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August 11, 2026·Edition 42

What does your perfume say about you?

Internet Microdoses

The Palais de Tokyo is hunting for a temporary home while its Paris building gets overhauled, and the search has rankled the French art world over who will inherit the foot traffic. NIMBYism, meet the avant-garde.

A colossal 2,500-year-old sculpture just surfaced, leaving UNESCO archaeologists “astounded and a bit perplexed by it.” It literally outlived every empire that stepped on it.

Vogue World is heading to San Francisco in 2027. Their traveling runway-and-culture spectacle has hit New York, London, Paris, and Milan, and will now hit the one city that dresses exclusively in quarter-zips and On Clouds. More proof that fashion follows the money.

Decoy Font protects your written text from being read by AI, scrambling text for machines while keeping it legible to human eyes. If you’re using it, you better be writing from scratch yourself.

SpaceX left its first crater on the Moon, a cast-off piece of an old rocket that floated for a year until gravity pulled it down. Elon promised to leave his mark on the cosmos. Turns out it was more of a pothole.

The 1am job interview is on the rise, all thanks to the fact that the first round is a bot that books whenever you’re free. Nothing says “we value your time” like pitching yourself to a robot in the middle of the night.

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Flattering is out
Edition 40 · July 28, 2026

Flattering is out

Aesthetic Study

Scent Wardrobe

For a little while there, everyone smelled the same. Sniff around and Le Labo’s Santal 33 was everywhere — clouding every coffee shop, every boutique hotel, everywhere someone was working on a MacBook. The scent may be sandalwood, but it started to smell vanilla. So the next wave went niche: Clue Perfumery in Darien, Wisconsin, with a scent called Warm Bulb that smells like a hot dusty lightbulb; Imaginary Authors building fragrances around made-up novels; DedCool, Kismet, Marissa Zappas, Zoologist. These small perfumeries continue to go viral online, where most have to imagine the scent by the description. That’s how you end up with scents like dandelion butter, wet mushroom, empty library.

Of course, Comme des Garçons was mixing perfume to smell like gold back in 1994, or like a flower ripped apart and ironed flat; Demeter has been bottling Dirt, Snow, and Funeral Home since before most of its buyers were born. But the audience is spiking as the next generation would rather smell like a specific afternoon than like good taste in general — a rained-on campfire, their grandmother’s kitchen, something no one at the party could place. After all, each of our signatures is uniquely ours — why should our scents all smell the same?

  • The niche market is set to double mass-market growth by 2032
  • How Santal 33 became the smell of a decade
  • Inside Clue Perfumery’s surreal Wisconsin scent lab
  • Demeter’s “representational” scents, from Dirt to Funeral Home
Cover of Scent Wardrobe collection
Scent WardrobeBy @sequencebycosmos
An image uploaded by EMMA ØVERLAND DUDLYKE on Jul 07, 2024.
An image uploaded on Oct 21, 2023.
An image uploaded on Mar 25, 2024.

August 11, 2026·Interview

Szilveszter Makó

The photographer who builds worlds from cardboard and bedsheets on the brief he ignored, and putting Rihanna inside a set held together by hand.

Szilveszter Makó
Szilveszter Makó

A moment with

Szilveszter Makó

The photographer who builds worlds from cardboard and bedsheets on the brief he ignored, and putting Rihanna inside a set held together by hand.

At fifteen, Szilveszter Makó shot a classmate on a long exposure until she came out translucent. He’d wanted to be a painter, but found it too slow. He works out of Milan now, unsigned, building his sets by hand from cardboard and bedsheets — then placing Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, and Solange inside them for Vogue, GQ Italia, and Numéro Paris. This summer he shot Rihanna for the first time, an eighteen-page story for Edward Enninful’s 72. Here he talks about the brief he ignored, the one person he still hasn’t photographed, and the object he keeps in his pocket on every shoot.

Three places you’ve felt inspired by.

My primary school in Lillafüred. It sat at the bottom of two mountains, miles from any shops or streets. I remember a river around the grounds and a stone castle to play in. The remote villages of Yunnan. I've seen old ladies so elegantly dressed and wrapped in bright scarfs complimented with headpieces, and this is how they dress each day. I was shocked, in the best of ways." Milan, though I had no intentions to live here. What remained was the city itself, the culture, architecture and presence of history carved into the walls.

What can't you stop thinking about and why?

Tilda Swinton. I have a visual board of ideas created for her, accumulated over the years. I haven't had the chance to work with her yet. She is a consistent thought, an idea, in my mind. If I have the chance to work with her, I'd be ready.

What's the best thing you've refused to do?

The brief for my shoot was simple and clean. A suit, black and white. Willem Dafoe in a suit has been done a thousand times before. Months prior I had been in Hungary with my grandma, looking through childhood photographs, and I saw my kindergarten self with a cardboard house on my head. I asked Willem to wear the headpiece and act as if his parents had just sent him to the corner for misbehaving. Three shots in and I had the image.

Who is your forever inspo?

My master, whom I really look up to and admire so much, is Paolo Roversi.

Write us a fortune cookie message.

What doesn't exist, I create.

Follow Szilveszter on Instagram.

Object Love

Spinning Orb

Spinning Orb

Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair is a hollow fiberglass sphere on a single swiveling pedestal — big enough to climb inside and pull the world shut behind you. He sketched it in 1963 to solve a plain problem: his family of four had no chair big enough to pile into. His first draft looked, in his words, “like a deformed potato,” but he quickly fixed it with a metal ring, added a red rotary telephone, and the thing was done.

Sixty years on, the shape is reminiscent of the office “focus pod” — you know, the acoustic egg you book for another awkward 1:1 Zoom with your team lead. But Aarnio built his for the living room, a place to hide inside your own home rather than your employer’s. And he also built it to feel out of time — a chair that looks beamed in from ‘70s depictions of the early 2000s, with a clunky rotary handset bolted inside. We’re kind of living in the future now, and we kind of always have been.

Quick Hits

  • Thom Bettridge is passing i-D to Steff Yotka.
  • Watch a living dress repair itself.
  • LEGO fans rebuilt Koons’ Balloon Dog.
  • Watch a Greenland iceberg do a somersault.
  • Buy Mike Myers’ cursed Cat in the Hat suit.

Puff-Puff,

Tania