T LOunge for May 24th, 2023

Estro Restaurant – Hong Kong

Let’s go for luxury today, shall we? After all, it’s WEDNESDAY and that calls for a little bit of pampering. Pick a spot that’s soothing or stimulating, depending on your mood for the day. Tell us how things are going. Boast. Kvetch. Celebrate. Infuriate. It’s all good here.

Wanda Sykes on Her New Netflix Special, Dave Chappelle and Being a ‘Woke Comic’: ‘They Say That Like It’s an Insult’
Though Wanda Sykes began working on “I’m an Entertainer,” her latest Netflix stand-up special, in 2019, hardly any of the material she wrote prior to March 2020 made it into the show. Instead, it was the radioactive events of the pandemic era — from COVID vaccinations to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the battle over trans rights to the murders of Black Americans like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain — that Sykes was drawn to.
Those deaths and the racial reckoning that followed were not obvious fodder for making people laugh. “All that stuff just kept piling on,” Sykes says, her voice softer and more tentative than the tart Southern twang she deploys on stage. “I knew I wanted to talk about it, but I just didn’t know how to make it funny. We were all just so angry.”

Lady Gaga: “There’s a strong mental-health component to beauty”
From “tremendous pressure” to immense inspiration, the pop phenomenon tells Bazaar what make-up really means to her as Haus Labs by Lady Gaga launches in the UK
Pop phenomenon Lady Gaga has a complex relationship with the concept of beauty, she reveals to me over Zoom – a meeting set in celebration of her make-up brand Haus Labs by Lady Gaga launching in the UK next month.
“Things that I might think are beautiful, someone else will see and think they’re extremely grotesque and odd or absurd,” she says. “And I’ve been called all those things throughout my career.” A sartorial chameleon, often presenting contrarian choices, Lady Gaga regularly reinvents herself – and her relationship with beauty has been an evolution as much as her aesthetic approach to it has.

The History of the Hero: The Hermès Kelly
This iconic bag launched back in the 1930s, and has never been a better investment than it is right now
When one thinks of the Hermès Kelly bag, a few words come to mind. Iconic – as all of our History of the Hero subjects are. Expensive – and it’s only getting moreso, making it one of those rare fashion things that’s actually a good investment. And classic, of course – except the Kelly wasn’t always a symbol of timelessness. When it launched, it was positively radical.
It was the 1930s and Robert Dumas had joined his father-in-law Émile Hermès in the family business. Dumas was behind several creations that would go on to become Hermès icons, including the house’s silk scarf, the Chaîne d’Ancre bracelet, and a game-changing women’s bag. The Kelly – or Petit Sac à Courroies as it was originally known – was larger than other bags of the era, affording the woman carrying it greater independence and symbolising a larger societal shift.

The best sapphire engagement rings for an unforgettable proposal
The stone symbolises luck, loyalty, love and happiness
A sapphire engagement ring is one of the most classic choices you can make for a proposal. Timeless, regal and elegant, they are said to symbolise luck, loyalty and happiness and are thought to bring harmony between a couple.
A stone of royalty celebrated throughout the centuries, perhaps the most famous sapphire engagement ring of all is Princess Diana’s 12-carat sapphire ring from Garrard, which is now worn by Kate, the Princess of Wales. It’s a ring many look to for inspiration and has been credited with igniting a renewed demand for coloured engagement rings in recent decades.

Why are we so obsessed with ‘mean girls’ in literature?
So many of our most popular thrillers are narrated by quippy, condescending women, says author R.F. Kuang. What does that say about how the world views us?
Every time I start a new project, I do what I call “vocal training”— reading as widely as I can in a new genre to soak in its tropes, its aesthetics, and the rhythm and flow of its sentences. So when I started drafting Yellowface, it seemed natural to sit for a while with novels like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train — that is, thrillers where women act badly with bloody consequences.
Now, there’s this particular female voice I find everywhere in this genre. She’s quippy, she’s condescending, and she’s remarkably mean. She almost always speaks in the present tense, and she is very descriptive. She has such an eye for the minute details of people’s lives and what they imply. She wants you to see the lukewarm tray of carrots and broccoli at a house party. The chips in the dinnerware. She’s always noticing when people’s clothes don’t fit right, when the hostess has lipstick stains on her teeth.

Succession’s Matriarch Dame Harriet Walter On Motherhood, Mistresses And The Best Man For The Job
The Olivier Award-winning actor and Royal Shakespeare Company titan speaks to ELLE UK about her role as Lady Caroline Collingwood in Succession, motherhood, and female actors’ self-determination.
Successions’s matriarch Lady Caroline Collingwood won’t win the award for ‘best mother’ anytime soon. But Dame Harriet Walter’s portrayal of the acerbic wealthy aristocrat certainly deserves a standing ovation. Viewers of the HBO hit show – which comes to its conclusion after four critically-acclaimed and widely-memed seasons next week – first welcomed Caroline into the fold in season one, ahead of her daughter Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) and Tom Wambsgans’ (Matthew Macfadyen) wedding. While she’s a visiting character (most likely to be seen chain smoking at a villa in Siena, or sipping on Dom Pérignon in a stately home in England), in recent years Caroline has gifted the show’s fans with some hilarious and acidic one-liners. Who can forget her description of Logan, Marcia and Kerry as ‘the skunk, the concubine and the porcupine’, or her coining of Cousin Greg’s (Nicholas Braun) nickname ‘Greg The Egg’ in season two? Last night, however, might have been one of Walter’s most poignant and personal performances to date.

Sofia Coppola’s First Book Takes Readers Behind The Scenes Of Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring And More
Whenever Sofia Coppola wraps a film, she throws all of her memories into a box: script drafts, magazine clippings, Polaroids from costume fittings. Anything that took up space on her desk or got pinned to a bulletin board during filming.
“You accumulate a lot of stuff over the course of making a movie, and when I was younger it all sorta seemed like junk,” Coppola recently told Vogue over the phone. “I would just throw everything into a corner and never really think about it again.”
When the pandemic shut the world down in 2020, however, Coppola used her downtime to sift through the “dozen or so” boxes stacked inside her family home in Napa, California. What once seemed like pieces of “junk” – a poster from the Sundance premiere of The Virgin Suicides, a marked-up copy of the Vanity Fair article that inspired The Bling Ring – suddenly held more nostalgic value.
The True Story Behind the Princess Margaret Plot in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Princess Margaret did tour the U.S. in the 1960s, but never appeared on a late night show.
In the penultimate episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Princess Margaret appears on the Gordon Ford Show, and Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) has a chance to shine when she writes a bit for the royal guest. “I love her,” Midge says. “She’s brassy, unencumbered by the crown, kind of sexy.”
Princess Margaret (Kate Abbruzzese) is set to appear on the late night show, and Midge pens a sequence where she gives a weather report and jokes about the Boston tea party.
While this never happened—because Maisel is fictional, as is the Gordon Ford Show—Margaret did really tour the U.S. in the 1960s. As Sarene Leeds notes in Vulture, “Princess Margaret doing the weather report…was likely inspired by the now–King Charles III, an aspiring actor himself, doing the weather report for BBC Scotland back in 2012.”

Meet Actress Lily Gladstone, the Breakout Star of Killers of the Flower Moon
Gladstone had a major moment at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in 1986, Lily Gladstone is of Siksikaitsitapi and NiMíiPuu heritage. (Her father is NiMíiPuu, or Nez Perce, and Siksikaitsitapi, also called Blackfeet, and her mother is white.) They grew up on the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, and lived there until she was 11. Her family, she says, “moved for lack of economic opportunities.”
“The reputation of Browning depends on who it is you talk to,” Gladstone said in a 2014 interview. “There are some incredibly ugly things that happen but shouldn’t. But you have to look deeper into why things are the way they are. At the foundation of my life, there is community and family. There is poverty, violence, substance abuse, and unemployment everywhere. But there is so much love in that community. What unites people there is a love of family, a love of land.”

Why Famous Women Can’t Stop Kicking Off Their Heels in Cannes
In 2015, a group of women were reportedly turned away from a screening of Carol at Cannes because they were wearing flat shoes, an incident that thrust the festival’s somewhat antiquated dress code into the spotlight. Festival director Thierry Fremaux insisted at the time that high-heels were not mandatory for women walking the red carpet, but it was widely acknowledged as an unspoken (and sexist) rule at the event.

In Philadelphia, Photographer Judith Joy Ross Helps a Nation See Itself
In 1987, on the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Judith Joy Ross—the photographer whose career retrospective is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) through August 6—typed up letters to scores of members of Congress, asking that they sit for portraits “in their offices or other sites of their choosing,” as she put it. The results would be exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as part of a yearlong bicentennial celebration.
Just proposing the project was a lot of work, and Ross, back then and to this day, used a large format camera: a big wood box on a tripod that requires her to crawl beneath a cape to work.

Millie Bobby Brown Launches Her Own Coffee Line
Gen Z officially has a new coffee queen.
On May 18, Stranger Things and Enola Holmes actor Millie Bobby Brown announced the launch of her new coffee company, Florence by Mills Coffee. The brand came to be thanks to a collaboration between Brown and the private-label company, Collab Coffee.
“I’ve been passionate about coffee ever since I can remember. It’s always been that pick-me-up to get me through those long days on set, it’s that moment away from all the chaos that allows me to be present again,” Brown shared in a statement. “I set out to create a brand that will allow my fans and all coffee lovers to do the same, a brand that isn’t just about great tasting coffee, but about those special moments, too. I’m delighted to finally share Florence by Mills coffee with you, and I hope you love it just as much as I do.”

Princess Leia’s Dress, Star-Lord’s Helmet and Batman’s Life-Size Batpod Up for Sale at Historic Prop Auction
Movie fans and memorabilia collectors better start saving up, and quickly, for Propstore’s annual live auction of film and TV memorabilia that hits June.
Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia dress from the original Star Wars movies, the hammer used by Tim Robbins to escape prison in Shawshank Redemption and the Batpod motorcycle used by Christian Bale in The Dark Knight will hit the auction block in June in what is being billed as one of the largest memorabilia auctions in the world.
The Star Wars dress, a holy grail for collectors, and the Batpod alone are estimated to fetch upwards of $2 million each in the live auction being run by Propstore, the 25-year-old company that specialized in cinematic treasures and collectibles.

Can You Love the Art and Hate the Monster?
In “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” Claire Dederer attempts the impossible task of disentangling herself from the figures whose work has made her who she is.
“Monsters” grew out of a viral essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” that Dederer published in The Paris Review in late 2017, at the height of #MeToo. She is less interested, however, in describing that national reckoning than in pursuing a personal reckoning with artists whose work she has loved. Early in the book, she confesses that she has fantasized about solving the question of whether to consume the work of a monstrous artist with an online calculator that could “assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the work of this artist.” This fantasy, she acknowledges, is “laughable, unthinkable.” She suspects “that balance is different for everyone,” thus rendering each individual attempt to achieve it as “a lonely puzzle of pleasure and responsibility.” The real question, she eventually decides, is not what “we” do with the monstrous men. “The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist?”

Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet
Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war’s most bonkers battleground.
How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

The First 10 Words of the African American English Dictionary Are In
An exclusive look at a dictionary consisting entirely of words created or reinvented by Black people. (Don’t worry: All three variants of “bussin” are included.)
In a recent online presentation, editors and researchers working on a first-of-its-kind dictionary of African American English gave a status update on the project. As academics explained their various methodologies, slides displayed behind them showed words that are more often associated with Twitter than Oxford: “Bussin,” virtual attendees were told, means impressive or tasty, while a “boo” is a lover.
Those were two of the first 100 words that the Oxford University Press said it had prepared to include in the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, the hopeful result of the three-year research project announced last spring.

How to Dry Hydrangeas to Use in Floral Centerpieces and Arrangements
As the vibrant summer color fades from your hydrangeas, prepare them for a second life in a dried bouquet.
Hydrangeas—beloved by home gardeners for their beauty, versatility, and low-maintenance growing conditions—are also a popular bloom for dried arrangements that admirers can display for years.
Once dried, hydrangea blooms work well mixed with other dried flowers, secured to wreaths, or presented as single, eye-catching statement pieces—and the process is simple, even for beginners. “All you have to do is be in tune with your flowers, and watch, and experiment,” says Millie Marzec, co-owner of Washington state flower supplier Hydrangea Rangers.

11 Sunroom Decorating Ideas That Will Transform This Underused Space
Design this room with everyday living in mind, and it will quickly become your favorite place to relax and entertain.
A sunroom offers the best of both worlds—views of mother nature, but protection from inclement weather. Whether you’re taking shelter from winter’s bitter chill, staying cool in the middle of a heat wave, or enjoying spring’s spectacular view, anyone who’s lucky enough to have access to a sunroom will return to this space all year round.
Just like any other area in the house, a sunroom should be designed with the utmost care. When decorating this space, you’ll want to lean into pieces that complement the unique indoor-outdoor setting. To help you get started, we’re sharing some of the best sunroom decorating ideas (courtesy of interior designers) that will transform this underused space into your favorite place to relax.

This Black History Tour of Atlanta Was Just Named One of the Best Travel Experiences in the U.S.
Highlights of the four-hour tour include Tyler Perry’s original Madea house and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth home.
From the civil rights movement to pop culture, Atlanta has long been a rich source of Black culture in America. So it’s no surprise that visitors have been raving about Atlanta’s Black History and Civil Rights Tour, earning it a spot on the 2023 Viator Experience Awards for best experiences in the U.S.
The four-hour tour in an air-conditioned van starts by passing important landmarks (like the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Underground Atlanta, and the Georgia State Capitol) before making the first stop at the Atlanta Olympic Cauldron Tower. Here, the guide shares facts and history about the 1996 Olympic Games.

How to Plan the Perfect Trip to Copenhagen
Everything you need to know to plan a trip to Copenhagen.
Named one of the best places to travel in 2023 by Travel + Leisure, Copenhagen continues to draw in tourists with its exceptional food, history, and architecture. The city was officially named the UNESCO World Capital of Architecture in 2023. On top of its newly recognized architectural prowess, the city continues to wow tourists with its tried-and-true offerings — whether that’s dining at Noma, the Michelin three-starred restaurant that announced its closure in winter 2024, or strolling the always-popular Tivoli Gardens. Here, your essential Copenhagen guide for hotels, things to do, restaurants, and so much more.

[Photo Credit: andrefustudio.com, estro.hk]

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