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Anne Hathaway announces her pregnancy and opens up about her infertility struggles on Instagram

July 29, 2019 | News | No Comments

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25th Jul 2019

“It’s not for a movie…⁣⁣” wrote Anne Hathaway alongside a black-and-white snap of herself smiling with a visible baby bump on Instagram earlier today.

But while Hathway’s announcement that she and husband Adam Shulman are expecting their second child began on a lighter note, it took an especially poignant turn at the end. “All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies,” she continued.

Opening up for the first time publicly about the fertility struggles she and Shulman encountered while having their first child—they welcomed a son, Jonathan Rosebanks, in 2016—as well as on their most recent journey to conception, the 36-year-old actress continues to be refreshingly candid about many of the challenging facets of motherhood. Not to mention, she admirably joins stars like Chrissy Teigen, Kim Kardashian West, and Gabrielle Union in being transparent about their personal fertility hurdles.

Infertility is becoming more and more widely acknowledged as an acute health issue—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 12 in 100 couples in the U.S. have difficulty becoming pregnant—and Hathaway’s revelation goes a long way. She continues to be unafraid to use her platform to address issues close to her heart.

This article originally appeared on Vogue.com.

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So, It Looks Like Sarah Has a Boyfriend Now: A Eulogy

July 29, 2019 | News | No Comments

It’s so nice to see everyone—what a crowd. I know that if Sarah were still single, and not currently at her boyfriend’s place redecorating his living room, she would have loved to be here today.

A lot of people didn’t see this coming. It feels like just the other day, we were doing a round of tequila shots to mourn her last boyfriend, Greg, a man with a back tattoo that read, “The only constant is change.” And after they broke up, it seemed like things would be different. I thought Sarah was finally free.

But as we all know too well—Greg most of all—life changes constantly. Still, who could have predicted that Josh would be at the bar that same night for a karaoke birthday party, waiting patiently for his turn to sing “Baby Got Back”?

He seemed harmless enough, at first. I certainly never thought this romance would last beyond a single night. None of us did. But the next morning, Sarah wasn’t answering any of my texts asking her how it went, and I sensed something was amiss. Even though I was obviously still tracking her on Find My Friends, I knew that Sarah was gone.

It began slowly. She would miss Sunday brunch, or take several days to respond to a hilarious meme I sent her. I mean, the dog was passed out on a couch, insisting that he would start his diet the following day. How could she not find that funny? None of it made sense.

I know that if Sarah were here like she’d said she would be, she’d want us to remember the good times, which is why I’ve prepared this photo montage. If some of you aren’t included in it, please remember that this day isn’t about you. It’s about my loss. It’s also about remembering those moments from when my hair looked really good after that new haircut last month.

Sarah’s parents, Rob and Sharon, were asked to say a few words, but they refused because they “actually really like Josh” and “think this event is a huge waste of money.” It’s times like these when you realize who is really there for you, which is why I’d like to thank all the friends and family who have been so supportive during this difficult period, particularly old college pals whom I’d forgotten lived nearby and agreed to meet for drinks. You guys are great, and I’m thrilled to be joining your amateur bowling league.

Well, I guess I should start wrapping this up. I don’t want to cut into anyone else’s time, especially Andrei, our kind landlord, who gave Sarah a four-dollar Starbucks gift card once for Christmas, or Mr. Davis, Sarah’s high-school English teacher, who congratulates her on work anniversaries on LinkedIn, year after year, without fail.

It still just feels so surreal. Do I miss her sometimes? Of course. Ever since she told me it looked like she and Josh were “probably together,” a week ago, I’ve been a wreck. But I console myself with the knowledge that everything is going to be O.K. because she’s in a better place now. A place where she doesn’t have to worry about making ironic Valentine’s Day plans or thinking of clever Hinge answers. I know it’s time to move on. But occasionally, when she likes one of my Instagram posts, it’s almost like I can feel her smiling down at me.

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A Louisiana Republican Reckons with Climate Change

July 29, 2019 | News | No Comments

Garret Graves is a forty-seven-year-old Republican congressman from Louisiana who, earlier this year, bet his considerable political future on the proposition that the age of conservative climate denial is over. Graves had come to the point of view, he told me recently, “that those who were denying were taking an unsustainable position. That the science was going to further and further sink the island that they were standing on, and that eventually they would be inundated.” When the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, announced a new Select Committee on the Climate Crisis this winter, after teen-aged activists staged a sit-in at her office, Graves visited the Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, to argue that the new committee gave Republicans a chance to take a less obstinate position on climate change, if they were nimble enough to see it.

Graves, who is medium height and athletic, with a strong chin and a loud voice, came with a PowerPoint presentation, laying out for McCarthy “everything from the disasters to our progress on emissions, without blowing up the economy, to the strategic resources of the United States and those of other countries.” There was, he argued to McCarthy, “a better way to apply Republican principles to this issue of climate change”—an insistence that the challenge of climate change can be met by scientific innovation, by the application of our remarkable instruments and brains. In February, McCarthy named Graves to serve as the ranking member on the committee. And, just like that, the Republicans chose as their spokesman on climate change a gregarious, outdoorsy young man who liked to say that not only was sea-level rise real but that he had measured it with his own yardstick.

Environmentalists regarded this mainly as a stunt. Republicans had correctly interpreted the polling on climate change to mean that they had to change their public image on the issue. But they were not willing to break with the energy industry. Graves seemed sincere enough when he acknowledged a human role in changing the climate, but that hardly made him green. Graves’s lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters was just three per cent; in the last election cycle, he received almost twice as many campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry as from any other industry. “I’d love to see more Republicans get on board with climate action, but it’s not enough to change how they talk about this issue. They need to change how they vote,” Representative Kathy Castor, the Florida Democrat who chairs the Climate Crisis Committee, told me.

In the months since Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, there have been signs of a shift in their view of the environmental crisis, changes which may turn out to be meaningful, or may prove to be as ephemeral as a branding campaign.

In May, Senator John Cornyn, a powerful Texas conservative, announced “a growing consensus [that] the days of ignoring this issue are over.” The Republican pollster Frank Luntz then circulated a memo insisting that voters “believe the U.S. must change direction on climate policy.” Democrats and climate activists received these statements with some cynicism, because of Cornyn’s long-standing ties to the oil-and-gas industry, and Luntz’s infamous memo to George W. Bush, in 2002, advising the President that there was “still a window of opportunity to challenge the science” of climate change. It was hard to believe that the Republicans had found a new church if Luntz and Cornyn were still at the pulpit.

But it was tempting to think that if there was to be a genuine Republican conversion, it would come from someone like Graves. Before he was elected to office, Graves had made his name by leading the recovery and rebuilding work in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. He had led the state’s efforts to recover billions of dollars from BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His view, which he made clear to Castor, was that the parties should be able to agree immediately on projects that would help local communities adapt to and prepare for changes in the environment. Graves told me, “There is built up momentum in the atmosphere right now where adaptation is the thing you’ve got to do no matter what, right out of the gate.”

Earlier this summer, before Hurricane Barry had crashed into New Orleans but with the Mississippi swollen to a degree that made everyone nervous, I went to Baton Rouge to spend a day with Graves. A day earlier, there had been a tremendous storm: eight inches of water had poured onto the city’s downtown in eight hours. The state has not so much encountered the reality of the changing climate as been inundated by it. Storms have so constantly battered the Louisiana coast during the past decade that historical benchmarks have lost their meaning. As Graves put it to me, “We had a thousand-year flood in August of 2016. In March of that year, we had a five-hundred-year flood. One state over, in Texas, they had a thousand-year flood—Harvey. All of a sudden, you’re, like, I’m in my forties. Something’s wrong with the statistics.”

If Louisianans were beginning to see why there was always so much water everywhere, then Graves had done his part to coax that understanding along. Having spent his twenties as a staffer in Washington, he moved back to his home town of Baton Rouge in the months after Hurricane Katrina, to help work on the disaster’s aftermath for Governor Bobby Jindal. By 2008, Jindal had appointed Graves to lead the new Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, whose mandate was to coördinate the environmental response to coastal erosion. In Louisiana, where a football field of land is lost to the sea every ninety minutes, the scale of that work is heroic. At the Center for River Studies, a state-funded research and public-education initiative in Baton Rouge, Graves showed me a wall-size map of Louisiana, with the many spots where land was being lost glowing red and the few where it was being replenished lit up in green. Graves pointed out the barrier islands he had helped to rebuild, the few places where engineers had helped resist a saltwater intrusion. Such projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars, required incredible ingenuity, and succeeded only in keeping tiny dots on the map from turning red.

It had taken a while after Katrina, as Graves explained over breakfast, for him to realize the extent of the permanent changes to Louisiana’s coast, but, in 2011, when he and his staff were revising the state’s coastal master plan, he started to see it clearly. One partial tally of projects reached two hundred and fifty billion dollars. “We were never going to get two hundred and fifty billion dollars,” Graves said. The agency changed its approach. The coastal master plan eventually included a line that ran across Louisiana, indicating which communities would be protected from the rising seas. North of the line was safe. South of it, Graves recalled, “We said, ‘Look, we don’t have the resources or the technical expertise to protect you.’ It was the first time we had told them the truth.” The reaction, in the small, conservative communities along the coast, was often furious. Graves said he got death threats. He and his staff held town halls on the coast, where, he recalled, “We would explain to people, ‘You don’t deserve this. This is unjust. But this is how we got here.’ ”

Those conversations seemed to have imprinted on Graves a certain caginess in how to talk about environmental change. “People are awakening,” he said, but the awakening was slow and partial enough that a certain care needed to be taken. “Raise the words ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming,’ and everyone goes to their corners.” Sounding a little exercised, Graves added, “I mean, the phrase ‘climate change,’ what does that even mean?” When Graves launched his first campaign for Congress, in 2014, he criticized a more conservative challenger who called climate change a hoax, but he also ran in part on funds from the oil-and-gas industry, whom he supported in what might have been a damaging coastal-erosion lawsuit, brought by a local flood board. “In my first campaign, the Environmental Defense Fund [PAC] maxed out their contributions to support us,” Graves told me. He was smiling, enjoying the irony. “So did the Koch brothers.”

Graves’s plans for bipartisan compromise do not include a carbon tax, which most environmental economists consider essential to staving off the worst possible futures. I asked him where he saw common ground with Democrats, beyond spending on adaptation and resilience. “Step two is emissions reductions,” Graves said. “We’ve got to reduce our emissions in the United States. So we need to be moving toward renewables, updating our grid system, investing in energy-storage technologies, and figuring out how we can do a better job providing energy-storage solutions. If you’re a liberal, that’s my pitch to you.” Graves said that he supported President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris accords, because the agreement gave China, classified as a developing country, more lenient targets for emissions reductions. But he thought America might just innovate its way to those same reductions. “I think we can actually hit Paris targets without doing damage to the American economy—I really do.”

What he planned to do with his new public role on the Climate Crisis Committee, he said, was to talk about climate change in other terms—more local and less threatening. To a liberal, he might talk about the need to invest in renewable energy or alter emissions standards, he said, but to a Tea Party conservative he’d take a different tack. “Hey, I have an idea that can lower your electricity bills. Or, I have an idea that can complement what you and President Trump have done, to improve the competitiveness of the U.S. economy,” Graves said. “I’m talking about the same thing in that liberal conversation and that conservative conversation. But it’s approaching it differently and meeting people where they are.”

As we spoke, Graves kept dropping hints that, though he was a conservative politician from a conservative place, he saw the world from other angles. When we met in Baton Rouge, he was riding a funny little bespoke electric motorbike that looked like the kind of thing you’d find charging in the parking lot of the Ben & Jerry’s corporate headquarters. He mentioned that he had led white-water rafting tours in West Virginia, while working in Washington as a Senate aide, and that he had met his wife, a longtime science teacher, “who is, candidly, to my left,” while they were both teaching a mountaineering course in California. He was a vegan for a while, and is now a pescatarian, because he doesn’t want to miss out on Louisiana seafood.

Graves recalled, slightly bashfully, that he had introduced an amendment to have Cajuns declared an endangered species. The tone was tongue-in-cheek—“If being an endangered species means the federal government works with you instead of against you, then let’s do it,” he said—and he pulled the amendment almost immediately. “You know, James Carville says it’s a war,” Graves told me. “He makes a really good point. He says,”—here Graves did a respectably fervid impression of the Cajun pundit—“ ‘Look, man, your land’s being taken. Your future’s being threatened. It’s a war, man. It’s a war.’ ” At this, Graves grew slightly self-conscious. Carville is a Democrat, and the riff about war suggested a desperate view of the climate situation that Graves did not share—publicly, at least. He seemed unsure whether or not to distance himself from Carville. In the end, Graves just said, “He’s so funny.”

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In recent years, the rhetoric around climate change has grown more radical and more urgent. The latest reports of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have imagined bleaker futures; scientists have grown more outspoken; youth movements have blossomed, here and in Europe, devoted to the declaration of a climate emergency; and Democrats have mostly endorsed the idea that the planet is confronting an existential crisis. In this context, a stance like Graves’s can seem at once tragically shortsighted and, against the backdrop of his party, heroic. “Republicans have gone in three years from ‘I’m not a scientist’ to ‘We need innovation. We need adaptation,’ ” Joseph Majkut, who directs the climate-policy program at the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank, said. “It’s a pretty profound top-level rhetorical shift.”

Some climate activists whom I spoke with suggested that adaptation and mitigation could serve as a “gateway drug” for the Republican Party, but it seemed to me that Graves was clear about how far he and his voters could go. Graves has worked with Jared Huffman, a Democrat from Northern California, on fisheries legislation. I asked Huffman, who chairs the Water, Oceans, and Wildlife Subcommittee, whether he thought that bipartisan progress on climate legislation with Republicans like Graves was realistic. Graves seemed enthusiastic, I said, about making major investments in renewable-energy sources like wind and solar. “In theory,” Huffman said. But Republicans were still boxed in by their alignment with the oil-and-gas industry. “I think, for Garret to get out of that box, he’s got to reimagine what the Louisiana economy is.”

This isn’t climate denial so much as resignation. “There’s a huge danger that we pitch from denial to complete despair where the only option becomes adaptation,” Huffman said. He pondered the implications for a second. “It’s like hospice for the planet.”

The weather meant that Graves and I could not go up in an airplane to view the Louisiana coast, as planned—our efforts to see the effects of climate change rendered impossible because of climate change, on some level—so Graves decided that we should drive toward the coast, to catch a few glimpses of the storm. It was all easy enough to see. Parking lots were swamped. Trees stuck out of what looked like lakes. The Mississippi—formally in flood stage since January, the longest such stretch since 1927—bobbed up to the lip of the levee. Graves pointed out all the trees that were being killed by saltwater, intruding where freshwater had once been. “It’s crazy that the river is so high,” Graves said. “We’re going to go up on the levee, and the comparison of the height of the water relative to where River Road is—‘scary’ may come to mind.”

On the way down the Mississippi, we could see the infrastructure of that economy—bulbous, white, featureless refineries and plants. Graves pointed out that the international politics of climate change mirrored the domestic: the places with abundant energy resources were slow-walking action, while those without were urging for the action to be sped up. “You’ve got to look at your strengths and weaknesses, and you know what we’ve got a lot of? Oil and gas,” Graves said. “You think all you see are the smokestacks—you think that’s a polluter. But these are the ones that are manufacturing the lighter materials that allow cars to get more miles per gallon in a safer manner. These are the ones that are innovating lower emissions.” Graves pointed to Valero, which has a refinery on the Mississippi. (Like other producers, it invests in alternative fuels, while remaining a national leader in carbon emissions.) The United States, Graves said, was spending more money on climate-change research than any country in the world, and liberals were sure that those innovators were the villains. He gestured again at the smokestacks. “People are thinking they’re the bad folks, but they’re not.”

We got out of the car on the west bank of the Mississippi, just a few miles upriver from the New Orleans airport. Graves wanted to show me a diversion basin called Davis Pond, which had been built so that, when the gate opened, the river and its voluminous sediment, which was otherwise bound for the deep ocean of the Gulf, emptied into the marshes, replenishing the freshwater ecosystem and the land lost, in part, to rising seas. “There is so much huge land-making capacity in this that is being wasted,” Graves said. A dozen alligators were idling by the gate, waiting for it to open and for fish to come flooding through from the Mississippi. Graves pointed at them and grinned. “Healthy freshwater ecosystem!” he said. He started to throw pieces of bread near the biggest alligator. “You can look at it two different ways,” he said. “I actually don’t think that it’s all that our ideology is wrong, and I don’t think it’s all that people are being miseducated. I think it’s a combination of the two.”

Graves’s position depends on his ability to persuade people in both parties of two ideas that are generally thought to be contradictory: that the environment urgently needs to be saved, and that the fossil-fuel industry can ultimately be a hero of our climate story, rather than the villain. So he talks in a liberal way about ends and a conservative way about means, making it seem that he wants to change the world by allowing it to stay exactly as it is. The more idealistic he is about both causes, the more credible, and therefore the more useful, he is. Once we had walked back down the levee, I asked Graves why he didn’t seem spooked by the increasingly catastrophic predictions of the U.N.’s climate panel, the I.P.C.C. “Those predictions are accurate based on our understanding of science, with all its caveats and brackets—if our technology remains static,” Graves said. With great confidence, he added, “And there’s zero-per-cent chance that happens.”

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Meet the kettle inspired by haute couture

July 25, 2019 | News | No Comments

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24th Jul 2019

Italian design house Alessi is renowned for bringing its sophisticated creative nous to ordinary objects in daily use. What it’s already done for the juicer, the bottle opener and the eggcup, it’s about to do for the electric kettle with the arrival of the Plissé Electric Kettle into Australia.

Available in classic shades of black and white, the functional elements of the Plissé are simple: it boils water, sits on a discreet hidden base, features thermal insulation (so you can place it on a bench straight after boiling), and is equipped with an anti-limescale filter. Where it most excels though, is in its design.

Made from sculptural thermoplastic resin the Plissé Electric Kettle takes its inspiration from fashion. Delicate pleats have long been a signature of fashion designers. Japanese maestro Issey Miyake began experimenting with pleating in the 1980s. For the autumn/winter 2019 season, pleated skirts once again fluttered down runways across the globe — glistening and metallic at Alberta Ferretti and Emilio Pucci, and in leather and sheer silk at Fendi. Pleats move with a fluid femininity, and the crisp lines articulate a refined strength. It’s a paradox that translates beautifully to the everyday object designed to transcend seasonal trends.

“With the skillful and creative use of pleating, fashion designers shape fabrics and create clothes like sculptural works of art,” says Plissé designer Michele De Lucchi. “The Plissé was shaped starting from a folded sheet of paper, then developed and produced by Alessi as if it were a beautiful sartorial object. The folds give form to the shape — they structure it — because a form without folds is only a volume without form. The folds transform simple two-dimensional sheets into three-dimensional objects.”

De Lucchi is an architect and designer who has been creating magic for Alessi since 2014. For the last five years he has been responsible for neo-classic hits like the Pulcina espresso coffee maker and the Raggiante wall clock. In Plissé, you can’t help but see his powerful architectural vision and personal passion for sculpture. His respect for artisanal skills is clear too. “The Plissé kettle’s shape is defined by its folds, a technique that is quite old but still very much in use today,” he says. 

As with all Alessi designs, the Plissé Electric Kettle is too special to store away behind cupboard doors. The sculptural folds add a subtle sophistication, a softness and a feminine curve to kitchens of all kinds.

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This is what Hollywood hairstylist Jen Atkin wants you to know about building a brand

July 25, 2019 | News | No Comments

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24th Jul 2019

Even if you’re one of the few who don’t know the name, you would have seen Hollywood celebrity hairstylist, beauty entrepreneur and soon-to-be author, Jen Atkin’s, stellar work at some point when scrolling through your Instagram feed. Atkin is one of the most in-demand, multi-talented stylists working today and has the type of successful career any stylist or beauty entrepreneur would dream of.

Not only does she jet around the world for fashion shoots (including to Sydney with Kendall Jenner for Vogue’s June 2019 cover) and tend to the tresses of some of Hollywood’s biggest names and most famous families — specifically the Kardashian/Jenners — she also has a haircare brand, Ouai, pronounced “way” (“In French, you’d say, ‘oui’ if you were being proper, but like, the cool kids in Paris would say, ‘way’,” Atkin told Vogue), is the ambassador for silk brand, Slip, and is currently writing a “big sister” business advice book. A book which is set to be a must-read for any budding stylists and beauty entrepreneurs out there.

On a recent visit to Sydney as part of her ambassadorship for Slip, among other responsibilities, Atkin shared with Vogue what it really takes to build a brand, the career advice she ignored and the down-to-earth ethos she believes is the secret to her success.

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You have made your success look effortless, is that the case?
“I really just want to paint a clear picture and what it means to really like build yourself as a brand. I think it’s important for people out there, who are like, ‘Oh, it’s easy, you just put everything on Instagram. And then it’s [success] done.’ It’s so much work. It’s so difficult. It’s almost harder now, because the world is just moving so fast. It’s moving as quickly as we scroll in Instagram.

But I also want to paint a picture that’s realistic too, because there’s days where it’s really hard and I sacrificed a lot. I think it’s important to kind of paint that full picture of what it is like.”

What qualities do you think have been instrumental in your success as a celebrity stylist?
“I think it just comes down to being nurturing. I think as a woman it was a little intimidating when I started out, because there were no female hairstylists really to look up to.

It’s different here in Australia. You have Renya [Xydis], you guys have female hairdressers, but back in 2006 when if first started it was just Sally Hershberger. So, that was a little discouraging to me, but I also realised that from a woman’s perspective, I knew on an emotional basis, that like, yes, these are celebrities, but they also are women that are working really hard and they have the same struggles that we do. And, I think, I’ve never lost the sense that I’m in a service industry and in there to take care of them.

And, it’s not really about me, when I’m with my clients. That’s something that’s really important, to just know that if you want to be in the service industry, don’t forget that you’re in the service industry. With Instagram, I think, people tend to like, you know, get a little caught up and forget that.”

What is the best and worst career advice you’ve received?
“The worst career advice I’ve ever was given, was by my old agent who said not to work with the Kardashians. And then the best advice I’ve ever gotten is by Serge Normant, the hairstylist. He actually wrote this in a magazine and I remember putting it in my locker at the salon. It said, ‘Don’t be jealous of your peers, be inspired by them.’

And that was pre-Instagram, so it was before the movement of just like, everyone supporting each other. It was very forward thinking of him.”

You’ve been working with the Kardashians for nearly a decade now and they all achieved phenomenal success, what has it been like being around that?
“Honestly, Kylie Skin’s moisturizer, I was so shocked. I tried it on camera actually for a YouTube episode I was doing, and my reaction was… I just couldn’t believe… the formula feels so thick, like La Mer. It’s so nice. She works so hard. She’s amazing. That whole family, I just think, they’re so hard working.

So many of my friends are doing such incredible products and, coming out with so many amazing brands and it’s just a really, it’s really fun. It’s like a revolution happening. We call it the democratising of beauty and I think it’s definitely happening.”

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These were the 6 top trends from Splendour in the Grass 2019

July 24, 2019 | News | No Comments

Photographer: Rachel Yabsley

Splendour in the Grass, one of Australia’s favourite music festivals, has now come and gone, leaving us looking back on the culture-filled weekend that was. Taking over North Byron Parklands from July 19 to July 21, the event proved to be a spectacle, with many attendees taking to the grassy fields wearing carefully thought out ensembles. 

Dabbling in animal print, giving the belt bag a run for its money, and tapping into the appeal of the bucket hat, festival-goers nailed the brief – no small feat considering the weather was considerably cool. While many did their best to stand out from the crowd, a particular set of trends were sported on high rotation. To find out which styles were favoured at Splendour in the Grass 2019, scroll on.

Boiler suits

What’s not to love about a boiler suit? The fool-proof style that was sported by many at this year’s music festival was typically worn in a loose and oversized fashion in a variety of neutral hues, and accessorised with everything from neck scarves to belt bags. 

Belt bags

Whether you’re a fan of the belt bag or not, the trend has most definitely stuck and the time to embrace the style is now. This handbag iteration, traditionally favoured by globe-trotting tourists, is an ideal alternative to the kind that would hang from your shoulder, as it provides the freedom to dance without the constant need to adjust a strap.

Cowboy boots 

When you’re spending a considerable amount of time stomping around a grassy field in the midst of winter, dancing until your feet are numb, a pair of trusty cowboy boots is a no-brainer. As such, it should come as no surprise that this particular style was the trending choice of footwear at the annual music festival.

Bucket hats

We’re calling it, the bucket hat is here to stay. Irrespective of the fact that it’s currently winter, Australians have taken a shine to the surf-inspired accessory. Come summer, we’re betting the bucket hat will be a sartorial statement piece you won’t want to live without. 

Bell-bottom trousers

Despite the fact that bell-bottom trousers are a rather tricky trend to pull off, many dabbled in the style at Splendour in the Grass this year. Paired with cowboy boots and a perfectly-worn vintage T-shirt, the trousers proved to be a go-to winter festival staple. 

Animal print

While it’s not exactly news that animal prints are having a moment, leopard print in particular has been a popular choice for quite some time now, many are opting to swap the tried-and-trusted print for the zebra or snake variety. Furthermore, cow print is also having a renaissance of sorts. The wide reach of the trend – worn in the form of clothing, shoes and accessories – became glaringly obvious at Splendour in the Grass this year.

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Grace Coddington on why photographer Norman Parkinson will always be in fashion

July 24, 2019 | News | No Comments

Audrey Hepburn wearing a Givenchy spring/summer 1955 cocktail dress, June 1955.

As a model in front of the camera, with her flaming red hair, Grace Coddington is a modern day Elizabeth Siddall. Behind the lens, as an editor, she is responsible for creating some of the most iconic fashion photographs of the past 50 years. And there is one photographer who she has collaborated with on numerous occasions, who she holds in particularly high regard – the late Norman Parkinson (or ‘Parkinson’ as she affectionately calls him). “He taught me everything about being an editor, and really keeping your eyes open all the time,” Coddington tells “To just keep watching. Keep looking. And take in everything so you can feed that back into your work.” 

Coddington’s love of Parkinson’s photographs dates back far beyond their first encounter, to her childhood in North Wales, when she would pore over his magazine shoots. As a new book of his work, is published, Coddington shares six of the standout qualities that made him truly unique.

The Beatles at the President Hotel, Russell Square, London, 1963. 

Norman Parkinson had a hawk-like eye for potential

“Parkinson and I first met in 1959. I was working in a bistro in London at the time and one of the regular customers, Tinker Paterson – a model and artist who was a major part of Parkinson’s life at that time – set up a meeting. I didn’t have a book of photos or anything to show him, but he said he didn’t want to see other people’s photos of me and would rather meet in person. Parkinson was really fantastic at finding new faces – he found them in the street, or wherever – and was able to recognise someone’s potential. Anyway, he booked me for my very first job and it was actually a nude shoot outside on his farm in Oxfordshire. I was so excited to work with him that I didn’t really register I would have to take my clothes off. I continued working with him as a model a little – in 1959 I won the young division of British ’s modelling contest and he was one of four judges – but he found much better models than me. We would go on to work together when I became a fashion editor, and that’s when our understanding of each other’s work really began.”

 Marie-Hélène Arnaud photographed for the cover of British Vogue, August 1957.

And that hawk-like eye travelled

“Parkinson and I travelled the world together. Perhaps one of the most memorable trips was in 1975 to the then USSR with Jerry Hall for a British shoot. We were invited by the tourist board and they had guides accompany us everywhere we went, watching our every move. One of the strict rules they imposed was that we had to have all of the film processed before we left the country. Parkinson stayed on an extra week to process the film and on our last night he said, ‘I’m really worried that they’re going to damage the film, can you take a few rolls back just in case?’ I was like, ‘No, no, no, Big Brother might be watching and I don’t want to end up in jail.’ But then Jerry said, ‘Oh, it’s fine, I’ll take it I never get searched.’’’

“So Jerry and I get to Moscow airport and we’re seized by the authorites who say they’ve received a tip-off that we’re smuggling out anti-communist propaganda in the form of unexposed film. They went through all our bags and of course they found our contraband in Jerry’s bag. It was the type of film that you seal with an ‘exposed’ sticker once it’s been used, but I reminded them it was ‘unexposed’ film they were looking for not ‘exposed’ and therefore they should give it all back to us. The funny part is when we all got back to London and compared the photographs, the ones processed in Russia were a much better quality.”

Montgomery Clift photographed for British Vogue in New York, November 1952.

He was a true original and, for better or worse, ahead of the game

“Quite often these days I will turn up to a job and there will be pictures from shoots I worked on with Parkinson, Guy Bourdin or Helmut Newton on the moodboard, and my response is always: ‘I’m not here to redo what has already been done, we did it pretty well back in the day.’ Because of the pace we are expected to work, and the way we swipe through pictures at high speed, photographers are frequently asked to copy something that already exists because they need a proven image that has already been okayed by the client.

“Parkinson was occasionally inspired by artists but he never copied other people’s pictures, which is why his photographs are eternally modern. He took an almost reportage approach. After he stopped working with Condé Nast he went over to and then I think his pictures became more brash and maybe a little tacky. But that’s exactly what happened in the world; it’s all about the Kardashians now, so he was ahead of his time in a way because he loved photographing the lives of the rich and famous. A good picture is a good picture, you can’t take that away – it will stand the test of time.”

He had the luxury of time

“Back then shoots abroad would always last at least two weeks – we really had the luxury of time; we’d spend at least a week on the ground scouting for locations – which meant you really got to see and understand a place. Like finding new faces, Parkinson was amazing at finding narratives in places and could conjure powerful images from almost any given surrounding. He wasn’t thinking about something else or the next job, he was always in the moment, completely focussed.

“Nowadays you learn what you can from a guidebook beforehand or from location shots but everyone gets the same thing – everything is done in such a hurry; shoots are crammed into a day and the photographer is expected to produce hundreds of shots – you never get in your own personal view. Parkinson made every place so personal because he looked at it through his eyes, not anyone else’s. That’s the biggest lesson he taught me: not to rely on other people’s opinions but to forge your own, really explore and look. It’s certainly done well for me.”

The official portrait of Prince Charles, marking his investiture as Prince of Wales, Caernarfon Castle, Wales, July 1969.

He was a consistent collaborator

“Parkinson always worked with a small team – aside from himself there would be one assistant, a fashion editor and a model on set and his wife Wenda would always come too and write the travel piece that accompanied the photoshoot. He created these pictures that we’re still looking at today and loving for their looseness and movement – they’re never stationary. The model isn’t necessarily rolling around with laughter, but there is always a lot of joy, and that’s down to the fact he was a funny man, charming, and he made them feel comfortable and in many cases made their careers; Celia Hammond for example.”

Pilar Crespi photographed for Town & Country at Trincomalee beach, Sri Lanka, March 1980. 

He knew how to make people, his subjects, feel comfortable

“Parkinson was really good with people, whether they be movie stars, fashion models, royalty or whatever. I was with him when he photographed Prince Charles for his investiture as the Prince of Wales. Parkinson asked me to come along because, he said: ‘I know he’s going to turn up after playing polo or something and he’ll be red in the face and I don’t know how to deal with that.’ I wasn’t a makeup artist or anything, but I brought along some powder and we spent the day at Windsor Castle. It was a very funny moment – at one point suddenly all these Corgis appeared out of nowhere, apparently the Queen was having tea on the other side of the hedge from where we were shooting, and another time the Princess of Wales galloped by on a horse – but it was quite a moment for me to be that close to the future king of England and be powdering is nose.”

, is out now.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Everything to know about the Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot

July 24, 2019 | News | No Comments

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24th Jul 2019

When Tori Spelling who played Donna on iconic ‘90s teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210 accidentally let slip to Access Live earlier this month that a reboot of the popular show was “confirmed”, die-hard 90210 fans went into excitement overload. 

Because, while the hit show—which ran for 10 season from 1990 to 2000—did have a second life from 2008 until 2013 in the form of a show called 90210, it didn’t capture fans’ hearts and minds in the same compelling way the original show did. Also, a 90210 reboot really needed to have the original crew back in their famous neighbourhood so fans could see what’s next for Donna, David, Kelly, Steve, Brandon and the rest of the OG 90210 crew.

Fast forward to 2019 and we will get to see what life looks like decades later for our favourite crew from the world’s most famous postcode. Are Kelly and Brandon together? What’s new for Steve? Is David still DJing? What happened to the Peach Pit? Will Shannen Doherty, who played Brandon’s twin Brenda and famously got fired from the show, return? We need answers to these burning questions.

Here, we’ve pulled together everything we know so far about the Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot.

Is the Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot definitely happening?
Yes. Aside from Tori Spelling’s accidental confirmation to Access Live, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) also confirmed the news, reporting the Fox network has “handed out a straight-to-series order for 90210”.

Who’s confirmed for the cast?
Initially, six original cast members were confirmed for the reboot per THR including: Jason Priestley (Brandon Walsh), Jennie Garth (Kelly Taylor), Ian Ziering (Steve Sanders), Gabrielle Carteris (Andrea Zuckerman), Brian Austin Green (David Silver) and Tori Spelling (Donna Martin). While we were unsure whether Shannen Doherty, who played Brenda Walsh, Brandon’s twin sister, would be returning to the set of the reboot after she was famously fired from the original show, the actress confirmed via Instagram that thankfully, she will be–and in more ways than just one.

Per Teen Vogue, Doherty is also set to executive produce the series. Heartbreakingly, there is no doubt we’re all going to miss 90210’s resident bad boy Dylan McKay, following Luke Perry’s passing in March 2019. While the actor was yet to sign onto the project before his death, Teen Vogue is reporting that in one way or another, the reboot is expected to pay tribute to Perry. 

What is the premise of the reboot?
Per The Hollywood Reporter the 90210 reboot will be a “twist” on the original show that will run for six-episodes as a “limited series”. The reboot was reportedly “inspired by the six original stars’ real lives and relationships.”

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The official description per THR is as follows: “Having gone their separate ways since the original series ended 19 years ago, Jason [Priestly], Jennie [Garth], Ian [Ziering], Gabrielle [Carteris], Brian [Austin Green] and Tori [Spelling] reunite when one of them suggest it’s time to get a Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot up and running. But getting it going may make for an even more delicious soap than the reboot itself. What will happen when first loves, old romances, friends and frenemies come back together, as this iconic cast… attempts to continue from where they left off?”

The stars took to their socials to share the news, posting a short teaser video about the reboot. Garth captioned her post with: ‘We’re coming home!”

A number of cast members have since taken to social media to share images from behind the scenes of the reboot’s production. Gabrielle Carteris, who plays Andrea Zuckerman on the hit series has posted countless photos to her profile, depicting everything from the new Peach Pit, to cast table reads. 

When will it be on TV?
Fox has finally released the official premier date for the Beverly Hills, 90210 reboot, which has been given the abbreviated title BH90210. As it’s set to air as soon as August 7, prepare to welcome the likes of Kelly and Brandon back to your screens in next to no time. The show’s first official trailer has also been revealed, so be sure to watch on as the cast reunite in the 30 second preview, below. 

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES