With a sequel 20 years in the making, The Devil Wears Prada franchise has morphed from a movie about the horrors of working for a magazine into a movie about the horrors of NOT working for a magazine. That’s how NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, aptly.
In 2008, humming ‘Suddenly I See’ and driven by an urgent desire to escape the Dubai heat during Ramadan (handily simultaneous with the Venice Film Festival), I made a solemn but vague and reckless promise to bring editorial attention to Emirates airline’s new daily route featuring BUSINESS CLASS WATER LIMOUSINE SERVICE.
Fortunately for me, Andy Sachs herself came to the rescue, and DXB’s very own Miranda Priestly, Louise Nichol, made space in Grazia Middle East’s 10 (very) Hot Stories for this mildly intrusive but sincere fan encounter complete with all-important promotional end line.
My personal water limo (“take me to your Lido”) was excellent — quite the way to make an absurdly over-grand entrance, with one misdirected autograph hunter asking what he’d “seen me in” — and certainly more comfortable than the bench I slept on one night. Summer of glam indeed.
That’s all.
@tdwp2
TODAY. I know it sounds like the kind of bobbins people put on Instagram for the purposes of self-promotion(!) but in my household the visual shorthand for “Dad” was always to mime “person engrossed in the Financial Times” — so it’s a thrill to have my first story for the esteemed organ’s @fthtsi magazine appear on its cover.
And what an assignment! (thanks, @katefinnigan__@craftacularuk@jellison22 and @louisquinze ). The Dutch designer and model Marte Mei Haaster welcomed me into her beautiful home for a preview of the furniture collection she’s made through the process of phytoremediation — drawing PFAS (aka “forever chemicals”) out of polluted soil using hemp supercharged with mushrooms. 🌱🍄. How Amsterdam is that? And how genuinely optimism-inducing, too. Not many side tables do that.
It’s part of the issue’s wider consideration of multi hyphenate talents, dontchaknow.
Exquisite photography by Amélie Ambroise, who I note resisted the temptation to do “mirror selfie with the talent”. Unlike yours truly (last slide). That’s a pro.
Link in bio.
TIME WARP. 17(!) years ago I interviewed Juliette Lewis backstage at the Paradiso as she toured Europe with the Licks. Now she’s (far, far) away from home again, playing Magenta in The Rocky Show at Studio 54. “She’s an alien pretending to be a human who loves to throw wild parties and bring new specimens into her freak orbit.” Hope to meet in another 17 years, by which point Juliette assures us she will be a committed horticulturalist to boot. 🌱Sign up for The Gentlewoman Club newsletter today!
“I look at you and go, ‘Right, what’s the back of your head? That’s going to be the shot. Your ear, it’ll be here, your glasses, it will be from the side, then we’ll go underneath your feet.’” This imaginary shot list, made outside the Goldborne Deli in peak Christmassy Notting Hill, is as close as I’ll get to being filmed by LYNNE (ACTUAL) RAMSAY, director of Die My Love and We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher and You Were Never Really Here. But I did get to spend hours picking Lynne’s amazing brain for The Gentlewoman, who commissioned these stunning portraits by Jamie Hawkesworth (ably butchered here by me, soz). You can read the profile online in the Library section of The Gentlewoman website. Thank you, Penny Martin and Co. What a joy. Also: Toblerones. #LynneActually #TheGentlewoman #TGW33
Today @jettenrob of @d66_insta became the youngest ever Prime Minister of The Netherlands. He also made history in his capacity as the first out gay PM of the country that was first to give the world same-sex marriage — and he happens to be engaged to the Argentinian hockey pro @nicokeenan , (presumably!!!!) giving flight to a million Heated Rivalry daydreams — as imagined by yours truly in the newspaper of record thanks to @nicola_jeal . Awkward? Nah. Hoera!
Thysia Huisman, the former model, whistleblower and survivors’ advocate, believes her late friend Virginia Giuffre would have been delighted with today’s news. As she told me for this piece in The Times earlier this month, “We promised each other, we’re going after those bastards until they’re all locked up.”
‘I seek justice. He seeks revenge.’ In YOU magazine with today’s Mail on Sunday - my interview with the extraordinary Astrid Holleeder, whose testimony sent her crime lord brother to prison. After a decade in hiding, she’s stepping out of the shadows and refusing to consider herself a victim. Photos by Stef Nagel.
The snow reminded me how nice it was to be in Brussels this time last year for The Gentlewoman, there to meet the designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt in a huge chambre de bonne at the top of her parents’ house. Soon to relocate to new premises, Marie gamely dusted off her fashion school binders and personally demonstrated the numerous ways to wear her deceptively simple, trend-shirking creations. “I see a garment like a piece of well-chosen furniture; I want it to have the same status, for it to be a timeless object,” Marie says. Tour Marie’s wardrobe in The Gentlewoman Library. #TGW31 #TheGentlewoman
Back when pterodactyls thronged the sky, I responded to This Morning’s search for a boy band. At the end of it all? A recording contract with one Simon Cowell. In today’s Times: as he gears up to do it all again on Netflix, has pop’s Mr Mean still got what it takes? Link in bio.
“𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦… 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘴?” My Wallpaper* profile of Irma Boom, the Dutch book designer sans pareil, is still on shelves in the October issue of the magazine, which is titled The Long View and given over to a selection of long-form stories that editor Bill Prince says “warrant the unique perspective afforded by print.” You can read it on the website via the link in my bio, of course — but it won’t be the same. Boom does mean tree, after all. Thanks to @irma_boom_amsterdam , @mathieulommen — and Wallpaper* design critic extraordinaire @hugomacd for a dream commission. Fab portrait by @cleogoossens
