We asked artist Laila Gohar — who recently released a capsule collection in partnership with Champagne Lallier — about the stain remover she uses to keep her clothes pristine, the olive oil she buys in bulk, and the gentle, unscented soap she keeps in the shower.
This is a sort of miracle remedy for stains. I’m a little bit messy and I often get stains on my clothes and my furniture at home. So I literally use this almost every single day. Another thing is that I cook in my nice clothes — I don’t necessarily have not-nice cooking clothes. I love cooking in all white, which people are always so impressed by. They’re like, Oh, wow, that’s so courageous. The reason I can do that is because of Shout.
Last weekend, I was out with my son and he’s really little, he’s only 7 months old, but he wants to eat everything. We were at my boyfriend’s restaurant and my kid wanted to have this black squid-ink rice, which is kind of out there for 7 months old, but he had some and he got it all over himself. And I was holding him, so it was all over me and all over him. I was like, Oh my God, what do I do? But then I got home and sprayed it with Shout and it was gone.
We keep this in the shower. Everyone in my family uses it. We used to use the rose-scented one before my son was born, but then we switched to the unscented one. I like that it’s all-purpose, so in a pinch, if you’re out of dish soap, you can just use a little. Not that I do that often — it generally just lives in the shower. But I also like that there aren’t a million weird things in it. I like that it’s been around for a long time and I like the philosophy of the company. The bottle has all this crazy writing on it that I read in the shower. I just believe in what they do.
I’ve been using this for several years. I remember the first time I used it, I was at a salon and the hairstylist used it on me and I was like, Wow, this is crazy. My hair looked totally different. This was like eight years ago. Now I always keep one of those little bottles around. It makes your hair smoother and softer. It looks healthier and less split end-y. I was told recently that you can overdo protein, which is what this stuff is. You’re not supposed to use it that often. So now I’ve cut back a little bit, but I still use it pretty regularly, a couple times a month.
I buy this big red tin of olive oil because I just use so much of it in my cooking. Whenever I buy a bottle, I’ll just be out of it in a few days. I like this Partanna brand because it’s very consistently good and it’s a family-owned business. The oil is very versatile. It’s a workhorse olive oil. I have other olive oils that I buy in bottles that are a little bit more robust in flavor. Those are finishing oils, like for salads. Sometimes a very flavorful oil will be too intense in a certain scenario; it’ll be too spicy or just add a flavor to something that you don’t necessarily want when you’re looking for something more neutral. But you can use this one for everything.
I go to Altro Paradiso and get the Pasta Pomodoro about once a week. It’s just really simple and straightforward and always on the menu. It feels like something that I can depend on, and to me, that is real comfort food.
At home, we have a lot of Bolognese. It takes a while to cook, so it’s a weekend thing for us. Sometimes we have something that I call pure pasta — it’s basically plain spaghetti with Parmesan and cheese on it. It’s something a 5-year-old would want to eat. But we both like eating that. Sometimes in the summer, we’ll make pesto. It depends. But, yeah, we eat a fair amount of pasta at home. Rummo makes really nice pasta, and it’s pretty widely available here in New York.
I love the Neue Galerie. I love the museum in general, I love the restaurant there, and I also love the gift shop. That’s somewhere I often visit during the holidays. I think they have really beautiful, special gifts. I came across these gloves there that feel so luxurious and nice. It’s maybe one of those things that you wouldn’t necessarily splurge on for yourself because it’s easy to lose a glove or whatever. But I think it’s such a nice thing to gift to someone.
I use glue guns a lot in my work. I’m very, very hands-on, and I love to make little prototypes of things that we’re designing, even if they’re fabricated elsewhere. So the glue gun is a really useful tool to keep around. Sometimes the ones for crafting are a little flimsier, but the DeWalt one is very sturdy and dependable. I have 20, I have so many. I have a studio and I work with a bunch of people, so sometimes we’ll need several glue guns, and then sometimes when we travel for work, we’ll buy more. We have a whole box of them and there’s some other ones in there that have found their way into the box, but I always go for the DeWalt ones.
I never buy pre-minced garlic or the one in the jar that’s already peeled for you. There’s nothing like real garlic. Yes, it requires an extra step, but I totally think it’s worth it. It would be very hard for me to cook without it, so it’s definitely one of my staples. You just need it. I usually use a couple cloves a day when I’m cooking. It’s not like you need a giant stash. Sometimes when you have it for too long, it develops the little sprouting thing. So I just buy a little all the time.
The collaboration with Lallier has been really great and exciting for me. It’s a capsule collection that centers around the perfect pairing. To me, mother-of-pearl and Champagne just conceptually look really beautiful together. And then in terms of this specific pick, it’s a seafood pick, which is something that I really enjoy eating with champagne, whether it’s something like a briny, minerally oyster, or other types of seafood like scallops or uni. So we designed these little dishes to pair with the Champagne and to tell the story of our collaboration and this seafood fantasy idea that my sister and I came up with.
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