What’s Happening: At a time when celebrities from the niche to the A-list (and most major fashion brands) all have their own skincare or makeup lines, Prada is leaning on tech to differentiate itself in a crowded landscape.

The Download: Prada’s Candy may be the stuff of fragrance ad legends—Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola even directed a series of shorts for the scent in 2013—but the fashion house has long lagged behind its ilk in branching out to skincare and makeup. This week, the brand finally remedied that by expanding Prada Beauty beyond its stable of fragrances. Giants like L’Oréal to Estée Lauder have leaned on metaverse tie-ins and virtual try-on tech in an attempt to stay relevant and keep up with AR and VR developments, but L’Oréal (which licensed the rights to Prada Beauty two years ago) appears to be experimenting with a more seamless approach.

Ines Alpha was tapped as the Prada Beauty global creative e-makeup artist, working alongside makeup artist Lynsey Alexander to develop virtual avatars on which they created the line’s debut color range. In some cases, Alexander said in a recent interview, Alpha created never-seen-before shades—and possibly created new colors—in her digital-first development process. So far, Prada is keeping the tech tie-ins on the product development side and sparing consumers the annoying nudges to upload their photos and “try on” lipsticks online.

It should come as little surprise that L’Oréal is behind Prada’s digital-first focus. At this year’s CES, the company won an award for HAPTA: a precision lipstick applicator for use by people with limited hand and arm mobility and fine motor control. The company won a second CES award for its AR-guided L’Oréal Brow Magic device. Fragrance brands, meanwhile, have leaned more on AI-driven technologies. Philyra, created by IBM Research and Symrise, can create new fragrances by sifting through existing formulations and raw materials. One of the most promising in the age of climate crisis, Firmenich’s Muse AI can re-engineer formulas that require the use of threatened botanic ingredients.

In Their Own Words: For Prada, L’Oréal seems to have dialed in the perfect balance between traditional and futuristic. “I would be working with pigments and she would be working with pixels, and through her pixelation she would create something that I hadn’t seen before, that maybe didn’t exist,” Alexander says. “We ended up with these soft matte lipsticks that have a white undertone which makes it look like a white light is shining through them. All the hyper mattes have a black undertone, so that it’s a much deeper, stronger pigment. In that way, it sort of mimics the way a computer works with its cyan, magenta, and yellow tones.”

Surface Says: If Prada’s falling in line with the other fashion—and now beauty—houses, is an overhyped Williamsburg storefront in its near future?

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Hysterical fear slowly throwing the Puritanical town of Salem into chaos is one of The Crucible’s most memorable themes—not to mention a sly critique of McCarthyism that resonates today. So when director Lyndsey Turner tapped Es Devlin to devise a scenography for Arthur Miller’s classic 1953 play at the Gielgud Theatre in London’s West End, where it’s playing until Sept. 2, the Tony Award–winning set designer drove that point home with a fluid centerpiece that upends any semblance of order on stage.

As the drama unfolds, a rotating trapezoidal form produces illuminated rainfall that, as Devlin says, “conjures for the audience how precarious their community order may have felt to them.” Ditto for the 40 neatly arranged church chairs that progressively become strewn across the stage. A hidden gutter drains the downpour, allowing water to be used repeatedly. “I aimed to create an environment that would support this potent visceral text as it grabs its audience by the guts,” says Devlin. She avoided using too many period props in order to illustrate a key point: “[The play is] as urgent now as it has always been.”

The art of finessing is key to understanding the gracefully proportioned furniture of Fabiana Machado, the Brazilian-born talent behind the newly launched Atelier FM. The designer, who splits time between New York and Tbilisi, scrutinized every detail while living with early prototypes of her debut Continuous Series, but gradually refined the palette from metals to woods in order to evoke a timeless “tone-on-tone” aesthetic and pay homage to the French Arts Décoratifs period that shaped her sensibilities.

Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai’s practice is rooted in what she describes as “brown reclamation.” Tapestries made of saris, and embroidery, needlepoint, and other women’s handiworks feature prominently in her debut solo exhibition at Roberts Projects Gallery in Los Angeles. There, her application of these processes supplants British colonial imagery and diasporic heroes with portrayals of regal South Asian women.

On July 29, a panel of curators and art historians gathered there to pore over Mattai’s take on “transgressive materiality” in honor of her show. The city’s arts community turned out to hear from moderator jill moniz, PhD, Grace Aneiza Ali, Joanna Robotham, Suzanne Isken, and Mattai herself about how the trifecta of craft, South Asian and Caribbean culture, and anti-colonialism color a rich body of contemporary art.

Membership and attendance have both diminished at the Guggenheim, but thanks to inflation and a newly unionized workforce, operating costs have soared. That explains why yesterday the Upper East Side museum announced higher admission fees, bringing the cost of an adult ticket from $25 to $30. That number is becoming the new normal—the Met, Philadelphia Museum, Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago all cost at least $30 for one adult ticket. Raising admission fees is hardly popular, but museums have few options. Experts predict it will take years to fully rebound to pre-pandemic levels of revenue and attendance.

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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