Sander Lak is sick of monochrome. Lak was raised in Borneo and Holland, and lived in Antwerp, Paris and London before landing in New York, where he launched and now serves as creative director for the emergent luxury label Sies Marjan. Moving from place to place has made him a composite of nationalities and mannerisms, and has left him uniquely equipped to adapt to the American lifestyle and work ethic.

Instead of Holland’s universal healthcare, picture-perfect cityscapes, and a political system so liberal it makes Bernie Sanders look like Mussolini, Lak has opted to chase American dreams of free-market capitalism and perceived autonomy. Growing up in the Netherlands, Lak says, “everything is equal—you can’t get really rich, you can’t get really famous, you can’t get really successful.” Rejecting this one-note ethos of supposed mediocracy, he eventually made his way to the US with aspirations of fashion stardom and commercial success, unabashedly hoping to establish a “massive company that follow[s] in the footsteps of Ralph Lauren, Armani, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.”

“First of all, I think that’s a stupid statement.” I’d made it halfway through the first question of my conversation with Spike Lee before he stepped in to set me straight. The statement in question was the opinion of some critics that the director and writer is “obsessed with race,” and he didn’t care to wait and see how I might contextualize the quote before responding with a sternness that knocked me back on my heels a bit. The topic of race has certainly pervaded Lee’s work throughout his thirty-year career, and has often been at the center of his many public controversies, including feuds with prominent filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Tyler Perry. But for anyone to accuse a man who is black—a fact that American society ensures will dominate his identity for life—of being obsessed... Let’s just say his indignation wasn’t unwarranted.

Sitting in a back office at the Fort Greene headquarters of Spike’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, we discussed blackness, from its weight and influence in his youth to its notable absence in modern-day Hollywood boardrooms. If a single message emerged over the hour or so that we spoke, it’s that one can’t expect to understand a man, much less an entire race, by observing him from afar.

I called Kiwi singer-songwriter Aldous Harding in the early evening hours from a computer telephone in the projection booth of a theater in New York City. She picked up a hemisphere away in New Zealand while relaxing on a beach, taking a moment off before heading back out on the road for the remainder of the year. Before we spoke, I’d heard Harding described as a ghostly rural-gothic folk singer, conjuring in my mind the landscapes of Jane Campion’ s The Piano and her T V series T op Of The Lake. An extraordinary artist and gifted singer, Aldous spoke to me about her newest record Party (Flying Nun/4AD), her creative process, and her plans for the future.

Vince Staples is not a household name—yet. He has put out two mixtapes, two EPs, and two albums since 2013, but only one in a hundred people could name a single song. His latest release, the relentless, future-thinking Big Fish Theory, pays homage to his grandfather and is dedicated to a special woman in his life, Alyssa Jo Marquez. Of the album, Rolling Stone’s Christopher Weingarten says “[Staples’] varying emotions and outlooks mark a full step forward into becoming a multi-layered, genre-crossing, emotion-spilling pop auteur in the vein of [Kanye] West, Drake or Childish Gambino.”

Tune in to artist Ian Cheng’s Emissaries and you enter a work in mediares. Creatures and characters roam in and out of view. Time elapses, weather passes through, topographies mutate. A child’s digitized voice suddenly warbles over the ambient sigh of an artificial wind. Do you want to go for awalk?

The piece is presented as a trilogy of live simulations, each an autonomous technocosm engineered by the artist using a popular video game development platform. The work was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, and is being exhibited in life-size projection at MoMA PS1 and livestreamed in partnership with gaming community and video network Twitch. At once meditative and maddening, Emissaries invites us to witness a parallel reality programmed to develop its own narratives in perpetuity , confronting themes of agency , recursion, and the fascinating mundanity of lifecycles both organic and synthetic.

Ian Isiah wears many hats—or wigs, to be exact—from champion of sexually saturated R&B, to creative muse of his high school friend and ‘sister,’ iconoclastic designer and Hood By Air founder Shayne Oliver. With a community of outsider ingenues behind and beside him, Isiah entertains and enlightens as he upends dusty, generic structures in place throughout our culture regarding music, fashion and sexual freedom.

Hairstylist Christiaan Houtenbos lives in Shangri-La. Walking into his massive, airy apartment in an unassuming building in midtown Manhattan is like stepping into the heavenly cluttered house from Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, only more fashion. Decades worth of archived images and drawings are everywhere, and objects are casually strewn about in that way that only inimitably stylish people can get away with. There are just so many gorgeous things to gawk at—works from Christiaan’s legendary friends like frequent collaborator Arthur Elgort and the late designer and artist Stephen Sprouse, and priceless original photographs featuring the likes of Kate Moss and Christy Turlington. The candids are unbelievable, and I audibly gasped at a snapshot of fallen supermodel Gia Carangi lounging in Houtenbos’ country house. “That was the one girl who walked around naked all the time,” said Christiaan, chuckling . “She was a badass. She was the best. ”