Brynn Valentine

The protagonist, an accomplished stage actress, constantly blurs the lines between her professional life on the stage and her personal life.

Production designer Kasra Farahani took that and ran with it, turning London’s Pinewood Studios into a retro-futuristic Manhattan by drawing influences from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and architects including Eero Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer.

Two years into an industry-wide slowdown from which the path forward for fashion remains unclear, “the past becomes a refuge, full of mirages we can turn to paper over the present,” observes Didier Barroso, Parisian gallery owner and director of the vintage boutique Plaisir Palace.

Friction is also what gives people agency to create, not just consume.

Today’s designers are hardly the first to navigate fashion’s complex relationship with the past: Houses are simultaneously obsessed with defining and defending their aesthetic territory, celebrating moments of past glory while asserting their relevance to what’s new, now, next.

we’re mistaking that voyeurism for genuine cultural shift.

The "Real Self" The novel asks the fundamental question of what constitutes the "real self" when so much of our behavior is dictated by the roles we slide in and out of. The unnamed narrator's constant self-awareness and internal monologues underscore the idea that all of us are, to some extent, performing for others and even ourselves.

I spent 10 years teaching at the University of Melbourne (and 5 years prior studying at it), primarily because I’m a romantic about higher education and the enormous growth it forces upon you as you navigate its various trials, frustrations and contradictions.

If there’s one thing I noticed over those 10 years, it was the slow death of this cultural... See more