What’s Happening: The art-house filmmaker has turned his lens on an unlikely muse: Tokyo’s public toilets.

The Download: Reporting at the UN Headquarters on a brisk November morning to run a 5k is a blissful experience for precisely one reason: the opportunity to freshen up in Bryant Park’s well-attended bathrooms. In America’s major cities, including New York, an easy to access, continuously cleaned toilet is a veritable commodity that makes Birkins and Kellys look downright pedestrian. The best thing Equinox and New York’s three Soho Houses have to offer isn’t their communities—it’s their commodes. The Big Apple is by no means the only city impacted by a dearth of convenient public bathrooms, though it’s among the most vocal. San Francisco, which has become infamous for its $1.7 million single toilet proposal, is a close second.

In this light, it should come as little surprise that the Tokyo Toilet Project, which brought the city’s denizens well-maintained toilets by the likes of Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, and Kengo Kuma, is the muse behind Wim Wenders’ latest film, Perfect Days. “It’s especially otherworldly to someone from New York,” film critic Bilge Ebiri writes, “where we treat bathrooms as unmentionable pits of stained despair that must never be made accessible to the public and certainly never kept clean.” Perfect Days, by contrast, stars Koji Yakusho as Hirayama, a quiet custodian who dabbles in film photography, reads William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith, and spends his days tending to Tokyo’s public toilets.

The project was spearheaded by Koji Yanai, a Fast Retailing executive, who, together with the Nippon Foundation, commissioned 17 star architects to create wheelchair-accessible public toilets in Shibuya City. According to the New York Times, Yanai invited Wenders to Tokyo, reportedly hopeful that they would strike inspiration within the Paris, Texas filmmaker. A delayed, spectator-less Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics thwarted the project’s earlier planned debut. After seeing them, Wenders and screenwriter Takuma Takasaki hammered out a script in three weeks. The film, which was shot in a whirlwind 15 days, earned Yakusho a best actor award at Cannes in 2023. The rest is history.

In Their Own Words: “If I say Japanese toilets are world number one, no one will disagree,” Yanai told the Times late last year. Looking at the list of megawatt talents who signed onto the project, and their star turn opposite Wenders’ lens, why should they?

Surface Says: For now, New Yorkers can look forward to waiting five more years for the city to bring five additional public toilets to its 302 square-mile footprint.

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The upmarket men’s fashion brand 424 has become a streetwear favorite for its collaborations with Arsenal and FIFA, but its new Melrose store is anything but bro-y. Founder and creative director Guillermo Andrade worked with Zoo as Zoo to create a home for 424’s suiting-inspired outerwear, tailored separates, and distressed leather and denim statement pieces. Instead of a typical, glass-box retail setup, the studio evokes a wind-blown cave straight out of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Against the shop’s cave-like walls, everything from pillowy shearling biker jackets to its buttery leather boots stands out in sharp relief.

Ann Lowe, the Black couturier behind Jacqueline Kennedy’s fairytale wedding dress, was once reduced to “a colored woman dressmaker” in an interview with the former First Lady that ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal. A dressmaker of choice to the Rockefellers and DuPonts, she wasn’t even mentioned by name in the story. Who exactly spoke the words remains the subject of debate, but the erasure of Black designers’ contributions to the cultural lexicon taints modern design history. A new book, Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design, champions under-known talents across a century of fashion, architecture, and graphic design, and examines the craft of some of today’s foremost contemporary talents.

Author Charlene Prempeh speaks to the hurdles, triumphs, and historical context of trailblazers like Lowe, who hired an attorney to seek proper attribution from the erstwhile magazine. In the process, she shares the talents of seamstress and costume designer Zelda Wynn Valdes, midcentury architect Paul R. Williams, and Norma Sklarek, the first Black woman to become a member of the AIA. Contemporary interviews with the likes of stylist Law Roach and artist-designer Samuel Ross help the reader dive deeper into Prempeh’s writings about the talents working today. “With unprecedented levels of attention being paid to diversity in creative fields,” Prempeh writes, “debates for the need of representation have expanded—and finally burst—to unveil a new, more vibrant discussion about economic sustainability for Black designers, access to design industries, and support for emerging talent.”

Since meeting in a high school shop class and establishing the furniture studio Materia, Matt Ensner and Megan Sommerville have focused on crafting heirloom objects whose reductive, pared-down forms exemplify the inherent elegance of raw materials like stone, brass, and wood. The studio’s 15th anniversary has ushered in some welcome change for the duo, who relocated their longtime studio from the Hudson Valley to the New England coastline and recently pulled back the curtain on their first-ever gallery space, a lived-in SoHo penthouse that intermingles their new Plateau lighting collection with antique items collected during their travels.

Last week, the fashion designer hosted her annual Lunar New Year party with chef Danny Bowien at Boom, atop the Standard High Line. Guests ascended 40 stories above the New York skyline and were greeted with favors in the form of temporary tattoos commemorating the year of the dragon. Flutes of Pommery champagne awaited the crowd as they entered the Roman and Williams–designed club, where a crowd of beauty, fashion, and media downtowners mingled over sets by DJ Parker Radcliffe. While many of the guests and staff wore bows, a signature of Liang’s label, the designer fittingly wore the biggest one of all.

When was it? Jan. 31

Where was it? Boom, The Standard High Line

Who was there? Ella Emhoff, Chloe Wise, Anna Shoemaker, Imani Rudolph, the Young Emperors, Sara Hiromi, Tynan Sinks, and more.

When: Starting Jan. 31

Where: Karlskirche, Vienna

What: Unfurling throughout the soaring dome of Vienna’s Karlskirche is a monumental neon squiggle sculpture, one of the largest works Cerith Wyn Evans has ever created. Spanning more than 80 feet tall and consisting of luminous tubes stretching 2,300 feet in length, the piece is the latest iteration of the Karlskirche Contemporary Arts program that aims to bring site-specific artwork to the Baroque church’s ornate interior. As the title suggests, the seemingly tangled tubes evoke imagery reminiscent of musical scores, scientific diagrams, or blueprints depending on one’s perspective.

Founded in 1990 by partners Dan Menchions and Keith Rushbrook, II by IV Design is a multi-faceted global studio with more than 34 years of experience creating transformative designs that stand the test of time.

Surface Says: Modern luxury is inherent in this firm’s substantial portfolio, as is a total mastery of materials.

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