Latest news with #Firenze
Yahoo
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mia Khalifa's New Sheytan Body Chains Are Breaking the Internet
Mia Khalifa is adding more sparkle to summer, and it's not coming from the usual fashion suspects. The media personality and entrepreneur took to Instagram this week to unveil the latest release from her jewelry and lifestyle brand Sheytan: an ultra luxe line of body chains designed to dazzle, seduce, and empower. In a sultry series of photos and videos that quickly went viral, Khalifa modeled the 'BODYCHAIN'D' the brand's newest addition. Wearing the cushion cut Italian crystal chain, handmade in Florence, she captioned the post: 'New belly chains now available at @ I'm wearing the cushion cut Italian crystal chain handmade in Florence.' The post has since racked up over 750,000 likes, 8,000 comments, and a staggering 175,000 shares, with fans and fashion aficionados alike praising the blend of elegance and sensuality that Sheytan has fast become known for. The New Drops: Luxe Meets Liberation The Sheytan website now features two new designs as part of its BODYCHAIN'D collection: $160Made in Firenze, Italy, featuring Marquise cut Italian crystals set on an 18ct Gold Vermeil chainSwim proof, Sweat proof, F** proof* $160Also crafted in Florence with Cushion cut Italian stones and 18ct Gold VermeilSwim proof, Sweat proof, F** proof* The bold tagline isn't just for marketing. It's a manifesto. These pieces are designed to move with the body, endure the elements, and make a statement: confidence is the new luxury. The Story Behind Sheytan Co-founded by Sarah Joe, better known to the world as Mia Khalifa, and creative partner Sara Burn, Sheytan is more than just a jewelry label. Described as a 'universe, a vehicle for creativity and collaboration,' the brand is an homage to the body, to feminine mystique, and to unapologetic self-expression. 'Sheytan' the name itself a reference to the Arabic word for 'devil' plays with contradiction: temptation and beauty, secrecy and empowerment. The brand leans into what it calls 'Shh! Pieces' subtle, statement making accessories designed to be worn with intention and mystery. The smaller 'Shh' logo that appears in the brand's visual identity hints at something intimate a knowing glance between wearers, a secret power shared in plain sight. Made with Meaning: The Sheytan Standard Far from fast fashion, Sheytan's pieces are produced in carefully selected factories in Florence and the UK, many of which are women owned or family run enterprises. Every step of the manufacturing process is personal, artisanal, and intentional. 'We know the human hands who are touching each product we've made,' reads Sheytan's brand manifesto. 'It's not faceless. We know who's making this. We know who's packing it.' The result is a product not just beautiful in appearance, but rich in craftsmanship and integrity. The founders make regular visits to their workshops, ensuring sustainable practices and quality that aligns with their vision of jewelry made 'for forever.' A Movement, Not Just a Brand From the outset, Sheytan has positioned itself as a lifestyle concept, not simply a purveyor of chains and crystals, but a feminist, sensual, and highly curated design house. Khalifa and Burn treat jewelry like lingerie: personal, powerful, made to delight the self first. With their newest BODYCHAIN'D collection, they remind women (and anyone who wants to feel divine in their skin) that adornment is a form of agency. As Khalifa continues to redefine her career through entrepreneurship, Sheytan stands as a bold chapter in her evolution, one rooted in sensuality, substance, and storytelling. And with pieces this captivating, it's safe to say: the secret's out. The post Mia Khalifa's New Sheytan Body Chains Are Breaking the Internet appeared first on Where Is The Buzz | Breaking News, Entertainment, Exclusive Interviews & More. Solve the daily Crossword
Finextra
08-07-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Wealthtech Firenze signs Söderberg & Partners
Firenze, the wealthtech innovator redefining Lombard lending, has today announced a partnership with Söderberg & Partners Wealth Management, the UK arm of the Swedish wealth manager. 0 By bringing Lombard lending to wealth managers, Firenze is opening up the benefits of private banking to mass affluent investors and those who choose not to work with private banks; enabling them to borrow against the value of their investment portfolios without selling assets, disrupting investment plans and triggering capital gains - all while continuing to make gains from investment returns. Firenze's platform offers loans from £65,000, secured against clients' investment portfolios, increasing liquidity for other investments. And because borrowing is secured lending with highly liquid collateral, Lombard lending offers lower interest rates compared to typical unsecured loans and allows decisions to be made in hours rather than weeks or months. With the integration of Firenze, Söderberg and Partners advisers benefit from: • Increased focus and improvement of investment decisions and portfolio performance - keeping clients invested rather than selling assets • Increased speed of investment for clients, retaining ongoing fee revenue • Use of borrowing as a strategic toll for tax planning and optimal inheritance strategies • Support clients with intelligent cash flow solutions, without sacrificing market exposure • Differentiated from competitors - and competing against private banks Söderberg and Partners Wealth Management has been expanding its presence across the UK, investing in independent financial advisers (IFAs),helping them grow, drive efficiencies and benefit from innovative, new propositions and solutions for clients. David Newman, CEO of Firenze, commented: 'Soderberg & Partners are one of the most exciting players in the UK wealth management market today and it is a real pleasure to partner with Nick and his team. They have a really innovative platform, have acquired some incredible firms and it's great for their advisors & clients to now be able to benefit from Lombard lending.' Nick Raine, CEO of Söderberg and Partners Wealth Management said: 'We're delighted to partner with Firenze. Being able to offer Lombard lending provides our advisers with another tool in their arsenal and a distinct advantage, strengthening their broader proposition, offering forward-thinking, new ways to invest and engage clients, as well as growing AUM and competing with the private banks.' Dave Ferguson, CEO of Seccl, whose technology powers the Söderberg platform said: 'It's great to have a ringside seat on the innovations at play within the wealthtech sector. Propositions like Firenze's are helping to meaningfully improve the proposition that advice firms and platforms alike are able to provide, not to mention the experience that end investors receive." Continuing momentum The announcement comes after a successful period for the wealthtech, which has recently closed a £2.5m seed round, led by Outward VC - the backers of Curve, PrimaryBid and Vauban. It is already partnering with leading wealth managers, covering c.£75bn of assets under management (AUM) and recently announced a partnership with Monument Bank - the sole challenger focussed on the mass affluent - with a £160m funding line committed. Firenze is led by Firenze is led by fintech entrepreneur, Daid Newman, and has established a heavyweight Board, including Paul Pester as Chair (Virgin Money, Tandem Bank and TSB), Samantha Bamert (Barclays, Ask Inclusive Finance) and Mike Toole (Artorius, Baker Tilly, KPMG, Skipton).
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Enjoy TikTok Explainers? These Old-Fashioned Diagrams Are A Whole Lot Smarter
In the aftermath of Hiroshima, many of the scientists who built the atomic bomb changed the way they reckoned time. Their conception of the future was published on the cover of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , which portrayed a clock set at seven minutes to midnight. In subsequent months and years, the clock sometimes advanced. Other times, the hands fell back. With this simple indication, the timepiece tracked the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. Although few of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project are still alive, the Doomsday Clock remains operational, steadfastly translating risk into units of hours and minutes. Over time, the diagram has become iconic, and not only for subscribers to The Bulletin. It's now so broadly recognizable that we may no longer recognize what makes it radical. John Auldjo. Map of Vesuvius showing the direction of the streams of lava in the eruptions from 1631 to 1831, 1832. Exhibition copy from a printed book In John Auldjo, Sketches of Vesuvius: with Short Accounts of Its Principal Eruptions from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (Napoli: George Glass, 1832). Olschki 53, plate before p. 27, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Firenze. Courtesy Ministero della Cultura – Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Any unauthorized reproduction by any means whatsoever is prohibited. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze A thrilling new exhibition at the Fondazione Prada brings the Doomsday Clock back into focus. Featuring hundreds of diagrams from the past millennium, ranging from financial charts to maps of volcanic eruptions, the exhibition provides the kind of survey that brings definition to an entire category of visual communication. Each work benefits from its association with others that are manifestly different in form and function. According to the exhibition curators, a diagram as 'a graphic design that explains rather than represents; a drawing that shows arrangement and relations'. In other words, a diagram is a picture with a purpose, and its purpose is at least one degree removed from the image presented. It can be understood only through transposition. If it corresponds to reality, it never does so literally. These qualities, which show how complex diagrams are as a mode of expression, are evident even when you look at some of the earliest examples in the exhibition. For instance, many of the anatomical charts from Medieval times and the Renaissance are inscribed not only with parts of the body but also with constellations. Astrological signs were believed to influence bodily functions. (Aries was typically associated with the head, Taurus with the neck, Gemini with the lungs, Scorpio with the groin.) The influences of the stars were physically invisible. Fitting the signs to anatomical features, diagrams depicting the so-called 'zodiac man' provided pictorial guidance to medical practices such as bleeding, while simultaneously reenforcing the animating idea of man as the cosmos in microcosm. The practice of superimposing disparate information has outlasted scientific acceptance of zodiac men. In fact, juxtaposition has advanced many disciplines by testing the explanations the graphics purport to illustrate. Diagrams give specificity to hypotheses, subjecting them to collective scrutiny. Presenting correlations across multiple dimensions, they expose meaningful patterns as well as false associations. The Fondazione Prada exhibition provides several compelling examples from epidemiology, including one of the most famous maps in the history of medicine: the diagram that revealed the cause of a cholera. In 1854, Dr. John Snow charted cholera cases in relation to the locations of London's neighborhood water pumps, showing a geographic overlap that revealed cholera to be a waterborne disease spread through contamination. His theory – now accepted as scientific fact – ran contrary to the medical consensus that cholera was a poisonous vapor, an illness contracted by breathing. The older hypothesis, known as miasma theory, had also been charted. One especially impressive diagram was prepared by Dr. Henry Wentworth Acland, who showed British cholera cases in relation to temperature, precipitation, and barometric pressure. Although Acland's bar chart did not disprove the theory he sought to bolster, it provided little explanatory power, far less than was conveyed by Snow's famous map. Attempting to show that cholera was modulated by climate, Acland inadvertently contributed to the miasma's demise. The contrast between Acland's graph and Snow's map demonstrates both the value of data and the significance of format. Explanations are aesthetically experienced. Snow could have reached his conclusion with bars of different lengths instead of geographic coordinates, but the cause of cholera probably wouldn't have been as readily apparent, and the presentation certainly wouldn't have been as compellingly persuasive. Of course, persuasion isn't always felicitous. When data are carelessly used or callously manipulated, persuasiveness can be downright dangerous, the crux of political propaganda. Assessing a diagram requires critical thinking. But the Prada exhibition presents at least as many instances in which diagrams have advanced political principles and positions with incisiveness generally lacking in political discourse. W.E.B. Du Bois. Conjugal condition of American Negroes according to age periods, c. 1900. Exhibition copy of a statistical chart illustrating the condition of the descendants of former African slaves now in residence in the United States of America, Atlanta University. Ink and watercolor on paper. Daniel Murray Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C., Daniel Murray Collection Library of Congress, One of the greatest practitioners of the 20th century was the sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. In a set of diagrams prepared for the 1900 Paris Exposition, Du Bois showed the fortunes of Blacks in the United States since emancipation. What is most striking about this series is the impact of the work as a whole. This is all the more surprising given that each diagram is highly particular, practically sui generis . One shows the 'assessed value of household and kitchen furniture owned by Georgia Negroes'. Another shows 'race amalgamation in Georgia based on a study of 40,000 individuals of Negro descent'. There are charts tracking literacy, migration, and taxation. These charts do not overlap in the way that Snow superimposed cholera and water pumps. They could not comprehensibly be assimilated into a single diagram. Instead they use a shared visual language to connect different dimensions of the African-American experience, constructing a multifaceted reality with novelistic acumen. Each chart is descriptive. The explanatory power of Du Bois' project emerges as the eyes move restlessly between them. The Doomsday Clock is also political, picturing conditions that collectively contribute to the irreducible reality of a world in peril. In recent years, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have added factors ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence into their temporal calculus. All of these explain present conditions and must inform political decisions. Yet there is an important difference between the cover of the Bulletin and Du Bois's contribution to the Paris Exposition. If the former has the expository breadth of a graphic novel, the latter has the semantic compression of a concrete poem. Our command of apocalyptic technologies necessitates a new kind of relationship with history, a responsibility for all possible futures that is visually expressed in the restless movements of the clock's hours and minutes. What the Doomsday Clock lacks in mechanistic explanation of risk, the graphic makes up for by exposing our influence over the end of time. Each and every person is an existential threat in microcosm.
Telegraph
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How Italian men look effortlessly smart – even in sweltering heat
It's a scene so arrestingly beautiful that Michelangelo himself could have painted it (or the 21st-century equivalent – turned it into a cracking Instagram shot): a candlelight palazzo in the hills above Firenze, the city putting on a show in all her terracotta-roofed majesty below as the sky streaks lilac and coral and the well-heeled nobility pick their way through a jasmine-scented giardino to put on il ritz. Welcome to Pitti Uomo, the Florentine men's fashion fair that occurs twice a year in the spellbinding city, where its frescoed backdrops are matched only by the exceptional clothes on display at various showcases. What's also interesting to note – as yours truly arrived at said soiree puce-faced with a grimy, delightful film of sweat in the 36-degree heat – is just how immaculate the Italian man looks even in the searing temperatures. Take that sumptuous dinner, for instance; thrown by Italian luxury titan Brunello Cucinelli, it demonstrated oh-so-deftly that even on a balmy June evening, formality was the order of the day, yet doing so without looking painfully hot and bothered. It's a particularly timely conundrum as we weigh up summer weddings, particularly those in continental locations. Of course, we also have the Italian wedding to end them all (perhaps literally, if WW3 erupts as the corks pop) – the Bezos/Sanchez spectacle taking over Venice imminently. How do Italian men do it so elegantly as the mercury rises? Mr Cucinelli, the maestro who coordinates much of Pitti Uomo's more rarefied events, and who unveiled his new men's collection in the city, has some insight. 'There's a real comeback, particularly amongst young men, towards a youthful sense of refinement. It's traditional, but done in a very modern, relevant way for today.' What does that translate to in real terms? 'Men want to be elegant again. For our collection, that means that everything is softer, wider, easier, blazers are longer and elongated. There must be ease to how men dress.' He also points out that, when it comes to dressing for formal occasions, it's a matter of respect and national pride in Italy. 'If you attend my funeral and are not well dressed, you will be turned away,' he says (jokingly, although a state occasion it will no doubt be). Cucinelli also points to the double-pleated trousers which allow for a more airy stance, and the fact that the cut allows movement. It's something us Brits could take to heart; the culture of painfully tight suiting, some of it suspiciously shiny and squeezed over hefty thighs and gym-bro biceps, looks about as comfortable as a skin condition. There are other lessons to take away from our Italian fratelli; one thing for which Pitti Uomo is excellent is people watching, allowing one to sip a potent espresso and watch the parade of peacocks shake their tail feathers in passing. Little details make all the difference in terms of tailoring: a roped shoulder is softer and lighter than one that's stiffly peaked, and a jacket created in a 'half canvas' style means the body of the back is essentially removed to create a sense of lightness. Likewise a double vent. The old guard of Jermyn Street have a great deal to say on correct vents, but the fact remains that two vents in the jacket will feel looser. That longer seat trick at Cucinelli is a smart move that recalls the Neapolitan tailoring of the 1950s, designed to sit loosely in those sweltering southern climes. See also the movement towards overshirts in place of jackets, a trend across the Florentine cobbles and also at Italian brands such as Caruso and Nappa Dora, proposing heavyweight shirts or even safari shirt styles over a proper blazer. If you've got the Italianate brio, pair with a lighter shirt underneath and perhaps a little neck scarf for extra 'Pitti points'. There's also the question of what to wear under your tailoring. In the intensity of Italian heat, a tie feels out of the question, even amongst those who remain steadfast in their classicism. There's a particularly continental affectation for wearing a foulard with undone collar in its place, which is less restrictive but still looks as if you've made an effort. There's a more daring interpretation from the men that sip negronis at the city's bustling Gilli Bar: going shirtless. I know, something for the oiks, and it's certainly a flex that comes with caveats; it only works on the lithe of frame and in relatively good shape, and it's only a viable option with a silk scarf underneath, so that just a triangular slither of chest is revealed rather than some brutish posturing. The other sartorial flourish that Italians get so right in warmer weather is how to finesse accessories. Shoes, for instance, are always light and less painfully heavy than the traditional British Oxfords. Brunello Cucinelli proposes sleek white trainers with pinstriped suits, and elsewhere there's a focus on driving shoes that allow for better breathability. Wear with invisible socks – traditionalists might recoil at the idea of bare ankles, but I'd wager they haven't climbed up cobbled Florentine streets in heady 30-degree heat. For the braver still, espadrilles can look on point with a suit, particularly if they're in a buttery taupe suede or leather. There's also an emphasis on hats in how Italians dress to keep cool; adding a hat might seem entirely counterintuitive, and it's by no means for every occasion, but a light straw panama can provide shade without feeling too claggy and unpleasant. Will Bezos and his ilk follow suit – quite literally – for his operatically-scaled Italian nuptials? Whatever the approach, it's unlikely he'll hit the high notes of Florence's leading men.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Napoli make contact for Fiorentina's Rolando Mandragora
Serie A champions Napoli continue to look to bolster their side and have come forward for Fiorentina's Rolando Mandragora. FirenzeViola have reported that the Partenopei have made contact with the midfielder's entourage and it has been described as an interlocutory meeting to know more about the player's current situation att Fiorentina. Advertisement This is the first sign of interest from Antonio Conte's side, who wanted to understand the player's current salary and contract situation. Mandragora is waiting for signals from Fiorentina, who remain his priority. No renewal has been discussed because his current deal expires next summer and there is an option to renew if he makes a certain amount of appearances next season. Everything now depends on how Fiorentina react to Napoli's interest. Kaustubh Pandey I GIFN
