How to End NYFWM

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Culture

Iconic New York Corners on Prada Mode

June 09, 2026

Danish film director, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Japanese video game creator, Hideo Kojima, are worlds away, but their friendship transcends distance, language barriers, and even time. Building off of last year’s exhibition of the same title, Satellites II expands on human connection and communication. As a project of Prada Mode, — a contemporary cultural series bridging diverse audiences and luminaries — the city’s historic hot spots transform into immersive, engaging galleries.

During the initial private days, Prada Mode welcomes its members-club to talks, workshops, performances, parties, screenings hosted in The Hotel Chelsea. The following days open to the public, with four additional iconic New York corners acting as site-specific installations. As an immersive cosmic voyage about communication and connection, Satellites II bridges culture to foreign spaces.

The Hotel Chelsea makes a perfect location to narrate a reflection on public, domestic, and intimate environments, balancing private spaces and collective accessibility. Perhaps Refn and Kojima could have been strangers in a shared lobby space, but as fate would have it, the two share a friendship that isn’t deterred by cultural nuances, foreign dialects, or tens of thousands of miles. Their collaboration is one rooted in pure creativity, not bound by technicalities such as language but encouraged by raw feeling. Together, their dialogue explores the shared fundamental need to create and the failure encoded in the process of creation, experiences that define humanity and our approach to art.

As the city’s beacon for the aspiring creative community and symbol of cultural intersection, the hotel hosts the two day series of exclusive programming. Programming features the Prada Mode Channel, a bespoke broadcast in the vein of a cable station. In collaboration with journalist and TV-host, Mikael Bertelsen, the variety of programs invoke analog television troupes from talk shows to horoscopes to music performances. The channel acts as a portal to Satellites II, reiterating the 1970s-80s as a potent element to American culture. As a similar homage, a screening curated by the two will display three cult classics Japanese anime films at the Angelika Film Center during one of the following days open for the public.

Satellites II continued on-site for public view at The Hotel Chelsea, Prada Broadway, and Kat’z Delicatessen. Two futuristic television stands depict Refn and Kojima, who are in conversation. A huge chrome Prada vending machine glows white light and gifts guests exclusive Prada Mode merchandise. At Kat'z Deli, guests also receive a treat from Juno the Bakery, a Copenhagen delicacy (Refn's home country). During the exclusive first night, Kat'z Deli flipped over the tables to reveal a dancefloor lit by the restaurant's neon signs. The multiday event blended public spaces with private exclusivity, not hindering the flow of the space’s intended market but honoring human entanglement. The creative installations bypass origin and intention, place and time, such as the historic spaces they were held in.

Hideo Kojima, Sophie Thatcher, Nicolas Winding Refn

Culture

Berlin Night After Glow Documents The Rawness of Post-Nightlife Faces

Berlin nightlife is less about places and parties than about the human beings who create them. I wanted to capture not just who these people are, but who nightlife allows them to be.

Noltekuhlmann’s photography book, Berlin Night After Glow, is all about capturing hedonism in its rawest form. His aim is never to pose his subjects, but to allow the liminality of such an experience to expose itself in the shape of facial expression and body language. The Los Angeles and Berlin-based photographer pictured more than 350 people immediately after raving and clubbing in Berlin. Some were overcome with emotion or exhaustion, and others were overcome with euphoria or vulnerability. The states of mind pictured in these images are residual signs of nights fully lived.

Brought forth by Kehrer Verlag, Berlin Night After Glow is a book that shows us just how ritualistic and how sacred acts like dancing and partying can be. They are experiences that heighten emotions, blood flow, and connection with the self all at once. They prompt fashion choices that are “fetish-inspired” and disrupt traditional gender norms. These byproducts are all inevitable ones, because to surrunder your body to the art of the party is also to let go of the inhibitions that stump the emergence of our true selves in our day-to-day lives.

Culture

Eddie Huang Comes Undone

June 02, 2026

We were supposed to meet at noon. I was running fifteen minutes late. The kind of late that, in New York, means nothing, but still. I found him already there, coffee in hand, moving through The RealReal on a busy Saturday like a man with a specific mission. Which, it turns out, he was.

Eddie Huang — chef, bestselling author, the man who turned a Taiwanese bun shop in the East Village into a cultural institution — was on a Birkin hunt. Not just any Birkin. His wife's astrologist had been specific: earthy tones. Warm. Sensual. The kind of bag that carries meaning beyond its price tag. "She's been hinting at this for months," he told me, before his eyes lit up, scanning a shelf. We found the right sales associate immediately, a woman with obvious taste who, I was pleased to discover, knew exactly what Office Magazine was.

Photography and Text by Simon Rasmussen

The budget was $15k. We laughed about it, but he was serious. Eventually, they found the bag: a deep, earthy red. The kind of red that doesn't announce itself, it just is. Right. It ended up closer to $17K, but Eddie didn't flinch.

I'll admit I wasn't sure I personally understood it, spending that kind of money on a handbag. But he explained it with a clarity that I've been thinking about ever since. "I love gifting my wife," he said. "Spending time finding the right thing. No matter the price, almost, prioritizing her and putting in some effort to show her that I listen and I choose her."

He chose her. That's the line that stayed with me.

The context makes it funnier and sweeter in equal measure. The Knicks won Game 4 over the Cavs last week and, he revealed with the delivery of a man who has fully accepted his fate, she locked him out of the house. He was grinning when he said it. This wasn't an apology bag or a reconciliation gesture; it was a love language. Her love language. She has boots, he told me. "Her putting on her boots in the bedroom, that's love for me." They've apparently worked out a system. The Finals are coming. The bag felt like the right time.

We walked after, past Baohaus on our way through the city. His restaurant, his house, the place where the whole story started. It's the East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night. He noticed one of his staff members looking anxious and paused to quietly explain what might be going on with him, reading the situation, naming it with care. It was an offhand moment, the kind you don't perform for a journalist. It told me everything.

Eddie is one of those people you can't help but like. Not because he's performing likability — the opposite, actually. He's energetic without being exhausting, funny without needing to be, sharp about the world and genuinely warm about the people in it. He built a food show, opened restaurants, wrote books, and still has the emotional bandwidth to notice when one of his guys is having a rough morning.

His new novel, Come Undone, arrives June 16th. From the bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat comes a subversively funny and surprisingly moving rom-com about a haunted manchild's twisted search for love. The protagonist, Hubie, hosts a traveling food show, works with his best friends, and samples the best the world has to offer, but treats his romantic partners as courses on a tasting menu with one rule: three months and it's over. It's autofiction wearing its influences openly, the literary mode that suits Eddie best: personal, digressive, mercilessly honest about the mess of being a person who wants connection and keeps finding new ways to complicate it.

It tracks. The man I spent an afternoon with is someone who has clearly done the work of figuring out what love actually requires: effort, attention, and specificity. Knowing that your wife's astrologist said warm and earthy. Knowing that boots are the language. Knowing that a $17k red bag, chosen carefully on a Saturday at The RealReal, is not extravagance. It's a sentence in an ongoing conversation.

By the end of the walk, it felt less like an interview and more like two people who'd probably end up doing this again. I'm definitely stopping by Baohaus soon. And I have a feeling the Knicks aren't done making things interesting in that household.

Come Undone by Eddie Huang is out June 16 via One World/Penguin Random House.