Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. This week, we’ve turned it into a Mother’s Day gift guide, with recommendations on what we’re coveting for ourselves and considering for our maternal figures. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday. And you can always reach us at [email protected].
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Recipes From the Italian Countryside
It was nostalgia for her mother’s cooking and memories of her parents’ boisterous dinner parties that led the British-born artist and chef Amber Guinness, who grew up on a secluded 18th-century farm near Siena, Italy, to start the Arniano Painting School on the family property with her friend, the British artist William Roper-Curzon. While Roper-Curzon teaches landscape painting to artists of all levels of ability, Guinness keeps the students happily fed with fresh, flavorful versions of the dishes she first learned to cook from her mother, which she often serves al fresco in the estate’s gardens. Those recipes are collected in Guinness’s first cookbook, “A House Party in Tuscany,” out this week in the U.S., and include the hearty comfort food — like artichoke and béchamel pie, and spinach and ricotta malfatti — her guests clamor for. Her sister does, too. “Claudia is always asking me for Mama’s recipes,” says Guinness with a laugh, “so now I can just tell her to look in the book.”
“I do not like grand flower arrangements,” proclaims the artist Abbie Zabar. “I love drawing simple flowers that are not pompous, that you pick up at the local bodega and throw into an empty pickle jar.” Her colored-pencil drawings of this style of flora, daffodils, hyacinth and mums housed in jars, inexpensive vases or, in one case, a chipped creamer, are featured in “Bodega Bouquets,” an exhibit at Eerdmans gallery in New York. Those familiar with Zabar’s work (aside from that in the culinary sphere — she co-founded E.A.T., the venerable gourmet shop and cafe, with her ex-husband, Eli Zabar) may be surprised at the pivot from her previous floral obsession: Every week for a decade starting in 1995, she sketched the decidedly not-simple bouquets that greet visitors in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Zabar, who is also an avid gardener, is asked to name a preferred image from the show, she demurs. “No favorites,” she says. “Though I do like the weedy-looking ones.” “Bodega Bouquets” is on view through May 26.
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Pear-Shaped Gemstone Jewelry
The New York-based fine jewelry brand Foundrae, which was started by the wife-and-husband duo Beth and Murat Bugdaycay in 2015, has developed a cult following among men and women alike for its variety of vintage-inspired 18-karat gold chains, pendants and medallions (as well as for its colorful enamel pieces and cigar band-style rings). Customizable details — an initial here, an engraving there — make these objects feel intensely personal, modern heirlooms to keep forever. Until now, Foundrae had steered clear of using larger gemstones, instead incorporating a small diamond or two for subtle sparkle. But starting this month, alongside a new collection of medallions representing the state of reverie, the line is offering pear-shaped diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires, each in a burnished gold lozenge setting. “I was thinking about love and how there’s no such thing as a perfect pair,” says Beth, explaining how hard it can be to match two pear-cut stones, the difficulty an apt metaphor for the quest for true love. With Mother’s Day around the corner, perhaps some of us — many of Foundrae’s customers shop for themselves these days — might like to set together a diamond and a sapphire in tribute to one of life’s most enduring bonds.
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Vivid Prints by Dries Van Noten
Since the 1980s, the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten has worked closely with various Indian weavers and textile artisans, and twice during his visits to the country has witnessed the aftermath of Holi, the Hindu festival of spring, during which streets, walls, buildings and even pigeons are smattered with diffuse neon pigments. It was those scenes of riotous color — fuchsia stained with green, coral crossed with light blue — and a desire to support his Indian partners after their businesses were impacted by the country’s Covid-19 spike last year, that led the designer, an expert colorist, to create a new ready-to-wear collection. Their hand-woven and hand-embroidered fabrics appear on caftans sprinkled with summer flowers, malachite green silk pants and a silk ikat suit in delphinium purple, which are available exclusively on Mytheresa — and sure to delight a mother with a taste for glamour.
In 2019, Stephanie Danan and Justin Kern — the married co-founders behind Co, the women’s wear line known for effortless separates and voluminous silhouettes — introduced Galerie Co, an online platform offering vintage home accents. This month, they are adding their first original pieces: ceramic vessels created in collaboration with the Los Angeles-based artist Victoria Morris. “Everything we sell on the site is quite rare and one-of-a-kind,” says Kern. “It was exciting to find a contemporary who’s carrying on that tradition with California pottery.” The works were inspired by Co’s showroom in the Hollywood Hills, the noteworthy Hendershot House, designed in 1962 by modernist architect Richard Neutra, which Morris describes as “a really controlled space surrounded by this wild nature”; the variegated green tones found on a volcanic-glazed vase recall the lush foliage in Co’s backyard. Display-worthy as the ceramics may be, Morris insists that they are made to be used. “I envision them at a dinner party or family gathering,” she says, “and hopefully being passed on to the next generation.”
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Block-Printed Table Linens
After decamping from the city over a decade ago for a quieter life with her family on a farm in England, the writer and former fashion director at Barneys New York Amanda Cutter Brooks couldn’t help returning to the world of retail with an eponymous shop in the Cotswolds. The store carries a range of fetching home goods sourced from around the world, all of which make for lovely gifts: mouth-blown glass tumblers in shades of olive or amber, Indian cotton nightshirts and ceramic serving platters from Hungary. A sweet pick for a mother might be Cutter Brooks’s exclusive table linens from Stamperia Bertozzi, a century-old, family-owned company in Emilia-Romagna that produces its wares the old-fashioned way — made to order and block-printed by hand with vegetable-based dyes from recipes passed down through three generations. The tablecloths with tiny strawberries and winding roses are sweet, but we’re particularly fond of Bertozzi’s print of oversize peach peonies on a crosshatched background. The napkins look like something from nonna’s cabinet, and are perfect for a summer table.
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Sporty Summer Shoes
The concept for Teva, the brand of functional sport sandals with a rubber base and Velcro straps, came to Grand Canyon river guide Mark Thatcher in the early 1980s as he struggled to find proper footwear for water activities. While outdoorsy types, like my camping-obsessed mother, have worn them ever since, the highly practical style has in recent years appeared on runways: The spring/summer 2022 Hermès version is a light flatform grounded by the luxury brand’s trademark hardware, while The Row sent out a sandal with a molded leather footbed and foam midsole as part of its pre-fall 2022 collection. The Japanese label Suicoke has gained fans for its performance sandals, particularly the fast-selling collaborations with brands like Bape and Doublet, the most recent of which featured animal-print straps. Particularly playful is an iteration from the New York label Loeffler Randall, which is dressed up with a pretty raffia bow.