turns out M3gan’s taste for blood is only matched by her taste for luxury fashion.

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In the middle of the pandemic, chef Sebastián Vargas decided to open his own restaurant just as many were closing their doors. With humble beginnings, Vargas and his co-founders, Josh Hackler and Pili Restrepo Hackler, packed up to-go containers with no silverware, plates, or glasses. Despite the odds, Krüs Kitchen found success thanks to a menu dedicated to local ingredients, grains and vegetables, and open-fire cooking.

These days, Krüs welcomes patrons to its intimate dining room on the second floor of a light-filled space in Miami’s Coconut Grove. It has also sprouted offshoots: A downstairs restaurant, Los Felix, and natural wine market that supplies both of the restaurants with hard-to-find biodynamic and organic vintages.

While Krüs nods to Europe, Los Felix delves into the roots of Latin America with a focus on corn grown using the indigenous farming technique of milpa, in which maize is intercropped with other species like beans, squash, and potatoes. Dishes like the tamal—filled with smoked chicken, wrapped in banana leaf, briefly grilled and plated atop culantro salsa—speak to Vargas’s Colombian heritage. Vargas trained in Michelin-starred kitchens, but achieving that recognition wasn’t his goal. Naturally, Michelin came calling: Krüs earned a Bib Gourmand and Felix was awarded a star this year.

Ukrainian grit is the stuff of legends, so it’s no surprise in the aftermath of Russia’s assault that Cher17 forged ahead with plans to open a sleek boutique in Kyiv. Local studio Temproject envisioned a minimalist three-room shop “created in the aesthetics of a virtual space,” says designer Anastasia Tempinska. The result is an impossibly polished store that nods to the metaverse’s immersive interiors with high-impact color moments, neotenic furniture, and some made-for-Instagram vignettes with mirrors and artwork. The brand, founded by Tetyana Parfiliyeva and Velyka Vasylkivska, sews balaclavas and outerwear for the Ukrainian military and plans to fête victory with a glass of sparkling wine from the showroom’s pink granite tap.

Whether or not we were there to see it firsthand, the world existed before Touko Laaksonen began thrusting his technically astonishing, unabashedly explicit illustrations of swole men with swollen members into the hands of anyone who would take it. But it’s true, because once he got around, their sui generis sexiness slipped into the very fabric of 20th-century America.

Tom of Finland took centuries of homoerotic art—from Greek warriors cruising each other across ancient wine vessels through Michelango’s muscle studies, George Platt Lynes’s graphic early-20th-century photographs of male bodies in shadows to Physique Pictorial’s porn-as-wellness-tutorials—as tools. Also in his box? The inflated glamour of advertising and cheap thrills of comics.

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Far + Dang is a multidisciplinary design office engaged in the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary life. The firm’s research, strategy, and work focuses on transforming intangible ideas into spatial realities and physical form. They’re interested in taking a project from its initial conception to its final built form, and aim to heighten the immaterial such as ideas, hopes, and space, by way of the material such as site and structure.

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