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.
EAT HERE
A 100-Year-Old Parisian Cafe Gets a New Life
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| Left: at À la Renaissance, an all-day natural wine institution in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, the original neon sign has been restored. Right: shrimp cocktail is among the afternoon snack options. Mickaël Bandassal |
The American Colombian hospitality duo Joshua Fontaine and Carina Soto Velásquez have made an enduring mark on Paris’s dining scene with innovative formats. Candelaria, the taqueria they opened in early 2011 (the city’s first), has a speakeasy in the back; Le Mary Celeste, their seafood-forward spot in the Marais, followed in 2013, combining a careful natural wine selection with creative cocktails in a restaurant setting. But their latest venture is more of a restoration than an invention. They’re reviving the terraced all-day natural wine cafe-bistro À la Renaissance, an 11th Arrondissement neighborhood institution dating back a century. The architect Johanna Etournel, formerly of Studio KO, refreshed the restaurant’s interior with refurbished bistro floor tiles, a new bar with veined marble and touches of amber onyx and a hand-painted fresco by the artists Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby depicting Parisian characters past and present, including Voltaire and Paul Verlaine scribbling on a corner of the table and Léon, Carina’s son, playing with Morris, Joshua’s dog. The menu will still comprise breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner, but with key tweaks: The midday meal includes a self-service buffet of starters; Sunday lunch will feature fries and roasted chicken. Dinner will be à la carte, focused on updated bistro classics like veal sweetbreads with spinach and sole meunière. Another notable change? “A good coffee program,” says Fontaine, who will work with the Parisian roaster Ten Belles. “It’s small touches that we hope will make the place last another 100 years.” instagram.com/a_la_renaissance.
SEE THIS
In a New Monograph, Zora Sicher Captures Unguarded Moments
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| Zora Sicher’s “Sabrina & Manon” (2019), which will appear in her new book, “Geography.” © Zora Sicher |
The photographer Zora Sicher began taking pictures at 14 as a high school student in Brooklyn. Those early images capture the charged intimacy of adolescence: a friend leaning into the mirror to smudge on eye shadow before a night out, another drifting to sleep in the late afternoon sun. That tender and unguarded sensibility has shaped Sicher’s work since. Her new monograph, “Geography,” published by Dashwood Books, gathers 14 years of images into what she calls a “nonchronological map” of her practice and the people who shaped it. The earliest photograph dates to 2011; the most recent was taken in February. As the curator Gaby Cepeda writes in the book’s introduction, over the years the photos become “a scalpel, cutting into an unexplored level of vulnerability.” Sicher found inspiration for the book’s title when she saw a staged adaptation of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel, “Play It As It Lays,” which included a line about “the geography of the human heart,” suggesting that love is a kind of expanse, mapped across rooms, bodies and inner terrain. In Sicher’s work, an overflowing bathtub or the curve of a tattooed, pregnant stomach carries the same weight as an Ansel Adams landscape. “Geography” will be released on Sept. 25, with an accompanying exhibition opening at Dashwood Projects in New York on Oct. 3, dashwoodbooks.com.
CONSIDER THIS
Andes-Inspired Fabric Designed by the Artist Sheila Hicks
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| Knoll Textiles is reissuing a 1966 fabric design by Sheila Hicks in new colors chosen by the artist. Courtesy of Knoll |
In 1966, Sheila Hicks, the pioneering fiber artist known for her commanding woven pieces, worked with Knoll Textiles to create a fabric as distinctive as her artwork. This month, it’s been reintroduced with a few small updates. Altiplano by Sheila Hicks, 1966 — the reissue’s new name — is a checkered weave inspired by traditional textiles from the Andes, reflecting Hicks’s deep interest in Indigenous weaving techniques. There are nine color options in earthy shades like Terrain, a rich brown, and a loden green called Moss that reflect the South American landscape. The hues are new: Hicks reworked the original, considerably brighter palette. “She wanted it to be more grounded in the Andean region,” says Megan Younge, the design director of Maharam, the company that includes Knoll Textiles. Hicks, who is 91, is currently in the spotlight: There’s an exhibition of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and, in Paris, a show with the textile-art historian Monique Lévi-Strauss that opens on Sept. 30. Younge, who worked closely with Hicks on Altiplano, says the artist remains passionate about her work. “She wants to keep making, wants to keep exploring, wants to keep investigating,” Younge says. “It doesn’t seem like she’ll ever stop.” From $129 per yard, maharam.com.
COVET THIS
A New Collection of David Webb’s Maximalist Totem Pendants
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| The jewelry designer David Webb created his first Totem pendants in 1971, reflecting his interest in one-of-a-kind eccentricities. His namesake house has created a new grouping of Totems, which are available at the New York boutique. Courtesy of David Webb |
The jewelry designer David Webb created a menagerie of sparkling creatures over the course of his three-decade career. A diamond-and-enamel zebra cuff landed on Diana Vreeland’s wrist and in Irving Penn’s photographs for Vogue; Elizabeth Taylor reportedly wore his gold tiger brooch pinned to her shoulder. But Webb’s animals weren’t the only pieces brimming with personality. A series of Totem pendants — first introduced in 1971, each one entirely unique — drew on his interest in historical jewelry, from geometric Art Deco forms to Mughal-revival carved stones. The name evoked the vertical composition, as well as the personal connection that Webb hoped the pieces would have with their wearers. This month, a half-century after the designer’s death, the house has released a new suite of Totems crafted by the team of master jewelers at the Madison Avenue workshop. In one pendant, a faceted imperial topaz nestles against green onyx and lapis lazuli; in another, two fluted amethysts flank an octagonal tiger’s-eye inset with a glittering peridot. There is a maximalist’s sense of balance within this riot of colors, reflecting Webb’s desire to look beyond what he called “jewelry-looking jewelry.” The Totems can be worn on a simple gold collar or a more elaborate chain, including a diamond-and-onyx option. Available at David Webb’s New York boutique, price on request; davidwebb.com.
VISIT THIS
Maggie Lee’s Collaged Canvases, on View in Mexico City
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| “Star Girl Info” (2025), a piece that will be featured in Maggie Lee’s exhibition “Sparkles” in Mexico City. © Maggie Lee, courtesy of the artist and Gaga, Mexico City |
By Carla Valdivia Nakatani |
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After two years in Guadalajara, the Mexico City gallery Gaga is reopening in a new space in the capital’s Condesa neighborhood. Its inaugural show will be “Sparkles,” by the New York-based artist Maggie Lee, who uses found materials such as magazine cutouts, along with fabric, beads and glitter (among other supplies), to create canvases that read like poems. On a silver-brushed surface, one 2025 piece features words clipped from magazines arranged in the shape of a star. The terms conjure teenage angst: one grouping reads “fetish happy music rock star girl.” Lee is inspired by the concrete poetry movement that was popular in the mid-20th century, in which the arrangement of words might have as much significance as the words themselves. “It’s coded, hieroglyphic,” she says, comparing the form to graffiti. At Gaga, the cosmic will be a recurring theme: Lee plans to spray-paint the walls to create a star-patterned wallpaper. “Sparkles” will be on view from Sept. 18 through Nov. 1 at Gaga, Mexico City, houseofgaga.com.
READ THIS
A Cookbook From the Parisian Restaurant Mokonuts
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| The first book from Moko Hirayama and Omar Koreitem of the restaurant Mokonuts in Paris features 100 recipes, including a variation on labneh toast (right). Left: Mickaël Bandassak |
In the nearly 10 years since Mokonuts first opened its doors in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, the cafe turned restaurant has cultivated a loyal group of regulars. Travelers make a point to return for its daily-changing menu of line-caught fish and meat sourced straight from small producers, while some locals come in several times a week for a stack of rustic chocochunk or miso-sesame cookies. Now a trip won’t be required: The owners Moko Hirayama and Omar Koreitem have published their first book with Phaidon. Divided into five sections (Morning, Appetizers, Mains, Larder and Sweet), the couple whittled down a decade’s worth of dishes to 100 recipes that make up the backbone of their style, ranging from labneh toast to an array of seasonal fruit tarts. Expect a few other surprises, but not an exact science. “Omar’s cooking and my desserts have an incredible amount of instinctiveness that cannot easily be replicated,” says Hirayama. She recommends using the cookbook as inspiration, one that might just prompt a return trip to Paris. “Mokonuts” will be released on Sept. 25, $50, phaidon.com.
FROM T’S INSTAGRAM
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| Sophie Kirk |
London’s food scene has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. If some of the city’s culinary institutions once felt like either stuffy throwbacks or slightly forlorn cafes, now movements prioritizing careful ingredient sourcing and imaginative takes on regional cooking, as well as more professional service, have transformed the city into a place where visitors can plan their days around their meals.
So what are the best plates in the British capital right now? We asked six of the city’s top chefs to debate their favorites. Click here to see the full list and follow us on Instagram.
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