What’s Happening: Satoshi Kuwata has been named the winner of the 2023 LVMH Prize for Young Designers. It’s a marquee moment for the Setchu designer, who keeps his social presence private.

The Download: The LVMH Prize for Young Designers, or LVMH Prize in short, was created a decade ago by Surface cover star Delphine Arnault. The cash prize—this year’s sum was 400,000 euros ($429,000)—along with executive mentorship opportunities and the star power of LVMH’s network is unlike anything else in the industry, earning it the moniker of “prince maker” for its ability to catapult winners to stardom. Look no further than the meteoric rise of past winners Simon Porte Jacquemus, Marine Serre, and Grace Wales Bonner.

This year’s jury included LVMH artistic directors Jonathan Anderson, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Nicolas Ghesquière, Marc Jacobs, Kim Jones, Stella McCartney, Nigo, and Silvia Venturini Fendi, as well as Arnault, Jean-Paul Claverie and Sidney Toledano. Kuwata, a 39-year-old Japanese designer and Givenchy alumnus, was selected as this year’s prize winner from a pool of 2,400 initial applicants. As Arnault recounted, the jury’s decision was unanimous: “He did an exceptional presentation,” she told Vogue. “Two jury members wanted to buy his jacket. He has a lot of talent and a promising future. Everyone was pretty convinced.”

Kuwata is a Central Saint Martins graduate and Savile Row–trained tailor whose education and on-the-job experience at Givenchy and Gareth Pugh led him to found Setchu, his genderless fashion label. According to Setchu’s web and social presence, the brand’s ethos is rooted in a “compromise” or “blending of Japanese and Western concepts.” Setchu’s Instagram showcases a range of sumptuous knits, outerwear staples, and statement pieces, all with the effortlessly good-looking fit that in fact takes years of education and expertise to master. His aptitude for “layering, draping, and blending textures,” and “beautiful tailoring” comes as little surprise to anyone who knows of his training at bespoke tailoring house Huntsman, a 174-year-old fixture of Savile Row.

Kuwata’s selection seems to represent a break in the recent trend of designers aspiring to celebrity status: Setchu’s website makes no mention of Kuwata, and its Instagram does not follow him. (His own profile is private.) It’s a passing detail that contextualizes the grace and humility with which he answered the New York Times’ inquiries about how he will use the prize money: office space, an e-commerce platform, and eventually an accessories line. For a designer such as Kuwata, who reportedly employs only one staff member and has produced five collections for Setchu, the $429,000 prize and mentorship stand to be life-changing.

In Their Own Words: “Don’t rush, everyone is talented, it’s just a matter of timing,” Kuwata says in an archival interview with Central Saint Martins. “It might take some time for a young graduate to get their first job opportunity, but don’t give up as it’s only a matter of time before somebody discovers your talent.” His words feel prescient in the aftermath of his big win—at 39, this is his final year of eligibility for the prize, which requires entrants to be under the age of 40.

Surface Says: We’re ready to turn the page on viral fashion “moments” and designers getting caught up in their own mythos—perhaps the industry’s most distinguished arbiters are, too.

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Nestled within a wooded clearing in London’s lush Kensington Gardens is this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a rippling, low-slung structure that Lina Ghotmeh envisioned as a place that fosters lively discussion around the dinner table. Considering food as an expression of care and an opportunity to have moments of conviviality, the French-Lebanese architect intends for the pavilion to simply become a gathering place where memories are made. “It’s an encouragement to enter into a dialogue,” she says, “to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and to Earth.”

Ghotmeh’s use of sustainable materials fosters feelings of harmony with the park. Glulam beams nodding to nearby tree roots encircle the structure’s scalloped perimeter, with fretwork panels featuring plant-like cutouts that afford the structure dappled airiness and a nighttime glow. Palm leaves inspired its pleated, origami-like roof, which has drawn clever comparisons to paper cocktail umbrellas and giant portobello mushrooms but mimic togunas—shaded structures used for community gatherings—often built by Mali’s Dogon people. Reddish oak tables and stools arranged in a circle foster moments of intimacy inside.

From afar, it’s a bright, elegant sight—and one that aims to critique its own role in contemporary architecture. Credit Ghotmeh’s early interest in archaeology: “I like to dig deep, to ask: why are we doing this,” she says, “and where are we going?” It’s an apt question for the Serpentine Pavilion, the closely watched commission now in its 23rd year, whose sustainability and capacity for profound gestures have come into question.

Ghotmeh’s pavilion has already been sold and will move to a new home when it closes, on October 29. But the Serpentine remains an unmistakable bellwether of design talent, especially for promising architects with a global perspective and important things to say. (See: Frida Escobedo, Diébédo Francis Kéré, Sumayya Vally, Junya Ishigami.) “As we move forward from one pavilion to another, we’re learning and that’s important,” Ghotmeh says. “Each pavilion is a learning process. I hope the next one will be pushing that forward.”

Trained as a fashion designer, Ludmilla Balkis cut her teeth as an integral part of Céline’s creative team in London, where she developed an eye for sensual minimalism while working alongside Phoebe Philo. She then relocated to the French Basque Country to pursue ceramics, where those same principles inform poetic vessels that seemingly capture moments frozen in time, embody an unflinching pursuit of equilibrium, and reflect an appreciation of clay in a raw, untouched state.

When: June 9–Oct. 8

Where: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

What: Pierre Bonnard’s colorful paintings recorded Paris’s “theater of the everyday” until he befriended Claude Monet, whose influence yielded a preponderance of iridescent landscapes that captured the Normandy countryside’s light, energy, and domestic bliss. Bonnard’s penchant for vibrant hues influenced India Mahdavi, the Parisian interior designer renowned for her polychrome taste. For this show, she developed a kaleidoscopic scenography that reflects “an impression of his world through my own eyes”—and a compelling meeting of the minds of two luminaries whose inimitable use of color evokes feelings of joyful reverie.

Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.

The World’s First Wildfire Tornado Blazed a Path of Destruction Through Australia [Smithsonian]

Art-World Fraudster Anna Sorokin Sued by Her Lawyer for $150,000 in Unpaid Fees [The Art Newspaper]

London’s Natural History Museum Has Apologized for Renting Its Space to a Conservative Group for a “Hateful” Private Event [Artnet News]

Ex-Intelligence Official Says Government Is Hiding Alien Technology from Congress [Intelligencer]

There’s Drama in the Queer Penguin Community [The Cut]

Swifties Are Now Unashamedly Wearing Adult Diapers [Highsnobiety]

Instagram’s Recommendation Algorithms Are Promoting Pedophile Networks [The Verge]

ChatGPT has been compared to a “blurry JPEG of the web,” outrage ensued when an AI-generated picture won an art prize, and deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. AI continues to cause controversy as conversations around the technology evolve, but even Luddites understand that AI models have been trained on data scraped from the internet. That means they’ve been inadvertently programmed with age-old biases from humans—a flaw unearthed by the Algorithmic Justice League and the MIT Media Lab’s Joy Buolamwini, and one that London media artist Jake Elwes is aiming to subvert.

“We plan to disrupt the data set by flooding it with a myriad of marvelous queer drag bodies,” recites a shape-shifting Cabaret singer, whose glitchy likeness alternates between dozens of performers at once while belting out the opening lines to Willkommen to applause. Such is the premise of The Zizi Show, a deepfake cabaret that Elwes programmed to “queer the dataset.”

Avant Arte is a creative marketplace that makes discovering and owning art radically more accessible for a new generation. From Tau Lewis and James Jean to Jenny Holzer, Avant Arte collaborates with leading artists to create limited-edition works, from sculpture editions and NFTs to works on paper and hand-finished screenprints. They are building the world’s largest creative community with more than 2.5 million young art lovers, collectors, and artists.

Surface Says: With its network of emerging and established artists, plus support for Web3 technologies, Avant Arte rises to the occasion of democratizing access to the art market for creators and collectors alike.

Louis Vuitton is (finally) getting into NFTs with five-figure digital trunks.

Intelligence officials say the U.S. has retrieved a craft of non-human origin.

With new autocorrect features, Apple knows you didn’t mean “ducking.”

Acne Studios envisions its own fantasy house in the latest issue of Acne Paper.