What’s Happening: La Galerie Dior’s art-focused retrospective offers even seasoned fashion enthusiasts a look at the house’s long legacy of artistic collaborations and their enduring impact on the industry’s most influential maison.

The Download: In 1946, Christian Dior opened his couture flagship in Paris’s 8th Arrondissement. Just three years later, the house expanded its enterprises around the corner and down the block, taking over a neighboring address where he established his personal studio and offices in the street-facing corridor of the colossal Haussmanian structure that now hosts La Galerie Dior. Its current exhibition, which runs through May 13, focuses on the multidisciplinary art forms that have informed the house’s 77-year legacy as one of high fashion’s leading image architects for women.

Considering that Dior has gone to remarkable lengths to get its clothes and history into museums, galleries, and on runways the world over, some may wonder what more the house could possibly have to say for itself. Add to that the Apple TV+ series, The New Look, which has made the designer’s epic origin story practically common knowledge, and something akin to brand fatigue could begin to set in. Yet the gallery’s present show uses Dior’s considerable pop-culture, historical, and industry cred to create new moments of discovery.

Case in point: while the show incorporates cut scenes from The New Look, it also showcases original sketches, collection charts, swatches, and press clippings from the house’s defining Sorbonne haute-couture show in 1955. In the next gallery over, collectible design enthusiasts can gawk at the original furnishings of the designer’s “office of dreams” and even peek into his sunwashed workshop. Elsewhere, a venerable assortment of archival magazines chronicle seven decades of highlights in the pages of Figaro, L’Officiel, i-D, The Gentlewoman, and more. Also emphasized is the house’s longstanding history of working closely with creatives such as Marc Bohan, Niki de Saint Phalle, Elina Chauvet, Maya Goded, and more.

In Their Own Words: One of the show’s biggest highlights, especially for outgoing and curious types, is the two haute-couturiers stationed within. While sewing corsets, gowns, and tulle layers for the house’s couture creations, they field all manner of questions from visitors. “I had to learn for almost five years how to sew a haute couture dress,” Cécile, a couturier with three years of experience at Dior and 17 years of working in the fashion industry, told Surface of the path to her current position. “It’s a lot of skill, materials, and time. We never stop learning. Every day I learn more techniques. I work on the flow atelier, so I only make dresses and skirts, but it’s not always the same techniques. I have to create new ones.”

Surface Says: Dior fatigue may be imminent, but even we have to admit that this house has earned the considerable bragging rights it continues to flex.

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Downtown Toronto has welcomed a novel dining room in the Art Deco Westinghouse building that was recently restored as the Sutton Place Hotel. The ground-floor Abrielle imagines a muse of the same name that embodies the joie de vivre of the region’s women while emulating the warmth of eateries across Rome and Barcelona. DesignAgency cleverly divided the interior into cozy nooks, enhancing the ambiance with sculptural seating and plush banquettes that create distinct zones for dining and socializing. Gallery walls, a hand-painted mural by Tammy Flynn Seybold, and dramatic fixtures suspended from shiplap lend to the visual mélange, as does a supple leather bar and Calacatta Viola marble reception desk. As for the menu, expect French favorites: chive-dusted omelets and hearty Canadian ribeye.

Marcin Rusak grew up surrounded by the ghosts of abandoned greenhouses. His family’s century-old flower growing business abruptly shuttered when he was young, but the unsettling visuals of rusted metal, zinc planters, broken glass, and orphaned pumps in his backyard never quite left his imagination. In the years since, the Warsaw-born designer has dedicated his flourishing practice to slowing down the process of decay by capturing flowers in resin to create breathtaking furniture and objects that, in essence, freeze specific snapshots of time that reveal the immaculate yet fleeting beauty of florals. “If something is perishable or ephemeral,” he told Surface in 2017, “it creates this urge in you to preserve it and keep it.”

Seven years later and Rusak continues to reframe his practice as a conduit for his own lived history. The fruits of his latest experiments are now on view at “Vas Forum: Resina Botanica,” a solo exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York, where a makeshift herbarium of ghostly vessels ascribes near-eternal life to weeds and other discarded flowers past their prime. Each one-of-a-kind vessel’s cloudy appearance—part polished, part matte—takes on a special depth thanks to the flower-infused bioresin he developed in-studio over the course of several years. Their shapes mimic the stone slabs found along the placid shores of Poland’s pristine Solina River; air bubbles trapped within evoke morning dewdrops.

When: Until June 20

Where: 121 Watts Street, New York

What: Since 2020, JO-HS has taken the world by storm with its roster of international talents and its Mexico City–based residency and gallery. Today marks another landmark for the gallery, which is staging its first-ever New York show, a group exhibition of nine Latin American artists. The work reflects on the impact of technology on cultural exchanges between the art communities of New York and Mexico City, as well as humanity writ large. Since JO-HS doesn’t yet have a New York outpost, the gallery is staging the show in the former textile factory that once housed the studios of Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham.

iF, the name behind one of the industry’s most recognizable symbols of design excellence, fêted this year’s award recipients on April 29 with a glittering evening at Berlin’s Friedrichstadt-Palast. For iF’s 70th awards ceremony, the organization took to the palast’s monumental stage—the biggest in the theater world—to celebrate 75 winning designs across the categories of product, communication, packaging, service, architecture, interior architecture, user experience, user interface, and professional concepts. The day after the awards ceremony, iF staged its inaugural trend conference with hosts from BIG, Tangent, Ideo, and Tomorrow Stories.

For the past ten years, Tepozán has been Jalisco’s best-kept secret. Tepozán is one of the few estate-grown tequilas that’s fully grown, processed, and hand-bottled at the source. Pared down to the essential ingredients of mature blue agave, natural yeast, and volcanic-filtered well water from the brand’s estate, the tequila has absolutely no additives of any kind—just incredible flavor.

Surface Says: Estate-grown and additive-free, Tepozán stands out for its commitment to excellence through the old ways of the tequila-making craft.

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