Malala Yousafzai Brings Wit and Grit to GQ Hero Interview, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

Malala Yousafzai Brings Wit and Grit to GQ Hero Interview, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

Malala Yousafzai Brings Wit and Grit to GQ Hero Interview, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

Shot-in-the head while sitting on her school-bus in 2012, Taliban gunman survivor Malala Yousafzai was among the British GQ Heroes 2025 honored in early July. AOC notes that Brunello Cucinelli was also among the artists, activists and radical thinkers at the two-day event and on the cover of British GQ’s special issue. We must track him down.

GQ’s interview by Adam Baidawi launches on a private practice golf range an hour southeast of London. And she is giving him instructions.

The Uncomfortable Truths for Activists

Much of the interview is devoted to all the back-sliding happening around the world on women’s rights — and especially in Afghanistan, where Malala is deeply involved in girl’s education. And how activism has gone lukewarm in many countries around the world.

Badawai asks a critical question:

What’s an uncomfortable truth about the work that you do?

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Fendi Takes A Modern View of Roman Style in Fall 2025 Campaign by Steven Meisel

Fendi Takes A Modern View of Roman Style in Fall 2025 Campaign by Steven Meisel

Fendi Takes A Modern View of Roman Style in Fall 2025 Campaign by Steven Meisel

AOC loves Paris and the south of France. But we’ve been saying for many months now that it’s an Italian moment, and nothing — not even the king of cashmere’s current Italian sweatshop scandal — will dampen AOC’s love affair with la dolce vita.

Fendi’s fall-winter 2025 campaign film begins with a visual dose of sophisticated retro nostalgia, peppered with modern reinvention. In speaking with WWD about the fall-winter 2025 collection, Silvia Venturini Fendi stressed the reality that the fall 2025 collection presents “a contemporary and comprehensive vision of the brand”.

Fendi is also aiming to convey this modern message with ancient roots with the inauguration of a new sprawling flagship on Milan’s Via Montenapoleone.

Anne Is Swept Away

Depending on your age, the soundtrack will completely sweep you away. OMG! Barry White.

If you have lived a privileged life resulting from family heritage — or are a working girl who made good and led a privileged life based on your smarts — and you regularly kissed the ground landing in Italia, you will be swooning.

Personally, Anne is destroyed with this campaign video.

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Nicole Kidman News: Clé de Peau Beauté Ambassador, Portugal Residency, 2015 Playing Gertrude Bell

Nicole Kidman News: Clé de Peau Beauté Ambassador, Portugal Residency, 2015 Playing Gertrude Bell

Nicole Kidman News: Clé de Peau Beauté Ambassador, Portugal Residency, 2015 Playing Gertrude Bell

Actor Nicole Kidman made news last week with her skincare routine under scrutiny, now that the ‘Moulin Rouge’ actor became a new global ambassador for Clé de Peau Beauté [IG].

Clé de Peau Beauté has never pursued a superficial, external approach to physical beauty and the appointment emphasizes the shared values between the beauty brand and Nicole Kidman’s actions as a humanist.

Intelligent, Intentional, Illuminating Beauty

As a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, the actor dedicates herself to advancing gender equality, supporting education, and combating violence against women. Her humanitarian work echoes Clé de Peau Beauté’s core mission: to empower individuals and transform beauty into a vehicle for confidence, purpose, and positive impact.

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Actor Eva Mendes Embraces a Sensual Life | What Might Neuroimaging Her Brain Reveal?

Actor Eva Mendes Embraces a Sensual Life | What Might Neuroimaging Her Brain Reveal?

Actor Eva Mendes Embraces a Sensual Life | What Might Neuroimaging Her Brain Reveal?

Actor, activist, wife of Ryan Gosling and mom to their two daughters, Eva Mendes is a fabulously sensual woman. Much of American culture would call her a sex bomb.

Eva Mendes also calls herself a sex bomb, highly influenced by her husband’s deep appreciation for her sex appeal.

I asked AI to explain how neuroimaging would differentiate brain activity in a person who particularly enjoys fragrant flowers, dancing, and swimming with heightened awareness and intense pleasure. Someone like Eva Mendes.

AOC has been a huge fan of brain science for years because our brains are truthful when different regions are activited.

The basic idea I want to communicate is that our brains are a fingerprint of sorts of who we are. In the case of Eva Mendes, I promise you that she has highly-elevated SPS, as defined in point 4.

She also has elevated Openness to Experience, as defined in my Louis Vuitton analysis from Monday, see final notes in article link.

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Louis Vuitton FW25 Offers Express Bag for High Speed, High Performance, High Self-Expectations Lives

Louis Vuitton FW25 Offers Express Bag for High Speed, High Performance, High Self-Expectations Lives

Louis Vuitton FW25 Offers Express Bag for High Speed, High Performance, High Self-Expectations Lives

Louis Vuitton Women taps House Ambassadors Emma Stone and Hoyeon Jung for the Fall/Winter 2025 Campaign, lensed by Ethan James Green.

Before Speedy Came Express

Bags and luggage are the visual currency of the Louis Vuitton brand. They also ring the cash register at critical levels to support LV’s position in the LVMH heirarchy. The FW25 Campaign is focused on its latest handbag: the Express, a roomy reprise of the original name of Vuitton’s signature Speedy handbag.

Louis Vuitton’s Chairman and CEO Pietro Beccari delivered press comments detailing the important role ‘The Louis’ marks on the new journey the luxury brand is taking into the DNA of Louis Vuitton itself. Reinforcing key buzzwords, Beccari stressed the importance of Louis Vuitton’s spirit of travel being experienced not only by crossing national borders, “but through ideas, emotions and inspiration.”

Anne drills down on exactly what Beccari’s words mean.

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Doechii Covers British Vogue August 2025 Issue, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

Doechii Covers British Vogue August 2025 Issue, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

Doechii Covers British Vogue August 2025 Issue, Lensed by Elizaveta Porodina

I’ll not derail this spectacular British Vogue [IG] August 2025 issue cover story starring Doechii, with the origin of the expression ‘hell on wheels’. Or how it morphed into a gender-specific phrase applied to women.

Stella Greenspan styles Doechii in regal clothes from top luxury houses, lensed by Elizaveta Porodina.

Vogue writer Jazmine Hughes, author of Doechii’s cover story ‘“I Was Born To Do This”: Hip-Hop Disruptor Doechii On The Year She Entered The Stratosphere’ covers a wide berth in the interview.

Life is good for Florida’s self-described Swamp Princess, who grew up in Tampa, Fla. Here we get a taste of Doechii’s sound.

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LVMH's Michael Burke, New Chairman and CEO of its Americas Division Steps Into the Frenzy

LVMH's Michael Burke, New Chairman and CEO of its Americas Division Steps Into the Frenzy

LVMH's Michael Burke, New Chairman and CEO of its Americas Division Steps Into the Frenzy

It may be LVMH’s newly-named chairman and chief executive of its Americas division Michael Burke, who first introduced the term ‘hodgepodge’ to the popular press and select financial analysts’ LVMH lexicon.

Anne will explain, but first the latest news.

The Burke appointment comes at a critical moment when the luxury sector is haunted by waning demand and US President Donald Trump’s ever-changing, often daily, tariffs landscape.

LVMH also appointed Burke as nonexecutive chairman of Tiffany’s board of directors. He retains his 2024 appointment as Chairman and CEO of LVMH Fashion Group.

In June and July 2025, AOC has been obsessed with the word ‘hodgepodge’ being bandied about by select financial analysts, with the tangential support of several fashion journalists. Their focus is a lack of branding clarity around Louis Vuitton in particular.

Referring last evening to the issue, I set off again this morning, trying to document the original source of the word. The person may be none other than Michael Burke.

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Naomi Campbell Taps Humanity's Origins in Dazed Magazine 'Celebration' Issue 2025

Naomi Campbell Taps Humanity's Origins in Dazed Magazine 'Celebration' Issue 2025

Naomi Campbell Taps Humanity's Origins in Dazed Magazine 'Celebration' Issue 2025

Supermodel Naomi Campbell takes one cover of Dazed Magazine’s [IG] Summer 2025 issue, the last one under the editorial vision of IB Kamara, who also photographs Naomi.

The glorious Naomi Campbell channels humanity’s oldest African origins and self-adornment using beads, shells and hair collages made of twigs, real flowers, leaves and even stones and butterflies that honor the deep ties between humans and nature.

Transit In and Out of Africa Was Not a One-Way Ticket

No discovery has unseated the region of Lake Turkana, which includes the Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia and the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, as the route humans took out of Africa into the Levant.

AOC readers understand the attempts by white nationalists to press the case for a superior group of humans who came from the north, eventually reaching the Levant themselves. Anne has a personal mission to follow this argument very closely.

Out of Africa and into Bronze Age Canaan

After sharing critical new DNA info on Africans carrying Neanderthal DNA at much higher levels than previously tested [blowing out the white men from the north theory], AOC moves to recent DNA analysis that proves as high as 30% shared DNA between Palestinian and Jewish men with ancestors living together as Bronze Age Canaanites.

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Prada Balm in Banana Yellow Celebrates the 'Days of Summer' Campaign 2025

Prada Balm in Banana Yellow Celebrates the 'Days of Summer' Campaign 2025

Prada Balm in Banana Yellow Celebrates the 'Days of Summer' Campaign 2025

AOC returns to Prada’s ‘Days of Summer’ marketing campaign, where the Prada pink gozzo is moored beside the Prada Capri boutique, in Via Roma 2, until July 13th.

Prada Beauty Lip Balms in Macaron Colors

This Prada campaign is being executed with such colors of comprehensive precision that Prada Beauty lipstick glosses are the mouth-enticing colors of French macarons. Scratch that. I mean Italian Macaron colors.

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Goldman Sachs Adds LVMH to European Conviction Buy List, Ignoring Analysts and Fashion Writers

Goldman Sachs Adds LVMH to European Conviction Buy List, Ignoring Analysts and Fashion Writers

Goldman Sachs Adds LVMH to European Conviction Buy List

My case for LVMH got a big boost Monday, July 7th with Goldman Sach’s decision to add LVMH to its European Conviction Buy list. Goldman’s Louise Singlehurst recommends investors "look through Q2 softness and Buy into LVMH" as a clear winner in the next luxury upcycle, noting asymmetric risk reward with potential upside of 69% versus 5% downside.

The Goldman analysis also mentioned that the steep selloff of LVMH shares borders on being irrational. This was welcome news after the June 22, deeply-personal, Bloomberg supplied hit piece on LVMH published on BoF.

I then read — again from HSBC, the same financial institution that financed all of Donald J. Trump’s bankruptcy business messes, when no other bank would — that the current Louis Vuitton brand strategy is a “hodgepodge”. Seriously!

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Tyler Mitchell Shoots Ralph Lauren Pre-Fall 2025 Campaign | AOC Talks Values

Tyler Mitchell Shoots Ralph Lauren Pre-Fall 2025 Campaign | AOC Talks Values

Tyler Mitchell Shoots Ralph Lauren Pre-Fall 2025 Campaign | AOC Talks Values

We’re living in a moment of small victories,and surely photographer Tyler Mitchell [IG] feels great pride — and his family even moreso — over Mitchell shooting the Ralph Lauren [IG] Pre-Fall 2025 Campaign. Ralph Lauren carries great symbolism and respect in the Black community.

Ralph Lauren 2024/25 Business Results

The top leadership got big raises coming off an excellent 2024 performance that resulted in a 16.8 percent increase in the stock price for the year ending March 31. Since March 31, the stock has risen another 20 percent.

Like Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli, and Prada, Ralph Lauren’s Asia business is very strong. In China Ralph Lauren saw 20 percent growth in China in their 4th quarter ending March 2025.

Louvet has definite opinions about why the business is strong in China:

It’s important to keep in mind that Ralph founded this company on values that are pretty universal: optimism, authenticity, timelessness, elegance, family. Those are globally relevant and are resonating wherever we play, including markets where you might be concerned about anti-American sentiment.

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