Does anyone still have a single job title? Who among us does just one thing? In recent years, job descriptions have metamorphosed from being simple descriptors into multi-hyphenates. Where once a word covered the basics, we now need a string of 10. Many of the traditional professions have changed over the generations. Many more new roles have come into being. Everyone’s now got a side-hustle: DJ, vintage dealer, yogi-in-training. Doing one job is so passé.

This issue celebrates the multitaskers, and those whose bows have many strings. I know Marte Mei van Haaster as a model; the Dutch 33-year-old has walked dozens of catwalks since first landing a Prada exclusive when she was in her teens. But her career in fashion has evolved in tandem with her design studies – most recently on the subject of phytoremediation, which uses plants to draw poisonous PFAS out of the water system and soil and repurpose them in artistic, non-toxic ways. She talks to Mark Smith at home in Amsterdam, shortly before an exhibition of her work opens in Antwerp. Interestingly, van Haaster’s life in fashion has had some unexpected uses: she has assembled a motley assortment of scientists, biotech firms and laboratories to create her working consortium. She credits her convening skills to her career in modelling, where in order to be successful one must learn how to collaborate. It also helps that she’s so striking-looking: surely people are compelled to take her call. “I knock on many doors,” she says pragmatically. “A lot stay closed, but some open generously.”

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Singer, social-media star, actor and empire builder, Troye Sivan perfectly embodies the multi-hyphenated Zillennial career. The Australian broke through as a teenager on YouTube and has since picked up three Grammy nominations, a Golden Globe nomination and played the young Wolverine. Now 30, Sivan is parlaying his commercial power into a tranche of branded products. Fragrance has been the springboard for his beauty aspirations – Sage’s Rose, produced in conjunction with his sister, has just launched in the UK – but Sivan can’t be tied to one category. He and his sister meet Rosanna Dodds in Soho, London, to discuss top notes and his plans for world domination. Both siblings are wildly ambitious – in the very nicest way. They say a childhood in Western Australia, plus creative parents, have been the key to “shattering all limitations” in their path. 

Chris Black is another impressive all-rounder. I know him best as the other half of the podcast How Long Gone. But he has also just launched Hanover, a debut line of normcore things you “might like to wear”. His voracious appetite for all things fashion is matched only by his appetite for music and the media. For someone with what I thought were quite acquisitive habits, our Aesthete, I was surprised to discover, lives in quite a minimalistic space. The airy modern flat was created by the designer Matt Spevack, but Black still admits to owning a “few boxes” to contain all his nerdy stuff.

Lastly, we meet designer Bill Bensley for a tour of his verdant property in Chiang Mai. The designer who created the interiors for the hotels seen in the Thai-set chapter of The White Lotus could be trusted to make a lush extravaganza of his own home. Less well-known are his sustainability credentials. Throughout his long career in reconstruction and restoration, Bensley maintains he has never cut down a single tree. Gisela Williams went to visit him and his husband, the horticulturist Jirachai Rengthong, at their 20-acre property and found out more about the foundation they are funding to protect the rainforest in the Cardamom Mountains of south-west Cambodia. Despite the somewhat serious nature of their interests, Bensley insists that conservation can be fun. To prove it, he posed for our photographer, with Rengthong, sitting in their giant marble bath.

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THREE MORE STORIES TO READ THIS WEEK

Magnus Nilsson’s restaurant was awarded two Michelin stars. Why is he now serving £12 lunches? Pensionat Furuhem in southern Sweden is a paean to the ‘perfectly ordinary’ For sale: a time capsule of Australian Victoriana Curator Terence Lane amassed a stunning collection of 19th-century work in Melbourne.