With unprecedented introspection threatening to turn more than the clothes inside out, New York Fashion Week heralded the start of a new season. Fewer eyeballs would turn towards fewer designers and fewer bodies draped and distended in space, with much of the week composed virtually as fashion strains to fit inside the new normal.
At the end of February designers, models, celebrities and assorted hangers-on hotfooted from Milan to Paris just as Lombardy found itself in the first throes of coronavirus. In Milan, Giorgio Armani brought down the curtain in front of an empty theatre, but Paris remained du monde even as face masks were increasingly de rigueur. What followed was a fallow period, as global lockdowns gave fashion time to reflect on some longstanding issues: sustainability, excess travel, and industry churn as the demands of runway shows and department stores throw seasons out of whack, leaving an unseemly trail of fraying and frazzled designers.
Alessandro Michele announced that Gucci would reduce its number of annual shows from five to two, joined by brands like Saint Laurent equally keen to reset the clock and foster a little breathing space amid the hectic fashion calendar. The summer months collided menswear with haute couture or took conspicuous steps towards gender-neutral, as weeks in London and Paris went digital with virtual shows, podcasts, interviews, and panel discussions, cinematic shorts, and celebrity collaborations.
Not quite business as usual then heading into New York, for the first major showcase of spring/summer collections. With most designers opting for digital presentations, there were no celebrities adorning front rows and no street style fashionistas. Even the major names in American fashion were missing out, from Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, and Michael Kors to Oscar de la Renta, Tory Burch, and Proenza Schouler, while the CFDA set up the Runway360 platform to capture the virtual stragglers. But a few hardy souls still strove valiantly to present their wares in person, taking to the Spring Studios rooftop in TriBeCa.
It was there that Jason Wu, a favourite designer of Michelle Obama, opened New York Fashion Week, with caftans, tailored shorts, and loose-fitting slacks, light jazz and a tropical setting. Harlem’s Fashion Row kicked off the online presentations with a celebratory event upon the theme ‘Black Is the New Black’, featuring celebrity stylists and haberdashers like Jason Rembert and Dapper Dan, with designs from Kimberly Goldson, Richfresh, and Kristian Lorén.
Amid rapid tests and masks, New York City-based Monse ascended the Spring Studios rooftop for a cocktail party replete with leftover fall coats and tantalising resort wear. Bronx and Banco, Rebecca Minkoff, and LaQuan Smith also scaled the perilous heights of in-person presentation for shows featuring boho-chic, head wraps, and cut-out dresses. Striped essentials brand La Ligne made their fashion week debut by way of a poetry reading with the Lower Eastside Girls Club at La Plaza Cultural. And while Tom Ford showed a lookbook full of florals and animal print, Christian Siriano brought frivolity to his Connecticut lawn, with a show that climaxed with a pool dive from a pregnant Coco Rocha.
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If men are from Mars, there may be more life on Venus, was the thought perambulating scientific minds this week, upon the discovery of a strange gas in the atmosphere of our sister planet. A group of scientists led by Professor Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, using radio telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, have published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy detailing their observations of phosphine in the Venusian clouds.
Made up of one phosphorous atom and three hydrogen atoms, the gas is a component of the Earth’s atmosphere at very low concentrations, and can be found in the gut bacteria of penguins or in oxygen-deprived wetlands and swamps. Traces exist in the atmospheres of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, formed in their hot interiors before breaking down in their upper atmospheres. On terrestrial Venus however, which boasts the hottest surface temperature of all the planets in our Solar System but lacks the same fiery interior, the scientists detected phosphine at a concentration which cannot be explained by known chemical processes, raising the possibility of some form of life.
At a distance of 50 kilometres from the planet’s surface, temperatures have cooled considerably. But the existence of life even this far up is complicated by the thick clouds of sulphuric acid which shroud Venus, in an arid climate with nowhere to land. In another paper published last month in the journal Astrobiology, the scientists posited microbes sealed inside droplets of sulphuric acid and water, but the description remains tenuous. Discussing the phosphine in the clouds of Venus, they write, ‘Even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry’.
Such observations are likely to prompt further study. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Venera programme produced a series of firsts, including the first successful landing of a spacecraft on another planet, and the first images from the planet’s surface. The Mariner programme by NASA conducted a series of flybys of Venus, while the Pioneer and Magellan spacecrafts entered orbit for a closer look.
The Venus Express, the first foray from the European Space Agency, sent back data between 2006 and 2014, while the Akatsuki probe from Japan continues to study the planet’s atmosphere. The European EnVision, Russian Venera-D, and Indian Shukrayaan-1 orbital and landing missions remain in the early planning stages, while two Venus missions could receive NASA funding in the next round of the Discovery programme.
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On Tuesday the fifth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook report noted that the world has missed all of its biodiversity targets. Published by the Convention on Biological Diversity as part of the United Nations, the report looked back over the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and a Decade on Biodiversity inaugurated in Nagoya in 2010.
In Nagoya, 18,000 participants representing 193 national parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed strategic goals and targets meant to address the causes and impacts of biodiversity loss. The twenty targets, to be implemented over a ten-year period, included raised funding and awareness alongside specific goals covering pollution, sustainable fishing, and the conservation of natural habitats.
This year’s Global Biodiversity Outlook report therefore served as a final reckoning for the Aichi targets, concluding that none have been fully met while only six have been partially achieved. Stressing the importance of biodiversity for long-term food security and the prevention of future pandemics, the report noted some successes, including falling rates of deforestation, fewer invasive species in island habitats, and improved conservation of inland water and coastal and marine areas.
Yet some of these positive measures continue to be undermined as countries spend heavily to subsidise overfishing and the extraction of fossil fuels. Overconsumption, changing land-use patterns, and climate change threaten to hasten biodiversity losses in the years to come. The Global Biodiversity Outlook report arrives one week after the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London released the biennial Living Planet Report, warning of an unprecedented decline in global biodiversity.
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Within the space of one week last February, before the coronavirus pandemic threw preparations askew and led to the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympics, the springy Swedish starlet Armand Duplantis set two new pole vault world records. At the indoor meet in Torún, Duplantis broke the six-year record held by Renaud Lavillenie, before adding another centimetre a few days later as he topped a height of 6.18 metres in Glasgow.
Duplantis then at the age of just 20 years old looked all set to echo the achievements of Sergey Bubka, who broke thirty-five pole vault world records over the course of his career, each time raising the bar by the odd centimetre. Since 2000, the pole vault has been unique in the world of track and field for refusing to distinguish between indoor and outdoor records. Duplantis therefore boasted a world record with a dubious caveat, eager to prove himself in less stilted conditions.
That opportunity arrived on Thursday in Rome, as a curtailed Diamond League season reached a climax. After thirteen previous attempts this year from windswept Stockholm to the streets of Lausanne, finally Duplantis sailed over a height of 6.15 metres, setting a new outdoor benchmark in the event, besting the height of 6.14 metres set by Bubka back in 1994. Amid the celebrations, Duplantis said:
‘The 6.15 was really important to me, so I’m happy to get over that. There was kind of this confusion between the indoor and outdoor record – it’s kind of merged. I already had the world record but I wanted to clear everything up and be the best outdoor.’
On a fast track and balmy night in Rome, Jacob Kiplimo kicked past Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the home straight to win the men’s 3000 metres, as the two teenagers entered the record books with the eighth and ninth fastest times in history. Karsten Warholm ran 47.08, the third fastest time of his career, as the Norwegian superstar continues to push for a new world record in the men’s 400 metre hurdles.
Jemma Reekie impressed in the women’s 800 metres, and Yuliya Levchenko held off the challenge from her Ukrainian compatriot Yaroslava Mahuchikh to triumph in the women’s high jump. Meanwhile former champion Elaine Thompson-Herah fired a warning shot ahead of the Olympics next year, with a world-leading time of 10.85 in the women’s 100 metres.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court and feminist icon, who attained rock star status late in life for her withering dissents as leader of the liberal wing of the court, died on Friday at the age of 87. Her death from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer sets up a fierce battle over the future of the court as the United States races towards a presidential election.
Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents hailing from Kraków and Odessa, Joan Ruth Bader suffered the loss of an older sister in infancy and her mother, Celia, the day before her high school graduation, attending Cornell University where she graduated with a bachelor of arts in government. At Cornell she met Martin Ginsburg, who she married one month after graduation, demoted from her job at the Social Security office in Oklahoma when she became pregnant with the couple’s first child. Ginsburg subsequently enrolled at Harvard Law School, where she was one of only nine women in a class of hundreds, transferring to Columbia where she tied for first in class when she graduated in 1959 with a law degree.
At the discretion of her former professors, Ginsburg served a two year clerkship for Judge Edmund Palmieri of the Southern District of New York, before returning to Columbia. She learned Swedish and visited Lund University as co-author of a comparative study on civil procedure, and in 1963 took her first position as professor at Rutgers Law School. In 1970, Ginsburg co-headed the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the United States which focused exclusively on women’s rights, and in 1972 she became the first director of the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Under the auspices of the ACLU, Ginsburg argued a series of gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court, sometimes targeting male plaintiffs to highlight the diverse and encompassing inequalities which existed between men and women. She filed briefs in the landmark cases Reed v. Reed, which ruled that administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates based on sex; Frontiero v. Richardson, which ruled that the United States military cannot issue benefits based on sex; and Craig v. Boren, which challenged an Oklahoma statute setting a higher legal drinking age for men, for the first time making statutory classifications based on sex subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
At the same time Ginsburg took up a professorship at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman. In 1980 as the federal judiciary was expanded under President Carter, Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It was her reputation as a moderate consensus builder in the District of Columbia, working alongside colleagues like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, which made her a winning choice for the Supreme Court under President Clinton in 1993: in fact among the small number of dissenting voices were abortion activists, angered by a speech Ginsburg had made earlier that year which suggested a narrower scope in the decision Roe v. Wade might have spared twenty years of growing division. Expressing her support for abortion and equal rights while deferring on other constitutional matters, Ginsburg was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3, becoming the second female and first Jewish justice.
Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the landmark case United States v. Virginia in 1996, which struck down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute. The period 1994 to 2005 saw the same nine judges serve, the longest stretch in Supreme Court history, but by 2006 the court had shifted once more to the right. As the senior Democratic appointee, Ginsburg became known for her dissenting opinions.
Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 2007 ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pay discrimination claims must be made within 180 days of an employer’s discriminatory conduct, in this case from the date of the plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter’s first unequal paycheck. Objecting that the statutory 180-day period should only begin once a claimant becomes aware of the discrimination, Ginsberg called on Congress to clarify Title VII. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Play Act of 2009, which resets the statutory clock upon each new discriminatory paycheck, became the first bill signed into law by President Obama.
A further dissent came over Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which declared unconstitutional the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requiring states to receive federal approval before changing voting practises. Ginsburg responded, ‘Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet’. One of her favourite decisions remained M.L.B. v. S.L.J., which ruled that an inability to pay court fees should not limit the right of appeal in parental rights cases, while she lamented her decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York which denied tribal sovereignty to repurchased tribal lands, making partial amends earlier this year when she joined the majority for McGirt v. Oklahoma.
Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, but rebounded with the help of a personal trainer and never missed a day on the bench. She again underwent surgery, this time for pancreatic cancer, in 2009. By 2014 when she received a coronary stent to clear a blocked artery, some pundits were questioning whether she should make way for a Democratic replacement. By 2018 when she fell and fractured three ribs, hailed as a bastion of liberalism amid the rightward tilt of the Trump administration, support poured in for the popularly characterised Notorious R.B.G.
A CT scan of her ribs showed the early stages of lung cancer, and Ginsburg underwent surgery hours before casting a decisive vote blocking an executive ban on asylum. Pancreatic cancer returned in the summer of 2019 and again earlier this year. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was swiftly embroiled in matters of congressional ethics and talk of potential successors, as tributes were paid to an outstanding legacy on the grounds of the Supreme Court and across the political aisle.
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Replete with hazmat suits and disinfectant, featuring celebrity reunions, essential workers, and calls to get out the vote, the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards veered from the sublime to the ridiculous as they took place mostly virtually from Staples Center on Sunday night. Which is to say that the Canadian family comedy Schitt’s Creek seemed sublime then ridiculous as the assorted cast, socially distanced at an event space in Toronto, opened the show by swallowing up all the comedy awards.
Casting a covetous glance, Emmy and Schitt’s Creek only had eyes for each other as the small-town sitcom swept the comedy circuit. Showrunner Dan Levy became the first person to win in all four major disciplines, clasping the awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series alongside Andrew Cividino, while heading up the cast and crew as the show was named Outstanding Comedy Series for 2020.
Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Annie Murphy in the remaining acting categories completed the set. There was more diversity in the genres of drama and limited series, where Succession and Watchmen heralded a fine night for HBO, claiming the top prizes while picking up four awards apiece. Regina King (Watchmen) and Mark Ruffalo (I Know This Much Is True) took home the lead acting awards for their respective limited series, leaving Zendaya (Euphoria) and Jeremy Strong (Succession) as their dramatic counterparts.
Billy Crudup (The Morning Show), Julia Garner (Ozark), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen), and Uzo Aduba (Mrs. America) triumphed for their supporting roles. Andrij Parekh won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the ‘Hunting’ episode of Succession, while Maria Schrader won Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series for the German-American drama Unorthodox, the first Netflix series primarily in Yiddish.
Jimmy Kimmel returned to host the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, in front of a crowd of cardboard cutouts with Jason Bateman crashing the set. Jennifer Aniston was on hand to put out fires before racing home for a partial Friends reunion, Tracee Ellis Ross provided some Hollywood glamour, and Anthony Anderson bemoaned the fact that a big year for Black nominees coincided with a coronavirus-induced shutout. Mostly though the guests stayed home, giving us glimpses of family life and the quarantine habits of Zendaya, Mindy Kaling, and Bob Newhart.
