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 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.”
After lunch—which is delicious and eaten by all the Gohar World citizens in the studio today, including the florist Miguel Yatco, graphic designer Monica Magsanoc, and studio manager Yukimi Nate (“Yukimi does literally everything,” I’m told)—Laila begins an afternoon of design meetings for Gohar World’s next collection. Nadia has to skip this to receive Gohar World holiday deliveries—cardboard boxes full of candles shaped like flan and cauliflower from Italy, chicken-feet necklaces of natural pearl from Vietnam, and other whimsical, handcrafted items for the table. Nadia’s absence is the source of considerable, recognizably familial, bickering. As I leave the studio, I mention having recorded some of the design meeting. Nadia remarks: “Oh, that’s great. I’ll know what happened.”
Chef Ignacio Mattos—known for his own tendency toward artful presentation at his New York restaurants Estela, Altro Paradiso, Lodi, and, most recently, Corner Bar, and who has been dating Laila for nearly three years—tells me of the sisters: “The two of them are very in sync. Even if they’re extremely different. They have a complicity with each other. They disagree all the time, but they’re incredibly close and incredibly loyal. They have each other’s back.” Laila is the more extroverted. She’s been in the public eye for a decade, via her large-scale edible installations commissioned for openings by fashion houses from Cartier to Hermès to Prada (these evolved out of the catering company, Sunday Supper, she started 12 years ago). Laila is voluble, speaking in long, deeply felt soliloquies, punctuated by strong declarations: “I hate nostalgia. It’s annoying.” Nadia just moved to New York last February from Toronto, where she spent years working as a successful painter. (Nadia has had multiple solo and group shows and artist residencies. She continues to paint in New York. “Now it’s lots of red on canvas,” she says.) The sisters conceived of Gohar World together, through long conversations between Toronto and New York, with a clear idea of what they wanted to make. Behind the scenes, Nadia is known to be unwavering. Mattos affirms this: “Nadia has very strong opinions, and ways of making her point come across, but it’s a lot more subtle.”
I meet the sisters for lunch the next day inside the bright and airy Corner Bar, which Mattos opened last summer at Nine Orchard, the new Lower East Side hotel inhabiting the former Jarmulowsky Bank. Laila is early, standing outside the restaurant and texting, in a men’s button-down and barn jacket, both several sizes too big. “I’m lurking,” she laughs. She waves to the staff as we’re seated in a sunny corner booth. Momentarily, Nadia arrives, wearing a vintage Fiorucci sweatshirt and a Mattos Hospitality hat, which Laila finds hilarious: “They’re going to think you work here!”
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
