Neue Luxury is a global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

• CAPITANO SPAVENTO

  The Couture Edition

  Prestigious porcelain company Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg looked to fashion to reprise the original avant garde status of their signature Commedia dell’Arte figurines. The Couture Edition was a gesture of rebellion in keeping with the company’s original integral focus on commissioning leading artists of the day.

• LUKAS MACHNIK

  A curator's art

  Lukas Machnik is far more than the sum of his parts. In myriad ventures— interior design, furniture, objects, art—the Chicago-based Pole imbues his work with the eye of an auteur. Avant-garde, haunting, graphic, bold—these are hardly commercial adjectives, and yet this is how you might describe the Machnik aesthetic, the ability to cross-reference and stamp personality onto a project with a profound disregard for convention.

• MICHAEL ZAVROS

  Hyperreal beauty

  In the same year as Michael Zavros was born, 1974, the great Italian writer and philosopher, Umberto Eco, was exploring the realm of ‘hyperreality’ in America. This exploration was published the following year in a landmark essay, Travels in Hyperreality.

ART & AUTOMOTIVE

• A BLACK SWAN MOMENT

  Introduing the McLaren 570S

  Four thousand cars, a tiny number in automotive terms, is McLaren Automotive’s goal. Established in 2010, the marque is evidently still in its infancy. The F1—the fastest naturally aspirated production car to ever be built and one that still remains a global automotive supercar icon since its inception in 1992—remains a persuasive element at the heart of McLaren’s brand identity.

• MAKING SCIENCE VISIBLE

  In conversation with Mali Moir

  Mali Moir pulls out a chair and sits amid the dissonant quiet of the Melbourne Observatory’s Whirling Room at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. Built in 1905 to house a machine that tested air flow equipment, and named for the deafening sound it once made, the room is entirely silent now, save for the occasional chirp of a bird outside.

• MASTERS OF HOROLOGY

  Neue Selects

  There is a word in Sanskrit—‘kalpa’—which means the passing of time on a grand, cosmological scale. Native speakers uphold that the movement of celestial bodies can be observed only during meditative transcendence. Horology might be a noble science, but the watchmakers on this list, who approach their work with temerity and lyricism, prove that the tradition holds something divine.

• MADAME NATHALIE VRANKEN

  The art of champagne

  Champagne, like philosophy, romance, loftiness, and insouciance, is one of the beaux arts of the French people. Nathalie Vranken, co-owner and head of the marketing division of Vranken-Pommery Monopole, embodies all of them with dauntless equipoise. She is self-deprecating and graciously curt; her sentences are drenched in introspective solemnity and fitful dreaming.

• THE SENSORIAL ECONOMY OF LUXURY

  Neue Perspective

  We live in a very anodyne world and frankly it’s bland. Eccentricity is not well regarded. Women no longer walk pet black pigs in Hyde Park with their trotters gilded—as some did before the First World War—or dye their doves rainbow colours, as did Lord Gerald Berners at his country home.