Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we’re sharing five things we are eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. We hope you’ll join us for the ride. (Sign up here, if you haven’t already, and you can reach us at tlist@nytimes.com.)
Visit This
The Tokyo Neighborhood Where Tradition Meets Modernity
Tokyo’s Kagurazaka district lies just west of a canal that was once the outer moat of Edo Castle. The neighborhood, home to samurai during that period, has since seen a new wave of shops, restaurants and cultural venues that honor the past and embrace the present in equal measure. Chief among them is Akomeya Tokyo in La Kagu, a high-end Japanese grocery with an attached restaurant and cafe that opened this year in a former book warehouse reimagined by the architect Kengo Kuma in 2014. More browsing can be done at Koharuan, which is filled with glass and ceramic works by contemporary Japanese artisans. And for indigo-dyed textiles, shirts and pinafores woven using the centuries-old kasuri technique, visit Jokogumo. You might enjoy dinner at one of Kagurazaka’s classic ryotei — Torijaya Bettei has the best udon suki — or the new outpost of Toriko, which serves yakitori and wine, and then wander back to Trunk (House), a 70-year-old former geisha house that was converted to a rental property in August. For more ideas, see tmagazine.com.
See This
A Show Focused on One Renowned Dealer’s Own Unsung Art Practice
Perhaps best known as an art dealer who discovered and promoted the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters, Betty Parsons was among the first to show Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still in the postwar male-dominated art world. She also introduced the well-lit white-walled gallery aesthetic that is so common now that it’s hard to imagine anything else (pre-Parsons, galleries sought to emulate a residential setting). But Parsons was also an artist in her own right: She produced colorful canvases inspired by nature and the spiritual realm and small sculptures made from the flotsam found on the beach near her home on the North Shore of Long Island. For the first time in nearly 40 years, Alison Jacques Gallery has brought Parsons’s works to London for an exhibition that puts her, much deservedly, in the spotlight. “Betty Parsons: The Queen of the Circus” is on view at Alison Jacques Gallery through Nov. 9 at 16-18 Berners Street, London, alisonjacquesgallery.com.
I’ve long had trouble finding a good cardigan: They’re inevitably too roomy or too cropped, and usually just a little too old-fashioned. But Leorosa, a new knitwear brand founded by Parsons grads Julian Taffel and Paolina Leccese, changes all that — just in time for the weather to turn. They’re offering a women’s cardigan with a relaxed bow collar; a lamb’s-wool men’s gilet featuring a navy body with red, yellow and green trim; and a men’s cardigan with contrasting pockets (camel and burgundy, forest green and pale pink or burnt orange and royal blue). The brand’s signature piece, the Rosa, a merino-wool and cashmere cardigan, has brightly clashing piping — which comes in a splash of primary colors — giving it, like all of the brand’s styles, a look that is simultaneously nostalgic and wholly modern. “We love the idea of it being a bit childish and whimsical,” Taffel told me. “The idea of our knitwear is very simple, so we want to exaggerate it with wacky, bright colors you might not think to match together.” Read more at tmagazine.com.
Know About This
The Artist Creating a New Mythology for the North Pole
Himali Singh Soin, a London-based poet and artist from north-central India, has spent the past couple of years contemplating, among other things, the earth’s polar caps. Primarily a writer of poetry and art criticism, her language also spills off the page and into immersive audiovisual environments, film and spoken-word performances that often dwell on the environment, issues of identity and the nature of deep time. She’s made recent appearances in exhibitions and performances at Somerset House, the Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in the English capital but is lesser known to audiences outside the United Kingdom. With a new commission from Frieze, that looks set to change: At the fair, which opens tomorrow, she will show “We Are Opposite Like That II” (2019), a fantastical film that offers a feminist answer to masculine explorer narratives and colonial unease, and which meditates on ice as an archive of stories that risk being lost to glacial melt. (The film will also be broadcast on the U.K.’s Channel 4 this fall.) Read more at tmagazine.com.
While many people celebrate fall as the return of “sweater weather,” I have long thought of cooler temperatures as “bread weather.” Suddenly, a hunk of sourdough seems like the right base for every meal. And though I usually get through a batard from She Wolf Bakery in fewer days than seems nutritionally advisable, I’ve begun keeping the partially consumed loaf fresh, while it lasts, by storing it in beeswax wrap. These reusable cotton sheets, made pliable and water-resistant by a coating of beeswax and jojoba oil, are not only more sustainable than disposable plastic wrap (they can last for up to a year) but they’re sturdier and far nicer looking. While several brands sell their own versions, the set pictured above from the Danish company Haps Nordic, with its palette of subtle autumnal colors and crisp grid motif, is the best I’ve found. $24, murrayandfinn.com.
From T’s Instagram
Home, Sweet Morocco
Pictured above is the rooftop pool at Casa Tosca in Tangier, the home of the decorator Nicolò Castellini Baldissera, whose book “Inside Tangier: Houses & Gardens” is out now from Vendome Press. “Casa Tosca is a slim 1930s building overlooking a small square at the beginning of the Marchane plateau,” says the Italian writer and horticulturist Umberto Pasti. “This traditional Moroccan home was closed in on itself, but, through careful renovation done entirely by Nicolò, it has been transformed into somewhere light that opens onto a lush garden and far-reaching views of the Strait of Gibraltar.” Follow us on Instagram.