Latest news with #EdmundWhite
The Guardian
25-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Edmund White's writing shone a light in dark times
I enjoyed Eric Homberger's obituary of Edmund White (4 June), but take exception to his claim, of the Aids crisis, that Ed's 'lack of response seemed a manifest failure of his nerve as a writer'. Ed co-authored a superb collection of stories with Adam Mars-Jones, The Darker Proof, which was a bracing comfort to those of us then losing friends as though in a war the rest of the country was ignoring. It was a totemic work for those of us who had yet to find the courage or words to write about Aids in our novels. Patrick Gale Penzance, Cornwall Thank you for Monday's Journal. Such brilliant writing by Nesrine Malik, John Harris, Sally Rooney and of course on the letters page. It should be compulsory reading for Keir Starmer and his cabinet – they might develop a collective backbone. Too much to hope for? Daniel Taylor Brighton Why do we need to raise our spending on defence (UK will commit to spending 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, 23 June) when the foreign secretary's advice to a country being attacked by bombs being dropped on it is to 'dial this thing down' – not retaliate? Paul Russell Winchester What peeves my inner pedant (Letters, 23 June)? Politicians saying 'I have been perfectly clear' when they are being anything but. Tom Stubbs Surbiton, Surrey And don't get me started on 're-double' your efforts. Stuart Waterworth Tavistock, Devon Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Saint Laurent's Paris fashion week show takes audience on a holiday to Fire Island
Fire Island, the holiday destination near New York, has been associated with the LGBTQ+ community since the thirties. It has inspired books (Edmund White's 1973 novel, Forgetting Elena), a 2022 eponymous romcom and now, a fashion show for Saint Laurent. Taking place at Paris fashion week in 30 degree heat more suited to a vacation, the show notes named the beach spot as a reference for the creative director, Anthony Vaccarello. They placed the show 'somewhere between Paris and Fire Island, where escape becomes elegance, and desire becomes a language'. The collection started with this mood: the first look was a pair of short shorts worn with a silk shirt and sunglasses. There's little doubt this shape will be on trend for men next year, with Prada also showing it in their show in Milan last week. But as well as beach-ready items, the detail of shorts found their way on to the waistband of tailoring and pastel colours ideal for summer. There was a lot of workwear too, but rather than the more relaxed kind found in most offices in 2025, these designs committed to the same extreme eighties power-dressing shoulders seen in Vaccarello's hit womenswear collection shown earlier this year. Striped shirts and ties, trenchcoats and suits were included, often in the jewel tones associated with the brand. Every model wore sunglasses. As well as complementing the holiday feel and the weather outside, there was also a commercial angle: these are the entry-level designs customers can purchase before they can afford a suit. The show took place in the grand Bourse de Commerce, an ex-stock exchange where the art collection of François Pinault – the original owner of Saint Laurent's parent company, Kering – has been housed since 2021. The models walked around an installation called Clinamen by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, which resembled the kind of swimming pool found on holidays. Although the text clarified that the collection was not nostalgic – 'not homage. Not memory. Continuity' – it was coupled with an image of a young Yves Saint Laurent wearing short shorts on a tennis court in Oran in Algeria, taken around 1950, when the designer was a teenager. It also namechecked artists Stanton, Angus and Ellis – presumably Larry Stanton, Patrick Angus and Darrel Ellis – all of whom documented LGBTQ+ life in the seventies and eighties, with Stanton a regular on Fire Island. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion If this collection had a subtle tribute to a time and place, Vaccarello's Saint Laurent also excels at the kind of splashy moments that fuel the internet, and keep a brand in the fashion conversation in 2025. This month alone, 82-year-old Christopher Walken appeared in their advertising campaign – a clever move at a time when older legends are appreciated in fashion – and Rihanna, forever influential for her style, was spotted wearing the brand's clothes. The thigh-high patent waders that were in the January men's shows have also caused something of a sensation – with both Pedro Pascal and designer Marc Jacobs wearing them recently. Even with this profile, the brand – like many luxury brands – is seeing a decline in sales. A report of financial results across the Kering group for the first quarter of 2025 shows revenue was down 9%. This figure puts it in the middle of its stablemates, with Gucci's revenue down 25% and Bottega Veneta's revenue up by 4%. Kering announced Luca de Meo as the new CEO this month, and the man now charged with improving brand performances. Unusually for fashion, de Meo's experience is from a different sector - he was previously CEO of Renault cars. However, the industry seems to approve of the appointment. In the run-up to the announcement, the group's stock rose by 13%.
Vogue
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Vogue
Lynn Loves Jewelry: Multicolored Creations to Show Up for Pride Month
It's Pride Month! In 1978, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to win elected office in the United States, urged the artist Gilbert Baker to create a flag that would celebrate the diversity of the LGBT community. (If Milk's name rings a bell at the moment, it may be because in a viciously reactionary but hardly surprising development, the Trump administration has moved to strip his name from the US naval ship Harvey Milk, bestowed in honor of the Navy veteran and San Francisco politician who was assassinated in 1978.) The rainbow flag had humble beginnings: Thirty volunteers helped Baker hand-dye and stitch the first two in the top-floor attic gallery of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco. The design has undergone several revisions since, but the most common version is composed of six stripes, with the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Which brings us to the exquisite rainbow-hued jewelry we feature here. You might think that wearing multicolored baubles is a trivial way to commemorate a historic human rights struggle, but think about it—maybe your watermelon tourmaline ring or dazzling dripping earrings will provoke a conversation about the Stonewall uprising, that night 56 years ago that gave birth to the modern LGBTQ+ movement? Here is how the eminent author Edmund White, who passed away earlier this month, described the Stonewall rebellion: 'Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group—with rights, a culture, an agenda.' Rights, a culture, an agenda—what could be more important this year than fighting fiercely to defend and extend those freedoms? Among our suggestions this month, we feature Eden Presley's Believe in Love pendant—a flying piggy with pavé rainbow sapphire wings. Before Stonewall, the idea that a gay rights movement could even exist—let alone flourish—was as likely as an airborne porker. But as Representative Sarah McBride, the first trans member of Congress has observed, 'Change always seems impossible until it's inevitable.' Happy Pride. Rings Bracelets Earrings Necklaces
The Herald Scotland
09-06-2025
- General
- The Herald Scotland
Titillating tome as controversial as Lady Chatterley's Mollusc
His son used to help him wash windows during the summer holidays, so he was, of course, known as Shammy Davis Junior. Red turns bread A blatant example has been identified by Diary correspondent Alasdair Sinclair, who has uncovered a report stating that the Red Cross and the Red Crescent are to merge. Says Alasdair: 'It's alleged that a joint committee charged with managing the amalgamation has come up with a name for the combined body which, while reminiscent of the traditional titles of both societies, is shorn of any political association or religious imagery, and is in accordance with modern tastes… the Coloured Croissant.' Mind your language DELIGHTED linguist Sally Haggerty says: 'Learning French has encouraged me to live in the moment, because I currently can't conjugate any other verb tense.' The name game RESPECTED American author Edmund White died recently, which reminds Edmund McGonigle, the owner of the Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop in Glasgow's Otago Lane, of the time the literary lion stopped him in the street to ask directions to a restaurant. McGonigle admitted he couldn't assist, then asked if he happened to be chatting to Edmund White, man of letters. Receiving an affirmative answer, our correspondent announced that he, too, was an Edmund. At which point the famous novelist revealed that he came from a long line of Edmunds. 'I mentioned this later to a friend called Bill, who had German ancestry,' says McGonigle. 'He replied that he came from a long line of Willys, which gave me pause for thought…'
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on coming-out tales: from A Boy's Own Story to What It Feels Like for a Girl
'What if I could write about my life exactly as it was?' the teenage narrator of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story wonders. 'What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?' Published in 1982, A Boy's Own Story was hailed as one of the first coming-out novels, and its author, who died aged 85 last week, as a great pioneer of gay fiction. This auto-fiction relates White's privileged adolescence in 1950s Chicago, his struggles with his sexuality and search for a psychoanalytical 'cure'. In its extraordinary candour about sex – a hallmark of White's prodigious career – the novel remains startling today. It arrived at a pivotal moment in gay history: after the hope of the Stonewall uprising and just before the devastation of Aids, both of which White documented in what became an autobiographical trilogy with The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998). Lancashire in the 1970s might seem a world away from the American midwest two decades earlier, but Jeanette Winterson's account of her miserable childhood in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was similarly groundbreaking when it was first published in 1985. Forty years later, plans are under way for an RSC musical version next year. 'Why be happy when you could be normal?' her adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, an evangelical Pentecostal Christian, demands, when she catches the teenage Jeanette in bed with another girl. It doesn't get much more mainstream than a musical. But, as Winterson told the audience at the Hay literary festival last weekend, the BBC's Bafta-winning 1990 adaptation was a 'very brave' move after Section 28. 'It really shook up TV at that moment,' she said. Now another BBC adaptation is shaking up TV. What It Feels Like for a Girl (the title is a 2000 Madonna song), based on Paris Lees' 2021 memoir, powerfully shows what it meant to be a transgender teenager in the Midlands in the noughties. This personal story has once again landed at a time of intense public reckoning over LGBTQ+ rights. What It Feels Like for a Girl might be recent history, but, with ominous nods to a nascent internet, it is still a period piece. It is pre-social media and what Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation, has called 'the great rewiring of childhood'. Where once young people read to discover they were not alone, now they scroll. Each of these coming-out stories is rooted in a specific time and place. They are about class as well as sex, the salvation of books and music as well as romance. They are about loneliness, desire and a longing for escape – being a teenager, in short. Despite heartbreaking scenes of abuse and pain, they are also bursting with excitement. One of the conditions of youth is that one's 'own story' feels like the only story. This is why the coming-of-age narrative endures. In our digital age of toxic masculinity and intolerance, these memoirs call for truthfulness and compassion. They are reminders of the fragility of progress. 'If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance,' White wrote in his last book, The Loves of My Life, published in January, 'we should recognize we're still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen – and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know.'
