We round up all our favourite things for the winter issue of TANK. Please, take a seat
We shot the season’s best fashion, furniture and more among the objects d’art at Tom Dixon’s studio at King’s Cross. Well, it’s more of an emporium than a studio – the repurposed train depot hosts a workshop, restaurant, showroom and entire design ecosystem. Dixon’s career was made by a chair: the S-shaped design he created for Cappellini in the 1980s made his name and spawned a thousand imitators (and, as evidenced here, is light as a feather). Here, Sofia wears a suit and accessories from Alessandro Michele’s first Valentino collection, which he dropped in June in a surprise move at the end of Milan’s Mens Fashion Week.
The Fat Lounge chair by Tom Dixon wears shoes by Marsèll.
Round and round and round again – welcome to the circular economy
Sofia wears necklaces collected from around the world by Caroline Issa – warm glass beads from Iran, Tajikistan and Yemen. Her dress and bag are by Givenchy.
Carry your art on your arm, and transport yourself to shaded, blossom-filled valleys
The Lady Dior, with its refined architectural design, embodies the elegance of Dior. Usually adorned with cannage lines – the geometric pattern of squares that has become synonymous with the house – it merges Dior’s well-established codes with expert craftsmanship. Since 2016, the Dior Lady Art project has invited international artists to reimagine the bag as a canvas, expressing their unique vision. For the 9th edition, 11 artists including Sara Flores, Faith Ringgold, and Jeffrey Gibson transform the Lady Dior into a work of art. The bag featured here is from Korean artist Woo Kukwon, whose work often features little figures, inspired by fairy tales, who wander in seemingly idyllic but perhaps quite frightening landscapes. Nell Whittaker
Vaulting time and space, the Warburg Collection finds a new home in social memory
Aby Warburg’s role as an art historian and theoretician of the meaning of images has long shadowed how we think about visual culture. In 1926, Warburg founded the Warburg Institute in Hamburg, and following his exile in 1933 the Institute found a home in Bloomsbury in 1958 in a building designed by Charles Holden. For years the Institute, with its unique library containing many esoteric texts and other rarities, was one of London’s best-kept secrets. In 2022 the Institute began the Warburg Renaissance, a £14.5 million project to renovate its premises. Architecture studio Haworth Tompkins’ design for the Institute builds on Warburg’s own philosophy of the importance of using the memory of the past to activate the present by incorporating aspects of the Institute’s original premises in Hamburg. Jackson Mount
View of the reception area at the Warburg Institute, London. Photo by Hufton & Crow
As Derek Jarman wrote, “Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial.”
Sofia wears a coat and belt by Sportmax and is framed by three brass Beat Vessels by Tom Dixon.
For too long, the lobe has had all the fun. Viva the embellished earphone
Akoya pearls, grown in the frigid waters off Kyushu Island, Japan, perch atop TASAKI’s in-ear headphones. The “balance” model provides a beautiful mix of the practical and the urbane, and proves that there is no accessory that can’t be improved with the addition of a little string of pearls.
For too long, the lobe has had all the fun. Viva the embellished earphone
CHANEL Watches presents a modern take on the montre sautoir, a wearable timepiece popular in the Bell Époque, updated for the contemporary flâneur with in-ear headphones. The gold-plated steel and leather chain apes the clasps of CHANEL’s bags. Welcome to a new era of Haute Listening.
The absent-minded traveller can now carry an image of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo on your bag – so you’ll never forget where you’re staying
All of Sofia’s clothes are by Fendi. Her bag is by Sense of Lake with bag charms by Prada.
Worm-like memories find their way to the surface at Mardin’s sixth art biennale
As part of her installation titled Kasten Gömülmüştür (“Buried Intentionally”, 2024), Aslı Çavuşoğlu created four ceramic masks from photographs of herself taken during moments of crisis in her life. Inspired by the sacred and mysterious burial practices of the ancient city of Göbekli Tepe and the Mexican ritual of wrapping dead bodies in mats, Çavuşoğlu attempted to bury her past personas, wrapping them in old straw rugs, while their figures writhe up from the ground.
The work (captured here in a photo by Monica Fritz) which formed a central element within the sixth Mardin biennale earlier this summer, gained a powerful resonance among the ancient city’s honeycomb-coloured mansions and terraces. During the biennale’s opening, Turkey’s high society and cultural elite decamped from the west for a series of parties and events in the wild east, making forays guided by the curatorial team into the vagaries of French theory and sipping cocktails while looking out over the great plain of Mesopotamia. Yet amongst all the noise, the city’s involute history remained omnipresent, refusing a quiet burial. Thomas Roueché
Desire lines are the name given to the shortcuts formed by feet in defiance of pathways
Boucheron’s Quatre Classique rings and bracelet dangle from the branching stone tree, which point every which way.
The essence of travel is spontaneity – a sense of which you can incubate wherever you are
Sofia is wearing a bespoke Tom Dixon necklace with a shirt and trousers by Wales Bonner and Miu Miu shoes. Dixon dropped in at the last shot, looked at our table of accessories, said, “Give me ten minutes” – and came back with this necklace formed of stones strung on wire (with a plastic straw covering the wire at the back, for the benefit of Sofia’s neck).
Forgotten letters reclaim their voice in a new sound-based children’s book
In Azbuka Strikes Back: an Anti-Colonial ABCs (Walther & Franz König, 2024), anthropomorphised letters protest for choral communism, experience labour alienation, recall former lives in poetry and music over tea and dates and eventually fight for their emancipation. Art collective Slavs and Tartars and Leah Feldman, associate professor in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, collaborated on a book project that charts the lives of letters during the Soviet project of cyrillisation. Borrowing the form of the children’s sound book, Azbuka Strikes Back tells the story of the upheaval between 1927 and 1991 of the languages spoken by 25 million people. The book’s main text is accompanied by illustrations of letters engaged in hard graft, existential crisis and revelry, and buttons play audio clips of difficult-to-pronounce letters. This is the perfect purchase for parents trying to combat the Westernised perspectives of primary school pedagogy, or as a gift for toddlers looking for new and exciting ways to drive their parents insane – once triggered, the book’s audio clips play on a loop regardless of whether the book is opened or closed. Jackson Mount
A visage peers from these vast and trunkless legs of cork. Look on my works and despair
All Sofia’s clothes and accessories are by Gucci, except her necklaces, which belong to the stylist.
Georgia’s favourite late-20th century painter, Karlo Kacharava, finds a new voice in the country
If Niko Pirosmani, Georgia’s most famous painter of the early 20th century, was the archetypal solitary artist, then Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994), one of Georgia’s most influential painters of the late 20th century, was his antithesis. Kacharava’s life and art were conducted in collaboration, sociability and openness, reaching across cultural, temporal and formal boundaries in the pursuit of a simultaneously universal and individual expression.
Tbilisi, Cologne, Madrid, Paris, Berlin and Moscow were his cities; Nick Cave, Susan Sontag, Henrik Ibsen his influences. His life was short but prolific, and while he only lived to see three years of a newly independent, post-Soviet Georgia, his works helped usher in a new wave of Georgian avant-garde expression and articulated a new visual style at a time of great social and political upheaval.
Kacharava’s works defy easy categorisation. His first solo exhibition outside Georgia – Sentimental Traveller, mounted earlier this year at S.M.A.K in Ghent, and combining paintings, works on paper and illustrated diaries – pays tribute to this formal inventiveness. An artist, critic and poet, his paintings lean towards the literary, often containing slogans or textual references, while his writing is imbued with painterly details. “Moons light heavy bridges,” reads one line in his poem “The Angel of Travels”.
Installation view of Sentimental Traveller. Photo by Dirk Pauwels. Courtesy S.M.A.K.
Formally trained at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in the 1980s, Kacharava broke with many traditional aspects of art-making, both in the depiction of his subjects and through his method, in particular in elevating the visibility of his artistic process. Many of Kacharava’s major works appear closer to sketches, storyboards, and embryonic ideas visualised on paper, inviting us to see the artwork’s process of formation as the ultimate artwork itself. Unsettled, and often unsettling, these works appear caught in the liminal space between sketchbook and canvas, resisting the fixity of either.
Through this stylistic informality, Kacharava nonetheless took on big, human themes: collective memory, gender and class, politics and censorship, explored through a personal lens. Exemplary of this is General. Für Helena, his monumental wall-sized painting from 1988, dedicated, like many of his pieces, to Helena Lundberg, a Finnish academic who became both muse and lover to Kacharava. The striking, seemingly blood-spattered figure tells a personal story of the loss of his own father at the age of three, and Kacharava’s subsequent ascension to the role of the protector. The disproportionate physique of the general, whose oversized military uniform hides a slender, skinny figure beneath, suggests this was a role taken on prematurely – a child wearing adult clothes. But it also speaks to Georgia’s wider struggle, a country whose history has been dominated by bloody occupations and stories of resistance. One cannot look at this painting without thinking of Kartlis Deda (Mother Georgia), the sword-bearing statue that stands guard over Tbilisi, the country’s most prized symbol of strength and protection.
Kacharava embraced a multicultural and pluralistic outlook that, while avant-garde in his time, has become the dominant discourse of young Georgians today. In this sense, Kacharava’s legacy goes beyond an aesthetic. When the country’s political direction hangs in the balance, Kachavara remains an endless source of inspiration. Matthew Janney
FILA, once manufacturer of wool underwear for ruddy Italian mountaineers, opens a new path in streetwear
For ten years, Lev Tanju has been making Palace one of the cultest labels in streetwear. This year, he was announced as creative director of FILA+, a new line at FILA that will be Tanju’s first foray into designing outside of Palace – and FILA must be hoping that he’ll bring some of his capacity to inspire feverish loyalty with him.
A surprising collaboration between Fabergé and Game of Thrones is hatched – and adorned with Gemfields stones, takes flight
Sofia wears a Fabergé x Game of Thrones White and Rose Gold Diamond Transformable Ear Cuff.
In the depths of winter, appliqué flowers bloom and a cluster of bag charms sprout
Sofia’s dress, hat, bag, bag charms and a pink bag charm worn as a necklace are all by Prada. Her other necklaces are the stylist’s own.
Maximise dressing by sporting three shirts – wearing two as usual and one on your bag
All Sofia’s clothes and accessories are by Miu Miu.
Ultramodern automotive techniques meet wild west leather
DSquared2 romper suit and Christian Louboutin boots and belt are contrasted with a silver Tom Dixon chair, made in collaboration with HYDRO, the largest aluminium company in the world.