In New York, fashion was swept off the streets of Manhattan to the Spring Studios rooftop in TriBeCa and far-flung Connecticut lawns, while in London designers like Molly Goddard, Roksanda Ilinčić, and Victoria Beckham dived indoors to art galleries and Gasholders penthouses for appointment shows and virtual presentations, as Burberry and Erdem took to the English countryside to escape the capital smog.
Milan Fashion Week then sought some semblance of normality, with more models on runways and matching face masks largely an audience participation event. Street style, a pillar of fashion week just as much as celebrity spotting and the clothes themselves, even made a full-figured comeback.
Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana kicked off the action in front of small socially distanced crowds. Silvia Fendi, in her last show as the brand’s sole designer before Kim Jones takes charge of womenswear, invited guests via monogrammed pasta and her grandmother’s lemon pesto recipe, before unveiling a show rich in scenery, featuring picnic hampers and paper-thin linens printed with blue skies and billowing trees. Dolce & Gabbana layered georgette and chiffon to style out a ‘patchwork of Sicily’.
Back in February, Lombardy was emerging as the epicentre of the growing coronavirus pandemic, as Giorgio Armani pulled the curtain in front of an empty theatre and the fashion world hightailed it from Milan to Paris. In one of fashion’s last flings before the reality of lockdowns and loungewear, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons sat in plush green armchairs in the Fondazione Prada to announce an unprecedented collaboration.
The fruits of an inevitably compromised first effort were on display in Milan. Clutch coats, full skirts, and satin shift dresses emblazoned with evocative prints adorned a cast of first-time catwalk models, in a show screened virtually via Prada.com. Prada and Simons lingered afterwards to elaborate on their ‘conversation in progress’ by way of a crowd-sourced interview.
Hugo Boss decamped for Milan with languorous tailoring in shades of green and pastel blue, Versace took a deep dive underwater with crumbling columns and employees in the front row, and Tomo Koizumi designed a capsule collection for Emilio Pucci, whose coral ruffle dresses were available by appointment only.
With Moschino populated by marionettes while Giorgio Armani and Maison Margiela opted for digital presentations, it was left to Valentino to close the show. Pierpaolo Piccioli presented his collection in the old industrial space of Fonderie Macchi, where lacework, ruffled blouses, and chiffon dresses butted up against studded bags, short shorts, and tunics to give the brand’s fabled luxury a contemporary utilitarian sheen.
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Fresh-faced and bleary-eyed following its recent outing in Venice, Nomadland doubled up to take the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Claiming the People’s Choice Award in a year which mostly made do with online streaming, Chloé Zhao and Frances McDormand’s itinerant journey through the American Midwest is leading the running in early Oscars contention.
One Night in Miami, the directorial debut of Regina King, finished runner-up in Toronto. A fictionalised account of a real-life meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, soul singer Sam Cooke, and star running back Jim Brown on the night of Clay’s world title victory over Sonny Liston, the film is adapted from the stage play by Kemp Powers, and made King the first female African-American director in the history of the Venice Film Festival.
Inconvenient Indian, a history of the indigenous peoples of Canada by Michelle Latimer, won the documentary award, while the Georgian-French drama Beginning by Déa Kulumbegashvili won a single FIPRESCI Prize, voted on by international critics.
That marked the start of a big week for Kulumbegashvili, as Beginning also triumphed at the 68th San Sebastián Film Festival, which concluded on Saturday. The psychological portrait of extremism within a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses picked up Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actress as well as the Golden Shell for Best Film. Meanwhile critics kept their antennas tuned to the Big Apple, where the ongoing New York Film Festival saw the premiere of Mangrove, the second picture in the Small Axe series by acclaimed director Steve McQueen.
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At the beginning of the week, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder reported that the Arctic sea ice has shrank to the second-lowest level on record. Satellites recorded a sea ice covering of 3.74 million square kilometres on 15 September, which is only the second time in the past forty years that the ice covering has dropped below 4 million square kilometres.
The record low within the past forty years of record keeping came in 2012, when a late-season cyclonic storm broke up an already depleted layer of ice, leaving only 3.41 million square kilometres. This year’s decline hastened between late August and early September, owing to pulses of warm air from Siberia, which has been in the throes of an unprecedented heatwave.
In July the small town of Verkhoyansk in the Sakha Republic reached a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit), a new record high for the Arctic region. Wildfires raged across Siberia during the summer months, releasing record levels of carbon dioxide as they burned up carbon-rich peatlands. An international team of scientists subsequently concluded that the heatwave would have been ‘almost impossible’ without man-made climate change.
Developments in the Arctic, which is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, cap another damaging year for the environment. 2020 will be one of the hottest years on record, while reduced emissions in the face of the coronavirus pandemic have failed to halt record levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Devastating fire seasons in Australia, California, and the Pantanal region of South America, flooding across Asia, and a major oil spill near Norilsk have destroyed homes, contaminated our air and water, and ravaged animal habitats.
The Living Planet Report 2020 showed that global animal populations declined by an average of 68 percent between 1970 and 2016. Hoping to draw attention to some of these issues – citing burning continents, melting glaciers, and dying coral reefs – on Thursday David Attenborough joined Instagram, besting Jennifer Aniston and setting a new record by reaching 1 million followers in just 4 hours and 44 minutes.
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From the erudite Village Voice and scuzzier Creem to the underground stylings of Spin and faded indie sensibility of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone has always distinguished itself from its music competitors through a steady commitment to mainstream rock and roll.
The times however are a-changing. Rap is the new rock and roll, and it’s been like that for a minute, while a generation of female visionaries – producers and songwriters from Björk, Beyoncé, and M.I.A. to Taylor Swift, Solange, and Grimes – have upended traditional categories and hold old constructs in their thrall. In the digital age moss is perilous, which is why the magazine this week updated its list of the greatest ever records.
The Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time was originally published in 2003, and again in 2012 with minor revisions. The 60s and 70s dominated proceedings, with eleven albums by Bob Dylan, and ten by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Highway 61 Revisited by Dylan and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys made up a top five boyishly captivated by The Beatles, with Rubber Soul and Revolver making way for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at number one.
The original list was short on women, with Joni Mitchell the highest ranking solo female artist at number thirty. Madonna was the only woman with as many as three featuring albums, while hip hop hegemony shifted from 2003 to 2012 between the socially conscious Public Enemy and a soul-sampling Kanye West.
The new list by Rolling Stone is the product of more than 300 artists, producers, critics, and music industry figures, from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish to H.E.R. and Tierra Whack. Collectively they shifted the balance in terms of genre and gender, with a greater focus on rap, R&B, and soul music, and a generational fondness for the 90s in addition to a contemporary understanding of the 2000s and 2010s.
The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young still predominate, but with six albums Kanye West is now on par with The Rolling Stones. Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell can boast four albums apiece, while the diversity of artists on three albums includes the sonic explorations of Janet Jackson and Fiona Apple, slacker rock from Pavement, and rap luminaries from Beastie Boys and Outkast to Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar.
The Beatles hold on to a spot in the top five thanks to Abbey Road, with Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Blue by Joni Mitchell, and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys offering an evocative prelude to a new champion, Marvin Gaye’s weary but hopeful, environmentally conscious song cycle What’s Going On.
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Juliette Gréco, doyenne of the French chanson, died on Wednesday at the age of 93 years old. Once described by Jean-Paul Sartre as possessing ‘a million poems in her voice’, the tributes were led by French president Emmanuel Macron, who wrote that ‘The muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is immortal’.
Born in Montpellier and raised by her maternal grandparents in Bordeaux, Gréco trained as a ballerina at the Opéra Garnier in Paris prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Tied to the Resistance, she was arrested by the Gestapo while her mother and older sister were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, liberated by the Red Army as the war drew to a close.
Gréco became a familiar face in the cafés and clubs of postwar Paris, a thriving cultural milieu shaped by the existentialism of Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, styled in slender black to a soundtrack of smoky jazz. The Left Bank served as a haven for artists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Pablo Picasso, and James Baldwin, while Gréco would enter into long-term relationships with Miles Davis and the film producer Darryl F. Zanuck. At clubs like Le Tabou and La Rose Rouge she made the acquaintance of Jean Cocteau, making her major motion picture debut with Orpheus in 1950.
At the same time Gréco took to the stage, performing at the reopening of the renowned cabaret Le Bœuf sur le toit. To lyrics by Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Jacques Prévert and the compositions of Joseph Kosma, she became a celebrated songstress, scoring success with ‘Si tu t’imagines’ and ‘Je suis comme je suis’ then ‘Les feuilles mortes’ and ‘Sous le ciel de Paris’, which became standards.
Starring roles in films by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Renoir were followed by parts in Hollywood pictures and British-American productions. Sought out by Mel Ferrer, it was on the set of The Sun Also Rises that she first met Zanuck, and she played in The Roots of Heaven by John Huston and Bonjour Tristesse by Otto Preminger, before starring alongside Orson Welles in Crack in the Mirror.
Performances at the Olympia in Paris and on tours to the United States and Brazil had made Gréco the face of the chanson. From the late 50s, under the auspices of the composer André Popp, she recorded classic renditions of songs by Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, and a young Serge Gainsbourg. Between continuing forays on television and film, she had hits with ‘La Javanaise’ and ‘Déshabillez-moi’ and won critical acclaim for the albums Gréco chante Mac Orlan and La Femme.
In the 1970s, Gréco embarked on a series of world tours, switched record labels at the end of a long partnership with Philips, and tried her hand at songwriting. Sporadic recordings in the 80s and 90s were followed by a fully-fledged comeback and a series of albums in the 2000s. In 2012, Gréco celebrated with a new record and television specials in France on the occasion of her 85th birthday. She was promoted to commandeur of the Légion d’honneur.
A source of inspiration for philosophers, fellow artists, and the songwriters who wrote songs in her name, framed against the shadows of the stage with her long dark hair and black attire, Gréco maintained a spare approach to her craft, reciting the title of each song and performing with poetic flair and a husky voice out of the stillness.
In 2015 she spanned the globe, conducting a ‘Merci’ farewell tour. The following year she suffered a stroke and the death of her daughter. Gréco was married three times, to the actor Philippe Lemaire, the actor Michel Piccoli, and the pianist Gérard Jouannest, who died in 2018. In an interview with Télérama magazine in July, she spoke of her love of singing, saying ‘I miss it terribly. My reason for living is to sing! To sing is everything’.
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From the first flush of summer and Parisian café culture to autumnal weather and a narrowing assortment of fans, on Sunday the French Open made a belated entrance. The rescheduled event, usually the climax of a busy clay court season before the tennis world turns to grass, now serves as the final Grand Slam in a year which saw Wimbledon cancelled and the US Open take place in front of empty stands.
Organisers of the French Open were forced to repeatedly pare their plans. After taking the early decision to reschedule, they had hoped for around 50-60 percent capacity on the grounds of Roland Garros, equating each day to approximately 20,000 fans. By early September, with the US Open in full swing, that figure was revised down to 11,500, with new caps on large gatherings meaning a limit of 5,000 spectators on the show courts Philippe Chatrier and Suzanne Lenglen, and 1,500 on the smaller Court Simonne Mathieu.
As the coronavirus began to surge again across September, 11,500 became 5,000. Then late on Thursday, a day of record infections across France, at the insistence of the French government organisers confirmed a further reduction to just 1,000 daily spectators, representing less than 3 percent of last year’s total attendance of almost 520,000.
Where the US Open took place without Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, and much of the women’s top ten, the French Open welcomes back Nadal and other leading players like Simona Halep and Elina Svitolina, with only the recovering Federer and a cautious world number one and reigning champion Ash Barty missing out. History beckons for Nadal, who is vying for his thirteenth French Open and a record-tying twentieth Grand Slam, and for Serena Williams, who sets aside health concerns as she strives to equal the record of twenty-four Grand Slams still held by Margaret Court.
The opening of play on Sunday brought several surprises, as Italian teenager Jannik Sinner saw off the limp challenge of eleventh seed David Goffin, while ninth seed Johanna Konta lost out to Coco Gauff on the young American’s debut at Roland Garros.
Top seed Simona Halep made short work of Sara Sorribes Tormo, and there was a strong start for Alexander Zverev who hopes to go one better after finishing as US Open runner-up. Meanwhile in a sign of changing times, former Grand Slam champions Stan Wawrinka and Andy Murray met in the opening round, with the Swiss winning through comfortably in three sets.
Still after navigating the hazards of international flights, coronavirus tests, and hotel lobbies, many of the players had more on their minds than their performances on court. Serena Williams had longed for the sanctuary of private housing, and Rafa Nadal had already lamented the cold, when Victoria Azarenka took time out to berate the freezing weather conditions as the resurgent Belarussian sailed through to the second round.
