Le Monde d’Hermès 86 Magazine SS-2025 Lensed by Osma Harvilahti in Lisbon
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'Checking Out' at Ritz Hotel Paris by Tim Walker Prompts New Art of Living Hotel Stories
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In 2012, Grace Coddington styled Josephine Skriver, Kate Moss, Mirte Maas, Patricia van der Vliet and Sigrid Agren in Tim Walker’s phantasmagoria of feminine beauty and luxury hotel romanticism in ‘Checking Out’ for Vogue US. The hotel is the Ritz Paris and it prompted a move of the fashion story into AOC Living, with the intention of writing in-depth about the history of the famous hotel and its founders César and Marie-Louise Ritz.
Read MoreCelina Ralph for Sunday Times Style UK Suggests Regression on Larger Size Models
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Celina Ralph for Sunday Times Style UK Suggests Regression on Larger Size Models
Buzz-cut model Celina Ralph does business class, styled by Verity Parker in masculine suiting, crisp shirts and a tie for images by Ina Levy [IG].
It could be that fashion comes to rest around Celina Ralph’s body type as much more aspirational than in the past. And Ralph is in good company with shrinking-bodies models on Ozympic-style drugs. She cites her concerns generally on this topic:
“We have to be careful of tokenism,” she says. “Of course we celebrate when designers and brands celebrate women of different sizes, but there has to be longevity, and we definitely haven’t got there yet. What we need in this industry is variation — we need all different versions of beauty.”
Factually-speaking, about 50% of luxury sales in clothing are coming from 1% of the population. Very, very few of those women are not model size, and they’ve always been thin.
We have more than four-years of luxury brands featuring significant numbers of larger-size models on the runway with little or no financial payback. Celina Ralph may be the body type all brands can embrace in today’s business climate, also bodies like Ashley Graham’s, who is a tour de force far beyond her body size.
After all, many of us are trying to save democratic governments and core human rights in our politics. Our focus is just not on the psychological demands of these women.
Read MoreThe eBay and British Vogue Luxury Resale Synergy Taps a Rapidly-Expanding Market
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Model Yilan Hua is styled by Hanna Kelifa in ‘Sheer Pleasure’, another installment in British Vogue’s [IG] collaboration with eBay UK [IG]. Photographer Charlie Gates [IG] captures the second-life luxury looks that include 16 Arlington, Acne Studio, Bottega Veneta, Helmut Lang, Jacquemus, Maison Margiela, Massimo Dutti, Miu Miu, Nensi Dojaka, Simone Rocha, / Hair by Naoke Komiya; makeup by Claire Urquhart
Luxury Resale Expands
In media reports dated August 12, 2024, eBay revealed a significant increase in searches for statement accessories. Searches for "statement bags" climbed 40 percent, while luxury brand Loewe experienced a 35 percent surge in popularity.
Read MoreConspiculous Luxury Consumption in China Challenges Growing Income Inequality
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Top model He Cong graces the pages of Marie Claire China’s [IG] June 2024 issue. The Hunan-region beauty is styled by Austin Feng in red-inspired, fashion elegance lensed by Zhong Lin [IG].
China’s Monitoring of Flaunting Money on Social Media
This month [May 2024], China’s new ‘Clear and Bright’ campaign swung into action on social media. The campaign vows to crack down on influencers who create "ostentatious personas to cater to vulgar needs, and deliberately display extravagant lifestyles filled with money".
Jing Daily weighed in this morning, writing that across Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, Tencent, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu all reflect suspended accounts this week.
China Tackles Its Growing Income Gap Culture
The drive to reduce ostentatious displays of wealth [or internet cleanup, as Jing Daily calls it] “is part of a larger effort by Chinese authorities to curate and control social cultures to tackle China’s widening income disparity and wealth inequality.”
Read MoreThis Is Sotheby's? The Stories Kristina O'Neill Can Tell As Head of Sotheby's Media
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Kristina O’Neill, former EIC of WSJ Magazine is now installed at Sotheby’s as Head of Sotheby’s Media and editor-in-chief of a revamped Sotheby’s Magazine.
What an exciting creative road lies ahead of her. AOC raises this topic because O’Neill seems perfectly primed to tap into the creative and business evolution going on at the world’s largest auction house. Visually, it’s one that expands the customer base and also acquires “heart” along the way.
O’Neill can catch the modernized Sotheby’s football and run with it. Her decade of work at WSJ Magazine reveals her status as a change agent. Only someone like AOC who can easily call up a decade of her work for review is aware that O’Neill was featuring Black talent long before the summer of 2020.
British-Ghanaian photographer Campbell Addy comes to mind. Outside of a small feature in British Vogue in 2018, Addy shot for WSJ Magazine before any of the other major magazines.
Read MoreLVMH Reports Record 2023 Financial Results Adding $30 Billion to Market Value
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Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and Hennessy [LVMH] reported 2023 year-end sales of 86.15 billion euros [$93.46 billion], representing a 10% organic increase in fourth quarter and a 13% organic growth yearly increase against 2022.
Profit from recurring operations stood at €22.8 billion for 2023, up 8%. The current operating margin remained stable with respect to 2022. In addition, LVMH has advised the markets that it anticipates no further price increases across its business units in 2024.
Now that he is back to being the richest man in the world, thanks to a 12% rise in LVMH’s stock price on Friday, Arnault’s practice of engaging his children in collective conversations around every aspect of the entire LVMH business over Zoom lunches — early breakfast in New York — reminds us that the family is not a Rupert Murdoch-like clan of cannibals.
Read MoreAngelina Jolie Launches Atelier Jolie For Self-Expressive Humanists Clients and Global Creators
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