Monocle Weekend
Edition: Saturday

The European summer menswear season kicks off in London this weekend. The men’s event has had a tough time recently: it’s lost marquee names to other cities (and to women’s fashion weeks) and dropped from four days to three. This season the trend continues, with standout talents Grace Wales Bonner and Craig Green both absent. Yet there is an important pool of designers – including E Tautz, Oliver Spencer, Lou Dalton, Nicholas Daley and Martine Rose – for whom it still makes sense to show here. That’s because they design specifically for men (so can’t decamp to women’s weeks) and have a distinctly British approach, whether in their manufacturing practices – E Tautz owns UK factories; Lou Dalton works with Scottish makers – or their aesthetic: E Tautz’ fashionable tailoring, Martine Rose’s experimental designs and Nicholas Daley’s riffs on London subcultures. The schedule is diminished, yes, but there are still names worth watching.

Never wishing to be outshone by a contemporary, Zürich runs its own art fair during the weekend before Art Basel. This year’s Zürich Art Weekend kicked off yesterday and will run until Sunday, offering an enticing line-up of shows and talks. Some standout events today promise to be artists Matt Mullican and Christopher Williams discussing the works of American conceptual artist John Baldessari at Mai 36 Galerie, as well as Frieze magazine’s summer-edition launch at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. Zürich Art Weekend complements Art Basel but also adds to the city’s fast-growing cultural clout. Following the Christ & Gantenbein expansion of the Landesmuseum and the reopening of the Museum für Gestaltung, the Kunsthaus – which houses one of Switzerland’s most iconic permanent collections – will get an extension designed by David Chipperfield, to be completed by 2020. Rivalry aside, Zurich’s emergence as a cultural force presents a boon for the Swiss.

The World Cup kicks off in just a few days but in Pantin – the northeastern suburb of Paris known for its rising number of galleries, theatres and cultural centres – celebrations are starting early. A new exhibition at Les Magasins Généraux (once a graffiti-covered, derelict flour-and-grain warehouse), explores football through contemporary art. Titled Par amour du jeu 1998-2018 (For love of the game 1998-2018), the exhibition includes a fully functioning football pitch and 80 works of art including some from 11 young artists who created pieces for the exhibition. The works explore football’s relationship with the division of power, performance, celebrity, gender and fanaticism. And to show they’re good sports, giant screens outside the space mean that fans won’t miss a match.

While many gallerists and artists have decried big money and rental hikes squeezing the art out of New York, the Dia Art Foundation doesn’t seem so concerned. Best known for its upstate gallery in Beacon, the organisation has set about revitalising its assets in and around town in a project worth upwards of $70m (€59m). The move is the final realisation of plans that had been delayed as a number of directors came and went. But there’s also a sense of Dia looking to both cement its status and give the city an arts boost: its three adjoining spaces in Chelsea will be consolidated into a street-level space with the return of a Dia bookshop that was once a neighbourhood go-to. Dia is also planning to take control of a Soho building that it had long rented out to retail. RIP NYC arts? Far from it.

A visit to Turkish top chef Mehmet Gurs’ new venture in Finland.

Monocle editor Andrew Tuck navigates the Arsenale to find out how architects have responded to the curatorial theme of this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture.