French luxury powerhouse Chanel shares its Cruise 2023 campaign starring rising French model Loli Bahia and top model Vittoria Ceretti. Bahia first walked the fall 2020 Louis Vuitton show when she was still in high school.

The campaign, shot by Mikael Jansson [IG] pays tribute to Monaco and Karl Lagerdeld’s ties to the principality. Designer Virginie Viard highlights Monte Carlo’s cosmopolitan elegance, and glamour in her designs.

Coming on May 5 through July 16, 2023 ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ will be on view — and the focus of — The Metropolitan Museum’s of Art’s Spring 2023 The Costume Institute Benefit [also known as The Met Gala®].

Monaco Today

It’s ben awhile since AOC checked up on Monaco. Impressions are strongly embedded in my brain, but I haven’t travelled to Monaco for years. The average Monegasque is 44.3 years old, and one in two women is over 50 years of age [2020 data]. Monaco food stores now dedicate one hour per day to serving only elderly shoppers. One quarter of the population is over 60 years old [2022 data].

On a fashion forward note, we don’t have a start date for Apple TV’s ‘The New Look,’ starring Emmy Award winner Ben Mendelsohn and Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche. The new drama series will depict the meteoric rise of fashion designer Christian Dior as he dethrones luxury fashion’s grande dame Coco Chanel. Presumably, Karl Lagerfeld would have plenty to say about Apple’s choice of the word ‘dethrone’.

Our collective Nazi past is front and center with popular culture today, and the Apple series should be an interesting one.

This week, Adidas did sever ties with Kanye West over his recent corrosive behavior and words, including — but not confined to his anti-Semitism. His declaration that George Floyd did not die at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin felt like being stabbed in my gut.

CNN reported yesterday that a top executive working for Kanye West filed complaints against West for his obsession with Hitler and near naming of his 2018 album release as ‘Hitler’. CNN reviewed all the legal documents and financial settlement with the former executive.

It seems that in settlement documents, Kanye West did reject the truth of the assertions in what was probably boilerplate language. This was the second serious claim that West — like Trump — has a preoccupation with Hitler and other authoritarians. West has expressed strong admiration for Vladimir Putin in the recent past.

Monaco During WWII

Monaco did not, in fact, remain neutral during WWII, but also found itself invaded first by the Italian army and later Hitler’s Nazi forces, after Mussolini’s collapse. Monaco was always emotionally and psychologically loyal to the French, but the realities of life created a new history.

In 2015 Monaco’s Prince Albert spoke at a ceremony to commemorate Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Monaco’s sovereign noted that French Jews fleeing the Nazis, “came specifically to take shelter with us, thinking they would find neutrality.”

Instead, Monaco “committed the irreparable in handing over to the neighbouring authorities women, men and a child who had taken refuge with us to escape the persecutions they had suffered in France”.

Current research on the Holocaust estimates the number of Jews sent to their deaths by Monaco to be significantly higher than previously acknowledged. Research of primary documents, family letters and interviews of the families of Holocaust survivors paints an even more dire history of the truth than the one acknowledged by Prince Albert in 2015.