France politics
fromwww.thelocal.fr
7 hours agoInside France: French elegance, flying bells and Swedish snuff fury
French church bells are said to fly to Rome on Good Friday, returning with chocolate eggs for children on Easter Sunday.
Paul Kutchinsky's ambition to create the world's largest jeweled egg was driven by a desire to showcase British craftsmanship on a global stage, competing with the legendary Faberge eggs.
The Aubusson Tapestry Museum is situated in an exceptional context shaped by a rich history and a powerful natural environment. The Creuse capital of tapestry has been marked by its history since the royal manufactory of the 14th century.
Textiles are a window into the communities that created them, with every motif and line signalling a different memory, tradition or identity. Often seen as folk art, these pieces of embroidery and weaving bring together dozens of narrative threads, from Japan to South America. But nowhere is it more fraught with meaning than in Palestine.
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.
Crocheting started as a pandemic hobby. My background is all creative. I have several design degrees and yearned for a creative outlet that was away from a computer screen.
Making pojagi was a way of "economizing resources," and also "an act of affection," explains artist-fashion designer Christina Kim of Remodelista longtime favorite Dosa. Shown here: Dosa's cotton and silk Pojagi Scarves are "both a reminder of Christina's childhood in Korea and a beautiful expression of traditional recycling"-and would work well on a wall or in a doorway.
Sentimental Value is very much a film about a house - a Victorian " dragestil," or "dragon style," home in Oslo where generations of the same family have lived for more than a 100 years. Director Joachim Trier, who found the house in Oslo's Frogner neighborhood, called its role in the film "a witness of the unspoken ... a witness of the 20th century."
What if I took my design lens and built out my essentials capsule for the Everlane customer? I felt like that would be a really amazing opportunity for me to introduce myself as a designer to an audience outside of EB Denim.
Traveling to different home trade shows is a big part of my job, and sometimes it's hard for me to fully turn my editor brain off after a day of scouting new products and design trends. The fallout? I'm always looking at my surroundings and snapping photos of clever decorating ideas I see "in the wild." And what I mean by that, of course, is that every restaurant, museum, hotel, store, and so on has something to share.
My husband and I just upgraded our apartment here in Germany to one with much more space. The downsides of this is we have hard marble floors and a tall-ceilinged living room (oh woe is us!). It's very echo-y and looks directly into our neighbors across the street. The windows have external shutters, so light-blocking isn't needed, but we'd love to get
Fashion and dress in Mesopotamia - clothing, footwear, and accessories - were not only functional but defined one's social status and developed from a simple loincloth in the Ubaid period (circa 6500-4000 BCE) to brightly colored robes and dresses by the time of the Sassanian Empire (224-651). Styles changed, but the essential form and function remained the same. As in any civilization, the upper class and nobility wore more expensive clothes of higher quality.
These clothes are not secondhand, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. I prefer to call them used' or worn', she explains. Clothes that have been worn' carry a lot of information like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning. In some of Yin's works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.
While descriptions of the distinctive Mongolian nuqula hairstyle abound across both surviving written and visual sources (shaving the top of the head, leaving a rectangular lock on the forehead and twisting the remaining hair behind the ears in loops), rather less attention is given to how women wore their hair. In part, this is due to some of the clothing styles which obscured the hair from the view of travellers or in the paintings produced in the Mongol courts.
Also known as boho style, this free-spirited aesthetic is built on an eclectic mix of patterns and organic textures anchored by earthy elements and color palettes. Take a look at Justina Blakeney's Los Angeles home tour to find inspiration-her peacock-hued bedroom is a lesson in texture. The beauty of this style is that you can express yourself with bold prints that range from paisley motifs and palm leaves, or tone it down by layering a neutral bedspread and pillow shams with tassels or pom-poms.
That past is his - it is the 20th anniversary of his label, and accordingly he decided to embrace, engage, even embed himself in his own history. Which, in and of itself, is a history of histories - Moralıoğlu's office is peppered with random 1930s portraits (the ones his husband, the architect Philip Joseph, won't let him keep in their Bloomsbury home) and old, time-warped issues of Vogue, as well as overflows of books on everything from Merce Cunningham to Alfred Hitchcock.
The collaboration brings together Designtex's deep expertise in high-performance contract textiles and nanimarquina's poetic command of craft, tactility, and the beauty of the imperfect. For both teams, the partnership emerged from an immediate sense of kinship - a shared language of material integrity, color sensitivity, and a respect for heritage techniques reinterpreted for contemporary spaces. "We did that by using performance yarns and intentionally embedding imperfections into the weaving process."
In Lana Launay's Kinship series, light does more than illuminate space. It acts as a living archivist, revealing, preserving, and narrating stories embedded within inherited textiles. Through works such as Kinship I and Kinship II, the artist transforms antique doilies, lace fragments, and stockings passed down through generations into sculptural lighting forms that do not simply display history but actively project it into the present.
In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.
The ongoing repression of dissidents in Venezuela following the US attacks reminds us that President Trump never had the interest of the nation's people at heart. The painful reality of many immigrants is one of being caught between dehumanizing forces in their native countries and in exile, and reduced to abstractions in an increasingly unnuanced "discourse" that flattens lived experience.
It captures seven different femininities during an all-day pool party, enjoying themselves while revealing their distinctive styles. Creative Direction, Production & Styling by Maria Gkin. Photography by Eliza Poultidou. The models are Vanessa Otilia, Cyka, Alvina Chamberland and Angelica Komninak. The concept examines the thin line between what is seen as acceptable and what has been labelled ugly or immoral, explored through each woman's personal story. Textures, colours, makeup and styling come together, breaking down stereotypes and highlighting fashion as a means of freedom
From a single material, a Hyderabad-based design studio creates a wide range of site-specific installations, furnishings, and decor. It's all in the name of the firm, The Wicker Story, which was founded in 2019 by architect Priyanka Narula. Capable of being formed into everything from abstract constructions to functional objects, the natural material lends itself a huge variety of pieces that vary in size and complexity.
The Rural Cut places vintage fashion in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, among vineyards, open fields, and the animals that inhabit the land. As a Beirut-based stylist, I worked with a fully Lebanese team to create a shoot that feels authentic, where each garment and every frame reflects the textures, history, and rhythm of the rural landscape. Photography by Angele Basile / Instagram: @angelebasile Styling by Rinad Saad / Instagram: @rinaaaaddd
Tons upon tons of these single-use plastics end up in landfills or even floating in the ocean. Spanish design firm PET Lamp set out give another purpose to these otherwise short-lived materials. Partnering with artisans in communities from Chile to Ethiopia to Australia, the company celebrates both Indigeneity and sustainability, drawing upon time-honored global craft traditions while supporting local economies and recycling discarded materials.
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.
Lighting is one of the most essential aspects of a home; it's also one of the most overlooked. The right illumination can create ambience, soften harsh edges, and imbue a sense of warmth. However, not all light sources are of the same quality. A custom chandelier, for instance, will always stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. These meticulously made creations can range from minimalist to monumental, bringing scale, ambition, and elegance into the room.
It's not a multi-thousand pound handbag from Hermes that best captures the new era of It bags, but a 149 tote from John Lewis. Launched this season, it's deeper (45cm) and taller (33cm) than your average handbag, and comes loaded with good intentions. It's able to hold your packed lunch, flask and book, as well at a push as your gym kit.
Whether you're new to DIY-ing or an experienced crafter, these colorful wine bottles are for you. You can style and arrange them in all sorts of ways, from wine bottle trees to standalone vases. Made of clear glass, they show off the flowers, plants, or candles inside. Each bottle is 12.75 inches tall and 2.8 inches wide, holding up to 750 milliliters of liquid. "I love when the sunset hits the bottles. I also put a night solar lamp on them," noted one reviewer.
Looking more put-together doesn't always come down to big purchases or dramatic changes. More often, it's the small upgrades that quietly do the heavy lifting - a better beauty tool, an impactful accessory, or one product that makes everything else work harder. This list is full of affordable finds that look and feel a little bougie, even though they're surprisingly cheap. Each one earns its spot by making you look more polished, more pulled together, or just slightly more expensive than you actually are.