Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com. WEAR THIS A New Denim Line With Workwear-Inspired Details
As a teenager growing up in San Francisco in the 1990s, the designer Becca Rosen regularly combed the vintage stores on Haight Street. “I was always super interested in clothing, but my parents were these anti-consumerist hippies,” she says, which meant she learned to improvise. This being the birthplace of Levi’s, there were racks of secondhand jeans, and she would tailor the waistbands to create her own low-rise pairs. Now, after designing denim in-house for Ralph Lauren, Helmut Lang and Uniqlo U by Christophe Lemaire — exercises in archival research and crisp silhouettes — Rosen is putting her own stamp on the category with her Los Angeles-based women’s label Dresen. The initial five-piece collection pairs classic workwear detailing with form-flattering cuts. Her low-rise selvage jean, offered in two dead-stock fabric options, includes deep back pockets and a truncated two-button fly. A lightweight denim jacket hits at the hip, with cream contrast stitching (a nod to the affordable thread traditionally used for purpose-driven garments) and specialty cotton-tape zippers (a purist’s choice). The notch trouser comes in Japanese indigo or ecru and features a V-shaped cutout at the back “for comfort and ease of movement,” she says. “It also just happens to highlight a beautiful part of a woman’s body.” The designer sees Dresen, which revives the pre-Ellis Island version of her family’s Eastern European last name, as a marriage of hard-wearing practicality and thoughtful style. To Rosen, the model, artist and mother Jane Moseley — who appears in the campaign photographs, with her pigs and donkeys just out of frame — exemplifies this kind of multidimensional life. From $395, dresen-studio.com. EAT HERE A Los Angeles Restaurant That Combines Nordic Precision With California Warmth
When the Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark and his wife and creative partner, Andrea, moved to Los Angeles in 2022, they celebrated with dinner at the now-closed French bistro Bicyclette. Four years later, their fine-dining restaurant, Lielle, opens inside those same walls. Named for the couple’s daughter and opening on Feb. 12, Lielle reflects Jernmark’s effort to loosen Nordic culinary discipline without abandoning its rigor. He arrives by way of Stockholm’s three-Michelin-starred Frantzén, where he served as head chef. In place of an hourslong tasting menu, Lielle offers a four-course format that starts with Dungeness crab gougères filled with Swedish vendace fish roe, followed by Monterey abalone dressed with a kelp and lemon verbena sauce. Diners who want to extend their meal can choose from optional additions, including razor clams, caviar or uni and spiny lobster chitarra. “Perfection takes a big toll on spontaneity and creativity,” Jernmark says. His relatively relaxed approach carries into the intimate dining room, designed with the local firm Lovers Unite, where Andrea’s hand-sewn linens, kintsugi-repaired dishware and elegant Nordic glasses ground the experience in warmth and restraint. lielle.la. COVET THIS Asymmetric Rugs That Evoke a Painter’s Palette
When the Swedish designer Erik Bratsberg shifted his career from finance to home décor, he wanted to focus on organic forms and materials. “I was allergic to square shapes,” he says. For his first collection, released in 2022, he created a wall sconce out of two curved pieces of epoxy resin. More recently, he challenged himself to translate that design into a rug. The result is a floor covering called Lozza, his first collaboration with the rug maker Layered Stockholm, debuting at Stockholm Design Week. Named after tavolozza, the Italian word for an artist’s palette, the rug imitates the tool’s curved shape. It comes in two tonal color ways, olive and teal, that are designed to work in both cool and warm interiors. To achieve the sinuous shapes, Bratsberg relied on intuition. “When I sketch, it’s so apparent when I’m on a right path with the pen,” he says. He hopes the undulating lines of the rugs will empower people to be more freewheeling with their furniture placement. “I find it easier when not everything is symmetrical,” he says. “It gives more edge, a feeling of something that’s alive.” From $2,020, us.layeredinterior.com. TRY THIS The Chefs Making Chocolate Without Cacao Beans
Several years ago, while the chef Johnny Drain was boiling potatoes in his parents’ kitchen in Birmingham, England, he caught a scent that recalled hot chocolate. It made him wonder whether chocolate could exist without cacao. Almost a decade later, the answer came not from the tuber but from oats and barley, vegetable fats and carob, engineered to mimic chocolate’s aroma, texture and melting capacity. In 2021, Drain, who has a Ph.D. in materials science, co-founded Win-Win to rethink how chocolate might be made without the environmental and ethical costs tied to cacao production, as climate change intensifies drought in producing regions and labor abuses persist across the supply chain. Drain, who believes we’re entering “a golden age of chocolate science,” isn’t alone in his interest. Spora, the culinary innovation lab founded by the chef Rasmus Munk of Copenhagen’s Alchemist restaurant, recently introduced Notch, a chocolate made from mask, the byproduct of beer brewing. Designed to reproduce even the familiar chocolate snap, it reached Nordic supermarket shelves last December. THIC (previously known as This Isn’t Chocolate) is a project from Endless Food Co., co-founded by the American chef Matthew Orlando, formerly of Noma and Amass, who just opened the restaurant Esse in Copenhagen. The team works with brewers’ spent barley and cacao shells that typically go unused to create chocolate in chunks, blocks, granulate and powder that mirrors the bitterness and depth of the traditional version, “but with a lot less baggage,” as they put it. “This began as a search for a sustainable replacement for chocolate in an upscale restaurant, but it grew into a push for larger-scale production for a broader impact,” says Orlando. THIC’s products are currently sold in Denmark’s 7-Eleven stores, and the company has plans for wider Scandinavian distribution. In Lima, Peru, the food lab Masi, which was created to supply the restaurants of the chefs Virgilio Martínez (Central) and Pía León (Kjolle), is exploring ways to make chocolate alternatives from every part of the cacao fruit, as well as from other species of Theobroma (the plant genus that includes cacao). Instead of relying solely on nibs, the research and development team has been experimenting with shells and pulp. Recently, they produced a vivid green bar made from cacao leaves sourced in the Peruvian Amazon. CONSIDER THIS A Photographer’s Eerie Portraits of Domesticity
For over a decade, the photographer Jeremy Liebman has shot the likes of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and the actor Walton Goggins for magazines including Interview, and captured artists’ homes for the interiors magazine Apartamento. Drawn to photographers like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and later Martin Parr and Wolfgang Tillmans, Liebman relishes the challenge of moving between editorial shoots and a more personal style. “Coincidences,” his first monograph, follows three generations of the Liebman family from Dallas to Brooklyn. All the photos are black-and-white, a decision which has its roots in Liebman’s childhood — his father was also a photographer, and the house was full of books featuring black-and-white fine art images. “Color can be so literal,” says Liebman. “There’s a poetry to black and white that lends itself to contrasts and polarities like light and dark, life and death.” Liebman wanted to strike an abstract, reflective tone with the project, which also documents his father’s declining health and gradual loss of language. On some pages, images that evoke the intimacy of family are complicated by ominous juxtapositions: the wheels of a baby carriage with a wheelchair, or a child in a pig mask next to a Christmas tree. “There’s something alien, something unsettling about the home,” says Liebman. “Something that’s comforting and domestic, but also maybe a little bit threatening.” About $64, apartamentomagazine.com. GO HERE A London Restaurant Group Brings Punjabi Food and Maximalist Décor to Manhattan
New York’s Indian food landscape once lagged considerably behind London’s but, over the last five years, restaurants like Semma, Bungalow and Musaafer have helped the American city catch up. Now the London restaurant group JKS is bringing its Ambassadors Clubhouse to New York’s Nomad neighborhood on Feb. 11. The over-the-top interiors will be familiar to anyone who’s frequented the Ambassadors Clubhouse in Mayfair, with stained glass ceilings, animal print accents, Tiffany chandeliers and colorful paintings by Punjabi artists, including Jatinder Durhailay and Simran Kaur Panesar. “The décor is inspired by these abandoned party mansions that you find across India,” says the JKS co-founder Karam Sethi. “It’s very maximalist.” While the space is virtually identical to the original, the menu of Punjabi classics features some only-in-New York additions like a seafood tower with shrimp nargisi koftas and scallops with chutney. But die-hard fans need not fret: The beloved barbecue butter chicken chops are making the transcontinental journey, where they’ll be fired up in a charcoal tandoor. ambassadorsclubhouse.com/newyork. FROM T’S INSTAGRAM An Artist’s Fascination With the Mystery of the Human Form
The British artist Emil Sands often paints bodies, many of them reflecting art history’s long tradition of bathers — and of voyeurism. In “Ripley’s Ladder” (2025), for example, a man lies on a sandy shore, watching others frolic in the distance. In “The Invitation” (2024), three young men wade half-clothed in a river while a fourth gazes at the viewer from the foreground. “I’ve spent my whole life looking at other people’s bodies,” says Sands, whose cerebral palsy has made him acutely aware of what’s considered normal. “I’m trying to work out why they’re different from mine, how I can ape them.” Sands’s solo show “Watchmen” opened this week at Victoria Miro gallery’s Venice outpost. Click here to read the full story about the artist’s new work and inspirations and follow us on Instagram.
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