Valentine’s Day in New York is usually a gauntlet of overpriced prix fixe menus and desperate last-minute bouquets, but a recent pop-up in Hell’s Kitchen offered a different kind of intimacy: a dinner date with an iPhone. Organized a chatbot platform, the "world’s first AI dating cafe" invited diners to don headphones and flirt with digital apparitions like Simone, a "proud Virgo" who loves Abbott Elementary, while a very real server awkwardly tried to refill their water. It’s a surreal tableau of modern romance: a room full of people staring into screens, whispering sweet nothings to avatars that can’t actually taste the shrimp toast they're being offered.

There’s a certain dystopian comedy in a room full of people ignoring each other to flirt with algorithms, yet the "romance" feels less like Her and more like a glitchy FaceTime call at an airport Cinnabon. While the creators hope to cure the loneliness epidemic, the current tech seems to have inherited the most human trait of all: being incredibly boring. It turns out that even with the most advanced LLMs at our disposal, we’ve managed to automate the most exhausting part of the New York dating scene: the mediocre small talk.

If you want to know the true soul of a stranger, don’t look at their LinkedIn; look at the crumbs in their passenger seat. Photographer Martin Roemers has taken this "you are what you drive" philosophy to its logical, sterile extreme in his series Homo Mobilis. Borrowing a move from Richard Avedon’s playbook, Roemers hauls a massive white backdrop across the globe, and parks drivers and their rides right in front of it. By stripping away the traffic and the smog, he turns everything from dented Ukrainian taxis to neon-splattered Senegalese lorries into high-art sculptures.

There’s a delicious irony in seeing a mud-caked, MOT-challenged van treated with the same reverence as a museum artifact. Roemers’ work reminds us that our vehicles are essentially wearable architecture: outer shells that broadcast our class, our chaos, and our aesthetic priorities to the world at 60 mph. In a world hurtling toward anonymous, self-driving pods, these photos are a poignant, slightly dusty eulogy for the era when our cars actually said something about us other than "I have a charging port."

If you’ve ever wanted to signal "I’m here for the high-end prosecco but I’m not above a 59p cucumber," Lidl and viral designer Nik Bentel have the accessory for you. Fresh off the success of last year’s "Croissant Handbag," the duo has returned for London Fashion Week with the Trolley Bag: a miniature, stainless steel shopping cart complete with a branded handlebar and a coin keychain fob. It’s a piece of "middle-aisle chic" that turns the most mundane symbol of the weekly shop into a literal runway statement.

There’s a brilliant, self-aware absurdity in turning a utilitarian hunk of metal into a "must-have" sartorial flex. By blurring the lines between a grocery run and a fashion show, Lidl is effectively out-memeing the luxury houses that take themselves far too seriously. Whether the bag is actually functional is debatable (good luck fitting anything larger than a loose lemon through those steel slats) but as a commentary on our obsession with brand-driven irony, it’s a total checkout success.