Fashion & style
fromElite Traveler
10 hours agoThe History of the Snuff Box and Its Rise as a Luxury Collectible
Smoking has seen a cultural resurgence among celebrities, yet tobacco use in America has reached its lowest level in 2024.
The new webpage, entitled 'How have objects come to be in the V&A?', points out that for some objects, their journeys have involved known histories of violence, coercion or injustice, while for others there remains uncertainty over exactly how they came to be here.
Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, replaced the king with the Duke of Mantua, who is just as morally bankrupt as the original. The opera premiered in 1851 in Venice and has been a popular production to roll out with both name recognition and one of those golden tunes that almost everybody has heard: La donna e mobile, which becomes haunting in the context of the actual plot.
I had to challenge my impulse to distill every line. I was feeling this desire to make work with a different kind of energy, a different kind of expressive force. It's about presenting these things I love about Murano and developing a frame for those gestures.
In Siegfried, the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner shifts the focus away from the troubled world of the gods towards the energy of youth on earth. This is storytelling through opera, where the theatre is crucial and the music sublime.
The question of how fashion is archived - what enters the museum; what is deemed worthy of preservation; whose clothes are considered culturally significant enough to outlast the bodies that wore them - has long sat uneasily at the centre of fashion history itself. Institutions have tended to answer it, or ignore it, in much the same way: couture gowns under glass, luxury garments mounted on conservation-grade mannequins in blockbuster exhibitions - an implicit hierarchy of the designed over the worn, the authored over the anonymous.
It's long had a reputation as the city of romance, but now the French capital is supporting a growing number of businesses that will arrange an extravagant marriage proposal in a landmark setting - for a hefty fee, of course. The luxury marriage proposal business is booming in Paris with agencies charging international clients thousands of euros to pop the question in a 'romantic' setting in the City of Love.
Embroidery is a historic mainstay of traditional clothing in Asia or the Middle East, as well as Western Haute Couture, but it is increasingly present in Paris, Milan or New York on modern men's shirts, bomber jackets or blazers. Designers at Dior, Dolce Gabbana, Kenzo or Gucci have adopted it in recent runway shows, while Louis Vuitton's celebrity rapper-designer Pharell Williams dedicated his entire June collection to India after visiting the country.
Studying abroad in Florence was one of the best decisions of my life for a multitude of reasons-I lived like a true local, ate some of the best meals I've ever had, deepened my appreciation for art and history, learned Italian, and was able to travel to five countries and two continents in just three and a half months. But most importantly, it immersed me in a culture where personal style is second nature, quickly teaching me how to dress in a sophisticated, timeless,
The earliest jewellery ever discovered wasn't gold or gemstone at all, but fish bones. In prehistoric times, hunters wore bones, teeth and claws from their kills as talismans of luck and prowess. For Italian shoe maestro Giuseppe Zanotti - famous for his sculptural, jewel-encrusted heels - this idea of turning humble scraps into ornamentation has long been second nature; during a seaside dinner in 2004, Zanotti sketched a fish skeleton on a tablecloth.
Speaking backstage before the show, Anderson, dressed in his signature faded Levi's jeans and a navy cashmere sweater, described the collection as another character study, explaining that this time he set out to explore the idea of a new aristocracy, questioning what it means today and what can it be? The-41-year old designer said when it came to the social hierarchy he wanted to ignore the aspect of money and instead home in on their eccentricity.
What exactly Giorgio Armani looks like without its eponymous founder at the helm has been the burning question in the fashion industry since the designer's death in September. In Milan on Monday afternoon, it got its answer as the designer's collaborator and right-hand man of four decades, Leo Dell'Orco, made his debut at the Italian fashion house where he will oversee menswear for the foreseeable future. It was the first Armani collection in which the late designer had no involvement.