What Editors Actually Bought in June
There is a specific kind of pleasure in hearing what someone whose job is to track culture and consumption actually spends money on – not the sponsored stuff, not the press gifting, but the things they sought out themselves. The Refinery29 team does this monthly roundup with a no-gatekeeping policy, and the June edition lands somewhere between Wimbledon season excitement, a high-fashion art exhibition at one of London’s most storied museums, and a years-long hunt for a kitchen bin that doesn’t look like a kitchen bin.
It’s more personal than a gift guide. More specific than a trend report.
Susan Devaney, Lifestyle Director at Refinery29, anchors this month’s picks – and her selections move from early-morning rituals to a weekend afternoon well spent, with a domestic frustration finally resolved somewhere in between. Each one is independently selected, with commissions potentially earned on purchases.
Wimbledon Without a Backhand
Devaney is upfront about the contradiction: she cannot play tennis. She also loves Wimbledon with the kind of enthusiasm that has nothing to do with athletic participation and everything to do with the ritual, the aesthetics, and the merchandise. This year she is attending the men’s finals – a fact she notes with a capital-letter OMG – but in the weeks leading up to it, her morning routine has been anchored by a Wimbledon “Awaits Scene” mug, the kind of object that does double duty as a daily mood-setter and a countdown calendar. A Wimbledon tea towel has also made it into rotation.
Last year she tracked down a Wimbledon bath towel, described as sought-after, and is already wondering whether she’ll manage it again next year. The mug is available directly through Wimbledon’s own shop. Pricing is not listed in the feature, but the item is linked directly for purchase.
There’s something worth noting about how sports merchandise operates outside the fanbase of the sport itself. Wimbledon has spent decades cultivating an identity that functions independently of tennis knowledge – the strawberries, the whites, the particular green of the grass – and its branded homeware taps into that world effectively. You don’t need to know a tiebreak from a service game to want the mug on your kitchen shelf in late June.
The V&A’s Love Letter to Elsa Schiaparelli
While London was running warm and sunny in June, Devaney found a reason to go inside anyway: the Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art exhibition currently running at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The show is a dedicated retrospective of Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer who built her reputation on shock, wit, and a relationship with surrealism that made her work categorically different from her contemporaries. The V&A exhibition presents a wide range of her designs in person, close enough to read the construction details that photographs never quite capture.
Devaney describes it as “a showstopper love letter” to Schiaparelli – witty, colorful, and consistent in its engagement from the first gallery to the last. The exhibition’s character, she argues, mirrors the designer’s own: irreverent, visually dense, never dull. Weekday tickets are priced at £28 ($37) and weekend tickets cost £30 ($39), with advance booking available through the V&A’s website.
Schiaparelli’s work has had a complicated afterlife. The house was revived and has attracted significant attention in recent years, but the original designer – who famously feuded with Chanel and collaborated with Salvador Dali – has sometimes been overshadowed by the label’s contemporary output. An exhibition of this scale at the V&A, one of the world’s most visited museums, puts the original work back at the center. For anyone interested in the wider landscape of fashion and beauty culture this month, the show is a direct extension of that conversation into fine art territory.
The exhibition runs through the summer, and the V&A’s location in South Kensington makes it easy to pair with a half-day in the museum’s permanent collection, which remains free to enter. The Schiaparelli show is the paid ticketed component sitting within that larger context – a structure the V&A uses frequently for major touring or curated exhibitions.
The Bin Problem, Resolved
Months of searching. That is how Devaney frames what preceded her eventual kitchen bin purchase – a hunt for something that looked sleek, cleaned easily, and worked within a stainless-steel kitchen aesthetic without fighting against it. The solution came via a recommendation from colleague Raquel Reichard, Deputy Director at Refinery29, though the specific bin and its price are not detailed in the available section of the article.
The detail that sticks is not the product itself but the duration of the search. Months is a long time to think about a bin. It speaks to how much friction the wrong domestic object creates – not a dramatic friction, but the low-level visual irritation of something that doesn’t fit, that draws attention to itself for the wrong reasons every single time you walk past it. A kitchen that functions around stainless steel has a particular visual logic, and a bin that breaks that logic becomes a minor daily annoyance that compounds over time.
The resolution – a colleague’s offhand recommendation cutting through what product searches and retailer browsing couldn’t – is one of the more honest notes in the whole piece. Not an algorithm, not a sponsored post. Someone who works near you saying: I found the thing.
