Latest news with #LastSummer
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Women of a certain age are finding themselves with Phoebe Philo
At any given moment, fashion has a main character. For the past few years, it's been the bookish but seductive, slightly frazzled woman of Miu Miu, with trends such as chipped nails, bag charms and miniskirts emanating from the brand's runways to TikTok and the streets. It felt right to have that young, intelligent but not quite together young woman as a guiding light in a moment when pop culture became dominated by 20-something female pop stars pushing the boundaries of freedom and music, and festooning everything with bows felt like a somehow silly feminist statement. Well, move over, girlies! There's a new woman in town: She's in her 50s, at least. She's busy — very, very busy. She does not look perfect — but she looks amazing. Not overdone, but strange, special, elegant. She is the focus of novels such as last summer's must-read novel, Miranda July's 'All Fours,' and age-gap fantasy films such as 'Babygirl' and 'Last Summer.' And in fashion, she is the brainchild of the British designer Phoebe Philo, who on Tuesday released the images of her fourth collection from her eponymous brand — called in the brand's parlance Collection D, a seasonless, trend-less slate of pieces that will be available in six months' time. The fashion world's Instagram feeds snapped into a frenzy, sharing pictures of her sandals with a series of rib-cage-like extra-long buckles and a fluffy but sharply shaped shearling bomber. Substackers joined in: 'Natural hair. Embracing age. Skin texture. Perfectly undone styling. And big aura. The Phoebe Philo woman!' wrote Zoë Yasemin Akihary. 'Something off in an otherwise perfect look: that's when chic happens,' wrote Edward Kanarecki. For this woman, putting on clothes, no matter how little time she has to do it, is a personal ritual. 'When I get dressed in the morning, I have my 15 minutes, and it's an act of self-care,' said Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. 'And [Philo's] clothes allow me to feel cared for when I get dressed.' Philo invokes a mania more akin to a cult leader than a fashion designer. And it is safe to say that wherever Philo's eye goes, the world follows. It's almost impossible to overstate her influence — especially when few of the ideas of luxury designers are accessible, pragmatic or novel enough to permeate throughout the rest of culture. (The old cerulean sweater trickle-down paradigm of 'The Devil Wears Prada' is ancient history.) Women who call themselves the Philophiles still seek out the pieces she made during her time at Celine, from 2008 to 2017, on resale platforms. The language that Philo created at that brand, of oversize tailoring and fluid dresses with a boxy or blousy top, all done with a subdued sense of mischief, remains everywhere today. Its understated appeal was the building block of 'quiet luxury,' and this is still the predominant way that working women younger than 40 dress, as a look at Instagram or TikTok, or a walk around a white-collar office, will show you. Brands such as Frankie Shop, Favorite Daughter and Zara have iterated relentlessly on her Celine designs, making it accessible to a wide array of women even if they are unaware they're wearing a Philo-inspired garment. (And, as some of these knockoffs demonstrate, it is easier to make an oversize blazer than one that fits perfectly.) Perhaps that's because, although she speaks rarely publicly and lives quite privately, Philo designs autobiographically. The little pleasures and obsessions and annoyances and inconveniences of a woman's life are her lived experiences and the meat of her creativity. Few designers offer this mix of pragmatism and oddness (perhaps because there are so few female designers these days). Philo, who is now 51, is making clothes for her peers, making the 50-something woman, with all her eccentricities and anxieties and well-earned confidence, fashion's trendsetter, or even soothsayer. 'I'm a grown-ass woman, and her clothes make me feel like a grown-up,' said Nasr. Actress Tracee Ellis Ross, one of the most fashion-fluent women on the planet, let alone in Hollywood, has a ravenous dedication to Philo's clothes. 'I was online, waiting,' said Ross, who is 52, of the moment the brand launched in fall of 2023. While she often wears borrowed clothes for the red carpet, as many actresses do, 'everything [by Philo] that I've worn is stuff that I purchased.' She has brown trousers and an asymmetrical jacketlike top, fringy footwear she calls her 'horseshoes.' 'I have a rule about social media,' Ross said. 'I don't do anything for social media — it's what I'm already doing and what I am wearing. So I don't put on outfits to take a picture for social media. And Phoebe's clothes work for my sensibility and also how I live my life.' 'I can't wear certain things anymore,' said Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the founder of the New York gallery Salon 94, who is in her mid-50s. 'And I don't mind. I had a great time in them, but they are just not for me anymore. They're not for my age. And I feel my age in her clothes, and I feel good in my age. And that is something that distinguishes her clothes from many other designers.' While the brand launched less than two years ago, retailers are already seeing other designers taking notes from her work. 'She seems to have no intention to set trends and yet the impact of her work is immediate,' said Yumi Shin, chief merchandising officer at Bergdorf Goodman. 'When we launched Collection A as the brand's first physical retail experience, we saw the industry quickly embrace the crop bomber jacket, the slouch jeans, high-neck collar detail, leather jackets and trenches with detachable scarves. In Collection B, the overdyed T-shirts and denim also inspired others to follow suit and continues to do so.' While Philophile brands (and their cousin, the Rowdents) have diluted Philo's Celine concepts into something partly tasteful, the designer has adapted a naughtier attitude: one that embodies how women think about aging today. These are extraordinary but wearable clothes for adult women, and Philo is letting her freak flag fly with clothes that are not obviously flattering or cloying — a slightly radical act in an industry that lionizes youth. Philo's colors are not brown or pink or white but 'sludge,' 'floss pink,' 'apricot shearling' 'chewing gum,' 'salt.' Shirts have tails; jackets appear to have spines. These are not simply meant to be kooky ideas but real clothes to wear. Several of her customers described Philo's clothes as 'solving problems.' 'She's grounded in a very real world: I've got to actually wear these clothes and get from point A to point B, and things can be designed and can be beautiful, but they have to serve a function,' said Nasr, who has worn Philo's garments since the designer's days at Chloé in the early 2000s. 'And they're not necessarily here for male gaze. They're here for me to feel great and empowered in.' 'What's so remarkable about her thinking is that these are clothes that are meant to be worn every day,' said Shin. A T-shirt dress, or long ball skirt made of tiers of silk, might at once seem like an overly casual or overly formal idea — but her way of building clothes makes them wearable in a multitude of ways. And notably, they are different from a common but sometimes condescending romanticism of aging, that celebrates the graying woman in big jewelry and patchy fur. Philo's heroine is powerful and extraordinarily confident, and most of all, cool. The ferocious independence with which Philo operates her label has helped it maintain a cult status. While some in the industry have groaned that she mostly sells her clothing online and has not done a traditional runway show, that has kept her work from getting sucked into the social media pipeline that overexposes much of fashion. 'There is an element to the way Phoebe is dropping her clothes that allows for an allure that I love because it's not a thing that everybody has touched and grabbed and commented on,' said Ross. 'It's something that's like you either know or you don't.' Younger woman are now taking up the look. Lotta Volkova, who helped invent the Miu Miu girl as the brand's runway stylist, recently shared a picture of herself in a gorgeously odd skirt with a sculpted crest of jersey at the waist. The girl is all grown up.
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘I Know What You Did Last Summer' features shocking cameos by 2 award winners (spoilers!)
Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the new I Know What You Did Last Summer revival. Guess we know what these two award winners — and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise veterans — did last summer. Sony never tried to hide the fact that Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. would be returning for the just-released 2025 revival as Julie James and Ray Bronson, who barely survived their own close encounter of the slasher kind with the hook-wielding Fisherman killer in the original 1997 film. But this latest Last Summer features a pair of shocking cameos by two other key players from the first movie and its 1998 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Daytime Emmy winner Sarah Michelle Gellar and Grammy winner Brandy Norwood both return for the new film — which takes place 25 years after the events of the original — and their surprise appearances inspired loud cheers and applause in the screening that Gold Derby attended. More from Gold Derby How 'Smurfs' points to the dire straits of the Best Animated Feature Oscar race 'She dies with me': Shari Lewis' daughter talks Lamb Chop's final act - including a new TV show and that song that will never end Gellar's cameo was particularly shocking, because the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star was adamant in interviews that she wouldn't be joining Hewitt and Prinze — her real-life husband — onscreen, despite a personal appeal from the film's director, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. The reason for her resistance? The fact that Gellar's character — Southport, N.C.'s resident beauty queen Helen Shivers — didn't survive her first run-in with the Fisherman. "As I explained to Jennifer, I am dead," Gellar told Entertainment Tonight in 2023. "I am dead dead. On ice. "[Jennifer was] like, 'Are you sure you're dead dead?' I'm like, 'It's soap-dish dead. I don't have a head. You can't write for someone that doesn't have a head. I'm dead.'" And, for the record, Helen is still dead in the new Last Summer — avoiding the dual resurrections that Buffy Summers endured during the course of her vampire-slaying adventures. (If you need a memory refresh, Buffy was brought back to life by CPR at the end of Season 1 and via witchcraft at the start of Season 6.) Instead, Gellar returns in a dream sequence and greets her contemporary counterpart, aspiring beauty queen Danica (Madelyn Cline). Gellar's return is hinted at earlier in the movie when Danica's best friend, Ava Brucks (Chase Sui Wonder), is filled in on the lore of the Southport serial killer by a visiting true-crime podcaster (Gabbriette Bechtel), who has Helen's face emblazoned on a T-shirt. There's also a cameo of sorts by Helen's equally dead boyfriend Barry Cox, played by Ryan Phillippe — the one O.G. cast member who doesn't return. During a visit to a graveyard, two characters stumble upon Barry's tombstone and make a joke about the double meaning of his last name. Later on, Ava and Danica are being held at the police station when the latter falls asleep and slips into a hallucinatory recreation of the beauty pageant that preceded her predecessor's gruesome demise. Even in the afterlife, Helen has plenty of attitude. After teasing Danica for her Fisherman-related fears, she gives the poor girl actual shivers as her pageant-perfect face decomposes into a talking corpse. Throughout her brief, but memorable cameo, Gellar is quick on her feet and quick with the quips — which gives fans all the more reason to look forward to the upcoming Buffy revival, directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. Buffy's second life will also hopefully give Gellar a second shot at a Primetime Emmy nomination — something she was repeatedly denied during its original seven season run despite the show's acclaim. Her performance was nominated for a Golden Globe, a TCA Award, and a Gold Derby TV Award for Drama Lead Actress of the Decade in 2010, nine years after the series finale aired. Prior to her vampire slaying days, she received two Daytime Emmy nominations for her breakout performance as Kendall Hart on All My Children, winning the statuette in the since-discontinued Best Younger Leading Actress category in 1995 at the age of 18. Meanwhile, her Last Summer performance netted her a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Supporting Actress, as well as an MTV Movie Award nomination for breakthrough performance. Make sure you don't run screaming from the theater when the Last Summer credits start to roll, because there's one more surprise in store. A mid-credits sequence switches locations to a suburban house where news coverage of the latest Southport killing spree is playing out on a living room TV screen. Watching the footage is none other than Norwood's Karla Wilson, who had the unfortunate luck to be college roommates with Julia during the events of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. And she's clearly not over the experience all these years later. "Why do people keep trying to kill this girl?" she marvels to her husband. But then a knock on the door signals that her past and present are about to collide. Sure enough, Julia is there to fill Karla in on what just happened — and what's going to happen next. Another killer is still out there and rather than wait for him to come to them, they're going to go to him. Stay tuned for I Definitely Still Know What You Did Last Summer in 2027. Norwood made her theatrical feature film debut with the Last Summer sequel, which hit multiplexes one year after she headlined the beloved 1997 TV movie musical version of Cinderella costarring Whitney Houston. Like Gellar, she was nominated for an MTV Movie Award and a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for playing Hewitt's friend and fellow Fisherman target. The film also arrived in the middle of Norwood's storied late '90s Grammy run, which started with nominations for Best Female R&B Vocalist in 1996 and 1997 for "Baby" and "Sittin' Up in My Room," respectively. (Funnily enough, she didn't record a song for the second Last Summer soundtrack, but Hewitt did use the film to drop her own single, "How Do I Deal.") Norwood struck awards gold in 1999 with her sophomore album, Never Say Never, featuring her blockbuster duet with Monica, "The Boy is Mine." That track received Grammy nods for Record of the Year and Best R&B Song, and won for Best R&B Performance by a Duo — a victory that the singers shared. Never Say Never was also nominated for Best R&B Album, but lost to Lauryn Hill's legendary solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. In an appropriate bit of timing, Norwood and Monica are hitting the road in October for "The Boy is Mine" tour. That's also when the new I Know What You Did Last Summer will be available for Halloween streaming. Now we know how '90s kids will be spending their spooky season... Best of Gold Derby Everything to know about 'The Batman 2': Returning cast, script finalized Tom Cruise movies: 17 greatest films ranked worst to best 'It was wonderful to be on that ride': Christian Slater talks his beloved roles, from cult classics ('Heathers,' 'True Romance') to TV hits ('Mr. Robot,' 'Dexter: Original Sin') Click here to read the full article. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jennifer Love Hewitt stuns in little black dress during rare red carpet appearance
Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified Jennifer Love Hewitt's character in "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Jennifer Love Hewitt is turning heads with a rare red carpet appearance. In one of her only red carpet jaunts over the last six years, the actress turned heads in a black dress adorned with beads at the July 14 premiere of the newest film in the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise. While debuting copper locks, she paired her all-black look with sparkling heels and rings. Hewitt, 46, rose to fame with costar Freddie Prinze Jr., 49, in the original 1997 film "I Know What You Did Last Summer." In the film, Hewitt's character, Julie James, was among the teen targets of a mysterious killer. In the 2025 version (in theaters July 18), the plot takes place nearly 30 years after the murders wreaked havoc on the small North Carolina town. In the film, new victims (played by Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon) – who are targeted by a mysterious killer – seek help from Prinze and Hewitt's characters. Jennifer Love Hewitt opens up about aging 'as humans, we want to evolve' Hewitt and Prinze were members of a quasi-Brat Pack including fellow Hollywood stars like Prinze's wife Sarah Michelle Gellar, whom he met while filming the first movie. Ryan Phillippe, Johnny Galecki and Anne Heche also starred in the original. Monica Lewinsky stuns for rare red carpet appearance at 'Good Night, and Good Luck' Both the "Last Summer" series and 1998's "Can't Hardly Wait" became cult classics, cementing Hewitt as a '90s teen idol, but Hewitt got candid last year about the public's response to how she grows older. Though the actress said "it's not personally hard" for her to embrace aging, for fans, it's a different story. "I feel like fans pick … this age that they love that they think represents you, and you're never supposed to grow beyond that," she told Fox News, referencing a quote from Taylor Swift's documentary "Miss Americana" in which the pop star says something similar. "People seem to have a really hard time accepting that … I don't look that way anymore," Hewitt said. "Whatever it is, you just want to have the freedom to be whoever you are at that age," Hewitt added. "And it's hurtful sometimes when people reject you as you are verbally on Instagram or the internet because they're having a hard time adjusting to it." Contributing: KiMi Robinson, Anna Kaufman This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jennifer Love Hewitt stuns on red carpet Solve the daily Crossword
USA Today
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Jennifer Love Hewitt stuns in little black dress during rare red carpet appearance
Jennifer Love Hewitt is turning heads with a rare red carpet appearance. In one of her only red carpet jaunts over the last six years, the actress turned heads in a black dress adorned with beads at the July 14 premiere of the newest film in the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise. While debuting copper locks, she paired her all-black look with sparkling heels and rings. Hewitt, 46, rose to fame with costar Freddie Prinze Jr., 49, in the original 1997 film "I Know What You Did Last Summer." In the film, Hewitt's character, Helen Shivers, was among the teen targets of a mysterious killer. In the 2025 version (in theaters July 18), the plot takes place nearly 30 years after the murders wreaked havoc on the small North Carolina town. In the film, new victims (played by Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon) – who are targeted by a mysterious killer – seek help from Prinze and Hewitt's characters. Jennifer Love Hewitt opens up about aging 'as humans, we want to evolve' Hewitt and Prinze were members of a quasi-Brat Pack including fellow Hollywood stars like Prinze's wife Sarah Michelle Gellar, whom he met while filming the first movie. Ryan Phillippe, Johnny Galecki and Anne Heche also starred in the original. Monica Lewinsky stuns for rare red carpet appearance at 'Good Night, and Good Luck' Both the "Last Summer" series and 1998's "Can't Hardly Wait" became cult classics, cementing Hewitt as a '90s teen idol, but Hewitt got candid last year about the public's response to how she grows older. Though the actress said "it's not personally hard" for her to embrace aging, for fans, it's a different story. "I feel like fans pick … this age that they love that they think represents you, and you're never supposed to grow beyond that," she told Fox News, referencing a quote from Taylor Swift's documentary "Miss Americana" in which the pop star says something similar. "People seem to have a really hard time accepting that … I don't look that way anymore," Hewitt said. "Whatever it is, you just want to have the freedom to be whoever you are at that age," Hewitt added. "And it's hurtful sometimes when people reject you as you are verbally on Instagram or the internet because they're having a hard time adjusting to it." Contributing: KiMi Robinson
Winnipeg Free Press
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
No last stop in sight for Streetcar
Stanley, Blanche and, of course, Stella! Nearly 80 years since Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden and director Elia Kazan made A Streetcar Named Desire the stuff of theatre legend, the play that Tennessee Williams often said was the best work of his illustrious career refuses to slow down. 'I was reading in a book that before COVID, somewhere in the world, A Streetcar Named Desire was playing every hour,' says George Toles, who is directing the Pulitzer-winning drama for the independent theatre company the 28th Minute. Arthur MacKinnon photo From left: Kevin Ramberran, Heather Roberts, Justin Fry and Sophie George star in Tennessee Williams' most famous work. 'Kazan said that if it's cast properly, it always works, and that's because of its dramatic shape, its characterizations, its vitality, its humour.' When the play debuted in 1947, it disinterred deeply rooted taboos, paving the way for a stream of theatre — sweaty, lurid, streetwise and feverishly realistic about the politics of sex — that forever changed the form, adds Toles, a longtime film and theatre professor at the University of Manitoba who has directed Williams' Confessional (2018) and Suddenly, Last Summer (2014) for the 28th Minute. 'The emotional challenges it brings up have in no sense been resolved, tamed or domesticated,' the director says. Over the course of an hour-long roundtable, the director and his principal cast — Heather Roberts, Justin Fry, Sophie George and Kevin Ramberran — could hardly contain their enthusiasm for a piece of work Toles describes as having a 'primordial energy,' achieved by its mingling of poetry and realistic prose. In Williams' hands, the two were one in the same. Roberts, who takes on the indelible role of Blanche DuBois, says there's no character she's encountered in her career more intricately layered and challenging to reconstruct than the southern educator. 'I think Blanche is always the smartest person in the room. I feel she's constantly speaking butterfly language to caterpillar people,' says Roberts. It's a role that actors often dream of taking on — that is, until they're tasked with embodying DuBois' raw emotion on a nightly basis. In Truly, Madly, Stephen Galloway's book on Vivian Leigh's tumultuous marriage to Laurence Olivier, he quotes Leigh as saying that playing DuBois 'tipped me into madness,' Roberts has maintained her affection for DuBois. She says the character reveals Williams' intent to craft Streetcar as 'a plea for the understanding of delicate people.' 'I feel if there's a question in this play, it's how to stay soft in a hard world. How do you maintain the vision of beauty and wonder and not fall prey to those external, rocky influences?' Fry, who plays Stanley Kowalski, a role immortalized by Brando, extends Roberts' thought by considering the play as an exploration of methods of survival. 'Stanley is very much about practicality,' says Fry, who has long yearned to portray the brutish young man. 'Being able to survive in this world means needing to be focused on the right things, and poetry is not one of them.' 'As much as Blanche lives for the hope of it all, she does fail at practicality,' says Roberts. 'I would say that the same question of survival emerges for Stella,' says Toles, who believes the character's method of self-preservation is in self-censorship and selective invisibility amid the chaos around her. 'One of the most challenging parts for me in playing her is living in the quiet. Stella says, 'I just got used to being quiet because he never gave me a chance to talk.' That's difficult as an actor to play, especially from the start. So being able to find the emotions Stella is feeling, not just what she's saying. The most helpful thing for me is approaching her without any judgment.' The omnipresence of impending doom and the whims required to evade it suffuse the production, possibly because when he wrote Streetcar, Williams, who was 36, was under the impression that he was dying. 'Without that sense of fatigue and that idea of imminently approaching death, I doubt I could have created Blanche DuBois,' the writer, who wouldn't have a funeral until 1983, told Esquire's Rex Reed in 1971, on the occasion of the playwright's 60th birthday. 'Death haunts this play for sure,' agrees Toles. The 28th Minute mounts one production every year, with each performance serving as a showcase for its cast and crew, who prepare in a basement studio at the University of Manitoba. Under Toles' tutelage, each participant brings a studious approach to both character and craft, often remaining for hours after rehearsal finishes to fine-tune their performances. By producing carefully selected works by playwrights such as Annie Baker, Kenneth Lonergan and Will Eno, the company sets its actors up for career-altering roles. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Fry made his Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre debut earlier this season in the backcourt dramedy King James, parlaying years of success in indie settings to a starting role for the province's largest company. For the actor, who is currently pursuing a master's degree in counselling psychology, the role of the intermittently stable Kowalski provides a professional opportunity for personal development. 'When you work with fictitious people written this well, what you have is really a study of human behaviour and understanding who we are,' Fry says. For Toles, who calls it his favourite play, Streetcar comes as close as any work of modern theatre to answering that eternal question. Ben WaldmanReporter Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University's (now Toronto Metropolitan University's) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben. Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. 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