Eye | John Galliano Returns At Teatime London | Hollywood Stands For Charlie | Adidas Originals Ad Campaign
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Helen Mirren shows support for free speech, holding Je Suis Charlie sign at January 11 Golden Globe awards in Hollywood.Adidas Originals | #OriginalSuperstar
Some of the best, memorable ad campaigns are launched by athletic brands, and the new Adidas Originals campaign hits a real high note inspite of a strong bass line. In the age of selfiedom — now promoted in more not memorable Spring 2015 campaigns than we can count — Adidas has a values-driven message: stop being obsessed with your own fame.
You can live through the lives of celebrities, says Adidas, even if you are Rebecca Harrington writing about her adventures in celebrity dieting in I’ll Have What She’s Having, out this week from Vintage. New York Magazine features Harrington’s ‘I Tried Taylor Swift’s Diet and It Was A Joy’.
John Galliano Returns to Runway Today
John Galliano with model Cara Delevingne at a London party December 2014.Former Dior Creative Director and Designer John Galliano will return to the fashion world today, as he debut’s French Label Maison Martin Margiela Artisanal collection at London’s menswear show. WWD reports that Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz, Burberry’s Christopher Bailey and milliner Stephen Jones are expected to attend the event.
Jones says that the event will occur at 4:30 pn London time at a “warehouse space in Westminster”.” It’s ‘Teatime’,” explained Margiela spokeswoman Jade Guishard, “which is very English.”
Perfect Timing?
If Guishard is right and timing is everything in life, Galliano might wish for a different day to showcase his work. The impetuous, alcoholic design talent, who has received major support from Vogue’s Anna Wintour and supermodel Kate Moss in his recovery, faced a deadly public relations backlash over his antisemetic, drunken February 2011 rant at the La Perle cafe in the Marais.
Unfortunately, the Marais is also the location of Paris’ terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket, with four dead bodies now headed for Israel, rather than burial in France. Anti-Semetic attacks and incidents in France more than doubled during 2014, says the French Ministry of Interior. About 7,000 French Jews moved to Israel from France in 2014 up from 3,300 in 2013. It’s believed that 15,000 French Jews will migrate to Israel this year, writes Middle East Eye.
Note that anti-Muslim attacks have also increased in France and throughout Europe over the same period.
Whether current events will impact the viability of Galliano’s return to fashion design will be decided after the first collections are shown. Galliano may no longer be relevant as a designer, writes The Guardian. Certainly his theatrical, over-the-top designs have no place at Martin Margiela. After phase one’s focus on the clothes, European retailers will decide whether or not to embrace again fashion’s bad boy now enjoying a revitalized, sober life based on values that resonate — or so he says.
Hollywood’s Golden Couple
Actor George Clooney opened women’s hearts around the world at last night’s Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood. The activist actor, who received the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille award, thanked his beautiful wife Amal Ramzi Clooney, née Alamuddin, (note that the world can’t figure out how to state her name) for coming into his life. Clooney, who married the Lebanese-born human rights lawyer at a spectacular September 2014 wedding in Venice, said with heart-felt words: “Amal, whatever alchemy it is that brought us together, I couldn’t be more proud to be called your husband.”
Amal Clooney looked absolutely ravishing in Dior, wearing a simplified elegance diametrically opposed to John Galliano’s theatrical designs for the luxury brand.
Earlier in the week, Clooney disputed a widely distributed story that Egyptian officials warned the human rights lawyer that she risked arrest if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary.
In an article written for The WorldPost, Clooney said it was “experts in Egyptian affairs” who issued the warning over a February 2014 report for the International Bar Association, not the authorities, as was reported in The Guardian, writes The Times of Israel. Clooney is on the defense team for Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy.
Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, chief of the Al Jazeera English bureau in Cairo before his arrest, released an op ed in the NY Times Op Ed on January 6, 2015 Al Jazeera Journalists Are Not Egypt’s Enemies.
It’s impossible for a political novice to summarize the intricacies of Fahmy’s op ed. In summary, he writes:
We three journalists had unwittingly been dragged into a cold war between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on one hand and Qatar and its allies, including Turkey, on the other.
Increasingly, it feels that the entire world is drawn into this puzzle of warring relationships in the Middle East. In the coming weeks and months, we will try to make sense of it in the world of financing terrorism and meting out harsh penalities to free speech advocates and — equally important — the world of women’s rights in countries that refuse to move into the 21st century.
An example that stunned us, researching Saudi Arabia last week, in conjunction with its sentence of 1000 lashes to blogger Raif Badawi. Saudi Arabia has no civil penal code. The country operates on interpretations of Sharia law, but even that hasn’t been codified despite promises to do so in 2010. A criminal procedure code was introduced in 2001, but it’s largely ignored.
Reason magazine shares a phone video of Raif Badawi’s first of 20 public floggings. AOC has a long history of involvement in empowering women in the Middle East, and this remains our focus, although we will follow the Raif Badawi case and its global outpouring of condemnation. In announcing support for Raif Badawi, we shared the public flogging of a woman in Sudan, where 40,000 women a year are flogged for indecent dress.
