Latest news with #SlouchingTowardsBethlehem
Vogue
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Olivia Rodrigo Keeps an Emergency Cheese Inside Her Vintage Bag
'I've been so into animal print lately,' Olivia Rodrigo says of her vintage leopard print Fendi bag—a gift from a friend. But not only is it fashionable, it's functional. 'I kinda schlep around a lot of stuff,' she admits. Rodrigo loves all things cute, and the contents of her bag more than prove it. Take her phone, which she keeps in a maroon puffer case. 'It reminds me of like a little jacket to keep my phone warm,' she says. (Her screen time? Only four hours. Talk about a brag!) On her keys, she affixed a little bear keychain she got in Japan. She also got a matching one for her best friend. 'It has a little hat that comes off,' Rodrigo coos. 'I love when they have accessories and you can dress them up.' Don't worry, though, the bear isn't lonely: she also has a bunny that she got in Amsterdam (yes, it has a hat, too). 'I'm obsessed with this game called Cambio,' Rodrigo says, pulling a deck of playing cards from her purse. While she admits that she can't find the rules online, she teaches the English pub game to members of her tour and friends around the world. Though she claims she's gatekeeping the rules, 'I am spreading the word, spreading the gospel about this game. It's so much fun, it's addicting.' With random spurts of free time on tour, Rodrigo also keeps a book handy. Her latest read was gifted to her by the singer St. Vincent, who inadvertently helped inspire Rodrigo's song 'All-American Bitch' by giving her Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. '[A teenage hippie] called their mom an 'all-American bitch,' and I thought that that was really cool,' she says, 'so I circled it.' Here, watch Olivia Rodrigo show us the contents of her bag, from the Babybel cheese she's obsessed with to her favorite fragrance. Director: Gabrielle Reich Director of Photography: Paola Oliveros Editor: Michael Suyeda Producer: Chase Lewis Producer, On Set: Michelle Bruno Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg Associate Producer, On Set: Oadhan Lynch Assistant Camera: Annie Mara Gaffer: Jon Alvarado Audio: Nicole Maupin Production Assistant: Quinton Johnson Production Coordinator: Tanía Jones Production Manager: David Alvarez Paz Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew Supervising Editor: Kameron Key Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch Director, Content Production: Rahel Gebreyes Senior Director, Digital Video: Romy van den Broeke Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson VP, Video Programming: Thespena Guatieri
Tatler Asia
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
From Sylvia Plath to Donna Tartt: 5 trending books you'll find in every It girl's tote bag
'A Secret History' by Donna Tartt Above 'The Secret History' by Donna Tart (Photo: Ivy Books) Intellectually elite, morally ambiguous and cloaked in a mist of fatalism, A Secret History offers the kind of heady narrative that It girls are known to gravitate toward. Tartt's tale of a group of eccentric classics students who commit murder and try to rationalise it through philosophy reads like The Talented Mr. Ripley set in New England academia. The book, a trending fixture since TikTok revived it, explores the seduction of aesthetics and ideas taken to extremes. With its gothic sensibility, Greco-Roman references and quietly sinister tone, it's no surprise this novel has earned a spot on the bookshelves of fashion insiders, models and artists. Tartt's characters are cold and brilliant—qualities often projected onto the modern It girl, for better or worse. 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' by Joan Didion Above 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' by Joan Didion (Photo: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Few writers have the cultural currency of the infinitely cool Joan Didion, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains her most iconic work. A master of restraint and razor-sharp observation, Didion captures the fragmentation of 1960s America with dispassionate clarity. Her essays blend memoir and reportage, revealing a mind endlessly attuned to chaos beneath surface order. For the It girl who prizes intellect and quiet detachment, Didion offers an ideal model: fiercely articulate, enigmatic and impossible to imitate. The book's understated black-and-white covers and clean typography make it a favourite among minimalist tastemakers. More than a trending book, it's a blueprint for cool-headed self-possession. 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith Above 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith (Photo: Ecco) Patti Smith's Just Kids is a memoir of bohemian life in 1970s New York, chronicling her artistic partnership with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It's romantic but not naïve, poetic without being precious. Smith details their rise from poverty to art-world prominence with an earnestness that's oddly radical in the age of irony. The It girl reader finds resonance in Smith's early hunger—for beauty, for expression, for significance—and in her resilience amid chaos. Unlike the curated intimacy of influencers, Smith's vulnerability feels unfiltered. It's a book that doesn't ask for admiration, only attention, and that's precisely what makes it an enduring favourite. 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh Above 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh (Photo: Penguin Press) On the surface, Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation might look like satire for the hyper-privileged. A beautiful young woman, numb with grief and aimlessness, attempts to medicate herself into oblivion by sleeping through a year in Manhattan. But beneath its absurd premise is a biting critique of self-optimisation, consumer culture and the fetishisation of wellness. The protagonist is unlikeable, opaque and often hilariously cruel—yet her disillusionment feels cuttingly relevant. With its minimalist cover and sardonic voice, this trending book has become a kind of anti-self-help bible for the It girl who is sceptical of overexposure and allergic to performative healing. These titles share more than just shelf appeal. Each explores identity, alienation or the tension between public persona and private self—territory that It girls know intimately. Whether it's Plath's portrayal of suffocating expectations, Tartt's intoxicating intellectualism or Moshfegh's elegant nihilism, these trending books offer a mirror to women living under constant observation. They are aesthetically spare yet emotionally intense, rich with complexity but never overwrought. In a world obsessed with content, women for literature that asks more of her and gives something back.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How the Movies Made Joan Didion a Great American Writer
We go on needing Joan Didion. The aloof gaze; the Scotch and cigarette chic; the crestfallen scrutiny of America, of life. Whatever combined in her, we seek it over and over, in a way that seems only to be intensifying since her death in 2021. She has become one of the things she was most suspicious of: a myth. One of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. This is the famous line that provides the title for 'We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,' Alissa Wilkinson's thoughtful, perceptive new study of Didion and her relationship to movies. It's one of those books that apprehend their thesis on the very last page. 'The movies,' Wilkinson, a film critic for The New York Times, writes, 'shaped us — shaped her — to believe life would follow a genre and an arc, with rising action, climax and resolution. It would make narrative sense. The reality is quite different.' This passage identifies exactly the fracture from which Didion wrote; for all her legendary cool, the controlling emotion of her work is almost always dismay. How could the world be like this? The dream from which she fell into that disillusionment, Wilkinson convincingly suggests, was the silver screen. Didion knew this herself, to some degree. Born in Sacramento in 1934, she was a daughter of both the West and the western. 'When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams,' she wrote in 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' her landmark 1968 book of essays. In her senior year at Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and moved to New York. Her success thereafter was never really in doubt. She was, as they say on sports radio, a generational talent — so brilliant that in the genre at which she was second best by some distance, fiction, she produced, in 'Play It as It Lays,' from 1970, a classic whose influence is still reverberating through contemporary fiction. After returning to California with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1964, she tried to break into Hollywood. Her story there was that of so many great writers before and after her: failure, more or less. Her mind was perhaps too intricate for a medium that rewards ingenious simplicity. ('It's not writing, but it can be fun,' Dunne wrote of screenplays.) To be sure, the pair got some credits, perhaps most famously for 'The Panic in Needle Park' (1971), which, Wilkinson writes, portrays 'what's believed to be the first real drug injection shown in a feature film.' Maybe just as important to Didion and Dunne, the couple went to a lot of great parties. Their daughter, Quintana Roo, played in a cage with Barbra Streisand's pet lion cub. Many years later, when Quintana Roo was sick, Didion flew back to L.A. on the private jet of her former carpenter, Harrison Ford. 'We Tell Ourselves Stories' has lots of excellent details like this for the dedicated Didion fan. But its strongest sections are the ones that question rather than venerate her. Wilkinson is superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion's worldview. She grew up as a conservative, and was a proud Goldwater supporter: 'At dinner parties, she'd announce that she was voting for him, sometimes shocking her fellow diners.' When she wrote, 'The center was not holding,' at the start of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' her most famous essay, she was not talking about Vietnam or Jim Crow. She was talking about hippies. Conservatism is the shadow side of romanticism; the ideal is in the past, rather than the future, but they share an aspirational unreality. Didion was too shrewd to keep believing in movies or the G.O.P. very far into adulthood: John Wayne was a phony tough guy and a John Bircher. But she never got over her heartbreak about the loss of those entwined beliefs. When they merged, in the Reagans, she was horrified, in Wilkinson's words, at their 'vapidity, a fixation on image to the exclusion of anything else.' Even then, she started calling herself a libertarian. Wilkinson seems to start out adulating Didion before moving uneasily into a more realistic diagnosis of her, as a rattled declinist. 'Didion had been trafficking in some kind of nostalgia all her life,' she writes late in the book, in the tone of a realization. It's a disquieting trait to find in a great writer, especially when camouflaged, like Hemingway's sentimentality, behind acerbic rigor. Yet it's also probably why Didion keeps growing larger in our minds: Her fatalism seems prescient, not melodramatic. Have you checked in on the center lately? Is it holding? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This searching, conscientious book leaves us with the question of what happens when everyone stops believing them at once.
