What’s Cool Right Now, According to Stylish People With Great Taste

Tired of seeing the same low-slung Togo sofa in all of your fancy friends’ apartments? If you ask Nacho Alegre, the next It couch might well be these gloppy, free-form love seats from Misha Kahn, the psychedelic artist who individually handcrafts each piece in his Brooklyn studio. “They’re a little bit Day of the Tentacle, a little bit H.R. Giger, and pop at the same time,” Alegre says, noting that they’re also “somehow very American.”

During this current Cartier Tank moment, Andy Warhol has been frequently cited as a Tank aficionado. But the artist also was known to wear the Piaget Polo watch, a timepiece also favored by style god Miles Davis. The designer Gauthier Borsarello predicts Piaget is the next venerable brand to blow up in the topsy-turvy vintage watch market. For the quality, he believes, the price is crazy low right now: “You can find an amazing Piaget piece for around $2,000, and it should cost $10,000. I collected them years ago, but I gave all of them to my friends for birthdays, and now they are impossible to find.”

No matter the event, the next time you find yourself stressing over what music to play, here’s the fix: amapiano—the red-hot South African house music subgenre. “It’s just a fresh sound,” says Ade “Acyde” Odunlami, “and it’s taking over.” The fix to your playlist woes? Grab the first amapiano mix that pops up on Spotify, and let it rip.

Every Tuesday, Alegre leaves his office in Barcelona around one, bikes to the sea, hops in his five-meter dinghy—which he bought secondhand for just a couple thousand euros—and races out on the glimmering Mediterranean. “And then I’m back in the office by 3:30,” he says. Alegre doesn’t quite understand why sailing isn’t more popular. “It’s pretty physical,” he says, and cheaper than you might think. Not too long ago, he notes, all of his friends started rock climbing, “like everywhere in the world.” There’s no reason, he says, why sailing couldn’t become the next big craze.

When the fever for pearls finally breaks, the next big idea in men’s jewelry is bound to be chain mail, says Lucy Weisner, one-half of the brain trust behind Café Forgot, the buzzy New York boutique at the center of a jewelry renaissance. Weisner is hot on Aslan, a brand that laces chain mail over ties, gloves, and more. “There’s something familiar but unexpected,” she says of the medieval material. If you’re not quite ready for chain mail, she recommends starting with a brolic silver necklace from Brooklyn-based Martine Ali.

Most people hang art to bring a little color to their bare white walls. But the design move that Shannon Maldonado swears by right now flips the formula. While she was decorating Yowie, her buzzy new boutique hotel in Philadelphia, Maldonado opted for subdued art against boldly colored rooms. “When you’re mixing punchy furniture and rugs”—the way she did with a striking variety of blues, browns, lavenders, yellows, and greens—you always need “a neutral inside of that,” she says. “The artwork kind of grounds a lot of the spaces [because] it has a little less color.”

While you’re agonizing over that Shaq-size fiddle-leaf fig in your living room, real-deal plant heads are suddenly preferring to tinker with plants of an infinitesimally smaller scale. On a window sill in his LA home, Carlos Morera—cofounder of the vibey bicoastal plant purveyor Cactus Store—has about a dozen microplants, none bigger than a single Airpod. “It’s about zooming in on this tiny little thing to learn about it—where it comes from, mimicking its growth patterns—rather than merely using it as decoration,” says Morera. Caring for minuscule plants requires a high degree of precision and restraint—but the results, enthusiasts argue, deliver unmatched satisfaction.

Acyde tends to crash at hotels for weeks at a time. The trick to doing it right, he says, is to make yourself at home in the lobby. “Living areas in hotels are really, really important to me,” he says. Indeed, the lobby can become more important than your room. “That’s why I call the lobby my living space,” he says with a laugh. Acyde’s favorites include the lobbies at Nine Orchard in New York (with its killer Ojas sound system), the Tokyo Edition (for its calming Japanese modernism), and—of course—the Chateau Marmont in LA (no explanation necessary).

Finally, the nonalcoholic-drink market is getting great. A whole new breed of vintners and brewers are introducing much more nuanced and flavorful options. “The natural-wine movement has sparked a lot of interest in fermented drinks like kombucha,” Alegre points out, “which is healthy and alive—you’re not drinking something stale.” At home, he likes to sip non-alcoholic aperitifs by Ghia and specialty aged kombuchas from Ama Brewery, based in Spain’s Basque Country and created by a pair of chefs with decades of experience working in the fine-dining scene who wanted to produce fermented beverages worthy of Michelin-starred restaurants.

A fresh bouquet is the time-honored move for brightening up a tabletop. But the artist Laila Gohar, whose installations subvert quotidian household tableaux, has a design twist worth trying: Squeeze more drama out of your plants by using them past their prime. “Some flowers die in a really dignified way,” Gohar says. Tulips, for example, “look better in death than they do when they’re alive.” If you’re short on conversation fodder at your next soirée, plop a droopy arrangement on the table and watch what happens.

Buy a fancy bag—and treat it like a cheap canvas tote. Angelo Urrutia uses the Goyard Saint Louis GM (shown). “It’s a really big size and super lightweight, but it’s a workhorse—mine is starting to wear at the corners. I might patch it up at a shoe-repair shop. I think it’s more interesting like that.” He also uses a vintage scarf bag from Celine: “It’s white patent leather, and I’ve already scuffed it quite hard.” His wife wanted to use it too, but he’s beaten it up so much that he says she was, like, “Hmm, it’s okay. You can have it now forever.”

Forget the beach or the cities that turn into hot spots in high summer. The smart move now involves finding a simpler—and colder—getaway. And no place beats Switzerland. Camilla and Giulia Venturini, the twins behind the Rihanna-approved handbags, escape the bustle of Milan by venturing to the tiny lakeside hamlet of Sils Maria (population: around 750). That’s where you’ll find a tranquility that’s reputed to have soothed the spirits of Nietzsche, Joseph Beuys, and David Bowie. “It’s very simple and minimal,” say the Venturinis. “There’s the lake and the mountain and nothing more.”

Alegre is similarly smitten with the Alps and told us that his ideal itinerary involves a few days at the newly reopened Drei Berge Hotel—a century-old alpine lodge that’s undergoing a facelift from the Paris-based designer Ramdane Touhami—and then renting a house on a tiny island in the Stockholm archipelago. Nothing but forests and water. It’s the sort of place, Alegre says, where you must “go to the restaurant by boat.”

Sourdough and laminated pastries are great, but it’s time to imagine wilder possibilities for bread, says Danny Bowien. Lately he’s loving the polenta pullman loaf from She Wolf Bakery in Brooklyn and brainstorming out-there breads with baker Simone Laboa, who perfects saltwater-brined focaccia and milk-fattened Japanese shokupan at Solo Pane e Pasticceria in Bath, Maine. “I’m really into the idea of talking to the Italian baker about Japanese milk bread,” he says.

The global culinary epicenter for generations, Paris has famously suffered through something of a dining stall-out. Alegre puts it more succinctly: “Paris was dead. It was boring.” Suddenly, he’s not alone in noticing a revival. He credits a new wave of chefs mixing traditional French technique with unorthodox flavors. When Alegre is in town, he spends time in the dining rooms of Le Clown Bar or Le Dauphin—where a chill, modern vibe eclipses the old-fashioned brasserie energy of yore.

You don’t need a eucalyptus-scented towel to get in a good workout. In fact, maybe the key to finding the perfect gym is letting go of the frills, say the Venturini twins, whose favorite place to sweat is helpfully simple. “We found a place in Milan, with really ’80s architecture,” they say. “It’s always very empty and it’s cheap. The more expensive gyms we used to go to were always full with certain types of people, with a lot of competition.” At the new gym, envy or comparison isn’t a problem: “Everybody seems to have a problem.”

After the rise of hyperartisanal small-batch scents, the smart way to stand out is to delve into the catalog of legendary scents that you might recall wafting around the mall in the ’90s. “Dior’s Hypnotic Poison to us is the smell of sexy,” say the Venturinis, who love the old classics. Other throwbacks to spritz right now: Aqua di Giò, Bleu de Chanel, and 1 Million by Paco Rabanne.

The roving bon vivant Kunichi Nomura is the guy called upon when the likes of Harry Styles, the Supreme skate team, and Wes Anderson all hit Tokyo. But lately he prefers to hang out in Osaka. “Central Tokyo may be 30 percent to 40 percent tourists these days,” Nomura says. “Osaka is more alive. It’s smaller and condensed, so you can walk around, and it’s the right balance of new commercial buildings—Louis Vuitton opened [one of] its biggest stores in Asia in Osaka—and there are drunken alleys still, filled with many big signs and old bars and izakayas. I like that lively vibe.”

For a long time, a restaurant’s chicken dish was little more than a safe bet. But Urrutia sees this changing as chefs treat the staple poultry with a new respect, either using it as a canvas upon which to develop bold flavors or executing more-nuanced preparations. “People don’t order the chicken dish enough,” he says, “and to me, they’re always a really beautiful surprise.” One of his favorites? The fried version at The Modern’s Bar Room in New York.

In a world overrun with martinis, Nomura says we’re ready for a simpler corrective: the whisky highball. “I go out every night, and drink quite a lot,” he says. “Do I ever exercise? No, but I’m 50 and still skinny. My secret is I only drink tequila or highballs. And I stand and walk around while I drink—that’s the exercise.” Nomura famously appeared (alongside Keanu Reeves) in a Sofia Coppola–directed ad for Suntory whisky, the legendary Japanese distiller, whose recommended highball concoction couldn’t be easier:

• Fill a highball glass with ice.

• Pour chilled whisky and chilled soda (3 to 4 parts soda to 1 part whisky).

• Quickly stir from bottom of glass.

• Add a twist of lemon.

Don’t pad out your playlist with cover songs, make a new one stuffed with them, and celebrate the bold act of putting new spins on old ideas. “It’s a beautiful art,” Urrutia says, “to reinvent something.”

5 BANGERS TO DEPLOY ON SPOTIFY IMMEDIATELY

Peter Gabriel covering the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love”

The White Stripes covering Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”

The Beachwood Sparks covering Sade’s “By Your Side”

Stereo Total covering Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It”

Divine Comedy covering David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” (above)

A version of this story originally appeared in the GQ September 2023 issue with the title “The GQ Hype List”