The Monocle Minute

The arrival of a Qatar Airways A350-900 at Adelaide Airport on Tuesday capped off a fruitful few weeks in South Australia. It’s hoped that the new route to Doha will create more than 200 jobs and bring in millions of dollars through tourism and exports of produce to the Middle East. This boost follows the announcement that 12 French-designed submarines will be built in the state in a contract that will create thousands of jobs (though it will also prove costly for taxpayers). Once a thriving manufacturing hub, South Australia’s economy has faltered and its unemployment rate is now the highest in the country. Fresh ideas are needed in order to add jobs and keep young people from moving out of the state.

Amsterdam is one of the most cycle-friendly cities in the world so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the Dutch capital will soon get its own bike mayor. Cycling-advocacy group CycleSpace came up with the initiative to see a designated person promote infrastructure and innovations related to cycling, acting as a go-between for city officials, bike groups and citizens; the group took inspiration from the city’s night mayor. “We thought it would be important to have an ambassador for cycling,” says Maud de Vries from CycleSpace. The mayor will be narrowed down from a field of candidates via an online public vote, with the final selection being made by a special jury made up of Amsterdam’s actual mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, as well as local transport authorities and cycling groups. The mayor will be chosen on 24 June and CycleSpace aims to introduce bike mayors in 24 other cities around the world.

This week Karl Lagerfeld traded Paris’s opulent Grand Palais for Havana’s leafy Paseo del Prado as the backdrop for his latest Chanel showcase, the 2016/2017 Cruise collection. The event – which saw models walk the promenade in Che Guevara berets and Guayabera shirts – marked a historic occasion for Cuba, which had not hosted an international fashion show since becoming a communist state in 1959. Unsurprisingly for one of Lagerfeld’s shows it was met with controversy: not only is Chanel banned in Cuba under the US embargo (so none of the pieces will be sold there) but the notion of a luxury house showing in a country with an average annual salary of €3,800 was widely criticised. While some have called it part of a wider industry move to tap into Latin America (later this month Louis Vuitton is showing in Rio de Janeiro), in reality it can probably be summed up as the latest manoeuvre by fashion’s greatest provocateur.

New York arguably didn’t have a decent contemporary design fair aimed at collectors until Collective Design was conceived in 2012 and launched the following year. Now housed in the vast Skylight Clarkson Sq – a warehouse on Manhattan’s west side – the fair brings together a mix of galleries and designers. “There was a gap in the market,” says founder Steven Learner, an architect by trade. “I found I was travelling to Basel, Miami and London, often to meet a New York dealer for a New York client.” Look out for the Sight Unseen section this year, featuring five indie design studios on the rise, including Studio Proba. Collective Design runs until 8 May.

What’s the future of photography? And in the search for the perfect image will brands and agencies now turn to amateurs instead of pros? We sit down with Lorenz Aschoff, co-founder of Berlin-based start-up EyeEm, to find out.

From cotton fields in Egypt to state-of-the-art laboratories in Bergamo, our search for quality “Made in Italy” textiles focuses on the fifth-generation Albini Group.