30 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
the Lohans summarized the changes
in the boutique-hotel sphere over the
past two decades. Décor: less froufrou.
Bedding: less itchy. Bathrooms: “No
more drying soaps in small dispens-
ers,” James said. Instead, “Aesop and
Malin & Goats, or Goetz, or however
you say it.” In the unexpected-guest
category: “Airbnb obviously turned up,”
he said, “which was a shock to all of
us, that you could charge people money
to sleep on your floor.”
He introduced Chris Sanderson, of
the Future Laboratory, which inter-
viewed experts in travel and related
fields (marijuana, sex) to come up with
its findings, summarized in a forty-sev-
en-page report. In a teal blazer and a
blue pocket square, Sanderson advanced
a new term for the nascent decade—“the
Transformative Twenties.” He rattled
off potential trends, such as the En-
large Your Paris Project (“You have to
be careful how you say that,” he joked),
which seeks to connect travellers to
lesser-known locales. He predicted a
lot of connecting. “Flexecutives” may
connect over “peakends”—Thurs-
day-to-Monday holidays bookended
by telecommuting. Guests can expect
hotels to connect them with opportu-
nities to volunteer, to ingest CBD, or
to participate in threesomes.
“Maybe we say goodbye to the can-
dlelit dinner and hello to biometrically
responsive room lighting,” Sanderson
said. “Increasingly, the aphrodisiac won’t
be in the oyster, it’s maybe in the way
the oyster’s been collected.” There were
slides touting a new travel vocabulary:
“nuptial nomadism,” “polycule peregri-
nations,” “self-romance,” and “buddy-
moons, where we celebrate love be-
tween same-sex relationships, but not
as you imagine them, because this is
about straight mates with their gay
friends,” Sanderson said. “Or what about
a ‘brotopian break’?”
The discussion adjourned for drinks.
“Some of it is obvious,” Rebecca Soloff,
from Six Senses hotels, said. “People
want nontoxic, they want organic, they
want local, they want raw materials.”
She went on, “But sexual wellness be-
coming a thirty-two-billion-dollar in-
dustry?”—a statistic from the presen-
tation—“that’s not something I was
expecting.”
Experts who contributed to the re-
port took questions. “Do you see this
whole theory as a global mind-set?” a
woman asked. “Or are Americans more
open to talking about sex and cannabis
and all these other wonderful things?”
“I see a lot of customers from all
over the world who might be coming
from a more conservative environment,”
Eva Goicochea, the founder of Maude,
a line of sex products, said.
“Age range?” another woman asked.
“Statistically speaking, people over
thirty-five are having way more sex
than people under thirty-five, which is
great,” Goicochea said. “We’ve sort of
said that sex is for everyone, like food
is for everybody.”
“One of the fastest-growing demo-
graphics of cannabis consumers is fifty-
five and up,” Verena von Pfetten, a
founder of the cannabis-media com-
pany Gossamer, said. “It’s not about
getting fucked up. It can be to eat Chi-
nese food and watch Netflix,” she added,
“but maybe it’s also a turndown service
with a sleep tincture, or a massage with
CBD oil.”
Near a table displaying bottles of
Maude lubricant, Peter Barsoom, the
C.E.O. of the edibles company 1906,
described his wares. “We have a prod-
uct for sleep, and we have a product for
sex,” he said. “Imagine, in your mini-
bar, you had a ‘Love’ chocolate and a
‘Midnight’ chocolate. Those are the two
things we want when we’re in a hotel
room: either sex or a good night’s sleep.”
—Sheila Marikar
1
BYHOOKORBYCROOK
WO O L LY“
I
’m starting with the base, which
is a tree,” the street artist London
Kaye said. “Once I get that up, I’ll add
all the adorable koalas and goodness
and things. I’m excited!” It was a
face-numbingly cold early morning on
a corner of Wooster and Spring Streets,
and the wind cut like a knife, but Kaye,
whose medium is crochet, appeared up-
beat. With a white cap pulled low over
her long blond hair, and wearing a pair
of fingerless gloves, she secured a brownswath of crocheted yarn she had made
earlier to a chain-link fence across from
the SoHo Chanel store. Kaye, who is
thirty-one and based in Los Angeles,
was in town to install the large-scale
sets—multicolor crochet creations at-
tached to a wire-fence backdrop—that
she’d made for “Beyond Babel,” a dance
performance inspired by “Romeo and
Juliet,” which is being put up at Jud-
son Church, off Washington Square.
On the plane from L.A., she had lugged
an army duffel full of crocheted hearts
with her, to hand out to the audience
members. “It takes me a minute and a
half to make a heart,” she said.
While in town, Kaye decided to un-
dertake another project: a ten-foot-by-
eight-foot yarn installation of outback
animals encircling a sapling, to raise
awareness of the Australian wildfires.
“I like making things that have to do
with current events, but that also make
people happy,” she said, cocking her
head to consider the placement of a
wool branch she had just tied to the
fence. Rummaging in her bag, she un-
furled a life-size rust-colored yarn kan-
garoo. “Look, he’s got a little joey, too!”
she said.
Kaye studied classical ballet as a child
and learned to crochet as a teen. “When
I was in ninth grade, I hurt my back
badly, dancing, and that’s when it took
off,” she said, attaching a supine gray
koala to the fence, then thrusting her
hands into her pockets to warm them.
“I loved crochet. I’d sell scarves to my
friends. I was always the weird girl who
would bring yarn to parties.” She went
to N.Y.U. on a dance scholarship, and
when she graduated she began work-
ing at the Apple Store in the meat-
packing district. One day, in 2013, the
fibre artist Agata Oleksiak, known as
Olek—who has yarn-bombed monu-
ments such as the Wall Street bull and
the Astor Place Cube—came in to buy
a computer. “I thought she looked so
cool,” Kaye said. “She had this crazy
crochet bag.” After Olek left the store,
Kaye reprinted the receipt so she could
Google her name later. “That’s what
led me to yarn-bombing,” she said. Re-
alizing that her hobby could find a larger
canvas, she took a scarf that she’d
made—“shocking pink and lime green
and fuzzy”—and wrapped it around a
tree outside her Bed-Stuy apartment.