Culture

Crossing streets with lattes in hand, camera lights flashing, perfectly curated outfits meant to be noticed, and a crisp chill in the air means one thing: New York Fashion Week has arrived. The September Fashion Week has long stood as the pinnacle of American fashion prestige. As the leaves turn red and brown, style photographers capture eclectic ensembles in motion, A-listers march through the streets and assistants carefully place nameplates on front-row seats beside pristine runways. But this year the week’s shimmer feels noticeably dimmed. The big names still show up – Michael Kors, Calvin Klein, Tory Burch. But in recent years they’ve been eclipsed by smaller, edgier and distinctly New York-based designers.

It is now more than three decades since President Bush the First declared that American families should be “more like the Waltons, and less like the Simpsons.” In this, as in so many other things, Bush was to be disappointed. Thirty-three years after he made his remarks, the Waltons are now barely discussed in popular culture, if at all, while the exploits of America’s most famous yellow-skinned family have now moved into their 37th season with a further three, at least, planned. This is a degree of longevity that is unparalleled in any live-action sitcom equivalent, and the show’s creator Matt Groening could be forgiven for doing a victory lap.

The last time Republicans were this mad at the Smithsonian Institution was in 1991. Then as now, America’s national museum system was gearing up to celebrate a major date: in that case, the quincentenary of the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Senators threatened spending cuts, accusing Smithsonian officials of having a “political agenda” with their representations of race and immigration in exhibitions. Thirty-four years later, on the eve of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, Republicans are saying the same things. Donald Trump reworded his predecessors’ criticisms in his own style, suggesting on Truth Social that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on the negative, too little on the positive.

When Bryan Cranston staggered on-screen in the opening scene of Breaking Bad in 2008, stumbling out of a crashed RV dressed only in his underpants, and addressed the camera with, “My name is Walter Hartwell White…to all law enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt,” he immediately changed perceptions of who he was as an actor. Previously, he was best known for being the goofy dad in Malcolm in the Middle, and despite some effective straight performances, most thought of him as a comedic performer, rather than the star of what became the most talked-about crime drama series since The Wire. Jason Bateman would, one presumes, like to follow Cranston’s lead.

The defenestration of the supposed talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, for the inflammatory remarks that he made during the monologue in his show on Monday night about Charlie Kirk, is both an unexpected and deeply predictable development. It was unexpected because Kimmel clearly believed that he was, like Lehman Brothers, “too big to fail,” and was therefore within his rights to make such comments as how “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” And it was deeply predictable because Kimmel now becomes the latest scalp that the right have seized this year, and perhaps the most high-profile yet.

The new comedy Splitsville amusingly diagnoses several urgent social ills. The film mocks those who treat marriage not as an expression of solemn vows but as a ticket to unfettered happiness to be discarded at the first sign of discontent; it also excoriates those who view the institution as so meaningless – just a piece of paper – as to persist in the midst of openly acknowledged affairs, romances and one-night stands. In its own coarse, fumbling way, Splitsville has an instinctive sense of how human beings long for monogamy and order even while they court freedom and licentiousness. Splitsville stars Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona as Carey and Ashley, a young couple who, 14 months after getting hitched, find themselves with different notions about the success of their union.

The third and supposedly final Downton Abbey picture released in American cinemas this Friday. Ominously subtitled The Grand Finale – oh how I wish, given the residual camp elements within the show, that it had instead been called The Final Curtain! – it supposedly wraps up the story of the Grantham family, the privileged idlers who inhabit the eponymous grand house, and their unusually devoted and long-serving staff, all of whom converse with their superiors on easy and intimate terms that bear precisely no relation to how the English upper classes have ever spoken (or been spoken to) by their servants in history. Still, if you’re looking for historical accuracy from Julian Fellowes’ Downton, you are not going to find it.

Jane Austen was born in Hampshire on December 16, 1775, the seventh child of a poor country rector. Despite being red-cheeked and a good dancer, she never married. And despite the handful of novels she wrote under the byline “A Lady,” she was always considered by her family less promising than her older sister. She died of a painful illness at 41. Her books found a readership that included the Prince Regent, but she had some prominent detractors. Charlotte Brontë scorned them: “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” Where were the windswept moors, the big feelings? In the next century, D.H. Lawrence dismissed Austen as “mean” and “snobbish.