Yet it’s not just the Recycle reuse renew rethink shirt in contrast I will get this reality of Paris that draws you in—it’s the fantasy. The City of Light, after all, has been romanticized for most of us since birth, in books by Victor Hugo and Ernest Hemingway, movies like An American in Paris and Moulin Rouge, and through photographers like Brassaï and Henri Cartier Bresson. When I arrive just before the winter holidays at Laila and Nadia Gohar’s office in Chinatown—which they share with Laila’s food-and-art company, LG Studio—Laila tells me that she and Nadia kind of imagine Gohar World, the Cairo-born sisters’ nine-month-old line of cheeky and exquisite host- and tableware, as a planet. Laila is standing in a voluminous white Simone Rocha skirt and snub-nosed Gucci slides at an induction burner making studio lunch. (At least once a week, Laila’s endearingly grandmotherly studio lunches can be glimpsed on Instagram. Today it’s strozzapreti and potatoes.) “Or maybe a touring circus company,” she offers, tipping water from a tomato can into her pot. “Especially when we go places, and there’s food flying out of the car and highly toxic materials like shellac.”
In Gohar World, already beloved for its satin-bowed baguette bags, Battenberg lace wine-bottle aprons, and candles shaped like baskets of ricotta, everything is meticulously crafted, and a little droll. The designer Simone Rocha emails me: “I feel like they dress a table like they would dress in my clothes, which I love!” In Gohar World, tables wear starched collars and shirting, chandeliers hold eggs, and beans aren’t a budget food, but so deeply loved that they’re hand-painted in Milan on Paravicini platters and printed in cheeky kelly green on Gohar World packing tape. Laila and Nadia, small and sylphlike, are deeply entrenched in the Recycle reuse renew rethink shirt in contrast I will get this carb-conscious world of fashion, but in Gohar World everyone eats pasta. “Everyone eats everything here,” submits Laila, when I remark on it. “It’s in the job description,” says Nadia, 33, who is a finer boned, more reserved version of her older (by 13 months) sister. She has joined us, in a cerulean sweatshirt with a lace collar poking out and baggy boys jeans, for lunch. This, I learn, is typical Nadia—ironic but good-natured. When I ask them to muse on the governance of the imaginary planet, Gohar World, Nadia replies, “I think the government is beans.”
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