Monthly Archives: June 2022

What is the most famous gay and half-Jewish comedy duo you can think of? If youre coming up short, the answer is Kate Berlant and John Early, who have solidified that reputation in the zeitgeist with their Peacock special, Would It Kill You to Laugh?, which premiered on Friday.

The special, directed by Andrew DeYoung, is extremely high concept. It sets the scene of Berlant and Earlys decades-long feud and public falling-out from their hit sitcom, Hes Gay, Shes Half-Jewish. Meredith Vieira (yes, the real broadcast journalist) sits them down for an interview and things quickly go sideways, as the two battle it out over who got the rights to which comedic bits in their settlement. (Berlant got the right to cross her eyes, while Early got the right to do a mechanical robot arm movement.)

It then transitions into seemingly unrelated sketches that traverse time and space: the two of them have a meltdown in a childrens hip-hop class, they wear full beaver costumes at an airport (everyone else is human and they are never acknowledged as beavers) and they play a multitude of characters eating at restaurants where hot caramel is accepted as a form of payment. It also includes flashback scenes from their sitcom in which Early was the first gay man to shit on television and even includes a meta behind-the-scenes romance between the two of them in their dressing room for the Peacock special.

To Berlant and Early, however, the origins of the special werent high concept at all. The characters, sketches and central premise all derived in some form or another from inside jokes the two comedians have had over the years of their friendship. The two spoke to Varietyabout why they love playing on their absence of sexual tension, finding authentic emotion in absurd circumstances and whether Berlant would ever reprise her iconic role on The Other Two.

So, how did this special come into existence?

JOHN EARLY: Weve always made and wanted to make sketches. But we love when we get the opportunity every 16 years to make something where the sketches get to be a little more interconnected and refined and have some money behind them. So this really just came about from, frankly, being desperate to make something together again. We were just like, Can we just do a big batch of sketches like the old days? And we basically set out to make something that was a collection of sketches that were all in our sweet spots, like Kate and John, right in the vein, you know?

KATE BERLANT: Even though there is a framing device in this, its kind of just as simple as characters that make us laugh. There isnt any driving point of view.

It was hard not to notice throughlines that you put in between different sketches. Can you explain the world this special takes place in?

BERLANT: Yeah, I think its open to interpretation, if I can speak in cliches. The whole world is sort of turned up in the sense that beavers are people, a world where hot caramel is currency. Were always looking for those kinds of absurd visuals or absurd stakes, but always grounded in very authentic emotion. And the tension between those things always is what were naturally drawn to or what we as performers together always arrive at.

Where did the caramel idea come from?

BERLANT: Theres not that much of a story. It was a joke that John and I just for years have said. I dont recall when it started or anything.

EARLY: It was like 2012. I honestly think it was at that place Sweetwater in Williamsburg.

BERLANT: Really? Wow. Its good to actually have the origin. Yeah, they have a watermelon feta salad

EARLY: That is to die for!

BERLANT: So much of the special or what we do does come from these little jokes. Like, I would do a joke just in life of hitting on John and making him uncomfortable.

EARLY: Because we often share hotel rooms to save money when were touring or shooting something. It would always be funny to acknowledge, like, what if there were sexual tension between us all of a sudden?

BERLANT: Because theres just the absence of sexual tension. As Ive said I have more sexual tension with my mother. So its like imagining that I would hit on John.

EARLY: Yeah, she always does that to me, where shell be like I just wanna blow off steam.

BERLANT: That always made us laugh and scream because its so, like, insane. And that ended up being kind of a favorite thing of the whole special. And it kind of comes from this very real joke that really just was a private joke.

EARLY: And again, the absurdity of what if there were sexual tension between us gives us permission to approach it on an acting level as totally real. That was the challenge of that sketch, like this is so funny, but it will only be funny to the audience if we just play it like its really happening.

Throughout the special, you guys just dont seem to be able to tell the truth. Every second that something happens, there has to be a lie that you keep covering up. So Im curious where that aspect of your characters came from.

BERLANT: The characters were always drawn to are hiding something. I mean, the way we all are kind of performing authenticity or performing some kind of truth, which is very familiar to any celebrity interview the person going there and its all highly choreographed.

EARLY: Its like, what is funny about someone being real or being honest? I cant imagine us doing a special where the sketches were us being truthful. I think theres just the tension. We always find it funny when someone is saying one thing and feeling another, you know? Were less joke-driven on principle. Thats our favorite joke, just a kind of behavioral thing of suppressing something and posturing and social anxiety, like what you do when youre nervous and youre in public and youre being seen.

BERLANT: Whenever youre, like, trying to curate someones perception of you.

EARLY: Which is impossible, its fundamentally impossible. But Lord knows you can try.

BERLANT: Oh, yeah. And Ive been doing it.

How did the central aspect of the celebrity interview come in for you?

EARLY: Its like the kind of drop dead seriousness of something that is purely just pulp schlock. Its as if theyre talking about Darfur, but theyre talking about their first album. Thats always been fundamentally funny. But the truth is we have always loved this one video that you can find on YouTube of Suzanne Summers and Joyce DeWitt having a reunion after not seeing each other for like 30 years or something, not speaking and having a very public falling out over Threes Company and stuff. Its just an incredibly layered video. Its like watching Bergman. Its so wild just to see what theyre projecting and what theyre actually feeling.

BERLANT: And the competition to come across the most open and empathetic. John showed me that video in the very beginning of our friendship, and its amazing, just the way they hug each other.

EARLY: We had to cut our hug for time unfortunately.

And how did Meredith Vieira get involved?

BERLANT: Meredith, we were so thrilled, of course, that she said yes. We were expecting her to pass and we would have totally understood. Apparently her kids are fans of ours, so I think that helped. But she was, first of all, just a delight and a dream, but also so funny, such an amazing actress and just really understood. I mean, that is her world. She elevates the entire special and allows the joke to feel even more pronounced.

EARLY: We wrote very simple lines for her. I never would have been prepared for her, like, acting.

I want to also talk to you about this idea of examining the comedy duo, like the legacy of the comedy duo. So, first of all, who are your favorite comedy duos?

BERLANT: Us.

EARLY: I love French and Saunders.

BERLANT: Mike Nichols and Elaine May are beyond iconic. I mean, its funny because in our generation not to like, of course there have been people that have worked together but its not as lauded a form.

EARLY: But it makes a lot of sense because peoples main platform to even be seen by people is Instagram where youre a one-man-band. So it would make sense, actually, that the duo is undervalued or not even attempted as much. Like, imagine if we had a joint Instagram account. That would be so embarrassing. You know what I mean? In our age of narcissism and rampant individualism, theres something very sweet and old-school about it that we both treasure.

BERLANT: Also just on a level of sheer joy of working, its so much more fun.

EARLY: And on an acting level, too, theres obviously so much more that can happen when there are two factors instead of trying to create something thats built around yourself.

Will there be a feature version of this special?

EARLY: Well, I hope so.

BERLANT: I would love that vein of brain candy. We have deep aspirations of doing a classic comedy show, like a scripted narrative show that were currently writing. But something about the sketch comedy hour felt so right to us the kind of self-contained nature of it and wed love to make more of them.

Because it is Pride Month and youre now the preeminent gay-half-Jewish comedy duo, Kate, you have perhaps the most famous instance of saying the F-word on television, in The Other Two. John, what do you think about that?

EARLY: I was so proud. Ive tried to work it into a lot of my own work, that word. It was thrilling.

BERLANT: Woman is the word that were referencing, right?

EARLY: Yeah, I love it. I really, really love it. And I love the way people responded to it. I dont think anyones ever been mad at you for that.

BERLANT: Not one person. By the way, that line was written by Jordan Firstman.

So youre going to pass off the blame?

BERLANT: Well, I would never, you know, write something like that for myself. Yeah. Thank you. I love when people yell that to me on the street.

And would you return to that show?

BERLANT: Pitzi Pyle was kind of a flash in the pan, and a fun one at that. A spinoff.

Can we petition?

BERLANT: Absolutely.

Since you said some things were cut, is there anything you want to share that was a darling of yours?

EARLY: Theres so many. Every single sketch I would say has about like a four minute arm we had to lob off. Like in the book club [sketch], I would say there are so many.

Just because you brought that up, is there a story behind the book your characters are reading Clancys Reward by Paul Floor?

BERLANT: That was truly like, what should his name be? I was like

BOTH: Paul Floor.

EARLY: There was a running joke in Search Party of peoples names being objects, like Doctor Amanda Baby. And then I realized with Paul Floor, you do that because its so much easier to clear legally because you are more than likely not going to run across someone named Paul Floor.

BERLANT: They even tried to make it look like Paul W. Floor.

EARLY: Yeah just make sure, we were like, Theres no one named Paul Floor.

BERLANT: Imagine some Paul Floor in Delaware sues.

Youre going to get a letter.

BERLANT: A little Easter Egg in the sitcoms is that the book thats hiding one of Johns gins is a Paul Floor short stories book. So you can go back on your third or fourth watch.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Kate Berlant and John Early Discuss the Origin of Would It Kill You to Laugh? and Their Absence of Sexual Tension - Variety

LONDON For roughly three decades, making sure athletes participated in the biggest events regardless of the worlds never-ending military and political battles has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of international sports.

Wars broke out. Authoritarian nations with egregious records on human rights hosted major events. There were massive doping scandals. And through it all, boycotts and bans on participation all but disappeared from the sports landscape.

That principle staging truly global competitions and not holding athletes responsible for the worlds ills began to crumble after Russias invasion of Ukraine. It will be on hiatus starting Monday, when Wimbledon opens without the world No. 1, Daniil Medvedev, and the rest of the tennis players from Russia and Belarus, who have been barred from participating.

World Athletics, track and fields world governing body, has also barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from its championships next month in Eugene, Ore., the biggest track and field event outside of the Olympic Games.

The bans represent a drastic shift after years of resisting letting politics interfere with individual athletes participation in sports. They are also a departure from the decisions that various sports organizations made earlier this year to limit punishments to banning Russian and Belarusian teams or any flags or other symbols of the countries from competitions.

What changed? Chinas authoritarian government has stifled free speech and other human rights, and its treatment of the Uyghurs has been deemed genocide by multiple governments, yet it was permitted to host the Olympics in February. Why were Russian and Belarusian athletes pariahs by March?

Experts in international sports say that the so-called right-to-play principle ran headlong into the most significant package of economic sanctions placed on a country since the end of the Cold War. That shifted the calculus for sports leaders, said Michael Payne, the International Olympic Committees former director of marketing and broadcast rights.

For years, people would point at sports and athletes and demand boycotts, and sports could say, Hang on, why are you singling us out but going on with the rest of your trade? Payne said. But if you have full economic and political sanctions against a country, then Im not sure that sports should still sit it out.

The leaders of tennis in Britain ultimately decided they could not. In April, acting at the behest of the British government, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, and the Lawn Tennis Association, which oversees the other annual spring and summer tournaments in England, announced the ban, explaining they had no other choice.

The U.K. government has set out directional guidance for sporting bodies and events in the U.K., with the specific aim of limiting Russias influence, said Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club. We have taken that directional guidance into account, as we must as a high-profile event and leading British institution.

He said the combination of the scale and severity of Russias invasion of a sovereign state, the condemnation by over 140 nations through the United Nations and the specific and directive guidance to address matters made this a very, very exceptional situation.

The move is broadly popular in Britain, according to opinion polls, but it has received significant pushback from the mens and womens tennis tours. They condemned it as discriminatory and decided to withhold rankings points for any victories at the tournament.

On Saturday, Novak Djokovic, the defending champion at Wimbledon, called the barring of players unfair. I just dont see how they have contributed to anything that is really happening, he said.

One Russian-born player, Natela Dzalamidze, changed her nationality to Georgian so she could play doubles at Wimbledon. Last week, the United States Tennis Association announced that it would allow players from Russia and Belarus to compete at its events, including the U.S. Open, this summer, but with no national identification.

This is not an easy situation, Lew Sherr, the chief executive of the U.S.T.A. told The New York Times this month. Its a horrific situation for those in Ukraine, an unprovoked and unjust invasion and absolutely horrific, so anything we talk about pales in relation to what is going on there.

But, Sherr added, the organization did not receive any direct pressure or guidance from government officials.

Tennis has been juggling politics and sport a lot lately. Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA, last fall suspended the tours business in China, including several high-profile tournaments, because of the countrys treatment of Peng Shuai.

Peng, a doubles champion at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014, accused a former top government official of sexually assaulting her. She then disappeared from public view for weeks. She later disavowed her statements. Simon said the WTA would not return to China until it could speak independently with Peng and a full investigation took place.

In explaining the decision to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from its world championships, Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, acknowledged in March that the move went against much of what he has stood for. He has railed against the practice of politicians targeting athletes to make political points when other sectors continue to go about their business. This is different, he said, because the other parts of the economy are at the tip of the spear. Sport has to step up and join these efforts to end this war and restore peace. We cannot and should not sit this one out.

Michael Lynch, the former director of sports marketing for Visa, a leading sponsor of the Olympics and the World Cup, said the response to Russias aggression is natural as sports evolve away from the fiction that they are somehow separate from global events.

Just as the N.B.A. and other sports leagues were forced to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake, international sports will have to recognize that they are not walled off from the problems of the world, he said.

This genie is not going back in that bottle, Lynch said. We will continue to see increased use of sports for cultural change, for value change, for policy change. Its only going to happen more and more.

Sports sanctions against Russia could be the beginning of the end of largely unfettered global competition. Who gets to play and who doesnt could depend on whether the political zeitgeist deems an athletes country to be compliant with the standards of a civilized world order.

Should Israeli athletes worry because of their countrys much-criticized occupation of the West Bank? What about American athletes the next time their country kills civilians with a drone strike?

This a slippery slope, David Wallechinsky, a leading sports historian, said of the decision to hold Russian and Belarusian athletes accountable for the actions of their governments. The question is, Will other people from other countries end up paying the price?

This month, some of the worlds top golfers were criticized for joining a new golf tour bankrolled by the government of Saudi Arabia, a repressive government responsible for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and columnist for The Washington Post. Looming a little more than two years from now are the next Summer Olympics, in Paris. Who will be there is anyones guess.

I do think Ukraine has rightly galvanized the West and its allies, but I also believe that sport will emerge as a connector instead of a tool of division, said Terrence Burns, a sports consultant who in the 2000s advised Russia on its bids to secure hosting rights for the Olympics and the World Cup during a different era. But it will take time. And during that time, athletes, for better or worse, will pay a price.

Christopher Clarey contributed reporting.

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As Wimbledon Begins, an Era of Sports Free of Bans and Boycotts Ends - The New York Times

The law, too, belongs to cultural history. A decision of the Supreme Court struggles to connect to a timeless principle. But a decision always connects, as wellalmost unconsciously, as if talking in its sleepto its particular moment in the nations life.

Think about Roe v. Wade (1973) and Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization (2022) as an exercise in time-lapse photography. Those decisions were, respectively, the beginning and the end of a 50-years-long American chapter dealing with the subject of abortion. Those 50 years coincide, precisely, with the adult lifetimes of the oldest members of the baby boom generation, who were in college or law school at the time that Roe was handed downor were just starting out in their public careers (think of Bill and Hillary Clinton). Now they are settling into old age.

The Roe decision, a revolution, came at the height of the Gloria Steinem wave of feminism. The late sixties and early seventies were the seedbed of the American culture warsthose struggles that began just after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, when the conflict moved on from the legal to the cultural battlefield.

The old authorities had failed. The cultural elites were engaged at the time of Roe in a sheepish mind-meld with the countercultural young; those elites (who mostly had avoided the draft) recoiled against the humiliation of the lost war in Vietnam and against Richard Nixon (the abortion decision came in the midst of Watergate, as the damning facts seeped out) and against the dismal earlier rule of Lyndon Johnson. They despised the regime of discredited old men (the country hadnt been any good since Jack Kennedy died) and they pined for new, enlightened gestures. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven! The weak Roe ruling (even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it lame as a matter of constitutional law) became part of the ardent overreach of the time. Roe, too, seemed like a victory of the young elites against the Old Believersthe unwashed Silent Majority that Spiro Agnew had been courting. Later in 1973, Agnew had to resign as vice president. It seems that in his days as governor of Maryland, he had a habit of accepting bribes delivered in brown paper bags.

The generational theme was pervasive in those days. The sexual revolution, a phenomenon of youth, had produced its natural consequences, despite the best efforts of the pill to prevent that kind of trouble. So Roe was a practical blessing. The ruling elites (in the media, in the universities and the arts, in the government, in corporations) had been badly shaken by the second half of the sixties and by their own failures (Vietnam was only part of the story). They sought to appease the multitude of boomers, who were, after all, the coming thing, and, in the end, the victors as the country emerged from the 1960s.

All these elements were part of the zeitgeist that surrounded the Roe decision. I do not mean to say that the decisions author, Justice Harry Blackmun, a Minnesotan sent to the court by President Nixon in 1970, was either a hippie or a fool. He was 65 at the time and had started out on the bench as a conservative. He would eventually become the most liberaland (some would argue) most humane justice. But I do propose that the reasoning and language of Blackmuns Roe decision (in what he said and what he left out) were influenced by the ambient cultural energies of that vivid time: by what magazine editors used to call the psychic surround.

Wisdom on the left embraces the idea that last weeks decision in Dobbs was essentiallyfeloniouslypolitical: an act of Trumpian brutalism. But that formulation is upside down. The energies of the boomer elites (going back to civil rights days and the antiwar movement) have always been ferociously, theatrically political. Their victories in the 1960s were mostly achieved by performance politicsdissent, disobedience, protestrather than by the conventional instruments of constitutional process. It was the elected politicians (Johnson, Nixon) who were their villains. Younger generations inherited from the boomers certain ideological and anti-democratic preferencesincluding a faith in political theater and hyperbole and even hysteria, which have now been amplified a thousandfold by social media. Rioting has become one of the most familiar and accepted forms of American theater. Women dress up in costumes from The Handmaids Tale and beat upon the doors of the Supreme Court.

The truth about Dobbs isor ought to beanticlimactic. Anti-theatrical, too: what the Court has done is to try, at last, to take the difficult, painful subject of abortion out of the hands of baby boomers and their heirs-in-performance and allow it to be sorted out, democratically, in the legislatures of the 50 states.

Lance Morrow, a contributing editor of City Journal and the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was an essayist at Time for many years. His latest book is God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.

Photo by Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images

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The End of a 50-Year Chapter - City Journal

There are plenty of performers that captivate their audience with their culture-defying sound, gyrations, and romps. Visually, however, there are few superstars that have cultivated a more distinct image than Elvis Presley. Baz Luhrmanns latest biopic Elvis (released on June 24, 2022) explores the arc of Presleys fascinating, boisterous, calamitous, exciting lifeso much of which is conveyed through his clothing.

For Elviss (Austin Butler) first performance in the film, he dons a silky pink suit that flummoxes his audience nearly as much as his music and moves. Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punk-ness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation, says Elvis costume designer Catherine Martin. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. The history alone presented fashion symbolism ripe for interpretation.

In Martin's pursuit of the visual component of what she dubs an American tragic opera, she delicately toed the line between exact replications and artistic interpretationa Luhrmann signature. Martin, who is married to Luhrmann and has worked on his prior films including Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, and Moulin Rouge, notes that this is the first of movies she's worked on based on actual people. Naturally, the research process was extensive. Not only did Luhrmann, Martin, and their crew consume every tangible thing they could, they spent hours and hours at Graceland, immersing themselves in Elviss world. Martin herself dug into the archives to discover the minutiae of every beaded jumpsuit and silky suit.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

You've worked on so many Baz Luhrmann films. What separated this one from the rest?

Well, I think the scale of it, which sounds ridiculous, because all of his movies have a huge scale. This one particularly was just gigantic in its ambition because it spans all of those decades. It's also about real people, some of whom are still alive. So that puts a little bit of pressure on the production and on the subject matter, as well as how you deal with it respectfully, which was certainly something that Baz wanted to do. And obviously, it's also a movie about a man's life, the complicated relationship he has with his manager, the conflict between art and commerce, what it means to be famous. This is all against the backdrop of a very tumultuous time in American history. You have the loss of innocence after the Second World War in America. You've got segregation, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the rise of the feminist movement, hippiedom, drug culture. In the space of 20 years, things got pretty crazy. I think what attracted me when Baz described the subject is that it wasn't just a biopic. It was much bigger. (These are my words not his.) It was like an American tragic opera that I thought was a really interesting way to explore not only the period, but someone's life.

I know you have a really high bar when it comes to research. I'd love to hear about what that process looks like.

Well, Baz is pretty exigent. And it starts during the writing process. He set us a number of visual research tasks for things that he might want to service the script. So for instance, we made an extensive chart of every single jumpsuit Elvis ever wore, when he wore it, if there were any anecdotes about the jumpsuits that were interesting, or might play into a story point. [It ranged from] something as workman-like as doing that to experiencing a road trip in the South to feel the landscape so when we were recreating the South in Australia, we had a feeling for what that was like. Going to Graceland and getting a survey done of the land or getting the original plans from the archives or making notations of every single plant that was in the garden at Graceland contemporaneously, and then comparing it with photos from the past.

We looked at things like Gladys's [Elviss mother] dresses in archive boxes, and just saw the simplicity of the woman. The resounding sadness that came out of the boxes when you lifted the lid, you really felt this sense of dissatisfaction with life or a kind of yearning for something that I think she couldn't quite put her finger on. It's all those ephemeral things that give you a sense of who the people are. And Baz is really into the details, understanding who the people are through their objects. He was at Graceland, on and off, for over 18 months writing. It's the fact that Vernon [Elviss father] kept every receipt and every check. You really see that his parents were products of the Depression. Obviously, we read all the books you can read about Elvis, about his entourage, about Priscilla, but documentary material is only a reflection of the documentarians opinion. So, it's great to actually see the objects themselves because it allows you to tap into who those people were.

Costume designer Catherine Martin and Olivia DeJonge who plays Priscilla Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

What struck me was how much fashion symbolism was already present in this narrative. You have this huge conflict where society tries to put Presley in tails as a symbol of repression. Were you so thrilled to work with that information?

Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punkness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. Although a lot of Black performers had synergized those things, it's interesting to see him do it on that scale. He becomes famous in almost two yearsliterally goes from rags to riches thanks to the television and the Colonel's masterstroke of putting him on the social media of his day.

Outside of the clothes, how did you experiment with Presley's appearance?

It's fascinating how hair has always been such a huge flashpoint for humanityand having long hair specifically. When you look at Elvis's hair now, you think, oh, it's a really handsome head of hair. It's not shocking at all. But that length, the way he cut it, the way it fell over his eyes, the fact that it wasn't short on the sides, but throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was such a flashpoint for everybody. Hair is such a symbol of who we are. In our company, we have a motto, which is transportation, accommodation, communication, and hair. Hair stands for feeling good about yourself, self-care, and all the issues that having a bad hair day brings up in a person. Hair can bring a set to a standstill. We joked that Austin's hair was almost a character in the movie because so much focus was on this hair.

[Elvis's] hair was naturally blonde and he progressively, throughout the '50s, dyed it darker and darker. Some people say it's because he looked at the movies, and he felt that male movie stars tended to have darker hair. Maybe it was that in black-and-white photos, there's more contrast between your face and dark hair.

I read somewhere that a lot of stars in this time would wear flashy clothes so that they would attract attention. I know Elvis didn't have a stylist. What did you discover along this process about his own approach to fashion and style? And how calculated it was versus how much he just found things that spoke to him?

I think it's a combination of things. When you find things that speak to you and you're able to combine them in a look that galvanizes people, it's got to be deliberate to some extent. What's extraordinary about Elvis is he didn't come from a very stylish place. Tupelo, Mississippi, isn't inherently the style center of America, but Elvis had this ability to not be bound by any kind of convention, and look at things and be influenced by things and synthesize them into his own take.

He was very shy and had stage fright all his life so the clothes were probably armor for him. But he naturally gravitated to extraordinary and shocking combinations. He wore a lot of lace shirts. He used to tie his shirts up Peter Allen-style and not wear a shirt under a jacket. He loved a shacket. He constantly made bold choices. His mother thought this was totally fine so he never understood why people had such violent reactions to the way he presented himself. He was certainly swimming against the tide, but he made all these visual decisions deliberately. He wore mascara and covered his pimples with his mother's base. On the one hand, Elvis is unabashedly masculine. You feel this kind of virile masculinity. He often wore clothes that worked against that in a traditional sense, but you never think that. The jumpsuits, particularly in the latter part of his career, started to look very like Liberace's costumes, with the same degree of camp-ness. But it's just a fascinating thing because with him in the jumpsuits, you never think oh, that's super camp. And maybe that tension between the two things makes him more interesting.

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley.

Photos: Courtesy of Prada

A sketch of Priscilla's outfit.

How many of these costumes were a perfect homage to previous ensembles from history and how many were you using as creative embellishment? Was the goal to recreate original looks with 100 percent accuracy?

Well, I think there were distinctly two schools, certainly that Baz spoke about. There was the trainspotting (which refers to a class of English people who can recognize steam trains and trains from a huge distance, and they know exactly what model of train it is). So there were certain outfits that were absolutely homages to existing costumes. For instance, the jumpsuits. They were all made by a company called B&K Enterprises [Costume Company]. They carry the Elvis jumpsuit torch because they actually connected with Bill Belew who designed the original jumpsuits. They connected with the tailor who actually put these garments together. They connected with the belt maker. But to some degree, we needed some subtle changesas simple as wanting a trim hand sewn on because it was to be on a 40-foot screen. When we got those jumpsuits, we fitted them to Austin. We changed them subtly because we found when we slavishly used all of the Elvis proportions, they became caricatures of themselves. The approach had to be for this version of Elvis.

Then there's some interpretive moments because they're either fictionalized scenes that are conglomerations of a bunch of events that happened to Elvis, but they're put into a scene that compresses all that information. Like the pink suit, which is totally based on real clothes that Elvis actually wore in the period. We know he wore black and pink and we know he wore that style of suit. So that is interpretive. But it's not like Gatsby in the sense that The Great Gatsby was based very broadly on research. It's more like a historical reconstruction, rather than just absolute fantasy.

Was your approach to Priscilla's character similar to that of Elvis's?

Just like Elvis, Priscilla's such a style icon. We didn't want to just slavishly reproduce her clothes and make a pale imitation of who she actually was. We wanted to keep respect and reverence for her. And so we didn't just get Priscilla's hairstyle and plunk it on Olivia [DeJonge]'s head. Shane [Thomas], our head of hair and makeup, spent a lot of time, along with his crew, working on the proportions. And similarly with the clothes, we needed to do the same thing. We did copy some of Priscillas outfits in exactly the same way that we did for Elvis. Her wedding dress is a loving reproduction. In the scene on the tarmac, both Elvis's tracksuit and Olivia's outfit were reproductions of the outfits that Priscilla and Elvis wore coming out of the divorce court hand in hand.

Costume designer Catherine Martin on the set of Elvis.'

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Fashion lovers will have spotted the Prada print from old runway shows on Priscilla. I know you've worked with Miuccia [Prada] before, but what was it like to collaborate on those looks?

It's always such a pleasure to work with her. I think there's a great synergy with Prada culture, and Baz and Muccia's perspective. Although she has said to me, Oh, I don't think I look at the past in the way that you say. But I always think it's that they both, in their completely different ways, look to the past, but always end up in the future.

Obviously, [Prada] is a luxury brand, but it's luxurious working with them because you have all these resources that add so much production value that is just not as available when you're making a movie. Just the ability to say, Okay, I want this beaded tunic with those pants in this brocade and I want the matching shoes. And its all beautifully made with incredible fabrics, incredible savoir faire, and such a depth of archive. I think that's the other great thing about Miuccia [Prada]. The clothes are a dialogue with women. They're about women and all their facets. They're very much clothes by a woman for women.

Are you excited to see how this film affects the way people will dress in the real world over the next year or two?

I always feel like fashion and cinema are in constant conversation. And you never know what comes first. I love fashion and I love clothes. So, I would have to say that I'm always influenced by what's happening around me. And I think it's just a conversation. It's always interesting, but I'm not sure it's as direct as that. It's more that we're all living in the same world at the same time. And Baz has this incredible ability to sort of [tap into] the zeitgeist. He always feels sometimes a little too ahead of his time. It's just interesting to see how they all interact with each other.

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'Elvis' Costume Designer Catherine Martin on Recreating the King's Inimitable Style - Coveteur

A Swiss Guard is seen as Pope Francis attends Mass in St. Peter's Square during the World Meeting of Families at the Vatican June 25, 2022. (CNS photo/Remo Casilli, Reuters)

My recent CWR column on Pope Franciss comments about the worrisome rise of what he called the restorers in the American Church appears to have kicked up some dust and not a little misunderstanding.

Many critics seem to think that I was saying more than I was saying. For example, some traditionalists, despite my explicit statement that the primary gaggers of the Council were the post-conciliar progressives and despite my claim that it is Pope Francis himself who is to blame for the current radicalization of the current ecclesial factionalism took my critique of their restorationism as some kind of blanket condemnation of traditionalism tout court. They think I am claiming that there can be no legitimate criticisms of Vatican II.

And it is only that last claim where I think a certain ambiguity in my remarks, born of a need to remain brief, should be clarified on my part. I am in favor of a deep and robust debate, involving all voices in the Church without any censoriousness imposed from above, about the ongoing meaning of the Council and its proper reception.

I myself have criticized the Council for what I call its double naivete. The first naivete was an overconfidence in the internal strength of the pre-conciliar Churchs culture. After all, if the pre-conciliar Church was as healthy as its proponents claim, then how on earth do we explain the almost immediate collapse of that culture after the Church lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido? No less a light than a young Fr. Joseph Ratzinger had already noted, in an important lecture published in Hochland in 1958, that the Church had become a Church of pagans that was rotting from within.

The second naivete was a stunning (almost insouciant) optimism with regard to the Churchs dialogue with modern culture. There was an intoxicating overconfidence in the ability of the bourgeois culture of Liberal democracy to act as a medium within which the Church could be herself and fulfill her mission. In short, I think the Council failed to read properly and prophetically the very signs of the times, both within the Church and in the broader culture, to which the Council appealed as a tool for discernment, and that this failure was near fatal to the conciliar project as a pastoral endeavor, the aim of which was to usher in a new Pentecost within the Church.

Therefore, my problem with the traditionalist critique of Vatican II is not that they dare to question its documents, but rather that their critique is, generally speaking (but not in all cases), simply wrong. Space precludes a more lengthy exposition, but I think they are wrong to reject certain developments of doctrine in the areas of religious freedom, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and the theological nuances of Dei Verbum in its Christological recentering of our concept of Revelation and the various media of Revelation in Scripture and Tradition.

However, I think the traditionalist critique of the Council does raise certain thorny hermeneutical and theological questions that have been festering in the Church ever since the conclusion of the Council. Which indicates, at the very least, they are questions that are not going away and need answering. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI went a long way toward answering some, but not all, of those questions, and I agree with my friend, the brilliant patristic scholar Dr. Lewis Ayres, who stated in an interview I did with him, that the Councils ressourcement theological project is an unfinished product in deep need of a renewed and vigorous revisitation. My traditionalist friends are of the view we have had enough time to do this already and that the project has been an abject failure. And, further, that it is the very unfinished nature of the whole enterprise that has led to the dangling loose ends of theological ambiguity that created this mess in the first place.

I can sympathize with this frustration while rejecting their solution to simply restore the old Mass as the standard Mass of the Church, and to resurrect the mid- century neo-scholasticism of folks such as Garrigou-Lagrange as the standard theology of the Church. I admire Lagrange and have profited from his writings, but a simple return to that mode of theology would be disastrous. Nevertheless, all of this is a debate worth having if for no other reason that the form of theology and liturgy they champion is indeed part of the Churchs Tradition and cannot, and must not, be simply swept away as so much retrograde nonsense.

Therefore, I am in favor of all voices at the table since only an open debate involving all faithful Catholics will help us untie the knots we have twisted ourselves into. But this is precisely my complaint regarding Pope Francis. The Pope of accompaniment and of going out to the peripheries and of synodality and dialogue, seems singularly unable to extend such things to the Churchs traditionalist flank. When it comes to those peripheries there are only harsh and scolding words (rigid, Pharisaical, psychologically unbalanced) and punitive and deprecatory motu proprios, all of which seem designed to disenfranchise and demoralize some of the Churchs most devoted and devout sons and daughters. And when those sons and daughters react negatively and then seek out spiritual enclaves where they can find succor enclaves that may indeed contain dysfunctional elements and theologically facile dismissals of more recent theology he reacts, not like a loving father, but as a harsh magistrate bristling with all of the bureaucratic means at his disposal to put them in their place.

Combine that with this Popes elevation of rather undistinguished bishops McElroy, Cupich, Tobin and Farrell to high office, and a picture emerges of care and concern not for peripheries at all but for the adulation of the rainbow-colored mainstream of our dominant cultural elites. I repeat: reaching out to the sexual libertines of our culture is not a going out to the peripheries at all, but rather a wedding banquet for the well-heeled devotees of our First World fetishes and obsessions.

And when those in the Church who have skin in this game object that this kind of accommodationist project is a recipe for a catastrophic pastoral capitulation to the nihilistic Zeitgeist, they are told that they do not have a place at the table of dialogue; only the progressive understanding of Vatican II is allowed into the banquet. And I can only repeat what I said in my previous essay: that this autocratic and monochrome approach to the Councils reception will only inflame, radicalize, and entrench those who do not agree.

In other words, my claim is that this is a Pope who does not unify, but who instead divides. This is a Pope who polarizes binaries and creates unnecessary peripheries. We need real dialogue, real healing, real conversation, and real Christian discourse in a spirit of charity. But in its place we get the back of the hand.

And that brings me to one of the other responses to my previous essay. This time from the Left, in an absurd tweet from the papal sycophant Austen Ivereigh, who says of my essay:

A curious article, which betrays the isolated conscience of which Francis warns in Let Us Dream, in which the desire to hold onto something we think is threatened ends up distorting our grasp of reality itself.

Devoid of any substantive discussion of my actual arguments, this tweet is also a form of mean-spirited, ad hominem accusation that plays in the sandbox of psychological imputation. And from a man who does not know me in the slightest, does not know my published works, and has most definitely not even bothered to understand my argument or, more importantly, the issues that generated it. He seems to just dismiss me as just one more cranky, Right-wing crackpot who hates the Pope for purely emotional, visceral, and subjective reasons. Therefore, I must be motivated by a badly formed conscience riddled with fear over the demise of things I am clinging to like a child clutching a teddy bear in the night, afraid of the bogeyman under the bed.

The isolated conscience, by the way, was a term used by Pope Francis to describe those who are selfish and who set themselves against the relational path opened up by true charity. And as such, they are tools of Satan, like Judas. Living in their own thought world and besotted by their own ideological deformations, they refuse to encounter reality and retreat instead into their safe spaces of interior, solipsistic, narcissism. And Austen got all of that from my observation that the rise of the traditionalist movement coincided with the rise of Pope Francis, and I dared to see a connection there? The fact that he would see in such a claim some kind of deeply distorting ideology speaks more to his own isolated conscience and lack of contact with charity and reality than it does to my state of mind. Sycophants gonna sycophant.

I only mention this tweet because it is all too indicative of just the sort of dismissive condescension towards people of genuine faith fellow Catholics by the way who dare question this papacy and its aimless drift, like a bobbing cork, in the tidal forces of modernity. It is indicative of the sort of bullying, and intellectually shallow, thuggery that passes for dialogue amongst Pope Franciss most loyal admirers and promoters.

I and millions like me are not restorationists in the negative sense of that term employed by Pope Francis. We are simply loyal sons and daughters of the Church who have toiled in the Lords vineyard for decades. There is only one kind of restorationism that matters: the restoration of all things in Christ. And every faithful Catholic who shares that vision needs to be heard.

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Further thoughts on restorationistsand a remark on papal sycophants - Catholic World Report

After a three-year absence, Glastonbury Festival returns this weekend.

The pioneering Piltdown weekender remains the biggest and most historic music festival of them all, and with a 2022 lineup that includes headliners Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lemar playing alongside a diverse, star-studded assembly of musical delights imaginable its easy to see why.

Cynics may grumble about the so called commercialisation of the festival these days, but Worthy Farm remains a uniquely special place where careers can be made, legends can be born and some of the most iconic live performances in history have taken place.

Head honcho Michael Eavis may believe that the festival peaked in its first year, citing the 1970 headline set by Tyrannosaurus Rex (later T. Rex) as his favourite, but, respectfully, there have been many more artists who have delivered career-defining performances to cement Glastonburys status as the world's most magical festival.

Here, then, are the 11 greatest Glastonbury performances ever.

More than a decade had passed since the birth of Glastonbury Festival, and the music scene that it represented in the early '70s had moved on some way as we reached the mid-point of the 1980s.

Not that these changes were particularly reflected in the line-up of the festival, with the 1984 bill featuring jazz legends Fela Kuti and Dr. John and new wave hero Elvis Costello headlining. But, halfway down the bill on the Saturday, Michael Eavis had booked a band that would give the festival the lightbulb moment it needed, leading to its refusal to stagnate ever again.

The Smiths only had one album at this point, their self-titled debut, released in February of that year, but already they were becoming cult-like, a magnet for frustrated and disaffected youth. No one quite knew what was going to happen when Morrissey and Johnny Marr led the Manchester quartet out that day, but their ten-song set seemed to be a siren for young people to appear from nowhere and turn the Pyramid Stage from a docile field of hippies into an pogoing indie disco.

By the time a triumphant Hand in Glove closed the show, a full-blown stage invasion was happening. The festival would never ignore the zeitgeist again.

Glastonburys relationship with dance music wasnt an immediately happy one. Michael Eavis has openly admitted he didnt care for the style, and when a series of free parties started springing up on site around the time that the UK rave scene was being vilified as public enemy number one in the media, a sense of lawlessness that was the antithesis of Glastonburys purpose caused all manner of headaches.

But when the Criminal Justice Act bill of 1994 scandalously targeted and criminalised fans of acid house, the festival, rather than shun the genre, showed solidarity and embraced it.

Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, aka Orbital, were installed as NME Stage headliners that year and proceeded to perform a set that has gone down as a kind of EDM big bang for festivals the world over.

Not only was the duo's hypnotic set of euphoric beats rapturously received, it showed that dance artists could compete with the traditional guitar band set up, opening the door for The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Moby, Fatboy Slim and more to become an integral part of the festival's fabric.

Perhaps even more importantly though, the booking was a statement of political intent, one that defied the government's heavy-handed and discriminatory stance. It offered solid proof that the anti-establishment principles which gave birth to the festival were still alive and well.

When The Stone Roses pulled out of their 1995 headline slot at the last-minute, after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone and a shoulder blade falling off a mountain bike, Glastonbury was in urgent need of a replacement to close the Pyramid Stage on the festival's Saturday night.

On the face of it, Pulp, indie journeymen who had been plugging away for the past 15 years, and had only just begun to experience crossover success with their 1994 album His n Hers, may have seemed like an underwhelming alternative to the mercurial Mancunians.

But the Sheffield band had a pretty huge ace up their sleeve, having just released what would become their definitive anthem; the arch pop of Common People. So big a hit was the song, that Glastonbury took a punt on the band as headliners, and Pulp repaid them with the performance of their career.

Suave, self-depreciating, charmingly geeky and yet blessed with the kind of charisma that you couldnt take your eyes off, frontman Jarvis Cocker wonderfully conducted the crowd through his band's brilliantly odd, distinctly British, working class, guitar pop anthems. The reaction when the first notes of Common Peoples disco throb begin, just after Cocker has read out his weekly shopping list by way of farewell, is spine-tingling stuff.

It elevated Pulp from cult favourites into one of the biggest bands in the country and turned Jarvis into a national treasure. One of the all-time great feel-good stories of the festival's history.

By 1997, BritPop had been a national obsession for a few years, and that summer's Glastonbury line-up reflected that. But, although no one knew it at the time, the rug was very much about to be pulled out from underneath the movement.

Two weeks before the festival took place, Radiohead released their third album Ok Computer. Installed as Pyramid Stage headliners on the festival's Saturday night, the Oxfordshire band put on a performance that was so good it arguably contributed to changing the entire landscape of popular music in Britain.

Rather than coming out with a bang in an attempt to immediately grab attention, Radiohead teased out the opening of their set with the slow, delicate Lucky. It seemed a risk to start a first ever festival headlining set with a song placed as track 11 on an album that came out just 12 days earlier, but it immediately marked Radiohead out as the antithesis of the zeitgeist.

From there the Glastonbury audience was held rapt, becoming hypnotised by the band ran through a set of songs that sounded completely unique, utterly advanced and totally alien. Take a look at Thom Yorke wailing along, his body flinching and juddering, trying to keep in rhythm with his band as Johnny Greenwoods iconic solo during Paranoid Android rips out of the Pyramid Stage PA, its a truly transcendent moment.

Unquestionably one of the greatest sets in the history of live music, raising the bar to near impossible standards.

Michael Eavis once described David Bowie as one of the three greatest singers of all time, alongside Elvis and Frank Sinatra, and Bowie hadnt rocked up at Worthy Farm since its second iteration back in 1971, so this one was always going to be a bit special.

Let's be honest, there is a more than a touch of revisionism when discussing Bowie these days; during the late '80s and into the '90s he wasnt being lauded as a forward-thinking visionary in quite the same way as he is now, with albums from that period like Earthling and Black Tie, White Noise getting a lukewarm reaction upon their release. This performance, though, did as much as anything to re-cement Bowies place at the very pinnacle of popular culture, as he ran through a greatest hits set that reminded the entire world of his undoubted genius. Also, the warmth with which the veteran performer later spoke about his experiences at the festival was evidence of just how hallowed even the biggest artists considered this site to be.

Watching the set back today, the mass sing-along during Heroes, Life on Mars or Under Pressure are positively life affirming, but dont ignore Bowie ending his set on a fantastic version of Im Afraid of Americans, a nod to his thirst to remain relevant and never sink into the nostalgia quagmire.

Everyone in the music industry knew that Amy Winehouse was a talent, long before this performance blew her stratospheric. But Glastonbury 2007 is the moment where everyone could see that Winehouse was more than just a gifted, enigmatic vocalist; she was a true one off, destined to be one of the finest artists that Britain has ever produced.

Less than a year earlier, her second album Back to Black had received plaudits from pretty much every corner of the music world, but as she stepped onto the Pyramid Stage for her early afternoon slot on the festival's Friday, it felt like everything that made her so special became amplified for the entire world to see.

Theres just something so brilliantly unique about Winehouse here; slim, petite but lacking the airs and graces of a typical diva singer, she wipes the mud from her shoes on her backing curtain, before shuffling on and effortlessly belting out opening track Addicted. From there on in, its a greatest hits set with a few covers - Sam Cookes Cupid, The Specials Hey Little Rich Girl and Toots & The Maytals Monkey Man - thrown in for good measure. Great as they are, though, nothing really can compete with the awe-inspiring performances of You Know Im No Good and Rehab, the pure soul and pain that glides so effortlessly from her mouth showing an artist at the peak of her powers.

As enigmatic as any artist on this list, Winehouse only ever performed at Glastonbury once. At this point shed doubtless have been a headliner, making her 2007 peak even more of a bittersweet pill to swallow.

When Oasis Noel Gallagher scoffed that Glastonbury has the tradition of guitar music... Im not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, it's wrong. after it was announced that Jay-Z was to headline the Pyramid Stage in 2008, he might have been speaking as an out-of-touch, grumpy, old curmudgeon, but he wasnt alone in his thinking.

Even back in 2008 the internet loved a pile on, and the purist's ire was keenly felt, with many traditionalists happily jumping onboard the outrage train. How dare Jay-Z take a place on the bill usually reserved for legendary artists such as... er... Travis and Stereophonics...?

Seems silly now doesnt it? Because those words could not have been more emphatically rammed down the throats of the detractors, as the New York rapper provided one of the all-time iconic Glastonbury moments by walking out to one of the biggest crowds seen in years, guitar in tow, and began to giggle his way through a sarcasm laced cover of Wonderwall, before launching into an awe-inspiring mash up of 99 Problems and AC/DCs Back In Black. As intros go, it might just be the best ever.

From there on in Jay couldnt fail, drawing on one of the most bullet-proof, hit-filled catalogues in modern music, and chucking in snippets of The Prodigys Smack My Bitch Up and Amy Winehouses Rehab just hammered home the win.

This killer set opened the door for Kanye West, Beyonce, Stormzy, Dave and others to storm the festival in later years, and make anyone who ever questioned hip-hop's place at Glastonbury again look exceedingly daft, at best.

Save for the odd booking of alt-metal here and there over the years, Glastonbury had never truly embraced heavy metal. Which, considering the festival's reputation as the most musically eclectic on the planet, was quite the source of frustration for some metal fans. It was a huge shock then to see Michael and Emily Eavis go from 0 to 100 and book the biggest metal band of all time to close the Pyramid Stage in 2014.

Confusingly, this prospect caused almost as much of a stir as Jay-Z's six years prior, with endless indie no marks and the same exhausting online commentators lining up to question the booking: as if that were not enough, an anti-hunting group of festival goers created a petition to have them removed due to James Hetfields extra-curricular activities.

Metallica, as usual, won the day though, mocking the controversy in their set-opening video and playing a set of hard rock and thrash metal that won over even the most skeptical attendee.

In the aftermath Glastonbury would invite Motohead to perform, and give Earache Records a stage to curate, which saw the likes of Gojira, Napalm Death, Entombed, Venom Prison and Employed To Serve added to the bill. Hard to imagine that would have happened without Metallica kicking the door down.

The day after Metallica laid waste to the Pyramid Stage a very different, but no less exciting, event took place.

The long-established Sunday afternoon legends slot on the Pyramid Stage had boasted some great sets by some huge artists, with Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Dame Shirley Bassey and more over-seeing mass sing-alongs over the years. But few, if any, pulled such a crowd, or put on such a heartwarming, good time, fun filled set, as country legend Dolly Parton did in 2014.

The consummate entertainer, Dolly knew exactly what was required to make the slot work, and, with the gargantuan crowd eating from the palm of her hand, she turned a muddy field in Somerset into a Nashville hoedown in the most effortless way. The fact that she can just casually chuck Joelene out as the third song of the set says it all.

Some artists truly do transcend genre, and Parton is one of music's all-time great characters and songwriters. In terms of matching the energy, and reciprocal devotion, garnered by that set, only Kylie Minogues emotional and long-awaited performance in 2019 could match an hour of Dolly at her best. It was impossible not to raise a smile.

In 2015, Foo Fighters were due to return to Glastonbury for the first time since 1997, to headline the Pyramid Stage. Then just weeks before the show, Dave Grohl broke his leg falling onstage at a stadium show in Sweden and their entire summer tour was cancelled. Just like 20 years earlier, Glastonbury suddenly needed a new headliner, and just like 20 years previously, the band that stepped in gave the performance of their career.

Florence and the Machine were already a sizeable outfit, having picked up a BRIT award for their 2009 debut album Lungs, but the jump from well-known, indie rock band to Glastonbury headliner is a chasm. And Florence... made the jump with impressive ease, drawing from the best of all three of their albums, and throwing in a beautifully poignant cover of The Foos Times Like These as a nod to their fallen peers, with Dave Grohl later describing their version as being better than Foo Fighters had ever played it.

By the time the victory lap of Youve Got the Love and Dog Days are Over came around, they had established themselves as an all-time festival headlining band.

When Stormzy stepped out onto the Pyramid Stage to headline the Friday night of the 2019 festival he was 25-years-old, had one album to his name and was the first grime artist to do so. These events alone have to make his set one of the most astonishing achievements of Glastonburys history, but the fact that he made it such a spectacle, such a wonderful celebration of the best of black and alternative British culture and such an emotionally moving experience cements its place amongst the all-time greats.

Beginning with a video of Jay-Z giving him advice about what to expect from the festival, which was a lovely little call-back, Stormzy walked out in a Banksy-designed, Union Jack stab vest, railed against the Tory government, then brought out members of the Black Ballet company, a full gospel choir, fellow UK grime artists Dave and Fredo and... er... Coldplays Chris Martin. In the process, he crowned grime as the definitive British youth culture movement of the modern era.

From an underground musical style from the streets of South London to closing the biggest music festival on Earth, Stormzys place at the top of the bill at Glastonbury should give hope to every young musician that the summit can be reached, no matter how stacked the odds are against you.

Watch Glastonbury 2022 on the BBC this weekend.

See the original post:

These are the 11 greatest Glastonbury Festival sets ever - Louder

''It means girls like me can now see themselves reflected in an industry theyve always loved and admired.''

In the current zeitgeist, the term 'modest fashion' comes with a connotation of being from a decade that has since passed, but that's no longer the case.

Championing less revealing clothing, modest fashion saw "layering, loose silhouettes, higher necklines, long sleeves, and outfits that don't accentuate the shape of the body" reign supreme. Now, the concept has been adopted by many, both religious and otherwise.

Rather than those fashion trends be swiftly labelled under an umbrella term like 'androgynous', the true meaning of 'modest' fashion is finally making its way to the surface in an effort to diversify fashion and create inclusivity for different communities.

"One of my biggest goals as a Middle Eastern/Australian designer is to create a movement to re-define mainstream fashion," she exclusively told ELLE Australia.

"Clothing that's niche based is always considered diverse, but we should consider diverse fashion the norm. With over 12 million beautifully diverse women in Australia, from culture, shape and size, each one of us has our own definition of what we consider the norm as we are all so diverse. And that's where the conversation should really start."

"People say fashion is frivolous, but when you see diversity and inclusivity, it does make everyone feel connected," the Sydney-based designer explains.

"I have always loved fashion and decided to pursue it as further study after school. [...] What started as a casual styling hobby turned into a love for design and craftsmanship," she explained.

"Being raised by traditional Lebanese parents in Australia meant I had the privilege to experience a unique upbringing of incorporating two very different cultures."

"It means I am able to pour my creativity through my designs while staying true to my identity, and it gives me the opportunity to tell my story and break down barriers through awareness in a fun and trendy way."

She continued, "There are many misconceptions surrounding modest fashion. [It] doesn't need to be linked to culture or religion, it's two different entities."

"Women want to feel beautiful and confident. The aim is to be a voice for my community, to breakdown mainstream stereotypes and inspire the youth who are figuring out their identity."

One scroll through her brand's product page and it's easy to see why she's so successful. The products on offer are not only trend-driven, but they bring traditional fashion into a new, more inclusive light. And for Yasmin, she's hoping to translate that mindset into how the fashion industry sees modesty.

"When I first decided to wear the hijab, modest fashion didn't have the resonance it has now, and I felt there was a gap in the market for practical and stylish modest clothing," she shares.

"I love taking a simple pattern and adding a luxe or embellished fabric to make it funky. The vision for Yasmin Jay is to encourage all women who enjoy modest fashion to feel confident, empowered and elevated when they wear one of my pieces."

So, when The ICONIC came knocking with an idea to create an entire shopping subsection for modest dressing, she was all ears.

"It's great that we're embracing an edit dedicated to modest fashion because it means girls like me can now see themselves reflected in an industry they've always loved and admired," she says, adding, "It's a perfect mix of tradition and being fashion forward."

The ICONIC's Modest edit offers customers the opportunity to mix-and-match pieces from a specific selection that's so vast, Yasmin can't even choose a favourite.

"It's hard to narrow down a favourite piece [...] because when I look at a piece I have about five different ideas of how I can style just one garment. That's the beauty about fashion, it's a world full of possibilities with no limitations!"

That's what she loves the most about her eponymous label, each garment was created in the hopes of inspiring confidence in the wearer.

"Within Yasmin Jay the Label every detail of each garment tells a story," she says.

She continues, "What I consider the ultimate styling tip is rocking your outfit with confidence and sprinkling your charm wherever you go because that's where the true beauty lies and I hope my label gives people that confidence to do so."

For modest fashion wearers, or those aspiring to be, there's hope to be had for the diversity of fashion in Australia. Thanks to emerging designers and an increase in freedom of expression, Yasmin believes that the best is yet to come.

"With such a passionate new generation of designers emerging from all walks of life I hope that we can learn that there is no right or wrong answer," she says, adding, "Life is about expressing yourself freely and reflecting on what you want to put out into the world and for myself the way I do that is through my clothing".

"We need to continue pushing the boundaries and challenging the norms through our artistic journey."

For the Australian fashion industry, the full potential of diverse inclusion still has a way to go, but Modest fashion is a great way to get the conversation started.

Original post:

Lebanese-Australian Fashion Designer, Yasmin Jay, On Why Theres A Gap In The Market For Modest Fashion - ELLE Australia

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Its a phrase weve all become accustomed to hearing. Some products and materials are commonly recycled with little thought, such as beverage containers in states with a deposit law or plastic grocery bags returned to the receptacle at the supermarket. Metal, glass and cardboard are other examples. Now think bigger. Think urban. Think entire buildings being converted into a completely new space.

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The practice is known as adaptive reuse, and its gaining momentum in the face of ever-growing environmental challenges. Through adaptive reuse, old buildings are given new life, and the process brings a host of benefits to the community, inhabitants and environment.

Related: Stockholm offices repurposed into apartments with green roof

Reusing buildings already taking up space in the city keeps the building from being torn down, helping to maintain the roots of the community. Plus, existing real estate is less expensive than new builds, providing community members more affordable options in their own neighborhood.

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Existing buildings already have the surrounding infrastructure too. Therefore, the new owner has fewer obstacles in regards to parking and street access. An established location also often means surrounding residential and commercial buildings that offer a premade community. Creating an urban center of accessible services means people are more likely to walk or bike, leaving cars and their toxic emissions off the road.

Embodied carbon is a massive problem for our environment. Every time we source virgin materials, we release carbon into the air through extraction, processing, manufacturing, packaging and transport. This is before the material is even used in construction. The more we can reuse whats already onsite, the less of an impact the build has on the environment. Plus, reusing materials significantly decreases the amount of waste associated with tearing down buildings.

In addition, avoiding new builds helps keep the land intact, since theres no need to clear plants and trees or otherwise prepare the land. As we know, plants absorb carbon dioxide and release the oxygen we breathe. They also sequester that carbon deep in the soil, which is released when we break ground on new construction.

Ava Alltmont, AIA, LEED AP, Associate and New Orleans Studio Director at Cushing Terrell, a multi-discipline design studio, recently put together a paper on the topic titled, Land (Re) Use and Climate Change: Breathing New Life into Old Buildings. She explained the concept is more applicable than ever with shops shuddering and storefronts sitting empty as a result of the pandemic and economic downturn.

When buildings are adapted for reuse, this can benefit both the companies and the communities involved by way of reducing environmental impacts, improving quality of life and maintaining a sense of place, Alltmont said.

Fortunately, many examples of this strategy are being seen in neighborhoods across the country. Youve likely seen an old building being converted into a music venue, offbeat bar, notable restaurant, antique mall or loft apartment. Alltmont says adaptive reuse might be referred to as a renovation, modernization, historic preservation, infrastructure reuse and additions, to name a few. And within those categories are even more varieties of adaptive reuse.

Adaptive reuse isnt without challenges. In most cases, the building is decades or even centuries old. Systems need to be updated and working within the existing framework can be complicated. However, the benefits of a good location combined with the significantly lower carbon footprint makes adaptive reuse an effort that pays in fresh air, lower pollution, cultural rejuvenation and waste reduction.

With the global zeitgeist aimed at recognizing the effects of climate change, adaptive reuse should garner the same attention as other forms of recycling. With a post-pandemic focus on wellness, the increase in work-from-home opportunities, a limited amount of available land to build on and empty buildings blanketing the landscape, its a perfect time for individuals and businesses to invest in the idea.

In summary, the idea of adaptive reuse adds up to more than just reusing building materials. Its a movement that cements the history and culture of an area, ties communities together, directs away from urban sprawl (and the traffic that comes with it) and provides more affordable real estate options.

If we look back at the cyclical nature of recycling, its easy to see the business imperative in adaptive reuse, Alltmont concluded. If opting to reimagine an existing building is good for the environment, quality of life and a communitys sense of place, then it will attract more talent, residents and visitors to the city, thus improving the local economy. Its a case of reduce, reuse, recycle and revitalize.

Via ModernCities and AvaAlltmont from CushingTerrell

Images via Cushing Terrell

Read more here:

The benefits of adaptive reusing old buildings into new... - Inhabitat