May 2013
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April 2013
5 posts
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WWAHD: What would Audrey Hepburn do?
Audrey Hepburn is covering Vanity Fair this month, a few months after she covered Tatler. She’s also been the face of GAP and Galaxy. That’s a lot more covers and campaigns than many actresses alive get.
Hepburn was an amazing actress, a dedicated humanitarian and, as a person who went from nearly starving during World War II to the heights of Hollywood, an inspirational tale of...
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Why brands should think beyond the iPhone
My Little Paris, a lifestyle website dedicated to everything Paris, is having a sample sale of apparel from womenswear fashion brand Des Petits Hauts today. Only on its iPhone app. The sale was advertised on Facebook and half of the comments published so far are from annoyed, iPhone-less followers.
iPhone-only apps are a branding black hole. Once upon a time, the photo-based social networks...
March 2013
2 posts
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February 2013
1 post
January 2013
6 posts
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“According to the tabloids, she [Tina Brown] was destined to become Blair’s...”
– In 1997 like today, from US Vogue editor Anna Wintour to the then New Yorker editor Tina Brown, successful female British magazine editors working in the US are cursed to rumours of ambassadorship the moment they get involved in political campaigns.
Judy Bachrach, Tina and Harry Come to America...
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The Snow Fashion Tribes
Though rare occurrences in London, snowfalls result in a powerful fashion polarisation of the population, between the ones who try their best to ignore it, and the ones who give in to it.
The Man of Power tribe never wears a coat, nor does he wear his scarf around his neck. It merely hangs on his lapels, providing neither warmth, nor protection. For the Man of Power, the snow is merely another...
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Blogger Adventure: No Experience at Wandering...
I met Elisa Eymery on my fifth day of living in the UK. I was looking for the infirmary at the French lycée and she happened to know where it was. She was wearing a Nile blue top with jeans and a tonal scarf instead of a belt, which I thought very cool. Nine years on, we’ve been to the same university, lived in the same student halls, hosted a radio show and been on holidays to Cairo...
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Email Marketing: Avenue 32 helps you keep your...
You’re not just buying new clothes, you’re buying a kit which will motivate you to go to the gym, is Avenue 32’s promise this first weekend of 2013.
For any purchase from the Lucas Hugh Activewear range, the multibrand online store offers a complimentary exercise class with Barrecore Chelsea.
Considering most press around New Year’s resolutions focused on how unlikely you are to stick to them,...
December 2012
9 posts
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“Congressman Skinner: You know I never understood why you gun control people...”
– Aaron Sorkin and Paul Redford, The West Wing Season 2 Episode 7 The Portland Trip (2000)
This West Wing quote has been on a loop in my head since Newtown restarted the gun control debate.
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Sarah Lund's Career Advice
* Please note this article contains potential spoilers for all three series of Forbrydelsen.
Having a strong, smart female lead at its heart in Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) is one of the reasons for the success of Forbrydelsen The Killing. The series is good, the acting first class but the plot lines aren’t groundbreaking, following the traditional codes of thriller writing, especially in...
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TV series: What was the point of Camille Mettier...
* Please note this article contains potential spoilers for series 2 of The Hour.
“And this is my wife”. Camille Mettier (Lizzie Brocheré), French wife of journalist, TV anchor and general show hero Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) is introduced at the end of the first episode of series 2 of The Hour, the Abi Morgan miniseries on the behind-the-scenes of a 1950s TV show.
The clues were...
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Brand Communication: No one wears the Gucci tux...
As part of its festive communication, Italian luxury brand Gucci, part of French holding PPR, sent out an email focused on partywear, looking back at the best LACMA 2012 Art + Film Gala outfits for inspiration.
The selection included Salma Hayek-Pinault and her husband, PPR CEO François-Henri Pinault. The Gala was sponsored by Gucci, many guests wore Gucci, so using event pictures as part of...
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Christine Lagarde's career advice
A middle-class teenager who’s raised to running one of the biggest law firms in the world before joining the French government and heading the IMF through hard work, dedication, rigour and talent, Christine Lagarde has long been one of my role models.
Reading through French journalists Cyrille Lachèvre and Marie Tisot’s biography Enquête sur la femme la plus puissante du monde in...
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Blogger Adventure: Brianne Garcia
The first rule* of the Blogger Adventure feature is that I must have met the person I interview. I have however never met Brianne Garcia, fashion entrepreneur, content marketing manager and the force behind the Brianne Garcia blog, one of the frankest blogs on the difficulties of starting your own company and of looking for a job.
She’s not a total stranger though: we had a long Skype...
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The Duchess of Cambridge's Double Pregnancy Duty
The duchess of Cambridge’s difficult first trimester has provided a welcome change to the usual celebrity pregnancy discourse and has highlighted hyperemesis gravidarum, a little-known debilitating illness.
We have gotten used to magazines focusing on pregnancy glow, to actresses explaining how being pregnant was the best time of their lives and to models dispensing tips on bouncing back...
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Blogger Adventure: Jessica Stanley
I was introduced to Jessica Stanley last summer, over a bloggers brunch organised by connection-maker extraordinaire Danielle Meder.
Stanley’s weekly feature READ.LOOK.THINK., highlighting her favourite reads of the week, now is one of my most trusted sources of interesting online articles. For this Blogger Adventure, I asked her about the discipline and decision behind picking those...
November 2012
9 posts
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Gamification: The Hermès Online Chess Game
For three weeks in September, I was engulfed in an online chess game with my dad. We played on a virtual board available on the Hermès website as part of its Jeu d’échecs géant, Giant chess game.
Hermès’ Chess Heritage
Starting with the landing page featuring the knight prominently, Hermès is calling on its equestrian heritage. Chess pieces have adorned silk scarves in the past...
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First Person: A Wardrobe Full of Unwearable...
I bought a t-shirt last summer for a lot more money than it was worth. I’ve worn it twice, and it has since been gathering dust, though hopefully not moths, at the bottom of my white t-shirt pile. The official reason is that I ordered it at the end of the summer, and by the time I received it, it was too cold for t-shirts. You could wear it under a jacket, you say? I hear ya.
Truth is, I...
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Magazine Writing: Asma al-Assad's Vogue Profile...
When, in February 2011, American Vogue came under fire for its laudatory portrayal of Asma al-Assad, first lady of Syria, by Joan Juliet Buck, the magazine was reproducing a glossy tradition of obsessing over the Westernised wives of Middle Eastern and Persian dictators.
Reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs, his account of the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, I was reminded...
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Exhibition Review: The Little Black Jacket
Latest in the blurring of fashion and art trend is Chanel’s traveling exhibition The Little Black Jacket, currently showing in Paris after stints in Tokyo, New York and London, where I got to see it.
Focused on one classic little black jacket (LBJ) personalised ad infinitum in the Chanel ateliers to the dimensions and wishes of the personalities wearing it, the exhibition aims to show,...
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First Person: My General Petraeus Education
If you studied International Relations in the mid to late noughties, or had any interest in contemporary warfare during that same period, I would challenge you not to have heard of General David Petraeus. I name-checked the man and his counterinsurgency doctrine in more than onr essay. Petraeus is widely thought, if not as the instigators of counterinsurgency, at least as one of its foremost...
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The Stripy T-shirt As A Political Symbol Of The...
Can you imagine Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, innovation and skills posing for the cover of the Sunday Times magazine wearing a bowler hat and an umbrella in defence of the British industry? Arnaud Montebourg, the man with the slightly communist title of Ministre du Redressement Productif, minister of Industrial renewal, did just so for Le Parisien Magazine in the French...
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Brand Communication: Why Brad Pitt's Chanel No 5...
Conan O’Brien called it “nonsensical ramblings”, Saturday Night Live parodied it and Tumblr has got its own Fuck Yeah! Inevitable Brad! page. Brad Pitt’s Chanel No 5 ad is probably the actor’s most criticised film to date, far ahead of Troy, The Mexican and Mr & Mrs Smith. Yet this very pan is what has made the ad so successful.
Immediate reactions to the ad...
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Book review: Crushing on Delphine de Vigan's...
The blonde woman on the cover “wears a black turtleneck jumper, holds a cigarette in her left hand, she seems to be looking at someone or something, but likely isn’t looking at anything, her smile dark and sweet”*. The black and white woman immediately drew me to Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit, displayed between other recently published novels in a French train station in the...
October 2012
6 posts
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Lanvin's Surrealist Tribute To Louis Aragon and...
French luxury brand Lanvin messaged its Les Yeux d’Elsa brooches for Halloween. Made of a right and a left eye, red lips and black hands, the brooches come together in an email visual the Surrealists wouldn’t have rejected. Luckily really, considering Louis Aragon, the man who wrote the poem Les Yeux d’Elsa, Elsa’s Eyes, which inspired the design, was one of the three...
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Classy Film: Ginger and Rosa
On time for the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, Sally Potter directs the story of two teenage girls whose world is standing still and being blown apart in parallel with what could happen with the A-bomb threatening the world.
“We had a dream that we’d always be best friends” writes Ginger (Elle Fanning) in the poem closing the movie (and opening the trailer)....
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First Person: How I Discovered The Online Fashion...
It was the summer I bought my first (and so far only, gathering dust in the cupboard) Vanessa Bruno cabas bag because ELLE had been telling me for years it was the bag to own to be cool and fashionable. It was purple, because in 2006, purple was totally my colour, as proved by no photo of me at all. It was purple because it was the only decent colour left in the shop and I was determined to buy...
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The Inherent Sexism of the Valérie Trierweiler...
Yesterday, the Huffington Post asked whether Valérie Trierweiler was “France’s least popular First Lady ever”. The question stemmed from the latest unauthorised biography of François Hollande’s partner, La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), which attributes her a string of concomitant lovers, while her marriage to journalist Denis Trierweiler was still ongoing.
Right-wing...
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Petit Bateau and Carven: A Natural Fashion Match
The concept, two well-known, coveted brands coming together might be the same yet the recent collaboration between French brands Petit Bateau and Carven has little in common with the H&M collections in partnership with Lanvin, Karl Largerfeld or Comme des Garçons its has been compared with, beyond bringing two well-known fashion names together.
Petit Bateau and Carven feel much closer, in...
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Brand Communication: Sandro's PHP Coding Issues
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Despair over the brand’s issue with PHP coding and French accents
Sandro isn’t the only fashion brand struggling with PHP and HTML coding issues however, its French origins combined with the fact this sign-up email will be most customers’ first inbox contact with the brand means...
September 2012
8 posts
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Tina, Model, In Copenhagen, In 1962 (In Children's...
While attempting to piece my childhood library back together, I stumbled upon mystery novel Tina Mannequin, Tina Model at a flea market in France. I bought it to compare the depiction of modelling in the early 1960s and nowadays.
Five decades before the Nordic Noir craze, Danish author A.B.Carroll brought suspense to French houses with the story of Tina, a goody two-shoes Danish teenager who...
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Brand communication: Why The French Accent, Juicy...
France might have dropped off the top 20 most competitive countries in the world, according to the World Economic Forum, but the French language still holds its own when it comes to shifting fragrances. Proof is, Juicy Couture’s TV ad for its latest fragrance, La Fleur, told with an accent as French as its name.
Yet Juicy Couture is one of the least French brands in fashion. Born in Los...
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Which New Fragrance Tagline Is Your Favourite?
Gucci Première: Experience The New Fragrance For Women
Lancôme Trésor Midnight Rose: Le Nouveau Parfum Féminin/The New Feminine Fragrance
Gucci Guilty: The New Fragrance For Her
Prada L’Eau Ambrée: The New Fragrance By Prada
Helena Rubinstein Wanted: The New Fragrance Worn by Demi Moore
Givenchy Dahlia Noir: The New Fragrance
Bottega Veneta: The First Fragrance For Women
...
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LVMH and PPR Battle Out On The Libération Cover
Left-leaning French daily Libération got itself a lot of free publicity on its home turf and abroad by launching a campaign against LVMH COE Bernard Arnault’s decision to seek Belgian nationality.
Today’s self-congratulating front page headline, “Bernard if you come back I’ll cancel everything”, a direct reference, as was yesterday’s cover (“Get lost,...
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Compare And Contrast: Baz Luhrmann's Chanel N5 vs...
A famous woman escaping her world of obligations into the arms of a young, good-looking, poor man living on a hill overseeing everything representing what she’s fled, unsuspecting of her real identity until she’s forced to go back. The story has been told multiple times but I’m always stricken by the similarities between Baz Luhrmann’s Chanel 5 advert with Nicole Kidman...
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23 Things To Do Pre-Spring/Summer 2013 Show
Wash and iron entire content of the laundry basket (NB: Find good DVDs to watch while ironing)
Fill the fridge (NB: Only pick things easy to cook/eat late at night, on little sleep)
Plan outfits (NB: No matter what, you’ll end up in jeans and Converse the weekend before)
Find a reliable weather app so you can carry out #3. This is London, rain as good as guaranteed. (NB: Fortune tellers...
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First Person: How I Moved to London
Friday 31 August marked the ninth anniversary of my move to London. I was 17 and realising my dream by spending my last year of high school in a foreign land, living amongst people whose language and customs represented a struggle. Some people say it was brave, I think it was foolhardy. I had no idea what to expect, let alone that nine years on, I’d still be living in London.
I moved to...
August 2012
11 posts
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First Person: Inner Dialogue Around The Perfect...
Temptation: This fits you perfectly, it’s so snug
Reason: A bit too snug maybe? You could probably go one size up, you’ll never fit a jumper underneath.
Temptation: Cashmere and wool with rabbit fur, you’d never need to wear anything underneath anyway
Reason: But you’re cold, all the time, cold for you isn’t a temperature, it’s a state of mind, practiced...
