This past weekend, Jaguar Land Rover hosted the fifth annual Defender Service Awards at its headquarters in Mahwah, New Jersey, and in Manchester, Vermont, bringing together six nonprofit organizations from across the U.S. and Canada for a celebration of service, purpose, and the work still ahead.
Continuing the fifth annual Defender Service Awards weekend, Jaguar Land Rover brought winners, media, and partners to Manchester, Vermont, for a day of off-roading, camaraderie, and hands-on adventure with the Defender.
On March 18, Cunard hosted an intimate evening at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo to introduce its latest collaboration with celebrity stylist Micaela Erlanger.
This week, Philips Sonicare reimagined one of the most routine parts of the day (and night) by turning it into something immersive, sensory, and unexpectedly cinematic.
As part of the 2026 Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival in New York, we had the opportunity to step inside Lucinda Childs’ repertory. On February 26 and 27, at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance, a professional workshop dedicated to Radial Courses offered a rare chance to embody the technical rigor of Childs’ minimalist language. Led by Kyle Gerry, currently dancing with the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, the three-hour session revealed that what appears spare from the audience demands extraordinary mental and physical calibration from within.
On Thursday night, The Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom bloomed into a vertical city of orchids as the New York Botanical Garden hosted its 2026 Orchid Dinner in celebration of The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle. Under the Plaza’s crystal chandeliers and iconic gilded ceilings, the room filled with a cross-section of New York: Martha Stewart in composed elegance, Alex Newell radiant and commanding, Plant Kween in full botanical glamour, alongside design leaders, philanthropists, collectors, and downtown creatives.
Held in the Chelsea Mercantile, Recollect, hosted by Nolan Feng and Silver Chang, marked its inaugural Lunar New Year dinner salon. Conceived around the Fire Horse Year, the gathering positioned Lunar New Year as both cultural preservation and contemporary authorship, bringing together a cross-disciplinary community of artists, designers, technologists, and friends to experience what celebration looks like when heritage is carried into metropolitan life. The evening centered on intentional hosting, ritual participation, and collective alignment, brought to life through thoughtful partnerships with Rémy Martin, West Elm, Maison Detto, Hudson Wilder, and 25hours NYC.
Last week, Maison Martell welcomed the Lunar New Year at Opera House in Manhattan’s Chinatown, marking the arrival of the Year of the Horse with a celebration rooted in symbolism, craftsmanship, and cultural ritual. Opera House, the upstairs cocktail space above Chinese Tuxedo on Doyers Street, was transformed with red lanterns, silk drapery framing the walls, and red tassels along the dark wood interiors. The room was saturated in crimson, the traditional color of prosperity and renewal.
The evening opened with an open cocktails and conversation with Martell representatives and guests. At the open bar, Lunar New Year–themed cocktails showcased Martell’s portfolio. The most popular was Year of the Fire Horse, a layered blend of Martell Blue Swift cognac, Ming River baijiu, shoumei tea, lemongrass, ginger, and mandarin. The drink balanced citrus brightness with spice and depth, reflecting the energy associated with the zodiac animal. Later on, the guests were surprised with a dragon dance performance that moved directly through the crowd. Accompanied by rhythmic drums, the dragon weaved between guests who were handed red envelopes containing a dollar bill and encouraged to feed it before the dance began. The gesture carries symbolic meaning: placing money into the dragon’s mouth represents an offering of good fortune and prosperity for the year ahead.
Midway through the performance, the dragon bent low and consumed a bundle of lettuce before spitting it outward in a burst of green. The ritual, known as cai qing or “plucking the greens,” draws on a linguistic pun. In Cantonese, lettuce (sang choi) sounds like “growing wealth,” and the act of scattering the greens symbolizes the distribution of prosperity to the community. As the lettuce fell across the floor, applause followed. Inside, two mahjong tables anchored one corner of the venue, staffed by a host who guided guests through the game’s rules and rhythms, with the clicking of tiles adding a steady percussive layer to the evening. In the main event area, passed bites from Opera House reflected contemporary interpretations of Chinese comfort food. Guests sampled Mala fried chicken, golden-edged turnip cakes, and sweet sesame balls that opened into savory pork filling.
Martell’s connection to the horse extends beyond this year’s theme. When transliterated into modern Chinese, the first character of Martell, “Ma” (马), means horse. The house highlighted that resonance with two limited-edition releases created specifically for the 2026 Lunar New Year. The Martell Cordon Bleu Lunar New Year Limited Edition by Chinese contemporary artist He Datian incorporated calligraphy into the design so that a horse emerges from the Chinese characters of the brand’s name. The dynamic brushwork evokes movement and vitality, echoing founder Jean Martell, who established the house in 1715 at age 21 and traveled on horseback throughout the Cognac region selecting eaux-de-vie. The cognac inside remains the original Cordon Bleu blend introduced in 1912, composed of more than 100 eaux-de-vie, primarily from the Borderies cru, known for richness, elegance, and a long, fruit-and-spice finish.
The centerpiece of the evening was L’Or de Jean Martell Zodiac Edition Assemblage du Cheval. Housed in a Baccarat crystal decanter shaped like a suspended drop, the edition features a deep red crystal horse-head stopper and a gold pedestal engraved with a horseshoe motif. Each bottle is individually numbered. Martell Cellar Master Christophe Valtaud selected aged Grande Champagne eaux-de-vie, including reserves drawn from previous Years of the Horse, to enrich the existing L’Or profile without altering its identity. The resulting blend carries notes of honey, candied fruit, florals, red fruit vibrancy, and extended length on the palate. Guests were invited to select Martell-branded folding fans placed throughout the venue. A small number of fans were discreetly marked with an “X.”, those who discovered the marking were invited to a private tasting of L’Or, creating an intimate moment within the larger celebration. Champagne from Perrier-Jouët flowed alongside cognac tastings as guests circulated between the bar, mahjong tables, and lounge seating.
Lunar New Year celebrations in New York often reflect a balance between heritage and evolution. The evening at Opera House demonstrated how established rituals like red envelopes, dragon dances, prosperity symbolism can be integrated into a modern, design-conscious setting without losing cultural meaning. In the Chinese zodiac, the horse represents vitality, momentum, and independence. Maison Martell’s Lunar New Year celebration positioned those qualities galloping into 2026.
On Saturday night, February 21, the Perelman Performing Arts Center filled steadily. Reflections: A Triptych by Benjamin Millepied, presented by L.A. Dance Project and co-presented with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, arrived in New York as a culmination of the first time the three works were shown together in their entirety. Commissioned by Van Cleef & Arpels across more than a decade, the triptych Reflections (2013), Hearts & Arrows (2014), and On the Other Side (2016) traces a long arc of Millepied’s choreographic language. Seen consecutively, the evening felt like a study in presence: how bodies negotiate time, how dancers remain porous to one another, and how sequencing becomes structure.
The first piece, Reflections, unfolded against Barbara Kruger’s bold visual design of a stark red and white typographic field that pressed language into the background as both assertion and interruption. Set to David Lang’s score, the choreography oscillated between sensual suspension and sharp-edged fragmentation, where movements began in isolation and then dissolved into fleeting proximity. Timing was precise and almost lyrical. The dancers’ responsiveness to one another felt immediate and effortless, embodying themes of presence and absence. Millepied’s ballet allowed the sequencing to breathe while one dancer initiates a phrase, another absorbs and answers it. The score functions not merely as accompaniment but as atmosphere and a frame within which the dancers improvise micro-adjustments, calibrating weight, and gaze to help the audience visualize the tension between desire and memory.
In Hearts & Arrows, set to the crystalline rhythms of Philip Glass, the pace sharpened. Glass’s music carries a layered insistence, with repetition that accumulates. Dancers entered and exited like shifting facets of a gemstone, while Liam Gillick’s sculptural lighting design became an active partner, carving the stage into zones of tension and release. A cluster of dancers spun through a sequence of lifts and turns that suddenly narrowed into an intimate pas de deux. Here, the sequencing felt architectural, as lines formed, dissolved, and reassembled, and the dancers’ timing created visual counterpoint with one body accelerating while another held suspension, one phrase extending while another contracted. The score, as with much of Glass’s work, invites endurance, as relationships formed and fractured in quick succession.
But it was the final work, On the Other Side, that landed most deeply. Set again to Philip Glass, this time to selections from his Piano Études, the piece shifted from crystalline abstraction into something more human, more porous. Dancers arranged themselves in still or near-still compositions that lingered just long enough to register emotionally before dissolving into motion. These held images, like tableaus of bodies angled toward one another, and weight shared through a shoulder or hip, felt almost painterly moving through skin rather than sound. In this final work, it felt like witnessing a single organism expanding and contracting across space. The curtain call was met with sustained applause. The stage, washed in saturated color, framed the dancers hand-in-hand.
After the performance, Millepied gave a speech during the cocktail party. He spoke first of gratitude for the partnership with PAC NYC and Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, whose continued commissioning and support have allowed these works to travel and evolve. He acknowledged the dancers, describing their dedication as essential in a cultural moment where funding for the arts has grown increasingly precarious. “Money for culture,” he noted, “is clearly more difficult everywhere.” Yet the full theater in New York stood as counterpoint, proof that audiences remain hungry for live performance.
Dance, he suggested, is often considered the least popular of the performing arts. It lacks the narrative clarity of theater or the mass familiarity of music. And yet, in cities like Paris and New York, theaters continue to fill. That persistence, he implied, is not accidental. It is evidence of belief.
On Tuesday evening, inside the auditorium at Japan Society, a room filled with cultural enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and the matcha-curious gathered for Matcha: The Next Generation, a conversation and tasting presented as part of the organization’s annual Living Traditions series in partnership with the Government of Japan.
The evening explored the shift in matcha culture from ritualized, ceremonial, and preserved to an evolving and rapidly changing state. Moderated by Rona Tison, Tea Ambassador and Executive Advisor at ITO EN North America, the panel brought together three voices shaping matcha’s future across continents: Masae Shinjo, Founder and CEO of Matcha Tourism Co., Ltd.; Kunikazu Mochitani, Co-Founder of The Matcha Factory; and Silvia Mella, Founder and Creative Director of Sorate.
Japan’s rural tea-growing regions, particularly in areas like Uji and Shizuoka, are facing demographic decline. Aging farmers, shrinking labor pools, and global demand pressures have created a tension between preservation and production. Mochitani spoke to the technological shifts underway with innovations in farming and supply chain transparency that allow producers to maintain quality while adapting to modern market realities.
Shinjo approached the topic from another dimension with tourism and storytelling. Through Matcha Tourism Co., Ltd., she has built immersive experiences that reconnect consumers to origin, to the fields, the farmers, the labor behind the bowl. In an era where matcha is often consumed as a latte or aesthetic accessory, her work reframes it as agricultural heritage. Revitalizing rural communities, she explained, requires not only innovation but visibility by inviting global audiences to witness the process rather than just consume the product. The matcha boom has been shaped by global wellness trends, social media virality, and aesthetic minimalism, but Silvia Mella emphasized intentional growth by ensuring that farmers benefit from the expansion.
Beyond the economics, the panel returned repeatedly to cultivation itself. Matcha production is labor-intensive: shade-growing tea plants weeks before harvest, carefully selecting leaves, steaming, drying, de-stemming, and finally stone-grinding into the luminous green powder. Climate change, labor shortages, and mechanization debates all shape the future of this process. Following the discussion, guests moved into a tasting reception to experience the human experience behind the shift in match and how it’s being recontextualized through technology, tourism, and women-led entrepreneurship. For a beverage often photographed more than understood, the event offered insight on how the industry is balancing preservation with evolution.