15 jolly things to do in June

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Métier introduces bespoke

Experiencing big-luxury bag fatigue? It may be time to go bespoke. Melissa Morris, founder of London-based accessories brand Métier, says its made-to-order capsule was conceived in response to customer demand for “something that is really personal, perfected and thought-through”. The four-month process allows clients to choose between four sizes of the Vérité style, distinguishable by its braided handles, in a latticed lamb’s leather woven by hand in Italy and inspired by retro sports car fittings. Available in five colour combinations (ranging from black to Pomodoro and the deliciously old-school brown, cream and black check), a solid brass plate on the bag’s interior can also bear a personal inscription. “The notes have been so sweet,” says Morris. Ellie Pithers

SEE

Andreas Gursky revisits Montparnasse

Working with his large-format camera, German artist Andreas Gursky is able to photograph man-made and natural landscapes, from a Prada store to the banks of the Rhine, with an almost dizzying degree of detail. In his new work, Paris, Montparnasse II (2025), on show at Gagosian Paris from this week, he revisits the vast Immeuble Mouchotte apartment block in Paris, which he last photographed in 1993. “I was interested not in repeating a photograph, but in examining how time inscribes itself, subtly, almost imperceptibly, on the surface of modern life,” says Gursky. “The building has changed, yes, but more than that, our way of seeing it has changed.” The original photograph shows a grid of hundreds of apartments coloured by curtains and furniture. The clarity of Gursky’s new image, intensified by decades of technological development, is so great that we can read the titles of the books lining the shelves. “We’ve moved from a more atmospheric view to one that searches for systems, data, and meaning beneath the surface.” Aoife Murray

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Beaded jewellery from a make-believe world

Kasmira’s Moon began life as an illustration of a fairytale, created by artist-jeweller Alexandra Jefford when she was a fine art postgraduate student at London’s Central Saint Martins. Over the years, the dragons, birds, and magical creatures that populated the make-believe world were employed in bedtime stories for Jefford’s children. This month, the characters take the form of six 18ct-gold “talismans” (from £890), presented alongside a series of precious and semi-precious beaded necklaces and 18ct-gold chains (from £700) available exclusively at Dover Street Market London.

Each talisman has a playful name and corresponding trait: Sam Sun (joyful), Moody Moon (shy), Fatty Puffs (empathetic), Mr Boots (boisterous), Baby Jeff (meditative) and Iguana Pickle (mischievous). Clients can also create bespoke beaded necklaces, choosing from rubies, sapphires, emeralds, Paraiba and other semi-precious and glass beads personally sourced by Jefford from Mexico, Afghanistan, Burma, Japan and beyond. “The six all have different qualities; ethereal, grounded, warm, cool,” says Jefford, who plans to expand the line-up in the future. “The characters are meant to communicate with our inner child.” EP

BID

Modernist icons go up for auction

In 1937, now-cult designer Frances Elkins conceived of the San Francisco home of businessman James D Zellerbach, deploying seashell sconces, wall-to-wall mirrors, and endless oak panelling. The bar, card room, gallery and foyer have remained unchanged, until now. This month Christie’s New York will auction off their furnishings, revealing Elkins’ flair for naturalism and early appreciation of European modernists. Highlights include a pair of plaster “Oiseau” sculptures by Alberto Giacometti (estimated at $2mn to 3mn) and an oak “Aragon” table by Jean-Michel Frank (estimated at $400,000 to $600,000). MW

SEE

Dior couture curated by Carine Roitfeld

A new exhibition in New York this month charts the story of Dior couture through all seven of its past creative directors. Looks from each of the designer’s eras – beginning with Christian Dior’s Bar Jacket, moving through John Galliano’s vampy lace-up boots and visible seams to outgoing designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s frothy tulle gown – have been styled by Carine Roitfeld and photographed by Brigitte Niedermair. Alongside the photographs, a programme of panels and talks will take guests behind the scenes of Dior’s tailoring atelier, including a live demonstration of the Bar Jacket being worked on. Baya Simons

DRINK

Cult bar Wine is Fine pops up in Paris

This month, Paris’s go-to neighbourhood bistro Le Cornichon is hosting the team from Wine is Fine, a buzzy restaurant in Monastiraki, Athens, for a summer feast. They’re bringing over bottarga pasta, buyurdi spreads (baked feta with tomatoes and peppers), stuffed pittas and crisp glasses of natural wine from their homeland. Inès Cross

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’90s-inspired sunglasses by YMC and Cubitts 

Following the success of their ’70s glasses collaboration, fashion label YMC has teamed up with spectacle maker Cubitts on two new styles referencing bold, rectangular shapes from the 1990s. The Akira and Kitano frames are named for the super-sleek shades worn by Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa and Takeshi Kitano, and come in black or blue and grey respectively. IC

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Joan Jonas’s drawings alight in Tokyo

Pace Gallery Tokyo’s latest show explores the drawings of performance artist Joan Jonas. Japan is a natural home for the American artist’s ink and watercolour pencil drawings, which are populated with bunnies inspired by the folkloric “moon rabbit” Tsukino Usagi, as well as  an assortment of species copied from “a Japanese dictionary of fish” Jonas found in a San Diego thrift store. Marion Willingham

EAT

An OG smash burger arrives in London

Parisian smash burger joint Dumbo, celebrated for its dry-aged beef, artisanal buns and the elegance of its eateries, arrives in Shoreditch this month, the brand’s first international outpost. The airy, industrial aesthetic of the new space was conceived by Red Deer architecture firm, who are behind St John and Lina Stores. There, crisped patties and twice-cooked fries are available straight from the street-facing hatch or in a covered garden at the back. IC

BID

Buy a piece of Princess Diana’s wardrobe

Have you ever lusted after Diana, Princess of Wales’s floral Bellville Sassoon dress? Perhaps her scarlet ski suit was more your speed? Whatever your preference, both are to be auctioned by Julien’s at The Peninsula Beverly Hills in LA this month. As well as fashion highlights – heels, hats and handbags all worn by the princess herself – there are childhood photos, signed portraits and Royal Wedding ephemera. Many lots, including a pair of green satin pumps ($2,000-$4,000), will donate a portion of proceeds to Muscular Dystrophy UK, long-term beneficiary of the Princess’s charitable activity. Bids can be made in person and online, with the lowest estimate – a novelty Queen Elizabeth II scarf – starting at $50. Rosanna Dodds

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David Alekhuogie reconsiders Walker Evans

The 1935 MoMA exhibition African Negro Art was among the first to present African objects as artworks rather than artefacts. More than 600 sculptures were shipped over from the continent, assembled in the New York museum and photographed by Walker Evans, whose tightly framed images were later republished by The Met with the title Perfect Documents. “African sculpture was thereby filtered through the lens of western modernism,” says photographer David Alekhuogie.

For his latest project, A Reprise, Alekhuogie gives Evans’s images new life, pasting them onto three-dimensional structures, replacing their white backgrounds with bright textiles from Nigeria and east Africa, and setting some of them on makeshift plinths – delivery boxes, or a biography of James Baldwin. He wanted to highlight the fact that we are looking at a photograph, which can’t represent the physical sculpture’s “nature, its spirit”. “It is important to think critically about how history works,” Alekhuogie says. “Who gets to tell it? Whose narrative does it serve?” Rebuilding the sculptures, he says, became an act of “performative remembrance”. MW

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PJs for the long haul

Swedish essentials clothing brand CDLP and Lake Como’s hotel Passalacqua have collaborated on a summer capsule collection inspired by the idea of dolce far niente, “the sweetness of doing nothing”. It comprises breezy shirts and shorts, a postcard-print T-shirt and a silk twill scarf featuring an illustration inspired by 1930s travel. In the accompanying campaign, Milan-based stylist and editor Robert Rabensteiner demonstrates how they might be worn: hanging out by the pool or speeding along in a bright orange golf buggy. Aoife Murray

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Cindy Sherman arrives in Menorca

“I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character,” Cindy Sherman told John Waters in an interview in 2012. The thrill of concealment has driven the photographer through four decades of work, seeing her pose as a Sophia Loren-esque movie star and collage photographs of herself to create strange new faces. Her oeuvre forms a study of “the photographic presentation of women”, says Tanya Barson, curator of a new career-spanning exhibition of Sherman’s work at Hauser & Wirth’s Menorca gallery next month. “Sherman’s project portrays such a vast range of women, female subjectivities and identities, but also how they construct themselves for society.” In this photograph, for instance, part of her breakthrough series Untitled Film Stills, Sherman captured herself in front of a church, looking demurely towards the ground. For Barson, it evokes the work of early modern photographers Ansel Adams or Paul Strand, and the 1952 Western High Noon, which starred Grace Kelly as the wife of a heroic town marshal. The pleasure here, as in all of Sherman’s work, is that she invites us to imagine our own story because “they are moments from a film that doesn’t exist”. BS

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Tidy up with Tracey Emin

Returning to the National Portrait Gallery in 2023 after its renovation, visitors were greeted by three enormous bronze doors, etched with the faces of 45 women. They were designed by Tracey Emin, with the intention of counterbalancing the 14 busts of male painters that sit atop the roundels of the building. The gallery has now made the drawings for the grand metal doors available in a less forbidding form: a tea towel. Cotton linens feature three of Emin’s expressive preparatory acrylic drawings (£15), as do a range of plates (£65), mugs and jugs (£35). BS

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Postcards from paradise

During the late 2000s, Meg Gage Williams, a former intelligence risk analyst, and her partner Philip James Baber, an advertising photographer and the FT’s former head of consumer advertising sales, left the UK and started living an idyllic existence in a surf hotel in Sri Lanka. They divided their time between surfing, raising their two young children and amassing a private collection of James Bond movie artwork. It was the latter that led to a chance discovery of a pile of old advertisements for tea and films made in Sri Lanka in the early 1900s. They inspired the couple to establish Stick No Bills, a company dedicated to creating licensed fine art prints of posters from the golden era of graphic advertising.

Today, the collection spans art deco-inspired graphics of Balearic train journeys and contemporary illustrations of skiing in Verbier, which are sold from galleries in Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Dubai, Galle Fort in Sri Lanka and London. Sizes range from postcard-format (£25.95 for 10) to larger limited editions (from £108) and “Master” editions featuring 24ct-gold lettering applied by the gilder favoured by the Spanish royal family, which sell for more than £16,000 apiece. Simon de Burton