Spectator Life

Contrary to what we redheads have been led to believe, we are not disappearing. Our numbers have increased in the past 10,000 years, according to a recent Harvard study. What’s more, researchers found, being ginger may actually be desirable as far as natural selection is concerned because "having red hair was beneficial 4,000 years ago." The reason why has yet to be discovered. But it’s good news for the class bully, producers of sunscreen and those – like me – who’ve had a love-hate relationship with the variants in their MC1R gene which leads to red hair and pale skin. I was an extreme redhead as a child growing up in Scotland; not one of the beautiful ones with long, auburn curls and green eyes.

Forget the protesters versus police clash on the West Coast: this week's fiercest battle of wits is between a Vietnamese fashion critic and the Vice President of the United States. The man running an anonymous X account dedicated to critiquing politicians' attire, Derek Guy, may find himself America's next top deportee. Guy, who has criticized Pete Hegseth's USA socks and Sam Altman's strange trouser bagginess, took to X Sunday evening, to come clean about his own illegal residence and disgust with the Trump administration's deportation agenda. "My family escaped Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and went through an arduous journey that eventually landed them in the Canada," Guy wrote. From Canada, his dad went to the US to work, overstaying the legal timeframe.

It was typical Kamala. Did she really want to be at the Met Gala or not? She couldn’t seem to make up her mind. So the candidate that the Democratic party thought could beat Donald Trump in the race to be US president skipped the red carpet, slipped in a backdoor of the Metropolitan Museum and posted a photo of herself in a black and white silk gown on social mediaThe look in her eye as she stared at the camera was pure uncertainty. Had she just stepped on another landmine, obvious to everyone else but her? The caption on the photo tweeted from the Democrats account may have read, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala,” but that is not how most Americans will view it.

Though it got somewhat lost in our daily swirl of World In Crisis, last week marked a potentially significant moment in American industry: the formal introduction of a new, low-cost US-based car company. This company is called Slate, mercifully no relation at all to the online magazine. The startup, significantly backed by Jeff Bezos, last week pulled the sheet off a $27,000 fully electric pickup truck, which should be available by the end of 2026.The Slate Truck is significant for what it doesn’t have. The body is plastic, the manually adjustable seats cloth and it lacks electric windows. The driver will operate the windows with a manual crank. It has two doors, a 4x5 bed and black painted steel wheels. It comes in basic gray.

Melania Trump’s one-of-a-kind wedding dress is on sale for an asking price of $45,000 on eBay. The ivory duchesse satin dress was worn at the 2005 wedding between the future president and first lady – and also featured on the cover of Vogue magazine, the sole instance of international model Melania appearing on a Vogue cover. Jill Biden, meanwhile, has two to her name. The Christian Dior gown was designed by John Galliano. It took over 500 hours to hand-sew 1,500 Swarovski diamonds onto its 13-foot train. Its reported original manufacturer’s suggested retail price was $210,000, but it will now be sold at a fraction of the price after being worn only a handful of times.

Donatella Versace was never supposed to be a fashion designer. She had no formal fashion education and was happy working on the business and styling of Versace as her brother, Gianni, built his house into Milan’s most opulent. But, in 1997, a madman brutally murdered him — and someone had to keep his legacy and brand alive. And so Donatella did. Over the almost 30 years that followed — struggling through grief, business troubles and addiction — she has released more than 100 collections, grown the brand into a multi-billion-dollar giant and did so aggressively, without selling out its style or quality. Her recent Fall /Winter 2025 collection was an eccentric, fabulous celebration of those decades, pulling exuberantly from the Versace archives.

Most of the people in my feed spent their weekend talking about how ashamed they are of their country. That’s a sentiment I don’t share. But a very specific shame was still very much on my mind because of the Trump-Zelensky press conference: suit shaming.   The suit shaming of President Zelensky started as soon as he arrived at the White House looking like one of the henchmen from Anora. As Zelensky stepped from an SUV, Trump commented on his outfit: “He’s all dressed up today,” a power-player rhetorical cue to make Zelensky appear poor and small.   At the press conference, the media itself got in on the suit-shaming.

Last Friday afternoon, amid the menswear shows for Paris Fashion Week, a crowd of influencers, shoppers, celebrities and fashion journalists waited for Dior’s latest collection. Attendees, however, weren’t chatting about what they expected from the clothes, or the staging, or the state of the brand, or what they were hoping to see. Instead, it was all about the fate of its designer. The show received strikingly positive reviews, with critics raving over Dior Homme’s return to simple form and immaculate craftsmanship. But before, throughout, and after, one question saturated the air: would this be the last show by its men’s creative director, Kim Jones?

In her favorite room of the White House, the Yellow Oval room, stands Melania, in a black Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit. She’s less Barbara Bush, more the first female James Bond.  Mrs. Trump's second official portrait appears to be a deliberate homage to the promo photograph for Diamonds Are Forever, which depicted Sean Connery standing firm with an American flag rippling behind him. It is, according to Caleb Daniels, author of Licensed Troubleshooter: The Guns of James Bond: “a clear celebration of the work of Terry O’Neill, who captured portraits in this style for Connery and Brosnan.’ When Melania’s portrait was released, Daniels says he had to look twice.

What do the musicians Paul Weller and Daryl Hall, the gallerist Iwan Wirth, and the actor Gary Oldman have in common? A taste in tailors. I meet Tom Arena, who's just set up a regular pop-up atelier, in his suite-cum-studio on the Chelsea Hotel’s fourth floor. He has just finished a morning of fittings with “Young British Artist” Liam Gillick and the makeup queen Bobbi Brown. I’m here for my second suit from Arena and the sheer abundance of cloth and swatch books of the world’s finest yarns makes my head spin: Fox Brothers tweeds, Dormeuil cottons, Caccioppoli linens and silks, exquisite Venetian linings and trimmings.

Both Jaguar and Volvo released online marketing campaigns that went extremely viral this week. One was a huge success and one was a legendary ad bust. But they’re both absolutely terrible, for very different reasons. Jaguar offered a hideous future shock of an ad that featured a cast of multicultural unisex models wearing bright, horrifying, ugly outfits, wielding paintbrushes and ball-peen hammers. In a font that may have looked futuristic around the release date of the original Logan’s Run, Jaguar encouraged its fleeting consumers to “create exuberant” and “live vivid,” among other things, but never actually encouraged them to drive or purchase a car. In fact, a car doesn’t even appear in the ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Each year, more than 40,000 people die in car accidents — and most of them are caused by user error. Set aside drunk driving and texting and live-streaming while driving a McLaren in the rain; even in normal conditions, humans are just not, fundamentally, great drivers. So imagine a future without that; where death by car accident is a freak occurrence and driving is handled by expert computers instead. We don’t use elevator operators anymore and are glad for it — and autopilot systems have long made flights safer. Why not let computers drive us too? True “Level 4” autonomous cars wouldn’t just make commutes more pleasant, letting you read or sleep as your car takes you to work, but save many, many lives. I believe in that future.

On Monday night, celebrities, designers and the highest edges of New York’s upper crust attended the biggest party of the fashion calendar, the Met Gala. Given its supposed importance, you’d think the looks would always be fantastic; that it would be a night for designers to compete for the best, most creative, most glamorous couture. The reality is a lot more disappointing. There are only ever a few truly standout looks, with most being bland at best — and when designers bother to follow the theme, it’s usually in a painfully uncreative manner. The message of the Met Gala should be that the fashion industry is filled with incredible creative talent. But it usually just tells you that money doesn’t buy taste; nor does being employed by Chanel.

It’s summer and very warm on the famed Café Tomaselli terrace in the heart of Salzburg. Nevertheless, I’m sipping a hot coffee and nibbling strudel (mit Schlagobers — whipped cream, of course!) with Melissa (Missy) Baldino. We are talking food, fashion and Rike & Co., the charming entrepreneur’s new business. Missy launched Rike & Co. this past October from her charming Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may seem a bit incongruous in this age of hyperfeminism to be selling aprons and housedresses. But “Rike & Co.,” Missy says, “is all about family and being fashionable while cooking and doing housework and everything else that many of the fairer sex still enjoy doing.

Nike — named after the Greek goddess of victory — is seemingly too scared to be associated with US armed forces; or more aptly, too frightened to offend someone. Their famous Military Blue sneakers have been renamed: as the “Industrial Blue” Jordan 4. I was watching Nike’s “Jordan Retro Preview” event on the Nike Sneakers app, tempting my urge to buy yet more sneakers (at more than sixty pairs, I desperately need some more). In most ways, it was like every other Sneakers Live stream. There was good releases (the Jordan 1 “Artisanal Red”), some very bad ones (dear God, the green Jordan 1s) and many, many, many more that I expect to see on clearance shelves across America.

It was inevitable. Having infected every other part of culture, partisan politics has arrived in the world of sneakerheads.  Last week, Trump announced that he would be at Pennsylvania’s Sneaker Con, to some consternation. “Donald Trump showing up to hawk bootleg Off-Whites is the closest he’ll get to any Air Force Ones ever again for the rest of his life,” snarked Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler. So last Saturday, sniffer dogs and Secret Service security were among the hypebeasts, old heads and collectors. To boos and cheers alike, Donald Trump took to the stage, announcing his own sneaker line. He held up his first sneaker to be released, the limited “Never Surrender High Tops.

The view from my top floor room at the Steigenberger Hotel de Saxe looked out at the great dome of the Frauenkirche. It’s a huge Baroque church in the center of Dresden; I first saw the building on foot, when failing to find a local restaurant on my first night there. I turned a corner to see it towering above me. It looks like it’s always been there, but the original was destroyed in 1945, under the infamous British firebombing, and reconstruction only finished in 2005. I was eventually directed to the restaurant, past the Oktoberfest stands that began sprouting up during my visit in late September. However beautiful the town, I was not here for “Florence on the Elbe” and its grand buildings, but for smaller, more delicate wonders from a nearby town. And so, at 8 a.m.

Matthew Williams, the tattooed American fashion designer and creative director at Givenchy, will soon be evicted from the famous house. Givenchy announced on December 1 that Williams would leave his job at the end of the year. Nobody is particularly surprised. His three-year tenure has been controversial and highly disliked by many, and also hasn’t produced any viral products. It was obvious Williams’s publicists knew his time was up too. Late last year, he was profiled by Jessica Testa in the New York Times; an article built around the fact that designer contracts typically only last three years, and that his time at Givenchy wasn't producing hits. Diesel, Vetements, Loewe and Balenciaga have all spun controversy into sales. The best Givenchy achieved was disappointment, if that.

The Cybertruck is here. Finally. Maybe. Sort of. Thursday was the “Cybertruck Delivery Event,” where they finally rolled off the production line and were handed over to waiting customers. Musk served as chaperone, host and speaker, and the event was a hype-fest for fanboys. As the presentation started, it was hard to tell whether some in the crowd were shouting “Elon” or “hallelujah” (I think the latter). He presented a polished marketing video, markedly sparse on specs, but promised that the Cybertruck was one of those rare products that change how we see the world; that it is “more truck than truck,” while also being “a better sports car than a sports car” and the best product Tesla had ever made. It’s not.

Practical political wisdom says height is one of the few reliable indicators of electoral victory. In the case of Ron DeSantis, it explains why he is trailing behind 6’3” gargantuan Donald Trump. It also may explain why DeSantis is being accused of wearing four-inch lifts in his favorite pair of cowboy boots.   The Florida governor was confronted with a viral clip of his hidden heels during an episode of the Patrick Bet-David podcast this weekend but denied the allegation. “Those are just standard of-the-rack Lucchese boots,” DeSantis said, adding that he is indeed 5’11”.   https://twitter.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1719095369412284594?

It would have happened on a Thursday, as it does every Thursday. Crowds of young men and teen boys would have lined up outside stores around the globe, in hopes of buying the latest drop from Supreme — the pugnacious streetwear brand which rose from New York skater shop to global multibillion-dollar fashion colossus and sold to fashion conglomerate VF Corporation for $2.1 billion in December 2020. Even if you don’t care about skating or streetwear, you would instantly recognize a white T-shirt slapped with their logo; a red box, with “Supreme” in Futura Heavy Oblique font inside. Celebrities love Supreme, the stylish (Hailey Bieber, A$AP Rocky, Kanye West) and the stylish-wannabes (Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Jaden Smith).