That’s right: I am watching Love Island. My obsession started as prep for a story that unfortunately didn’t materialize (one day I’ll write about THAT), and has since become something bigger, deeper, more beautiful, and more sinister—one of those precious but disgustingly odoriferous flowers that only blooms once a year, in secret. My civic duty, which I previously reserved for political elections and wearing deodorant in public, has expanded into voting contestants off the island. Yes, I have the app. Every day it asks me illiterate questions like, “Villa Girls + Casa Boys: Which Connection Has You Seated?”

One of the great things about watching Love Island USA is that it’s an immersive experience. My TikTok and Instagram are overrun with couch commentators, former contestants giving their two cents, and meme creators, all of whom I obediently scroll through. One thing kept coming up: an astrologist who was apparently forecasting Love Island USA results with uncanny accuracy based on contestants’ birth charts. Lindsey Damis, who goes by Linndsology on TikTok, saw Corbin’s Casa Amor reset, the strength of Trinity and Bryce’s connection, and Sincere’s flip-flopping coming. The 26-year-old Florida-based astrologer and I hopped on the phone to chat about what’s in the stars.

Tell me about your work.

I do astrology and human design. Human design is essentially another form of divination, but it combines astrology—I believe it’s Western astrology, the Chinese I Ching system, the Judaic Tree of Life system, and the Chakra system—all together. It looks at a body graph, and then tells you how you can best bring things into your life the easiest, basically manifesting, but for your specific energy type, and how to work with the resistance that the universe brings you. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to use human design a whole lot with the Love Island predictions, because I’m not working with birth times here, and you need birth time, date, and location to do a true reading. With Hellenistic astrology, you can get so much information with just the birth date. It’’s just working with the ancient rather than modern planet system and, basically, not using the newer outer planets

How did you get into astrology?

I’m a classic tale of someone who got into astrology because of Covid. I’’d always been interested in it, but I was putting a lot of music out—I make music and I produce it as well. These days I’m more focused on building my career in astrology and human design. For the past 6 years I’ve been seriously dedicating myself to it.

When did you first start reading the astrology of Love Island contestants?

I started last year. Last year all my predictions were terrible. I was just analyzing as I was going. Part of me was afraid of making a wrong prediction, and what happened was all of them were pretty much wrong. I’d never seen the show before last year. Then my friends and I watched Love Island Games, and I was like, okay, I officially love this show. This year I really cemented myself using Hellenistic astrology, and I noticed my predictions were so accurate. I just wanted to do something silly while practicing my craft, getting my reps in as someone who makes predictions.

What’s your craziest prediction that’s come true?

Bea’s elimination. I was like, it’s either Corbin or Bea, and I analyzed their charts, and I was like, Corbin has a little more luck on his side than she does, so if anyone is gonna go home, it would be her.

Recoupling is coming soon…Any thoughts?

Astrology exists in the context, so anyone saying, like, “Oh, I could have made this prediction,” then great, do it. I once predicted that my hairdresser was going to get engaged, but I wouldn’t have done that if she wasn’t already in a relationship, right? The point is, I don’t have a prediction yet because I don’’t have the context. Once it gets closer, I’ll sift through the information and make my prediction.

You’ve already predicted that you’re looking out for a fight between Corbin and Kenzie. What else should we watch for?

I literally have a list I wrote down. It’s so long. So: one of my predictions for Anaya is that she was in the mood to separate and cut something off, that was right before Casa, and then there’s something important that will happen with her around the time of recoupling. I’m guessing that her couple will be permanently changed. Bryce will miss Trinity, and Trinity will genuinely be tempted, but she’ll probably stick with him. Zach and Kayda might both end up struggling to solidify their couples. Sincere is going to have, like, a big moment around this full moon in Capricorn coming up, so that will be after Casa, and it doesn’t really look positive. Bryce will have a heated conversation with someone, either a friend or a romantic partner. He also might face some kind of hardship or rejection. A few days ago, I was like, what if he gets voted out?

No! I like him.

I don’t know, there’s like an ego wound that he’s going to go through, and I’m hoping it’s not getting voted out.

Who’s on winner watch?

Melanie, Kenzie, Trinity, and Bryce from the OGs, Anaya possibly as well with Carl. I like Gal so far. The Casa people have changed my winner watch.

Are there specific signs you think do better on the show?

Yes and no. It depends on a few things, if people have good charts or whether they just get lucky. Like, I remember looking up past contestants’ charts and thinking, “Damn, how did they stay on the show so long?” Then you look at their chart and realize they have a well-placed Venus, or they have a really well-placed moon, which kind of grants them ease or luck. And, or a well-placed sun, right? It depends on whether the planets are well placed in their own sign and they have dignity there, but ultimately what matters most is compatibility with the season’s air date.

If I tell you my chart, will you tell me if I’d be good on Love Island?

Do you know all your placements?

Yes…ready? My Sun is in Leo, my Moon is Cancer, my Mercury is Leo, my Venus is Leo, my Mars is Cancer. My Jupiter is Pisces, my Saturn Taures.

Okay, okay. Period. Honestly, you would have potential to win this year, but because of your Cancer Moon. You definitely could go far, especially because you have Leo Sun. Leo Suns do very well being themselves and sharing their personality and like leading with their heart. With everything that you have in your chart, you could go pretty far. Make it to the final type shit.

Because when I asked the guys outside if “men are okay?” most had to admit no. The reality is that dude monoculture doesn’t exist anymore—there’s no gold standard for what it means to be a golden boy. The fashion world, which has been showcasing new looks for men in Pitti Uomo in Florence and at Milan Fashion Week, doesn’t seem to mind. Instead of getting wrapped up in the discourse—thankfully—the designers put forth strong and playful ideas for what varietal of man will bloom next spring.

First was Comme des Garcons acolyte Kei Ninomiya’s punk redux for his brand DSM Kei Ninomiya, made of safety-pin suiting, tartan kilts, and intrecciato Vans sneakers. Much of the hoopla around the show focused on the hair: pink mohawks studded with flowers by stylist Pablo Kuemin and florist Azuma Makoto. But the clothes themselves were well-conceived subversions of classic shapes: The suit, the drainpipe pant, the three-quarter zip done here with rows of zips inching upwards from the waist.

Simone Rocha didn’t pull any punches with her menswear debut, either. A character study into the psyche of the Simone Rocha dude, the collection was one of her most diverse and delightful, segueing from the boxy tailoring shapes she developed when she launched menswear in 2022 and into new painterly smocks and smart knit vests. What I liked most about the Rocha romance was that it wasn’t too reverent to men—or menswear. These were delicate but powerful clothes that brought Simone’s feminine energy to guys.

That lack of reverence for the “codes” is what has made the Italian leg of the menswear season incredibly exciting. At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons emphasized “clarity” in their incredibly streamlined yet kooky collection. In the verbose press release, the brand explained: “The focus is a distillation, to the fundamental, intentional, and meaningful.” Okay… What that means actually is 49 pairs of skinny five-pocket jeans made of denim, leather, transparent nylon, and a little wool. Despite the severity of the silhouette, the collection had a vitality and an impishness: silk scarves knotted around waists, half-sunglasses fused together at the bridge, clunky dopp kits hanging from worn-out belts. Some models sported gumball-machine jeweled rings as earrings.

The message, as I left the Fondazione Prada in the sweltering heat, became clear: Men’s spring 2027 is not about tastefulness. THANK GOD. As womenswear slowly creeps out of its luxury-basic, CBK-wannabe era, men have bolted.

There’s a smart sexiness at Prada, a romantic materiality at Setchu (which showed garments made of fishing line and metal hoops), and a wacked-out Americana at Ralph Lauren. The Ralph show, a blend of the haute Purple Label and the sporty Polo label, was like a posh hallucination: imagine being in a palazzo crammed with guys who would medal in a Tom Ripley look-alike contest. There’s something so serious about the Ralph Lauren codes, but also something so devilishly over the top. This isn’t the cri de corporate you can find at other Italianate sartorial brands. This is for a guy with swag who isn’t intimated by a tie as a belt, a sash as a headscarf, or the thought of carrying a leather clutch like it’s pirate’s booty. (Whoever cast the models in this show, from age 18 to well over 50, is a literal genius.) It’s not about looking right, it’s about feeling right at Ralph Lauren—the feeling that your boat is just outside, waiting to take you to Cernobbio or Sag Harbor or Monaco with champagne and caviar in tow. The look is unapologetically fashionable. The whole thing reminded me of a Jack Donaghy line from 30 Rock: “I won the Amory Blaine Handsomeness Scholarship to Princeton, and then attended Harvard Business School, where I was voted ‘most.’”

If this menswear season continues to be about dudes doing the most, I will be so, so pleased. Because men deserve a little levity, and because fashion does too. I’m ready to kiss quiet luxury goodbye and welcome in the era of more. It’s making men look more than okay. They look great.

25th August 2022. It was a Thursday, back when I spent two days of my week freelancing during a clearly quiet time. I swam at the pool I go to and took a thirst trap Speedo selfie in the mirror. I had coffee with my friend Michael Rogers at Bar Italia in Soho. (He’s not on Instagram, so I have no idea what he’s doing day today because I’m bad at staying in touch.) I bought a copy of Rolling Stone with Harry Styles on the cover, and took a photo of the receipt to write it off as a tax expense. Later, I went to Hackney and saw my friend, the film critic Hannah Strong, introduce a screening of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, in honor of the book she had just released. I went home and took a photo of my crown in the elevator, convinced I was balding.

I think buying on-board WiFi is cheating. For once, you are handed the opportunity to ruminate on everything that’s behind you, back on the ground, and find entertainment in a black hole with no connectivity. A plane is not a place for new memories—it’s a limbo space. Our brain pushes our pasts deeper and deeper into its crevices the further we get from them. Up there, you’re handed the opportunity to reconjure them.

I have never been one for diaries, but I do think my camera roll functions as one. Watching it back, particularly on long flights, sort of feels like watching an unabridged documentary about your life. But there’s also a beautiful filter to it. We take pictures of things we want to remember, and keep our phones in our pockets in life’s more sullen moments.

But what our camera rolls offer up is a before and after, which in itself is an interesting way of framing the stuff we don’t want to return to. Most of the brain chemistry-shifting trauma from my life happened before I had a camera phone, but I wonder what it would look like, if I scrolled back to the days of the deaths of my closest family members, before I learned of the news. Was I pouting like a fish in a mirror? Watching a movie? Doing something so profoundly inane that it’s almost as if I was waiting for it to happen?I have no recollection of the garnishing of these moments, only the moments themselves, but I feel like having a visual documentation of what happened around it would remind me of how strange and unpredictable life often is.

As of right now, I have 62,851 photographs and screenshots on my phone, stretching back to 2014. With one hefty swipe, I could scroll back to any day from that point on and live it again. Next time you’re on a flight somewhere, instead of downloading a whole series, or locking in on the in-flight entertainment system, or—god forbid—buying the WiFi, I encourage you to use your phone’s camera roll to its fullest potential. Your life is more interesting than a blockbuster, more absorbing than a book, if you have the patience to process just how much you have lived.

Rose Gray, popstar extraordinaire, longtime bestie of Dougie Greenwood, dropped a new single last week that has gone platinum in my headphones already. “Club to Your Arms”, a big sexy synthy love song, was co-written with Justin Tranter (of “Sorry” by Justin Bieber fame), who called it one of the top five songs he’s ever worked on. It’s *that* good.

I asked her: What’s the gnarliest injury you’ve ever had?

ROSE GRAY: “I sliced my palm open by cutting an avocado wrong. The knife slipped on the nut and went so deep into my skin I saw muscle. I had to get six stitches.”

• What were you doing on August 25 2022? Send your paragraph description based on your camera roll below!

• I’ve been in and out of the country so much that I’ve missed a few releases, but I’m hyped for the anniversary restoration of Pink Narcissus, the legendary gay erotic art movie.

• I’m off next week! Going to my second wedding ever–in Italy, no less! Have fun without me. Xx

But Nicolaia, wasn’t 2025 the year of the showgirl? Aren’t you a day late and a buck short? Didn’t it kick off in 2024 with Pamela Anderson’s comeback The Last Showgirl, and reach an inflection point in 2025 with Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl (a title track that featured fellow showgirl obsessive Sabrina Carpenter)? Two things can be true, but also, these two things are different.

The enduring appeal of the showgirl archetype is based on intertwined forces: A moth-like draw to glamour, beauty, sex, coupled with the winking acknowledgement that it’s a varnish. Showgirlmanship opens the kimono completely. Showgirlmanship is not being a showgirl, as sportsmanship is not being an athlete. It is an attitudinal severity towards work, less about the product, more about the process, and also, the direct result of our dependence on the cultural equivalent of flavor enhancers: AI, behind the scenes songwriters, script doctors, creative consultants, publicists, coaches, etc. So many hands, so many forms of technology, so much potential for capitalist intrusions goes into any finished work—that it’s become en vogue to signal artistic purity through process posting. Anyone can look glamorous on Instagram, but the question that emerges in this brave new world is how to transmute care and craft through a screen?

In NOVEMBER (!!!) for this very Substack I wrote about the quickstep towards anti-algorithmic posting, and the uptick in public “finstas” (which, since then, every magazine and their parent company covered). Showgirlmanship is an extension of that ethos—a public declaration of the time, sweat, and glitter that it takes to be That Girl. It’s Sharleen Schiadic in the NYT, Adéla and Lexee in the studio, Addison recreating Emma Stone’s Easy A costume, Gabriella giving herself the Substack exclusive on styling Rama Duwaji, Rachel in the writer’s room. It’s also any season of RuPaul’s Drag Race (perhaps the birthplace of showgirlmanship). It’s the displacement of “chic” for the word “erotic” (someone on Substack pointed this out in a post that I cannot, for the life of me, find), a marked disinterest in polish. It’s commitment to the bit, a little messy, a little urgent, undeniably spunky. It’s renaming yourself Cristal— but after the champagne. Honey, it’s feathers and lashes, but it’s also knowing the taste of doggy chow!

• I hosted office hours two weekends ago at Bar Oliver and it was the sweetest group ever!

  

• On Saturday all my favorite writers (Whitney Mallet, Danya Issawi, Mikaela Dery, Maya Kotomori, Tanya Bush) and I are throwing a gargantuan closet sale and literary reading at Surrender Dorothy. Come for the clothes, stay for our Eulogies.

• The full Ottessa Moshfegh x Alexa interview is live online.

• Lastly, GO KNICKS! BING BONG!

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH: Okay. I’m going to record, put this on airplane mode, and we go. How’s your burrito?

ALEXA DEMIE: It’s really good.

I’ve never been to this place. It’s so cute.

This is my only safe space—where I can go alone and eat.

You only have one?

Well, my house, this place, and in nature.

What has that been like to not be able to sit alone places without getting accosted?

I don’t love it. I like to be independent, and I like to go places alone, so it feels a little restricting. I’m naturally already a bit of a hermit, and I think it definitely added to that. I can become very—I don’t want to say reclusive, but I really like being alone. If I want to go run alone, I think about that and whether I’ll be stopped.

God.

It’s interesting, because it just comes with what you do. I never felt, “Oh, I want to be famous.” It was, “I want to be a performer. I want to make art. I want to create.” Those thoughts have come into my mind, but that wasn’t the intention.

Well, thank God because that’s a pretty terrifying ambition to be like, “I want to be famous.”

I was going to say, I don’t think anyone wants that, but, yes, they do. There’s a lot of people that want to be famous. It’s a thing.

Because fame is its own occupation online now.

Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe everyone will become famous and then we don’t have to worry about anything, because it’s normal. Maybe it’ll bring normalcy to something that still feels so… weird. Does it freak you out when somebody recognizes you, or do you feel pretty calm about it?

People recognize me occasionally. I write books, so whoever’s going to recognize me is probably a nerd.

Your fan base is probably really chill and cool. They’re like, “I love your work.” They’re not going, “Can I get a photo of you?”

They’re composed, mostly.

By the way, I already read your work, but I picked up your book Homesick for Another World when I heard we were meeting. I was cracking up.

Oh my God, thank you.

The one story [The Weirdos]… Was it you dating the actor guy with the crystal skull? Did that really happen?

That was so close to my lived experience.

Okay, because I was like, “This is too real, too detailed, and too accurate.” I could not stop laughing.

He was amazing. An unforgettable, huge regret of a relationship. It was a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing. Two months.

Kind of amazing though. He’s a character. It’s interesting that he’s so spiritual, but then he wants to kill the birds.

That was fictional.

Okay, good. It added exactly what I wanted from the story. It also, for me, spoke about how we’re all very contradictory.

Good point. I feel like a character needs to have some contradictions to be legible, understandable, and relatable. Was season three of Euphoria the hardest season to film?

No, two was. Filming season 3 truly felt like the third act of my journey with the show and I felt held. I don’t think it was coincidence that Sam wrote GOD into the script the way he did…I felt the presence all around. Two was the hardest season, by far. After I finished filming that I was like, “Fuck everything. Fuck the show—everyone. I don’t want to do this.” After season two, that was the catalyst for me to pull away from Hollywood, away from acting and being in the limelight, and come back into myself. I was asking myself, “Is this really what I want to do? Am I fulfilled? Is this creatively inspiring me?” I think it was a hard season for everybody across the board. The energy around it was hard.

What do you mean? I’ve never even been on a set.

To be honest, I don’t know exactly what it was. It’s all in service to the art. I think the art, and what we’ve all done with the show, made it worth it. Around season two, there was something that was stretching us in a way that felt really painful—at least for me. I felt like I was being stretched. At the time I wasn’t aware of that. During the filming, I just was like, “I’m here and I’m bored.” I had Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” on repeat. I would just dramatically listen to that while driving home, and just reflect. Because getting the role was such a high.

How did that happen?

Oh, my God. It was such a high. Let’s go to the joy. Season one, it was this freshness, this newness, this joy, and this excitement. Getting the role, I remember I read the script like, “Holy shit.” I was reading a lot of stuff at that time, and I hadn’t read anything like that. I was really impressed by the musical choices. I read it and I just felt connected to it. I was like, “I have to get this.”

And you felt specifically connected to Maddy?

No. I was reading for Rue.

That would have been so interesting.

I grew up visiting AA meetings a lot with my dad. I was sitting in those rooms, so I would hear a lot of those stories when I was 9, 10, 11. I grew up around my uncles, their friends, and all the guys in the neighborhood, and I was just like the watcher, a silent observer. I never partook in anything—I don’t know, maybe going to those meetings with my dad really young helped to not take that route. I was just an observer.

So I felt really connected to Rue. I was just like, “I got to get this.” I went in to audition as Rue, for Sam [Levinson, the creator of Euphoria] and Augustine [Frizzell], who directed the pilot. I felt really comfortable, which was weird. Usually I’m really nervous, but I just felt really dropped in.

How was the audition?

I remember it so vividly. Sam whispered something during the audition. Obviously I was like, “Great, he fucking hates me,” because he whispered. They didn’t really give me much feedback, and I left. I met up with a friend who I was making music with, and I was telling him about it. It was like life or death for me because I had nothing at that time, no means of whatever. I felt like this was my moment. My friend was consoling me, and in the middle of making music I got a call. It was my agent, and he was like, “They want to see you back for Maddy.”

I truly didn’t feel connected to Maddy at first. I didn’t even bat an eye reading her parts when I first read the script. Maybe that’s because I was so focused on Rue. When I went back in [to audition] for Maddy, I felt tense, but the process was playful. Sam was having fun. I went back again to read with Jacob. Then, the producers were like, “We love you. We want it to be you. But, there are a couple executives that are not sold. They think she should be a blonde.”

So, I had to go in to audition for HBO. I don’t know if they’ll like me saying this… Barbie [Ferreira] was there, and a couple other people were there going to audition for HBO. But there was another girl there [to audition for Maddy]. I had to go up opposite a blonde. I was the only actor that had to go up against someone else. So she was there, I saw her, and I was pissed.

Can you say who it was?

If I’m being honest, I don’t remember her name. Truly, I don’t. I was pretty fired up. I was like, Joan of Arc mode. I just said to myself, “It’s mine.” She went in first, then it was my turn. Sam and the producers were being really supportive and kind. The first scene I had to do is the chili scene where I dump the chili over and call the mom a cunt. The line is, “I know I’m not supposed to be here, and none of you like me.” Maybe this is me being so dramatic, but I looked at every single person in the eye, and I said that with conviction. Because it’s what I felt. I did that, pushed the chili over, and finished the scene. They sent the other girl home. I stayed and did more scenes. I didn’t even care if I got the role at that point. It was just about something that I couldn’t even really put words to, just an energy. I was driving out of HBO and I didn’t even get out of the parking lot when I got a call. I believe it was Augustine, and she was like, “You got the part.” I just felt this exhale and this relief. Like, yes, yes, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever told that story.

That’s a great story.

And then I didn’t know what it would entail for the next eight years of my life. It was all just a feeling. That’s how I try to live my life as best as I can through feeling. I felt that I wanted it and I needed it. It was a decision made by something that my mind couldn’t argue with.

When you’re building a character, what do you trust more: instinct or structure? Do you think in those terms?

I trust instinct. Before I begin, I do structure. I write. To me, that’s the structure. But then when I’m on set, it’s pure instinct. I just call her in.

If everything is about feeling, what’s your relationship with manifesting and calling things into being?

It’s possible. I’ve called in a lot. I’ve written things down and the next day I’ll get a call. I stopped that for a while. I felt the need to go into a bit of a void, just exist in that void, and not try to get something or create something. It felt like a decision made for me by my soul to just clear out and distill.

Would you say that’s like what happened after shooting season two?

Yes. Looking back, it was such a great blessing. I would have just stayed on this high and just kept going, but I don’t think I would feel what I feel today. I feel so good in my body, comfortable in my skin, and more accepting of me. More embodied, less disassociated. It’s still a practice, but I feel more comfortable, like it’s safe to be in my body, it’s safe to be here on this earth. I want to be here and just experience it. And that was not easy for me.

The blessing of season two was that it allowed me the time for the inner work and to come back to my essence. I didn’t realize how method I actually am—or was. I created this character, but then I became her. Because I am naturally more shy, unless I’m performing, I used her as a mask. So when I would do press or meet people, I was in—

—in character?

She was my shield, she was my mask. I created her, and there are pieces of her that are me. There is a deep-rooted connection to her, but I’m not her. I’m not Maddy. I remember a moment where I realized Maddy was so enmeshed in me, that when I pulled her out, I just started crying. It happened after season two because for the first time—I don’t know—I couldn’t feel the difference between her and me. So after we wrapped, there was a yearning to get back to my essence again. For season three, I was then so scared that I couldn’t channel her again. I was afraid because I was so raw. [In between shooting season two and season three], I spent a couple years like a hermit.

What were you doing? What was your creative life at that point?

A lot of writing. A lot of sitting with myself in silence. And a lot of clearing layers of trauma. I felt like I was cleaning off all the mud, purging it out. Unknowingly, I was really trying to get back to this innocence or this essence that I felt was there. This entire process did not feel logical at all. It felt like spirit. It’s hard to even talk about, because there’s a lot of experiences I had that I think people would probably say I was crazy. Gnosis, you know? It was a lot of growing up, but then a lot of coming back to the innocent child.

I can relate to that. Part of it is growing up, but knowing how to protect yourself and your innocence. Like you were saying, Maddy became a shield and that’s dangerous. You need protection.

And it’s scary to go out into this world raw. I did that for the [Euphoria season three] premiere for the first time. I’ve never gone out onto a red carpet or done press without a beat face. Don’t get me wrong, I love glamour. I will paint my face again. I love it. To me, makeup is creative expression. But I just was like, “What would it feel like to go out without my hair?” That was my natural hair, not perfectly done. No extensions. I barely put fucking concealer under my eyes—which is a risk, and I would never do again… or maybe I would.

All in all, I’m so happy and grateful that I’m in this space to not feel like I need all of that all the time. How do I say this? For this last premiere, I really did not care at all. I didn’t care enough. My perfectionist was not in the room. Now, after having that experience, I’m like, “Okay, I’ll care in the middle. Let’s come into balance.” I did feel this new sense of acceptance and grounding, that looking back was such a gift.

That’s how an artist grows, right? You show up for what’s being presented, respond as intentionally and as openly as you can, and you pay attention and you observe. It’s so funny to hear you talk about that, because I have just downloaded every one of your performances from Waves to Euphoria. I haven’t watched all of season three yet—HBO wouldn’t send it to me. You’re really good and it’s so much fun to watch you.

Thank you.

Seriously. I loved where you took the character. But, anyway, back to how beautiful you are. When I saw you on the red carpet, I was like, “Oh, my God, she’s never looked as beautiful and glamorous.”

Wow, thank you.

There’s that famous line that Maddy says to Cassie about having taste. The peacefulness, sincerity, and transparency in your appearance on the red carpet, I found it really moving.

Thank you. When anything is new, it’s going to feel a little scary. Although I have been on many carpets, I hadn’t been on one in a long time. I’ve been so to myself. Personally, I have never felt more beautiful in my life than I do now. I feel that from the inside out, and I wanted to honor that. Without being fully conscious of it, my intention was, “I’m here and I’m not going to perform for anyone. I’m just going to be.” I felt rooted, calm, and did my best to be present with everyone. At the same time, it was a tender, raw space to be in because there were hundreds of people screaming and taking my photo. Also, I think the energy around the show is so charged. It just was a charged night.

That’s cool. This will come out after the whole season—which I haven’t finished yet—but I wanted to articulate this carefully. In season three, Maddy moves to LA and really takes charge of her life. It was so satisfying to see her act and take agency. Suddenly she’s self-motivated, actualizing and out in the world, and confronting the system. She’s like, “I love capitalism.”

I know. It’s so wild because I’m the opposite. I have to tell myself money is not evil. Money’s an energy. Money’s here to help us on earth. Money is okay. I like nice things. I want money. I like money. But there’s this part of me I’ve always navigated where I had to work through my whole “money is evil” trauma. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe seeing my mom struggle so much as a child.

I relate to it. But the way that we get to watch Maddy figure out how to succeed—it feels like I’m projecting onto you.

No, no. Go ahead.

I feel like the actress behind Maddy is doing the same thing for herself in her life. That was just the narrative that just flew in my head naturally. But how are you feeling now that Euphoria is behind you? You’re in a different place in your life now, and here’s Hollywood, this industry that wants something from you. How are you feeling as a spirit in all of that?

I have a really healthy relationship to the industry, because I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. I have a lot of integrity, and I honor that about myself. If I don’t feel like [a job] is going to light me up, I don’t do it. On one end, we’re on earth, I need money. I’m going to make money. But I can’t just take money gigs. I always ask myself, “What about this project inspires me?” I’m also not going to keep playing this character that a lot of people do want me to play. That would be such a disservice to my creative spirit. I couldn’t do it. It’s like you having to write the same story over and over again...

Yeah. I’m not here to serve that. I’m just on my way.

Exactly.

Do you feel like Maddy is a stereotype that you have to play against?

People do love Maddy. They love her confidence, her bluntness. She can appear larger than life, and I think she brings a lot of something to people. I don’t know exactly what.

She’s exciting and she’s daring.

And people want to be exciting and daring. People want to say the thing they’re not supposed to say. I want to say the thing I’m not supposed to say––it is liberating to play a character who says exactly what she feels or wants. When people really like something, they just want more of it. That’s fair and I completely understand. But as a human, as an artist, we’re here to evolve and grow, and we don’t want to just keep doing the same thing over and over again. I think that can kind of—not kill your spirit, because I don’t think your spirit could be killed, but just dampen it.

I’ve had my experience with that too, where people ask me to be myself, but they don’t know that I’m not that person anymore.

Exactly. That was frustrating for me the first two seasons, because there were people who would say… “Oh, she’s not acting, that’s just who she is.” That couldn’t have been further from the truth.That was a bit frustrating, but I also can’t be upset because I never really showed people or let people in. Naturally, I’m just really private.

That’s a lot. So, six months after filming, where are you creatively? What’s on the agenda?

I don’t like to share that anymore. I used to, and I feel like people really latched on to what I said. I’m such a feeler that what I’m feeling today I could not be feeling tomorrow. I’d like to keep this aspect of my life, for now, private.

I admire that very much. I’m asking not just because people want to know because they’re excited, but because I’m just curious as it relates to my own journey. I’m at a moment in my creative life where I just finished a book that I’ve been working on for four years. I’m excited to share it with people, and I never used to feel that way.

Whoa. Congrats. I’m ready to read that. Is it a novel?

It’s a novel. I have lots of ideas. The work of the artist is to be as vulnerable and open and focused at the same time.

Yes.

That takes so much discipline. And I’m realizing I need to be around people that are inspiring, have integrity, and understand.

Absolutely.

That’s hard to find.

It is, but I want to start believing it’s not. I want to believe that it’s shifting because we’re shifting. What made you write from this place?

I was in distress, honestly.

Distress is such a gift. It’s such a gift.

I was like, “I feel really trapped and miserable.” My art has to be the thing. If it’s going to have value, it has to be the thing that teaches me how to be more free. Part of me wants to know where you’re heading because I’m curious what comes next after because once you’re at a certain point in your career and you know who you are—that’s a very interesting moment.

I’m really excited for what’s next because I’m going to be creating from a new place, with everything that I’ve shed, and this innocence I’ve reconnected with, but also this power. A healthy power. It’s just going to feel so liberating and so pure to do... I’m hesitant to say too much.

Say it.

I’m just excited to be creating from this embodied place with the new connection I have to my body, to my heart, to my spirit. I think I’m going to be surprised.

That’s so exciting. That takes so much courage. And growing in private—that’s just you doing your thing.

Every day as we’re going through the press with Euphoria, I just remind myself of the gratitude. It’s easy to be like, “I’m over it, let’s move on.” But it truly was such a gift and helped me grow. A friend of mine told me that Euphoria was like a master class in every aspect of my life: As a performer, as a human being, and as someone working with a large group of people. I just try to remind myself of what a gift it was and it is, and really appreciate and honor every single person that’s part of the show. Each of these souls contributed to creating something that really stretched all of us in ways we needed, and also contributed to culture in whatever ways it did. I don’t know what it did for people, if it did anything, or if it’s just entertainment. But it did something. I know that. Now I’m ready for the next adventure.

My immediate concern was that Antwerp already has a main character. Actually, it has six. How do you build something new in a city whose fashion identity is still connected to a group of designers who left school forty years ago? In Antwerp, every conversation about the future of fashion somehow inevitably circles back to a person wearing black in 1987.

For a medieval mercantile city, the ghosts that haunt Antwerp aren’t merchants but these six designers. And I do believe in ghosts. Already on the first day, I was seeing visions. Why does the one fashion editor on this trip have a beard suspiciously similar to Walter Van Beirendonck’s? Do I even know what Walter Van Beirendonck looks like these days? Maybe he would wear a Delvaux. Maybe everyone in Antwerp slowly morphs into a member of the Antwerp Six after prolonged exposure. Is that actually Ann Demeulemeester in the third row of Marcel Sommer’s gothic presentation? And of course it was.

Coinciding with the festival was the landmark Antwerp Six exhibition at MoMu—and sue me for sounding like a fashion victim—but it really is as good as everyone says. Room after room unfolded like a fashion cemetery, with mannequins in archival looks standing in for headstones. Dirk Van Saene’s rotating catwalk installation and Marina Yee’s reconstructed studio turned the museum into a perfect shrine for fashion’s favorite myth. It quickly became clear that even the Antwerp Six can’t escape the Antwerp Six. Fortunately, neither can the rest of us.

The theme continued at Walter Van Beirendonck’s 40th anniversary presentation, where the gnomes of fashion past, present, and future all showed up in a brutalist construction-site high-rise. The W&LT founder returned in all his glory, mixing archival pieces with a new collection. Puk Puk (the brand’s trademark robot character—because when you’ve had a brand for as long as four decades, you do have a trademark character) was sent down the runway with numbered t-shirts signaling the brand’s past. Looks I’d just seen at the MoMu–-butterfly headpieces, gigantic gloves, and knitted flower balaclavas—had risen from the dead! Of course, the point isn’t to preserve ideas under glass, but to keep things moving.

After a few days in the city, it was easier to separate who came first, Antwerp or the six. Unlike most fashion weeks, Antwerp Fashion Festival actually lets you experience Antwerp. There were no generic venues that may as well have been in Milan, Paris, or a converted warehouse somewhere in East London. Instead, you move throughout the city—to see Jan-Jan Van Essche’s collection in a church, or Nadav Perlman’s performance in a chapel. Here, historic buildings are part of the programming, while carved faces stare down at you from ceilings and façades, watching the present unfold.

At Julie Kegels’ installation After Work at COUR gallery, the past melded into the present with her own pieces shown alongside works by artists she admires. Sleeping Beauty, a bed with makeup-stained sheets, reads as an afterimage of the night before. Elsewhere, Bernadette Antwerp offered a more literal version of what comes next. Founded by mother and daughter duo, Bernadette and Charlotte de Geyter, the brand embodies the sharing of ideas between generations. Because, of course, a love for bedazzled kitten heels is generational!

Over at KMSKA, second-year fashion students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp created designs in response to works from the museum’s collection. Laura Meier Hagested reinterpreted Jules Pascin’s Seated Girl, while Pommie Dierick flirted with nip-slips by referencing Jean Fouquet’s Madonna. On our way into the exhibition, conservators happened to be restoring a painting, so the symbolism verged on the ridiculous: the old and the new unite!

Then came the point every fashion school library all-nighter leads up to: the student show. From the outside, studying fashion in Antwerp seems comparable to the doomed experience of being in middle school and trying to live up to the rumor of an older, more popular sibling. Yet the masters students didn’t seem particularly intimidated. Carla Lázaro Bonet showed blown-out proportions covered in latex flowers; Yvonne Schictel sent out a wheat-straw dress, and Yichun Liu presented us some up-side down heels. Clearly, the students in Antwerp are here to make something new.

After all the students at the school had presented, the celebration ended with posters highlighting the Belgian government’s rising tuition fees, reminding me of the precarious reality of building an independent fashion practice at a time that’s very different from when the Antwerp Six rose to fame. At one point during the festival, an employee at the MoMu transparently admitted they weren’t sure if there even is a future for independent designers. Not quite the sort of quote you embroider onto a tote bag, but that’s exactly why the Antwerp Fashion Festival matters.

Calling this a fashion festival rather than a fashion week feels right. Rather than competing with Paris, Milan, or London, Antwerp is leaning into what makes it Antwerp. As with most things in life (and also the plot of Shrek?), the ace up your sleeve is being a little quirked up.

Parsons turns 21 later this month, but made Backrooms when he was 19. What were you doing at 19? In a K-hole in university? Drinking in a parking lot behind the bins? Spending most of your time figuring out what you were going to do with the long life ahead of you? To hear that someone has managed to figure their shit out before you is always loaded with a sense of envy. Sometimes it’s sheer talent; other times it’s luck. But there’s no denying that squeezing the juice out of your creative fruits when you’re young, whether you’re making art by yourself or working in the indie movie studio system, can often yield memorable—sometimes legendary—results.

This feels all the more prescient because the movie that’s trailing one spot behind it is another horror from a young YouTuber-turned-auteur: Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker. In third position? The new Star Wars movie Mandalorian & Grogu, which fell off a steep cliff after its opening weekend. (Backrooms outperformed that film three-fold this past Wednesday.)

Though this feels like an anomaly in box office history, the prodigious young director is not a new thing. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 26; Jaws is the work of a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles— the three-hour famously uneventful domestic drama, recently voted by Sight & Sound as the greatest film of all time—was directed by a 25-year-old Chantal Akerman. Xavier Dolan earned his enfant terrible status because he debuted at Cannes, with his film I Killed My Mother, when he was 19. The difference here is that, maybe Jaws aside, it takes a lot for a young director to achieve notable box office success. He’s achieved lifelong success before the life has really begun.

Nowadays, I run into more and more artists—musicians mostly, but actors and directors too—who are convinced that they are wilting before their frontal cortex is formed. The Billie Eilish effect, I call it. When Eilish debuted at the age of 14, and fairly soon after became the biggest artist in the world, there were a glut of alt-pop musicians who tried to follow in her footsteps, and make it before they’d turned 18. Olivia Rodrigo—Driver’s License dropped when she was 17—felt like her successor in that regard. Sombr’s self-sufficient songwriter status, Grammy-nominated and lauded by Taylor Swift at barely 20, also felt sort of unique. Youth feels front and center in the pop industry especially, where appearance harbors more importance than for comparatively discreet filmmakers, to the point that the “stage age” has become a thing. I’ve heard of many artists—even guitar-toting men—substracting four or five years from their real age to appear more prodigious.

Does it matter? Sure, but there’s also the reverse—the beauty of having time. In the pop sphere, it took a decade of graft for us to pay full attention to Zara Larsson. Ryan Beatty, who started unveiling parts of his fourth album this week, had a whole first chapter as a heavily-steered Radio Disney teeny bopper that felt entirely incongruous to the genius, country and folk work he makes now. It feels like a full circle moment that, in addition to writing on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, he fed into fellow escapee Miley Cyrus’ last record. You do not have to be brilliant as a teenager to ever be brilliant.

Still, I’m on a comedown from a Cannes Film Festival where the really old heads (50+ vibes) produced some of the least interesting, or down right bad, work. Maybe we should be scheduling a moratorium on how long we can work, rather than how long we have to wait before we make our first thing? Heck, give a million dollars and a trusty support network to a 15-year-old director. Good ideas come from our untapped dreams, rather than when our wells are old and empty.

If you’re Parsons, where do you go from here? Whatever comes next is his carte blanche moment, his opportunity to make whatever the fuck he wants. Blockbuster franchise deal? An even weirder arthouse moment? Nope. He wants to go back to YouTube for a bit, where the measurement of expectation isn’t measured in dollar signs.

• Bleak Week is unfolding in major moviegoing cities around the world. If you like your movies sad as hell then check it out here.

• I just got back from Barcelona for Primavera Sound and survived the washout on Thursday night. Oklou’s “harvest sky” during a torrential downpour? Lowkey transcendent.

• (Thank you Cupra for having me here btw <3)

• New Natanya is fantastic.

I may be biased but I think Lost is the best thing to happen to London nightlife in a very long time. Last year they took over a shuttered cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue, this beautiful Art Deco music hall that had been converted in the 1970’s. and started throwing parties in it again, bringing music back to the building in a way that felt completely nostalgic and completely new at the same time. Isn’t that exactly what dreaming feels like? I think so.

I thought this tube carriage was the perfect chariot for me, the unofficial Queen of Lost. I love graffiti, I love anything that is an attempt to leave a mark. I love Lost because it had that same ethos. It brought weird, messy, loud culture right back into the centre of London.

I chewed some gum on Shaftesbury Avenue and walked to the club. The night was hot and the queue was long. The other day I heard someone say how much they liked queueing because you can just zone out and not think about anything. I agree. But I didn’t queue because I am the unofficial Queen of Lost. At the door, phones are locked into pouches. The more I went to Lost, the more I started to experience the opposite of phone addiction. You start to crave the same kind of presence you feel in there, in all the other parts of your life. Anyway, I floated in wearing my white dress and drank some water. Then I bumped into Ethan and Ava from Silver Gore who had just played in the music hall.

Lost had lots of different rooms. The music hall was my second favourite, but my favourite was the Lost Cinema, one of the untouched screens from when the building was an ODEON (famously where I watched Toy Story 2 in 1999).

Style Wars the graffiti film from 1983 was playing so we watched for a while and then went to the club because Groove Armada were starting their set. They opened with “Superstylin’” and of course everyone lost it.

After shaking my [redacted] for a while, I snuck off and wound my way up a metal spiral staircase into the Loft. The Loft is a sort of VIP room that everyone constantly wants wristbands to get into, but as soon as you’re in there, you immediately want to leave. There’s just too much going on to sit around and schmooze.

Leaving immediately, I went to watch the genius director Jake Nava introduce some of his music videos. I got a lemonade and danced like I was possessed to “My Prerogative” by Britney and “Baby Boy” by Beyoncé (feat. Sean Paul). The entire cinema was full of people dancing and cheering. (No phones! Anywhere!!!) When something amazing happens at Lost – like if every single person in a cinema gets up and starts dancing – you notice the immediate instinct to pull out your phone. But then you override the instinct because you don’t have a phone. You experience things in the real, immediate world, instead of immediately attempting to curate what you’re experiencing for other people to see. It feels like freedom.

But it’s not just the no phones thing that made Lost so special. It had this feeling of expansiveness and potential. It’s often the friction between things that creates something new; between people, genres, aesthetics. At Lost you could find yourself watching hardcore bands, rappers, house DJs, ethereal harpists, bumping into Central Cee, walking in on a Soho Reading, seeing Gaspar Noe introduce his films, watching erotic cartoons and hearing poetry all on the same night. It was like five festivals in one building, with a secret line-up they only ever wrote in chalk on the wall. You could explore Lost forever and never see the same thing twice. I was there almost every weekend and there are still rooms I went to once that I couldn’t find again.

By now I was passing through the powder room. Here you could do whatever you needed to do, to your heart’s content.

I got lost for a while before finding myself in the music hall face to face with an enormous inflatable shark and Mowalola performing one of the best live sets I’ve seen in so long. She’s truly so punk. I love her and the music was so good.

That’s the shark. I think it was leopard print. It was really hard to photograph because it was so big. Then it was home time because I knew I was coming back tomorrow.

On the bus home I had an existential crisis. I think it hit me that the building was really closing. The corporate jaws of the city crunch up all these places that people really need: places to discover music and make friends in and get fucked up and make out with each other and dance and sweat in, places that make the difficulty of trying to live in a city more than worth it. They crunch them up and turn them into glass-fronted shopping centres, bland restaurants, places where nothing interesting will ever happen. Anyway here’s sad me and Neptune before I went to sleep. 1:41am, not bad!

On Saturday I woke up tired and went to a Pineapple dance class and ate a cream-filled mochi to prepare myself for round two.

I made my way over for the last time. It was sad. I wore black. Then I found everyone and we smoked cigarettes on the roof.

(Something you need to understand is that I cannot be held responsible for any technical mishaps made during this diary. Ultimately yes I accidentally reset my camera so every photo is now permanently timestamped with the wrong date. Just think of it as intentional. A night lost forever in time.)

From the roof you could see the huge golden moon and the London eye, and these fragments of messages from people who had been to the club being projected on the building opposite. I like the idea that Lost can appear and disappear in any place or any building across the city at any time. There are so many empty buildings sitting around in London doing nothing. I think we should act with more entitlement over our cities. They do not exist to make money, they exist to hold us while we go about the crucial business of finding out what it really means to be alive.

A lot of time went by between the roof and the club. I met Giggs, who was having a haircut in a van outside. I drank cranberry juice and watched the end of Mulholland Drive in the Lost Theatre, which was amazing because everyone was out-shushing each other in a funny way and at the end there was a standing ovation but everyone kept shushing all through it. Then I watched Mark Leckey films and lost everyone and then found them again.

In the music hall, I met Maria Dearest and we watched Geordie Greep play the most genius, brilliant, life-changing, fantastic, amazing show that I think has altered me as a person forever. Everyone was dancing like squirming cats and rolling on the floor and I was headbanging a little bit and felt so happy.

I thought this man’s shirt was perfect.

Now everything was starting to feel like one long glittering beautiful blur. Watching music like that with a crowd like that does something to your body. You can shake and laugh and shout and exorcise whatever you need to. Then we rushed out while everyone was cheering because The Dare had flown over for one night to DJ in the club and I knew I had to be on stage for that.

Here he is, the man, the legend, myth, the star. IT WAS THE BEST SET EVER.

Everyone was losing their minds, including me. The whole stage was full and the club was heaving and then who showed up but of course the rock star icon herself ms Charli XCX! <3<3. Duh! We were at the centre of the universe!

As you can imagine, I got a bit swept up in the moment (now streaming on HBO max) and didn’t really take any other photos. Harrison played Twist and Shout and I left my body.

And then, somewhere between a Georgian choir, stolen moments in velvet-lined rooms, lost connections, found possessions, forgotten people remembered, phone numbers written in chalk and accidentally rubbed out by people kissing - it was all over. I got lost in the mayhem of it all until suddenly I woke up and the lights were on.

I stayed around until the sun threatened to rise, then walked out onto Charing Cross Road and waited for a bus that never came.

The cab I ended up taking had a Union Jack doormat in it that felt very right and very wrong at the same time. Iconic, British, kitsch. Pointed, threatening, hard. People love this country for different reasons, but a growing number of them seem to think that in uncertain times they need hate as much as they need love. It’s like they think they need hate in order to love, or something. For some reason those people take comfort in turning away from things that look different to them. They start to say there isn’t enough room on our island. But there is so much room, so much empty room. It’s just locked up behind closed doors.

I’m sure a lot of the people who partied at Lost feel just as uncertain and afraid about their futures – probably most of them. But faced with the same uncertainty, they turn towards it, not away.

What’s obvious is that this cold, strange country is nothing without music. We all need to stand in a room and lose it to something, whatever it is, whatever you’re into, with other people losing it around you. Without music, “iconic british culture” devolves into a weird racist village fete where every stall is owned by another red-faced and dishonest dynasty. In contrast to all this reduction, Lost felt like a genuinely big swing, a historic moment for our club culture. Something only we can do, done so well, and with so much love. a place to find things and lose things. a place where things felt like they could really happen. a place you could just be, without needing to broadcast it.

I love London but it causes me so much pain. I really believe this city can be brought back to life. There is so much wasted potential locked away, taken from us without ceremony, and demolished. Lost showed me a glimpse of the kind of London that we deserve, a city that belongs to the people who live in it, people who wake up and use it every day as a way to figure out how to live. Isn’t that the point? Hasn’t that always been the point?

Anyway, I wish you had been there.

Lost is dead, long live Lost.

Bertie xxxoxoxxx

It’s Alexa Demie.

Photographed by Petra Collins. Interviewed by Ottessa Moshfegh. Styled by Brynn Jones.

Launching right now exclusively to our Substack subscribers is our special edition Alexa Demie Zine. Printed in an edition of 500, the zine is 10 double-sided posters starring the Euphoria actress. Inside, Alexa takes i-D on a journey through her psyche, transforming from cherry blossom faerie to devilish spider woman. With Moshfegh, she discusses the price of fame, the trials of Euphoria, staying creative, and finding herself amidst her characters.

ALEXA DEMIE: I didn’t realize how method I actually am—or was. I created this character [Maddy], but then I became her. Because I am naturally more shy, unless I’m performing, I used her as a mask. So when I would do press or meet people, I was in—

OTTESA MOSHFEGH: —in character?

ALEXA DEMIE: She was my shield, she was my mask. I created her, and there are pieces of her that are me. There is a deep-rooted connection to her, but I’m not her. I’m not Maddy. I remember a moment where I realized Maddy was so enmeshed in me, that when I pulled her out, I just started crying.

It’s a unique feeling, seeing someone’s own history being formed right in front of them, but one that’s happened quite a few times at the Cannes Film Festival this year. As I watched the movies (25 of them, you can read my thoughts here), I took mental notes of the young actors that moved me, in films from France, Nigeria, Great Britain, Germany, and more. Then, as they soaked up the spirit of the Croisette—most for the very first time—I interviewed them.

India Amarteifio, 24, from Clarissa

India Amarteifio arrived in Cannes as one kind of star—the highly followed, super successful lead of the Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte—and left it having earned some new bonafides. Clarissa, the new film from twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri,shot in Nigeria late last year on lustrous 16mm film and is a contemporary riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Transposed into modern day Lagos, it’s a story of a high society woman preparing for a party while looking back on her youth, and the figures that have both drifted from, and stayed with her. Amarteifio, 24, plays the flashback version of Sophie Okonedo’s Clarissa; her castmates include Ayo Edebiri and Toheeb Jimoh. It’s Amarteifio’s first foray into independent film. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “If I can pinpoint the trajectory of how I’d like my career to go, this is what I want to be doing: A piece of art where you just sit and go with it.”

The film was shot in Abraka, where the Erisi twins were raised, hours away from Lagos, so the cast spent most of their time together. “We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and went on our own adventures in the day,” Amarteifio says. Despite playing the younger version of Okonedo, the pair didn’t meet until they ran into each other in Soho the week before the film’s premiere. “She stopped on her bike to say hello.”

Amarteifio is Ghanaian, but being in Africa for her first job there helped her root herself more firmly in her culture. She’s planning a trip to Ghana later this year. “For me, the film is trying to help you come away with a better understanding of Nigeria, and to help you look inwards. To contemplate your own decisions. It’s kind of existential.”

Paul Kircher, 24, from Orange Flavoured Wedding

Paul Kircher played a lost teenager caught in a trap of violence in the 2024 movie And Their Children After Them, and won the newcomer prize at the Venice Film Festival for it. With the win he followed in the footsteps of its past recipients: Taylor Russell and Jennifer Lawrence. In France, he’s already a star, their homegrown Timothee Chalamet, with a high fashion deal (he’s a Dior boy), tousled hair, and a fellow actor sibling ( Samuel Kircher, who played the teenage protagonist in the crazy family sex drama Last Summer). Kircher, just 24 years old, is now three Cannes’ deep.He arrived this time on the Croisette with two movies in the same year. One is the animated high school love story In Waves, scored by Oklou; the other is his third collaboration with France’s GOAT of queer cinema, Christophe Honore.

Set in 1970s Nantes, Orange Flavoured Wedding is a semi-autobiographical story of two lovers on their wedding day, which unbeknownst to them acts as the fraction point in their future lives. Kircher plays Jacques, the soon-to-be husband. “He’s sort of a ghost-like character, like in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire,” he tells me. “My character loves his family very much, but doesn’t want to replicate the pattern of violence that runs through it.” The film reunites him also with Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Colour), who plays his sister. “She has so much tenderness,” he says. “She impresses me so much.”

Jay Lycurgo, 28, from I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

Jay Lycurgo is a lad from Croydon, South London. He’s a BIFA winner, a once-upon-a-time DC Comics boy (the TV series Titans), and, according to my actor friends whose taste I trust, one of the best young actors working right now. After a stellar one-two performance punch in Netflix’s drama Steve, then a part in the Peaky Blinders movie, he arguably delivers his best work yet in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.

The social realist drama by Clio Barnard, which premiered to a slew of starry reviews in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight strand, follows a group of five Birmingham friends who’ve hit 30 and realize their lives have gone nowhere. Lycurgo, 28, plays Oli—a boy who’s wound up becoming a drug dealer. But he bears none of the snarling cliches of that kind of character; he’s as much of a victim as those he sells to, desperate to survive and do something better with his life.

“You really get driven by anxiety sometimes on these things,” he says, “Because I can’t think of anything worse than to be in front of a camera and not know my accent.” Lycurgo studied the rhymes of the Brummy rapper Jaykae to pin down the accent. As for his mannerisms? Pete Doherty in the throes of his addiction. “I watched documentary footage of that trance that he was in, and it just helped me a lot to be accurate with it.” He pins down the perfect balance of frenzy and lethargy. “Especially when you’re talking about something so sensitive, with addiction, you want to be respectful.”

The film shot in Birmingham with a smattering of locals, as is Barnard’s custom as a director. In his downtime, Lycurgo hung out with his castmates, including Anthony Boyle (who gatecrashes our chat) and Daryl McCormack. He and McCormack went to church together. The film acted as its own kind of savior for Lycurgo. “I felt quite lost mentally myself at the time when we were shooting, very insecure,” he admits. “But it’s funny how that can work—feeling how the character’s feeling. Oli feels depressed, but he puts a big smile on his face. I feel like I had a bit of that going on.”

“But I love that,” Lycurgo adds. “Clio created this space for us to really let go. You need a place sometimes to scream. Being Oli was that for me, but instead of screaming, I was dancing.”

Naomi Cosma, 25, from I’ll Be Gone in June

For a long time, Naomi Cosma did not want to appear in I’ll Be Gone in June. “The director Katarina Rivilis reached out to me, was like, ‘Hey, do you want to come to the audition?’ And I was like, ‘No.” Cosma says bluntly, on the terrace of the Palais du Festivals. The film, set in a rural New Mexico town immediately after 9/11, is about the listlessness of teen existence in a jingoistic America. The lead character Franny, played by Cosma, is a 16-year-old exchange student, visiting for a year from Germany, just as the planes hit the towers.

“As a queer non-binary person, it’s not the most accepting place in the world, especially in the south,” Cosma says of their time in the States. The deserts made them feel “a little lost.” But they came away from the film with a new group of friends in their co-stars (who are also, largely, first time actors), and a brief but beautiful relationship that’s now cemented into their own coming-of-age. As Cosma puts it: “I was pretty much living the script.”

Rivilis had seen a photo of Cosma in a magazine, taken by their ex-boyfriend, and thought it was taken in the ’90s. When Rivilis learned of Cosma’s identity, they became the missing piece of the movie’s puzzle. Rivilis wouldn’t stop until Cosma had agreed to take on the part. They shot it in New Mexico in February 2024, with Wim Wenders on board as a producer, who Cosma calls “a sweet guy.” The movie has the air of an early Gus Van Sant film, all of the gorgeous scuzz of small town America.

Talha Akdogan, 19, from Butterfly Jam

Talha Akdogan was just a regular teenager, wrestling in his local New Jersey gym, when a casting director walked in and changed his life. They were looking for someone to appear in the new movie from Kantemir Balagov, the Russian director who became an arthouse darling off the back of his last project, 2019’s award-winning Beanpole. Now, the filmmaker was coming Stateside, and although Akdogan didn’t know it yet, he would be auditioning to play the son of an Oscar nominee. A few auditions later, after meeting Balagov, he got the part, and flew to northern France to shoot it.

The movie, called Butterfly Jam, is the story of a young Circassian high schooler named Pyteh, living in New Jersey with his volatile father Azik, played by Barry Keoghan. Pyteh’s mother is absent, and so he relies on his aunt, played by Riley Keough, for real understanding. In the film, Akdogan says, “they’re all each other’s God. Azik and Pyteh both want to see each other succeed, so they have to take care of each other.” It’s a film about the American dream; Akdogan, who was born in Kazakhstan and raised in Wayne, New Jersey, is living his own. Having just turned 18, he’s currently in college studying Film and TV production, but fancies stepping in front of the camera one more time. He’s a big Game of Thrones fan, he says. “Any parts in the spin-offs, let me know.”

Embla Berntsen Stridbeck, 16, from Low Expectations

In Norwegian director Eivind Landsvik’s debut feature Low Expectations, we meet a pop star whose career has been derailed by burnout, forcing her to move back in with her mother. As a temp job, she’s become a high school invigilator, a comparatively dead-end job rubbing shoulders with teenagers. Only one of the girls there recognizes her, and they strike up a friendship. That girl is Aida, a dance student played by 16-year-old Embla Berntsen Stridbeck.

“I got a text from my friend saying ‘My mom is forcing me to do this audition. You gotta join me,’” Stridbeck recalls. She remembers those early conversations being a little shaky (“I think I got the character’s name wrong!”) but eventually beat out her friends for the part. In the movie, Aida is a girl on the precipice of a creative career, coming face to face with someone who’s been scorned by it. Aida is “nice, sweet, desperate to be liked,” she says. She helped form the character with some early meetings with the pop star at its center, played by the real life pop star Marie Ulven, known better as Girl in Red. “It was very funny, because my friend had been to her concert and she met her girlfriend there. I thought about that when I met her for the first time, then told her that story!”

Currently at dance school, and with a modest collection of screen credits in television, this is Stridbeck’s first film role. “I feel more comfortable with dancing,” she admits, but she hopes some more dramatic parts will come her way.

Colas Quignard,19; Mitia Capellier-Audat, 23; and Suzanne Gerin, 19 (left to right), from La Gradiva

Perhaps the biggest surprise this year was the break-out success of a quiet film that premiered in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Marine Altan’s La Gradiva, a French debut running at a languorous two-and-a-half hours, is about a group of students visiting Pompeii and Naples on a school trip. Typically, films of its style would have passed under the radar there, but it left the festival with a slate of glowing reviews and the same hot distributor that handled the Charli xcx movie Erupcja.

At its centre are a trio of kids–Colas Quignard, Suzanne Gerin, and Mitia Capellier-Audat–who have never acted before, anchoring this gorgeous story of the confusing, violent nature of teen existence. Quignard, 19, first met Altan when “she had come to Naples to rewrite her screenplay with Anne Brouillet—they wanted to be more faithful to the way young people speak.” Quignard’s vernacular played into that, and “at the end of the trip she took my number, and we saw each other about ten times for casting.” He plays the film’s murky and opaque lead.

19-year-old Gerin, for whom this feels like an Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Colour-level discovery, called making the film “a powerful and precious experience.” It reinforced the idea for her that “acting is something collective.” She auditioned as a bit of a joke and ended up getting the part. Capellier-Audat, 23, who rounds out the central trio as an energetic scuzzball, was cast after he was spotted at a protest. “I was very anxious about being filmed, but also about being around so many people for such a long time, particularly people I didn’t know,” he says.

All of them have to finish their studies before they contemplate their futures. Quignard is studying theatre in Paris, Gerin is not focussed on acting for now. Cappelier-Audat plans to “finish my sociology degree all the way through, and to keep on fighting for a society where all the forms of violence we see through the film no longer exist.”

I know these trips are hardly the norm outside the media bubble—and no, we’re not unpacking that particular ecosystem today, ha—but I haven’t felt so enriched by a trip in a very long time. Maybe it felt even more restorative because I was there alone, wandering around for hours with nowhere particular to be whilst everyone on the other side of the world was fast asleep.

But first, why was I there?

AP flew a group of us out to celebrate its new collaboration with Yoon Ahn and Verbal: a limited-edition Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon 38.5mm titanium watch, capped at just 150 pieces. The watch pairs a black aventurine dial with a vivid red tourbillon cage. But we’ll get to that later. There was a fabulous dinner, an insightful roundtable, and, of course, a star-studded party that stretched deep into the Seoul night.

Not the standing clothes steamer changing my life.

For the duration of my stay, I set up camp at Josun Palace Hotel in Gangnam. Up on the 29th floor, my room was nearly the size of my London flat. A bathtub? Check. A Japanese toilet complete with a blow-dry function? Please. A bed so comfortable I never wanted to get up? Well, yes. Oh, and the option to order the viral Parasite ramen with medium-rare steak 24/7? Very dangerous. Very delicious.

But the real star of the room was the standing clothes-steaming chamber. Yes, you read that correctly. An entire vertical capsule dedicated to de-wrinkling your outfits like some kind of futuristic fashion cryotherapy pod. Picture this: you wake up, pick your look, pop it into said chamber, and go take a shower. Come back and bam, your outfit is ready. Nearly creaseless, and you’re free to go have a good day. I will have this in my house someday. I digress.

Suddenly, I understand watch people.

After settling into the hotel, us journo types and various key players from the AP universe headed to Mr. Ahn’s Craft Makgeolli for dinner. This was actually my second time at the restaurant (shout out Youngjin Kim!), and somehow it was even better than I remembered. There was a full tasting menu situation: mushroom ssam wraps, bulgogi croquettes, roasted red snapper, clam rice bowls, and a roasted mochi dessert I’m still thinking about.

Honestly, one of the nicest parts of these trips is getting to break bread with media from all over the world. It felt especially surreal to be back in Seoul with Diana Tsui from 10 USA, considering we’d trauma-bonded here at almost the exact same time last year.

The following morning, we headed to AP House to hear Yoon and Verbal speak about the new collab. Turns out they’ve both been AP collectors for years. She said she’d never borrow any of his watches. He, meanwhile, admitted to regularly borrowing hers.

What struck me most, though, was how genuinely obsessed they both seemed with the process of watchmaking itself. Verbal described the tourbillon as “the heart of the watch,” which explains the vivid red cage glowing at the centre of the dial. Yoon, meanwhile, said she wanted the piece to feel versatile enough to move “from day to night,” something you could actually live in rather than keep locked away for special occasions.

I tried the watch on. Took a selfie with Yoon.

Beyoncé was right.

Being in Seoul with AP also reminded me of the first time I ever heard about the brand: in Beyoncé’s “Upgrade U,” where Audemars Piguet sits alongside Hermès briefcases, Cartier tie clips, and diamond cream facials. Six-star pent suites!

Party with bestie, Hailey Bieber.

That evening was the extravagant bash, held on the rooftop of a stark concrete building overlooking the old-world architecture of Sejong Village. All day, someone kept texting about running into some sort of famous person. There was Evan Mock, who made it to the function even in crutches. There was Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae. Gstaad Guy because of course. Streetwear legends like Verdy and Heron Preston. Ejae and Ahn Hyo-seop of K-Pop Demon Hunters fame. But the rarest Pokémon of all had to be Hailey Bieber.

Every editor with a phone, myself included, had to get the shot. I tried to be polite and make it quick because there were dumplings to be had—yep, fresh dumplings—and approximately 7 margaritas with my name on them.

The afterparty kicked off in the same building, just down in the basement. At some point, the room started spinning, so me and a couple of other editors piled into our chauffeured van and headed back to the hotel in search of food. Alas, Seoul, at least in the fancy part of town, doesn’t seem especially built for random late-night eats. Or maybe I’m just too much of a chicken-shit tourist to properly go looking for one. I made do with some Korean fried chicken and galbi-tang via room service and called it a night. Honestly? I had a great time.

I still had a couple of days left in Seoul. Enough time to properly explore the city and temporarily convince myself I could move there.

Food.

• 1Pig—for the BBQ pork heads. Get every cut, if you can. I did.

• Gwanghwamun Gukbap—ok, more pork, but this time, it’s a clean, mellow take on dwaeji gukbap using black pig pork. The mild broth, tender slices of pork, hot steaming rice, and all the banchan you desire.

• Gebang Sikdang—raw marinated crab. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It’s as tender and creamy as it is fresh. Not fishy in the slightest. Go crazy and get the raw prawns too!

• Friend Chicken in Yongsan—an old school fried chicken spot to get a taste of the real KFC.

• Jayeondo Sogeumppang—if you come to Seoul and not try the famous salt bread, you’re a knob. You can smell these salty, buttery pieces of perfection halfway down the block.

• 현우동 약수직영점—a Japanese udon spot that changed my life with its cold options.

• Hue 135—if you’re feeling particularly fancy.

Fashion.

• Post Archive Faction—hit up their boutique in Dasan-ro for a light and airy take on subversive menswear. I got myself a chic black linen suit for the summer that I’ll wear forever.

• Amomento—I didn’t really know how strong Amomento game was until this trip. Beautifully cut separates. Hailey Bieber popped by the day before to get a leather jacket.

• Jaden Cho—beautiful, ornate womenswear brimming with good taste.

• Umber Postpastb—architectural tailoring with several delicious twists.

• Jiyong kim—the special guest at the next edition of Pitti. Get to know.

Beauty.

• Any product with PDRN.

• Get the Thermage laser treatment. I did…

• Oh, and throw in a RE20 skin booster too. You Only Live Once. Don’t ask how it’s made.

Business class gives you the dangerous feeling that consequences no longer apply to you. Unlimited champagne. Warm nuts. Entire physical separation from the general public. My enormous basket bag from [REDACTED brand not sponsoring this trip] didn’t fit under the seat or in the overhead locker, but nobody stopped me.

At Nice Côte d’Azur Airport I became briefly obsessed with the idea of becoming a luggage thief. The carousel system is built entirely on trust. I have never seen so many Rimowa suitcases in my life. Anyway, I followed the Burberry driver to Cap d’Antibes.

I got Riviera psychosis.

Hôtel Belles Rives has the kind of glamour that makes you instinctively sit up straighter. It’s an old Art Deco hotel perched directly on the water, once home to F. Scott Fitzgerald while he wrote Tender Is the Night—yes, models can also read a press release. Somewhere in the building you can practically hear somebody cheating beautifully.

Burberry had taken over the hotel for the summer. Blue Burberry check loungers lined the pier. Burberry parasols. Burberry towels. It felt less like a hotel partnership and more like Gatsby getting a sponsorship deal.

Nobody lets you touch your own belongings at luxury hotels. Three separate men grabbed my bags before I’d even entered the lobby.

Then I got to my room. Burberry boxes everywhere. Garment bags hanging neatly across the wardrobe. Beauty products lined across the bathroom. The poor hotel staff member was trying to explain the minibar while I nodded impatiently, waiting for him to leave so I could start ripping things open like a raccoon.

The room overlooked the sea in an almost offensive way. I immediately stripped naked, put on a Burberry bikini, and went downstairs. I asked the concierge where the pool was. “There is no pool,” he explained gently. “There is the sea.” Right. Of course. The Mediterranean herself.

I studied press trip anthropology.

Press trips feel exactly like transferring to a new high school halfway through the semester. At cocktail hour I wandered around clutching champagne trying to determine where I was supposed to stand and whether anybody could tell I was nervous. Eventually I attached myself to the Burberry PR team like a frightened duckling.

The food situation quickly became competitive. Towers of oysters. Prawns. Beef tataki. Crudités nobody actually touched.

Then I spotted Marc Forné, and we drank what I believe was three bottles of Chablis together.

I got first date jitters >.<.

The next thing I remember is waking up in my hotel room wrapped in a damp towel with every light still on like I’d survived an exorcism. I missed breakfast service. Whoops.

Hungover beyond medical description, I opened room service hoping for salvation. Instead I discovered there were also delicious options for dogs—an entire canine dining menu featuring minced beef, carrots, and rice. Apparently one influencer accidentally ordered from it because she thought it sounded healthy and was devastated when it arrived in a metal bowl.

I ordered a burger and removed the bun.

I went on a hot date.

Later that afternoon I had my Cheap Date interview with Devon Lee Carlson. I spent most of the day preparing emotionally. I booked a massage because I thought it might make me seem calmer and more mysterious. Side note: I didn’t have it in me to ask whether it was part of the brand comp situ.

Then came the “Everything Shower.” Exfoliation. Shaving. Moisturizing. When I say “everything,” I mean it!!! Full psychological reset. I opened a bottle of wine while getting ready because I was nervous. Technically unprofessional. Spiritually essential.

When Devon arrived she looked absurdly beautiful in a way that almost felt scientifically unfair (but, also, same). We sat on the pier drinking champagne while the sun set over Antibes and immediately drifted off topic. She asked where I was from, pulled up a map of New Zealand on her phone, and made me point to the exact location.

I kept trying to locate a flaw in her personality, but genuinely couldn’t find one. At one point I realized I had stopped interviewing her entirely and was just gossiping. Eventually a Burberry publicist physically came to retrieve us because we were late for dinner.

I’m suffering from Departure Depression.

Dinner unfolded on the terrace overlooking the water while the sky turned pink in that deeply European way that makes Americans start clucking. Nobody touched the food except me. Every plate looked like a tiny sculpture: white fish, white asparagus, white foam.

Later, inside the bar, I kept telling Marc I was cold until he gave me his jacket. I think he believed I was going to steal it. True. I don’t want to talk about how inebriated I got.

The next morning at the airport I ran into Devon again in the business lounge while looking genuinely catastrophic. She and her sister Sydney took one look at me and burst out laughing before immediately giving me anti-nausea pills and Erewhon supplements from their bags like glamorous paramedics.

Then they boarded their flight to New York and suddenly the whole thing was over. The champagne. The sea. The Burberry towels. The strange emotional intimacy that forms when beautiful people are temporarily trapped together on the French Riviera.

Onto the next one!

• Burberry mini camera Burberry fan

• Tiny Burberry teddy in swim trunks

• Burberry sunglasses Burberry T-shirt

• Burberry x Hunza G swimsuit

• Classic Burberry check bikini

• Burberry woven tote

• Burberry Her perfume—genuinely incredible

• Burberry blush—wearing it right now

• Burberry mascara, Riviera-proof

• Three Burberry lipsticks for three separate personalities

This year’s edition started slow—we had high hopes for some projects that wound up being duds, especially in the festival’s main competition. That is, so we’re told, where the gods of arthouse cinema convene. But it’s starting to feel like an old boy’s club, padded out by sluggish, sub-par movies from directors well past their sell-by date. Elsewhere, in the sidebar strands for younger filmmakers, new stars came to the fore: Jordan Firstman, with his raucous and special Club Kid; French director Marine Atlan’s perceptive movie about the struggles of late adolescence, La Gradiva; and another coming-of-age debut, the German-made, Texas-set I’ll Be Gone in June.

Thankfully, as the festival progressed, the competition got gayer—and therefore better. I was blown away by the one-two punch of La Bola Negra, a behemoth of Spanish queer history, and Coward, the new film by Lukas Dhont about flamboyant Belgian entertainers who fall in love in the WWI trenches. The great films at this festival are typically frosty and severe—here are two worthy contenders for Cannes’ top prize that lead with a knowing nod to the power of empathy.

Here, in alphabetical order, are all the films I saw.

All of A Sudden

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the very long Drive My Car, crafts an even longer story (3h16mins) of a French nursing home worker befriending a terminally ill theater director. Sharp, moving, and worth three hours of your time.

An Orange-Flavoured Marriage

French director Christophe Honore directs a great Adele Exarchopoulos and a great Paul Kircher in this admirable, if a little cumbersome, family drama.

Avedon

A serviceable doc on the life of the legendary photographer that will probably wind up on streaming somewhere.

Bitter Christmas

Master of gay melodrama Pedro Almodóvar’s new one. A meta tale of a filmmaker confronted for transforming his own friend’s lives into his movies. A bit confounding with a good final 20 minutes. Al-mid-óvar.

Butterfly Jam

A Circassian teenage wrestler in New Jersey has to deal with his dad (played by Barry Keoghan) and his unruly behavior. Great looking with excellent performances, but narratively unmoored.

Clarissa

The story of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is transposed to contemporary Nigeria in this painterly and sophisticated movie, shot on film and starring a supremely great Sophie Okonedo.

Club Kid

Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut is a stupidly funny, surprisingly touching knockout about a gay guy discovering he’s accidentally fathered a child. One of the best of the year. Read my full review here.

Coward

Close director Lukas Dhont grows up, and takes us into the Belgian trenches of WWI for a gay love story. Follows a farmer and a seamster as they bond while staging campy performances to entertain the soldiers. A gorgeous gutpunch.

Fatherland

Frosty, heady, and good looking, the Oscar-winning director of Cold War’s galaxy-brained take on a daddy issues movie. Earns more points for being under 90 minutes.

Fjord

Romania’s king of seriously depressing cinema Cristian Mungiu makes a movie about an evangelical Christian couple (an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) moving to Norway and being accused of mistreating their kids. Dense and gripping.

Gentle Monster

Lea Seydoux and the director of Corsage team up for a heavy, if fascinating story of a woman contemplating her marriage—and everything she knows about her husband—after he’s arrested for a heinous crime.

Her Private Hell

After a 10 year break from feature films, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn returns with a sci-fi slasher. Strange and impossible to decipher. Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, love you forever.

Hope

The true litmus test of this year’s festival. A banger of a Korean monster movie featuring Taylor Russell as a PS2 alien. Some booed, others (me) wouldn’t be mad if it won the Palme. Read my full review here.

I’ll Be Gone in June

A beguiling debut feature (produced by Wim Wenders) about a German student arriving in Texas just before 9/11 happens, and spending a year in a world shaped by othering, American jingoism, and her own listless coming of age.

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

A coming-of-age film for those who’ve reached their 30s and realize adulthood is still out of reach. About a group of friends in Birmingham, England navigating life’s disappointments. Brutal, but breathtaking.

La Bola Negra

The Spanish historical queer odyssey that swept everyone up here, about the interlinked lives of three gay men across a century. A beautiful behemoth. Read my full review here.

La Gradiva

An understated French debut following a group of teenagers on a school trip to Naples and Pompeii. Free of cliche, impressively formed. All newcomer actors. It won the top prize at Critics’ Week.

Low Expectations

Girl in Red makes a pivot from music to film for this tale of a successful artist dealing with burnout. Modest and tender, shot on stunning 16mm. One for the Norwegian movie heads. You can read my interview with Girl in Red here.

Minotaur

The most Cannes movie that ever Cannes-d, but maybe also a masterpiece. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s grand indictment of his homeland, about a woman cheating on her husband and how he chooses to deal with it. A tome of male aggression.

Paper Tiger

An old school New Jersey crime thriller starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller. Familiar and smells a little too much like an Oscar movie for me, but there are two god-tier scenes that make it worth seeing.

Tangles

A sweet, sad, and lovely queer animation about an illustrator at a niche press in late ’90s San Francisco experiencing her first real love, all while caring for her mother with dementia. Sobbed so hard the tears reached my bellybutton.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

As Jane Schoenbrun does best—a queer horror movie that answers the existential questions of our existence, and being understood for the first time. Gillian Anderson as a Tennessee Williams southern belle? Sublime! Read my full review here.

The Devils

A sexy, violent, blasphemous horror film so controversial when it was first released that the original version was never screened. Now it’s coming to cinemas in October, restored in 4K. Gloriously offensive—a masterpiece.

The Man I Love

Ira Sachs (Passages, Peter Hujar’s Day) makes a short but heartswelling film about a gay New York theater artist during the AIDS crisis, and the beautiful men that fall at his feet. A weepy one.

After years of slumming it on budget airline flights, stuffing clothes into suitcases that never shut and praying they meet the weight restriction, I had a journey to Cannes so bougie and beautiful that I’ll remember it until I’m 83.

The Venice-Simplon-Orient Express, a brand synonymous with luxury, invited me aboard the 2:30pm service from Paris to Cannes, staying in the Budapest Grand Suite. Beforehand, a neatly presented document laid out the rules: collared shirts only, no trainers or denim. I’m low-key one of those 31-year-old guys who can’t stop dressing like a toddler, so this struck fear in me at first. When I put on a tuxedo I feel like one of the penguins from Mary Poppins. But I brought two suits on board and, because the setting demanded it, I felt like a little star wearing them.

My friend Max and I boarded and walked straight into our grand suite, replete with petit fours, champagne, and caviar. It feels like a studio apartment from the early 20th century, Japanese varnished wood on the walls, a double bed, sofa and seating area for breakfast. There was an en-suite bathroom with a tiled floor, replete with cosmetics and creams and gels, half of which I took home with me. The train departs from Paris, chugs through the suburbs, then bursts into nature as you slip through France’s gorgeous green midriff. For most of the journey, I sat horizontal on the bed, looking out the window as the world whizzed by, repeatedly saying variations of: “We’re on a fucking train.” It felt simultaneously like going back in time but also sort of discombobulatingly futuristic: How had they mastered comfort and luxury aboard a carriage that was hurtling through France? Either way I loved it.

We opted for a late dinner, eating variations of lobster and artichoke, filet du boeuf and ratatouille, then a tiramisu in the shape of a train. I wore my Calvin Klein 205W39NYC tux (bring back Raf!). After dinner, drinks in the cocktail bar, as a pianist and a singer serenaded those on board.

As night fell, a storm hit, and we had the gorgeous kinetic equivalent of being inside a cosy house as rain lashed against the windows. We rode it out, swathed in luxury bedding, and woke up to clear skies. Outside, the waters of the Côte d’Azur glistened as we pulled into Cannes. I left wanting to take this train everywhere.

It started in middle school with my friend *REDACTED*. We were the dorkiest kids in school. I didn’t own a single pair of pants with buttons, and he only owned shoes that attracted disgust and scorn (Vibrams, velcro, discomfiting boy toe-cleavage). From high on my horse I thought, Well I may be lame and unchic and bad at math and also semi-illiterate, but at least my feet are contained safely within their unfortunately-patterned Hot Topic socks. I possessed a general apathy towards my feet that extended to their casings. For years I regarded this as fine: There is no normal way to feel about your feet.

Flash forward into the future. It’s 2020. My style is somewhere between the Frans (Fine and Lebowitz) while my personality remains with the Elaines (May and Benes). I buy clothes left and right, but my shoepathy remains. Sure, I have some cute pairs that I wear, but shoes just don’t call to me. They are either comfortable or uncomfortable, practical or impractical.

The summer of 2023 arrives. I am about to go on a birthday trip with my gorpcore-lite boyfriend. For a present he asks for Vibrams. The twist? He wants us to match. (Everybody wants a relationship with no-swag gap until your diva boyfriend starts giving shoe opinions.) Reluctantly I shell out $200 dollars for the monstrosities. Second twist (you didn’t know M. Night Shyamalan was ghost-writing this newsletter?): I love them! My feelings about my feet change forever! I finally am able to see them as a true extension of my body, in part because I can literally feel them, and so I am able to style them. Suddenly I became a “shoe girl.” At the point of writing I have so many shoes I am LARPing as the little old lady who lived in a shoe.

Today, I am ready to break ground on what will be my fourth Vibe summer, yet the issue of what shoe to wear in the heat comes for us all. I forced the entire i-D office (at threat of me stomping on their toes) to tell me what they’re wearing this summer:

Thom Bettridge (Editor-in-Chief):

“With all the buzz around Chanel’s heel-only sandal, I’ve been inspired to revisit a shoe I bought in Kyoto two years ago (I’m gatekeeping the store, sorry). It’s designed to cover only right past the ball of your foot, leaving the heel hovering just above God’s green earth. So yes, this thing that looks like a child’s sandal is actually a US13.”

Steff Yotka (Global Editorial Director):

“It’s my winter shoe—Prada monolith lace-ups—imagined as my summer shoe—Prada monolith sandals. I am an all-year, all-terrain fussbett adherent.”

Alex Kessler (Deputy Editor):

“Claiming the no cap non sandal sandal à la Chanel.”

Marley Wendt (Associate Editor):

“I dream of drinking a crisp sprite on the beach in these coral Valentino stud flip flops.”

Douglas Greenwood (Entertainment Editor):

“I got this little berries and cream moment in a vintage shop called Reign on Berwick Street in London to wear to my birthday party. I never did, and feared them for the first month they sat in my shoe rack. The heel’s just a little ostentatious but I’m loving the clip-clop sound they make.”

Flora Medina (Associate Editor):

“For personal reasons, I cannot wear an open toed shoe away from the beach. I dream of these flip-flop adjacent tabi slippers constantly.”

• I get a lot of messages from wonderful young writers who want to have a coffee, and I feel terrible because it would be my full year’s caffeine limit if I agreed to every single one. Instead I have decided to host “Office Hours” where I will sit from 11 a.m.-3p.m. at Bar Oliver on June 6th absolutely pounding espresso and whoever wants to join me can come by and chat. This could go south, or it could turn into a remake of My Dinner with Andre.

• This photo story on the Dallas Cowboy auditions by Taryn Segal is one of my favorite things we’ve run recently.

• Very into this piece on automatized writing. I’ve always felt that studying Oulipo in college made me a better poster.

• Finally…submissions are open for our literary contest!!!

Liana Satenstein is New York City’s preeminent fashion archivist and seer, able to predict the return of the YSL Mombasa bag, dissect the trend towards “nipple heels,” and summon out magical nuggets from the past that will be relevant in the future. This spring, we let her loose in i-D’s archive to see what she could learn combing through 45 years of issues.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been glued to my computer screen, jumping in and out of the digitized i-D Magazine archive and its winking covers. I’ve been combing through every issue from the seventh, 1982 pop art-inflected, scrawl-dribbled fanzine founded by Terry Jones to a Paolo Roversi black-and-white lensed cover of Naomi Campbell from 2019. The plan, I’m told, is to release the archive to you all later this year.

Some of us were there at the beginning—or the middle. There are many issues of i-D from my youth that I remember marinating in the international magazine section in Barnes & Noble. A snarling Lindsay Lohan from spring 2006, busting out of a lamé, ruffle-trimmed dress. Rihanna, glowing, from pre-spring 2009. Mariah Carey beaming in a bikini from June 2008. A little tagline floats next to Mimi’s head, “Put yr stunna shades on for Ice Queen, NADJA Swarovski!”

When I’m researching, say, an It bag, I need to submerge myself in every pocket, fondle the zipper, and smell the innards. I enter this realm, not by touching the physical bag, but by drowning myself in archives. I need to know everything about it, even if it involves contacting the PR associate who was promoting the carryall at the time. Even a mere It bag, like the Celine Boogie, the Fendi Oyster, or the Balenciaga City, is never just an It bag. To really understand the essence of an It bag (and there is one), one needs to see how many editorials it was featured in, who photographed the spread, and who the magazine’s accessories director was. That little red-hot It bag reflects what was happening in fashion–and what was happening in the world. While we can’t bottle a moment, an archive is a way for us to at least understand the moment.

Going through a digital archive is the next best thing to luxuriating at a desk at Library180, flipping through each ancient magazine by hand. Or maybe the sensation of clicking through the endless archive is akin to cracking open a fresh one at Climax Books. But these spots are in New York City, which is far for many. What is a fashion-curious kid supposed to do stuck in a small town, hovering on the border of New Hampshire? Alone in Kalamazoo, Michigan? Access is often cut short.

And even if you can get to the Library180s or the Climax Books of New York, let’s not forget that old issues of magazines can be expensive! I think a lot about myself in high school in nowheresville, Massachusetts, hypnotized by editorials shot in Moscow or Paris or Shanghai. It was so hard to get my hands on physical magazines: I saved up my cash bussing tables and begged my boyfriend to haul me into Boston so I could go to a magazine stand or a used bookstore. And when I didn’t have a physical copy on hand, I spent hours on The Fashion Spot or LiveJournal looking at shoots.

But even those prized photographs fade from the internet, whimpering away with each deactivated image-hosting site, morphing pages into a graveyard of broken links. If you are lucky enough to find a rare magazine tear online, the image is often rogue, an island separated from the rest of the pages and floating alone in the ethers of Tumblr, Pinterest, or Instagram. The image exists alone with no information about where it originated. In this world where photographs sans provenance are circulated on social media, we often don’t know the makeup artist, the hairstylist, or the fashion assistant. Without appropriate credits, these images lose a layer of meaning.

Today, information has become currency. Even the tiniest facts can give birth to full articles. The rarer the spread and the rarer the quote, the more conversations get started. How many times has someone spun a whole piece out of cobbled-together interviews and tidbits from the internet? It’s a beautiful thing.

i-D has always been a magazine for the hungry youth. It’s for the people whose beds are surrounded by cairns of magazines ready to topple. For those who organize them by date, type, and country. Who tab the pages with sticky notes in different colors! For those who make friends from across the country, thanks to a random fashion forum, and can talk about one Kate Moss photograph that struck them to their core and changed their lives. As for people who have worked in magazines, are jaded, and have seen it all, why not bring those raw feelings to life again with a bountiful archive? Why not democratize the thrill of discovery for all? Information is an elixir to boredom and stagnation, and it should be shared, and it certainly should be free.

Here are some things that I liked from the archive!

1. Rachel Weisz on the cover of i-D in September 1987, wearing bunny ears

The image of a plump-faced, sassy, winking young Rachel Weisz as a bunny on the magazine cover is forever Tumblr-versed. At the time, Weisz was only 17 years old, having completed her “A Levels in Art History, French, and English”, intending to study Drama at the Lee Strasberg School of Method Acting. She’s fun. “Men Only magazines make me want to have a wash but bunnying for i-D could have its rewards,” she tells i-D in a minuscule snippet on the credits page.

Also, fun fact: The photographer of the shoot Kevin Davies, tells i-D that the piggy smiley face on her left bicep was drawn on after the shoot by then editor-in-chief and i-D founder Terry Jones. (I said: “Oh, he drew it on in post,” and Davies responded with: “If you can call it that…”) Also, I love this part: The actress’s name is spelled incorrectly as Rachel Wise…in print! Life was so free.

2. The advertisements

I am a Vogue archive diehard, and I could happily illustrate campaigns in the magazine from 1997-2001 as if I were an orchestra conductor. But as for the advertisements for i-D magazine? That’s a whole different ballgame. Youthful. Experimental. This is where creative directors let their freak flag fly. Every campaign is like a shivering atom of energy waiting to pop out of the page. In a September 1992 issue, there is an incredible Levi’s campaign where it’s just hazy images of where people plop their jean-clad asses: chairs, benches, and motorcycles. In May 1999, the Calvin Klein ads are sexier, raunchier: Christy Turlington is all curves and aphrodite in a white cotton stretch bra and matching panties, smoldering in all of her smoky eye glory. There’s a Rorschach test image of a woman from Nike with her limbs and head replaced with a splattering of ribbon strokes, kicking in the brand’s Fit support tank and gym capri from June 2002. Oh, and Stüssy fans: You’re in luck. The archive is teeming with ads.

3. People were having fun… even the accountant!

For issue no. In February 2007, the magazine posed the question “If I ruled the world…” to the editorial team, including the advertising assistant and account manager. Fashion director Edward Enninful wrote: “I would make sure everyone had enough to eat.” Fashion editor Francesca Burns wished “high heels would be mandatory,” while the accountant Colette Kinsella penned “a normal working life would be three days a week, if you work part-time you work one day.”

4. All those Kate Moss images came from somewhere!

When I talk about images marooned on social sites, many of these are Moss’s i-D images. The model went on to appear on the cover of the magazine 20 times. This was her first one at the ripe age of 18 in December 1993, where she posed in a baggy sweater in a spread photographed by the woman who discovered her, Corinne Day. One image I had seen vomited again and again on the internet is from the cover with Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss strolling out of (or into) the nightlife abyss from August 1994. Inside, to introduce a story on New York, is a photo I have seen the most of. It shows the supermodel duo perched on a stoop: Moss in a slinky pink slip and Campbell in a tunic dress. This was created by the team of greats: photographed by Steven Klein and makeup by Pat McGrath!

5. The i-D merch was slammin’

There was once a time when the world was teaming with i-D merch. Collaborations from Simon Foxton, a young Judy Blame, and a freaky deaky Shawn Stussy. If anyone can find i-D merch, please tell me. No offense to the team (although they admitted it themselves), but i-D is the most difficult, worst word to search for on resale sites.

6. People

i-D did an incredible job of chronicling everyday people. There is a curiosity here that captures subjects in their most honestly dressed moments—similar to how Biz Sherbert chronicles youth in American Style. From the November 1997 issue says it best about the magazine’s role in interviewing and photographing people in their clothes: “The intention was to find fashion at its source, giving credit to new ideas born on the streets.”

One of my favorite spreads is from the January 1991 issue titled “Teenage Precinct Shoppers.” (The credits read as “With Help from Melanie Ward.”) The opening paragraph talks about the “small percentage” of elites who shop at Alaïa and Bodymap, but that a majority of the country heads to Marks & Spencer. The page shows a handful of kids in their favorite garms. Diverse. Vibrant. It’s a historical time capsule with subjects in their windbreakers, a 10-year-old boy named Rashi in a dastar en route to get his “hoover repaired”, a smiling lad in a Burger King crown, and a 17-year-old unemployed girl from Ilford in a bomber jacket and hoops.

7. Creative Freedom!

We see that unhinged zine mentality of i-D all the way through the magazine. The graffiti. The design. The advertisements. The photography is sometimes raucously bizarre. Photographer Alexei Hay had a wild (quite literally) editorial titled “The Raptor Project” in the February 2001 issue that featured a model collaged with photographs of wild birds and owl eyes. One image shows a hawk tearing the head off of a mouse.

Here is a short interview with Hay about the shoot.

LS: How did the shoot come about?

All those pictures were done with bags of clothes that were lent to me without stylist, which was a crazy thing. I know we got those clothes from Chanel, and the stylist was supposed to do that job, but he didn’t know how to call the showroom. He hadn’t done the job yet. So I think I called or he called or maybe he got them. I don’t know, but I had the bag of clothes in a sports sack bag.

LS: Why did you include the animal photography in the raptor shot?

Hay: It was a weird science photography challenge. You could shoot a supermodel and animals.

i-D was a place where you could draw from anything: you could do science photography, you could mix it with fashion, you could mix it with intimate sort of friend pictures, and they would even let me incorporate a picture that I took in college because it just went with the themes. And that was unheard of in an editorial thing, in an editorial arena. And remember i-D was still, it was just at the point where it was becoming very commercial too. I think I turned down one story because they wouldn’t let me smoke.

The panoramic cityscape around us is encased in a blur of smog, giving it the soft edges of an Impressionist painting. The waitress arrives, offering sauvignon blanc. We ask for three Diet Cokes with ice. “We don’t have those up here, but you can get them downstairs at the bar.” Challenge accepted. I saunter down to the abandoned cocktail area and order a half dozen Diet Cokes from the bar. I endeavor to carry them, but am told it would be a mark against the catering staff if I were seen schlepping fridge cigarettes up the stairs. One waiter then follows me with a tray of Diet Cokes, while another trails behind with a tray of rocks glasses. Upstairs, I am greeted like Napoleon returning to Paris. Pictures are snapped, others cheer. Even those not lucky enough to sip one salute the liberation of the Diet Cokes.

No one ever tells you this, but as a magazine editor one of the most important career decisions you make is deciding on your Press Trip Identity. How else can you withstand the social gauntlet of a luxurious school trip environment, crammed into Sprinter vans with friends, opps, and publicists alike? The i-D team has a myriad of PTIs: Alex Kessler transforms into a hedonist fit for the court of Henry VIII, Steff Yotka is the honor roll student who arrives everywhere on time and always reads the show notes, and Robby Kelly goes full Anthony Bourdain mode, brewski in hand, quietly becoming best friends with the most famous dude at the function. Another common type of PTI is to put on horse blinders and assume a distant disposition designed to give off an “I’m just here to write my review” energy. Some put on their bossy pants and performatively work on their phone in lieu of interacting. Many like to peacock, trotting to the breakfast buffet in their archive Whatever by Whoever from That Season. But the lion share of editors on a press trip take on a very similar PTI, which is basically a less funny version of Larry David, kvetching endlessly about every car ride, every group activity, and every function without sufficient dining options. Word to aspiring editors: Don’t be this person. For my part, I’ve cultivated a PTI that I guess we can call Whimsical Aloofness. I’m most likely going to miss most of the activities. I might even wear AirPods while everyone is chatting in the car. I have no idea who the famous people at the show are. But every once in a while, I’ll part the Red Sea with a tray of Diet Coke. This allows me to largely wander around and live in my own head, while still bridging the charm deficit that comes with being antisocial.

As the pavlovas arrive at the end of lunch, I begin daydreaming about the opening scene of Terminator, which was filmed at the Griffith Observatory: a young Schwarzenegger spawns out of thin air, completely naked, muscles lubed. He approaches a group of punk rockers and proceeds to kill them for their clothing. And just like that, one of the most iconic Los Angeles looks was born.

We finish up and some of us are whisked down the Hollywood Hills to LACMA, the Peter Zumthor-designed museum in which Jonathan Anderson will provide us with an intimate preview of his new collection. The designer arrives a bit frazzled—that’s usually his vibe—in his signature normcore jeans and hiking boots, sporting a rainbow of microchipped wristbands. He barely hesitates before launching into a monologue that careens across Christian Dior’s biography, Hollywood lore, handbags, and the memoir he recently read about a gas station gigolo. He is without a doubt one of the freest minds operating in culture today, one who can weave together a vast network of references from across mediums and eras, and create something intelligible, cutting, and, perhaps most importantly, expensive. Anderson is giddy about a Christian Dior jacket he found designed for Marlene Dietrich’s character in the Alfred Hitchcock film Stage Fright, which had long been buried inside the personal archive of Azzedine Alaïa. He is also tickled by a set of men’s shirts made in collaboration with Ed Ruscha, an artist who has long eluded both him and his boss, Dior CEO Delphine Arnaud. Anderson then describes how Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha serve as art historical bookends in defining the 20th-Century American landscape, to the knowing nods of us fashion folk.

Walking out of LACMA, I start thinking about MacGuffins. A MacGuffin is a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock to describe a plot device that drives a movie’s action forward but ultimately has no meaning. In Casablanca, the all-important “letters of transit” that you never actually see are the MacGuffin. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud is a MacGuffin. The briefcase that doesn’t get opened in Pulp Fiction is one as well. The magic of the MacGuffin is that it doesn’t matter to anybody that it’s never explained. Rather, it works on us through the images that wash over us, penetrating the ether like headlights through fog. One MacGuffin Anderson borrowed from Christian Dior was his gesture of putting a red dress down the runway toward the latter half of the show in order to “wake the audience up.” About four hours later, at the actual fashion show, I find myself woken up by this very dress, like a whiff of smelling salts. It forces me to ask myself: Was I even sleeping? And, if so, whose dream was I in?

The thing that designers and filmmakers have in common is their ability to create a planned reality that others can reside in. The ritual of the Cruise show, which is essentially a luxury group tour for editors, celebrities, and clients, is the most extreme expression of this ability. One does not go to a Cruise show by waltzing right through the door and right back out into the normal world. Rather, one stays at the Cruise Hotel, applies the complimentary Cruise SPF to their skin, eats at the Cruise Restaurants, takes a Cruise Selfie at the preordained locations, and thinks Cruise Thoughts on their way to more Cruise Activities. Here more than ever, the clothes are the MacGuffin. The plot is the lifestyle.

After the Cruise Show, we saw some Cruise Art at the Cruise Museum, piled into the Cruise Escalade to the Cruise Party at Chateau Marmont, where we had Cruise Conversations. Toward the end of the night, in a swirl of partygoers and vape smoke, I saw what seemed like a mirage: a man in an In-N-Out Burger uniform, paper hat and all, parting the crowd with a silver tray of hamburgers, much like the Diet Cokes of yore. He nodded at me knowingly, and I took a bite of my Cruise Burger.

A totally cliche (yet delicious) list of things to eat in Los Angeles:

• The soft-shell tacos at Leo’s.

• The hard-shell tacos at Tito’s.

• Sushi Park is fine, but I like Matsuhisa and deep cut Hide better.

• The Gochujang Smoked Tofu at Erewhon (they keep it in the yogurt aisle).

• Gjusta’s perfect boho version of schmear.

• Any Caesar or Asian Chicken Salad on any menu.

The competition focuses on four categories: fiction, non-fiction, experimental, and drama! All you need to do is to submit an original, unpublished work, up to 1500 words long. Maybe it’s a new idea, or a piece that has been sitting on your desktop for months, or maybe inspiration has struck… right now! One winner from each category will be selected by our judges and published in i-D’s Fall 2026 issue.

Short stories on any subject your imagination can dream up. Guest judged by Chris Kraus.

Personal essays, memoir, cultural observations—anything rooted in the real world. Guest judged by Cat Marnell.

Things aren’t so straight-laced anymore. Poetry, hybrid work, fragmented prose, things that don’t fit neatly into boxes. Guest judged by Julio Torres.

Screenplay excerpts, scenes, monologues, whatever you think brings the DRAMA! Guest judged by Jeremy O. Harris.

Entries are open to writers aged 18 and over, located in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EMEA region. Each winner will receive a $500 USD cash prize.

The submission window opens on 14 May 2026 and closes on 28 May 2026 at 23:59 GMT. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

All submissions go through this Google Form. Please read our Terms & Conditions here.

This feeling is not unique—in fact I imagine most people who know more than one artist always have some kind of reservation about their output. There’s surely someone who comes to mind for you too. I spoke to a bunch of people who describe being caught up in this dilemma—their names are changed below to protect their friendships—unsure about whether anything productive comes from being honest about it. When someone you like makes art you don’t, how do you navigate that?

Recently Jennifer realized that her friend is a “god awful” poet. “She’s really having a go at it,” she tells me. “She does poetry readings and has self-published an anthology collection. By all standard markers, she is a poet.” But the work isn’t hitting in a way she can fully stand behind. Jennifer’s been invited to many uncomfortable poetry nights.“ It was all too fussy and read like AI. I can’t think of any more excuses to miss her poetry nights and it’s getting awkward.”

How long can you keep up the act before you crash out and tell them how you really feel? I find that lacklustre artists happen to be the loudest, letting you know everything they’re up to, keen to show off their work. At art school, those friends are (for the duration of your course) inescapable. An art history student, Emma has been holed up with the worst of them for a while. She can sniff them a mile off and put a smile on for the sake of staying civil. They are perfectly nice people but, fuck me, she can’t stand what they make. She tells me there are three dominant types:

1. The so-parodied-it’s-serious white man doing Basquiat art

   “Ripping off one of the most famous artists is going to get you nowhere, unless your plan is to get clicks from rage-baiting.”

2. The nepo baby artist

   “Yawn. Sometimes talented, generally not. Mommy and daddy just happen to do late-summer weekends away with an art director. The only reason you’re getting noticed.”

3. The faux provocateur

   “The growing-up-in-Surrey-to-thinking-you’re-Marina Abramović pipeline is by far my favorite.”

She has been to parties, asked that harrowing question: What do you think? All along she’s managed to keep it cool. The nice thing about art school is that there’s an end in sight. That’s all good for Emma, but Jennifer is stuck in her bad poet situation. Has she managed to muster up the courage to lie? “I won’t betray my opinions and say ‘Oh wow that was amazing!’,” she admits. “I will try to say, ‘Oh wow, how exciting!’ instead.”

I’ve found myself doing versions of this out of politeness. If an actor friend is in a play or film I don’t like, but I genuinely think they’ve saved it, I’ll skirt around the quality of the text and hone in on their performance. I have vivid memories of running into a filmmaker whose film I had just seen and hated, and responding with: “You must be busy!”. Ben, a photographer, told me he’d recently been gifted a work by a friend of his that he hated. “I have to hang it up in my flat or they’ll notice!” he says.

I don’t think lying is good for anyone, even if it’s designed to protect the peace of a clearly passionate person. But “telling our loved one that their art isn’t to our taste would hurt and injure them,” says Harry Rawson, an Integrative Humanistic Counsellor I turned to to solve this problem. “The conundrum here is that the lie injures the relationship also. You could even argue that the sustained lie does more damage to the relationship than confessing.”

Rawson suggests that we could look at ourselves in this scenario. What does our hatred of our friend’s art, and our reticence to express it, say about us? Personally I think it’s a symptom of my unshakeable bitchiness that undergirds so much of what I do, but it’s probably a little bit of insecurity too. Rawson also cites Freud, specifically the quote: “Unexpressed emotions never die.” Rawson explains, “It could be argued that the feelings we may have about our loved one’s art, or our loved ones in general, have to come out.”

He added, “if we shifted our lens slightly, we could learn to celebrate the art, not in and of itself, but something deeply personal and a reflection of our loved one? We might say, ‘This painting isn’t to my taste, but I’m so proud of you for painting it’ or ‘I wouldn’t personally listen to it, but I’ve seen how hard you’ve worked on it and you should be really proud of yourself.’”

I started to think about it: What if I was that girl to some other person? The amateur DJ? The Bitcoin entrepreneur who developed a Diet Jackson Pollock artistic aesthetic? Would I want to know if those I loved were cringing a little at my new creative pursuit? Maybe they are! I never know what’s happening in the group chat—someone screenshotting my sentences and posting them with eyeroll emojis attached. Then I started to think: Maybe it’s healthy to keep some things to yourself. There’s something really lovely in that ignorance of not knowing.

Despite the annoyance it causes her, Jennifer is with me: She knows that her poet bestie won’t learn her opinion of her work. “At the end of the day that is my pal,” she says. “It’s not worth the hurt feelings.” But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of Jennifer’s mind that this secret beef might one day come in handy. “Some things are better left unsaid,” she says, “but if we have some kind of evil falling out—then I would reconsider.”

It’s quite nice when you see a show and you don’t have to lie about the thing to the person involved afterwards. Such is the case with Calam Lynch, who’s currently playing The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in the cool and deeply homoerotic Please Please Me at London’s Kiln Theatre. I saw it and told him it, and he, were both great—and that wasn’t a lie! We last spoke to him for his performance in What It Feels Like for a Girl, which is nominated a bunch at the TV BAFTAs tomorrow.

I asked him: What makes you think of 2007?

He said: “2007 reminds me of Putney Leisure Centre. Sure, on the one hand, it was just a leisure centre… it had a pool (Olympic size I think?) and a shit gym. But in 2007, Putney Leisure Centre was where I had my first kiss, soundtracked by none other than Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr the Mmrs”. It’s therefore a site of some spiritual significance.”

• Someone asked me what I was listening to the other day and I said old showtunes and Adéla.

• Which is to say, after our big Rachel Zegler digital cover story last year, her award-winning performance in Evita is coming to New York! One for people who like their plays like pop shows.

• The Cannes Film Festival kicks off next week. The next one of these will be dedicated to the good stuff I’ve seen.

• The muscle in the back of my armpit keeps twitching. I think it’s connected to me being on my phone too much.

• Blue Film is in US theaters this weekend. It’s so fucked up it would make Gasper Noé flinch. Read my review here, and my chat with its lead star Kieron Moore (<3) here.

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