Robert Downey Jr. on Broadway, fashion of the African diaspora and more NYC events

Each week, Alexa is rounding up the buzziest fashion drops, hotel openings, restaurant debuts and celeb-studded cultural happenings in NYC. It’s our curated guide to the very best things to see, shop, taste and experience around the city. 

What’s making our luxury list this week? Robert Downey, Jr. on Broadway, a huge new Arc’Teryx store in SoHo, and a social sauna opens in Flatiron. 

Arc’teryx Equipment has opened a two-level, over 14,000 square-foot store at 580 Broadway. It’s the Canadian brand’s largest retail space to date, and features a ReBIRD Service Center offering a full suite of services from full zipper replacements to hardshell repanelling, as well as light repairs, washing, and waterproofing of used gear. This location also brings the debut of ReGEAR shopping, with a selection of refurbished pre-owned items for sale, as well as the A-Frame Café, offering Arc’tonics, specialty coffees and teas, Garuka Bars and Shār trail mix. Arcteryx.com

“Ilit Azoulay: Mere Things” opens today at The Jewish Museum. This is the first U.S. solo museum exhibition dedicated to the work of interdisciplinary artist Ilit Azoulay (Israeli, b. 1972; lives and works in Berlin), and features works from 2010 to the present. A new work, Unity Totem (2024), “min[ed] the Jewish Museum’s collection for ritual objects such as Torah finials and amulets. Mostly created by Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, including in the artist’s familial homeland of Morocco, the objects in the photographs are suspended from a green hat that smokes like a cone of incense, spinning as they propel new spiritual energy outward into the world.” Through January 5, TheJewishMuseum.org

“Good writers borrow. Great writers steal,” is the tag line of “McNeal,” a new play written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar and starring Robert Downey Jr. He plays Jacob McNeal, considered one of the greatest writers of his generation and a “perpetual candidate” (but never winner) of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also has a new novel, an estranged son, “old axes to grand and an unhealthy fascination” with AI. “McNeal,” directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher, is at the Beaumont Theater through November 24. McNealBroadway.com

Next week brings the much anticipated opening of “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora” at The Museum at FIT (MFIT). The exhibit “explores fashion’s role in shaping international Black diasporic cultures…[and] is the first to examine fashion as a mode of cross-diasporic cultural production.” 60 fashions, including clothing and accessories, will be in display, created by Black designers from Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean. They include names many will recognize — Patrick Kelly, Wales Bonner, Aurora James for Brother Vellies, Telfar and Olivier Rousteing for Balmain — with a host of others, placed in dialogue with each other. The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Way, associate curator of costume at The Museum at FIT and is accompanied by a multi-author book edited by Way and published by Yale University Press. Through December 29. FITNYC.edu.

Toronto-based Othership has opened their first outpost in America, in Flatiron. Billed as a “social sauna and ice bath experience,” it includes what they call a “performance sauna,” a dedicated room for ice baths and a tea lounge set around a fireplace. A variety of classes are on offer (they fall into three categories (up, down, and all around for energy, relaxation, or emotional connection) as well as evening socials. Introductory pricing begins at $64 for a drop-in session, with class passes ranging from $33 to $67, and membership options starting at $51 per month. Othership.us