Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes | Official Trailer | HBO

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is a 2024 American documentary film, directed by Nanette Burstein. It explores the life and career of Elizabeth Taylor, told through access to Taylor's archives and newly found audio.

 

It had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2024, and was released on August 3, 2024, by HBO.

 

Explores the life and career of Elizabeth Taylor, told through access to her archives and newly found audio.

 

The film had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on May 16, 2024.] It also screened at the Tribeca Festival on June 11, 2024. and the Nantucket Film Festival in June 2024. It was released on August 3, 2024, on HBO.

 

The film received an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Documentary Lens

‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ and the Moment Star Worship Curdled

 

The documentary blends audio interviews with footage from her life to provide a revealing look not so much at the actress, but at celebrity culture.

 

Alissa Wilkinson

By Alissa Wilkinson

Published Aug. 2, 2024

Updated Aug. 5, 2024

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost TapesDirected by Nanette Burstein Documentary

Not Rated1h 40m

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/movies/elizabeth-taylor-the-lost-tapes-celebrity-culture.html

 

This summer, thanks mostly to the rise of Glen Powell, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about the state of movie stardom. The jury’s still out on whether we have “real” movie stars today, but it’s clear that the process of becoming a celebrity is different now from what it used to be. Social media and the popularity of small-screen entertainment have changed the game.

 

That question of stardom permeates “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” (premiering Saturday on HBO and Max), an intriguing documentary about one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, mostly in her own words. In the 1960s, Taylor gave interviews to the prolific journalist Richard Meryman, who died in 2015. Meryman, who had been known for his interviews with celebrities, was researching a book. Recently, some 40 hours of tapes containing Taylor’s interviews were found in his archive.

 

That audio, in which Taylor is reflective and candid, is the backbone for this documentary. The director Nanette Burstein takes a smart approach to the material, layering the conversation — along with audio from a handful of older interviews with Taylor and some of her friends — on top of archival footage from her life.

 

Taylor became a familiar screen presence while still very young, with her first screen role, in “There’s One Born Every Minute,” hitting theaters when she was 10, in 1942. Soon after, she starred in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet” and turned into a figure of fascination for the audiences. Thus the cameras followed her everywhere.

 

For the Taylor enthusiast, the film is unlikely to reveal much new information. But that’s not really the point. The movie covers each of her eight marriages and many of her projects, but Taylor’s narration focuses largely on her feelings at the time. Because we’re often seeing footage of her public appearances as she talks about her interior life, the result is almost like a behind-the-scenes track, a fresh disclosure of the disjunction between what we think we know about stars — who they are, how they feel — and what’s actually going on inside.

 

“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” also documents, with a harrowing frankness, the precise moment when the public’s interest in celebrities tipped over from worshiping their glittering lives to feeding on their scandals. As the film frames it, Taylor’s split from her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, after she fell in love with her “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton, prompted the birth of the paparazzi: photographers who would chase stars tirelessly to get a juicy shot they could sell. One commentator in the film says they weren’t coming for glamour anymore — they were coming for the destruction of glamour.

 

Taylor, in her own retelling, says that she decided at some point that it was fruitless to try to “fix” her public image. “People have a set image they want to believe, either the good or the bad,” she says. “If you try to explain, then you lose yourself along the way.” Of course, a series of high-profile fallouts with Burton, substance-abuse issues and her aging appearance were all reliable tabloid fodder. And it pained her, until she found a third act as an AIDS activist.

 

But “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” suggests that in her own way, Taylor, who died in 2011, paved the path for future generations of stars who would have to deal with celebrity. So it’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

 

A correction was made on Aug. 5, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated how many hours of recorded interviews were available. It is 40 hours, not more than 40.

Review

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes review – they don’t make stars like this any more

 

This absolute treat of a documentary uses a treasure trove of newly discovered audio interviews to paint an intimate, captivating picture of the actor

 

Lucy Mangan

Sat 10 Aug 2024 18.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/aug/10/elizabeth-taylor-the-lost-tapes-review-they-dont-make-stars-like-this-any-more

 

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes could have been called Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era. The tapes were found recently in the archive of the late journalist Richard Meryman. They include 40 hours of audio interviews Meryman did with Taylor as part of his research for a book. They start in 1964 when she was 32 and at the peak of her fame. Her voice is breathy and seductive until she needs to make a point, but it is always expressive and captivating – even without the accompaniment of her extraordinarily beautiful face.

 

Nanette Burstein’s film layers the Taylor-Meryman audio with archive film and television footage: we see 1940s and 50s Beverly Hills and Hollywood, Taylor at publicity events, her films, family snapshots, and newspaper and magazine clippings showing the post-juvenile lead with various beaux. Then there’s on-set footage recorded by close friends such as Roddy McDowall, showing them frolicking on the beaches with the likes of Montgomery Clift, or horsing around with James Dean on film sets. There is an inescapable innocence to it all, even now we know that the boyfriends were chosen and the dates arranged by her studio, MGM, and that most of her close friends were gay men, closeted by the social mores of the time. While Taylor provided a heterosexual gloss for these actors, they in their turn shielded the star from predatory straight men. The bloom may be off the 50s’ rose, but the idea of a world away from a thousand camera phones and instant social media cancellations remains curiously endearing – as does the appeal of an audience unified by their adoration of a handful of impeccably glamorous stars.

 

It was Taylor’s relationship with Richard Burton that helped usher in the new era. After her third husband, the producer Mike Todd, was killed in a plane crash in 1958, she created a scandal by “stealing” his best friend, Eddie Fisher, from his publicly beloved wife, Debbie Reynolds. She added insult to injury by divorcing Fisher after she fell in love with Burton when they met on the set of Cleopatra. Their relationship was denounced by the Vatican, they made headline news all over the world, and photographers began to follow them, disguising themselves to get close to the couple. The age of the paparazzo was born. The change is succinctly summarised in an interview with the actor George Hamilton: “They were not going for glamour any more. They were going for the destruction of glamour.”

 

It all creates an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of Taylor. Or the “trying-to-be-an-actress”, as she often refers to herself. The question of whether she would ever fully accomplish the transition from mere movie star is one that she was still pondering at the time of the Meryman interviews. Clips of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she and Burton starred as the bitterly and heartbreakingly co-dependent married couple George and Martha, are proof enough that she surely would have – if the studios and the public had given her the chance to leave the path they’d chosen for her.

 

The film does not sidestep the trap set by such intimate access and remains inescapably hagiographic. Meryman lets Taylor speak with barely any pushback (and when it does come, it is mainly when she claims not to feel like a sex symbol, and gives instead a practical, no-nonsense account of what it means for any attractive woman to move through the world). The film itself gives no hint of Taylor’s excesses and conspicuous consumption, which began when she was with Todd and were certainly part of her story by the time of Burton. Nor does it examine the stories of her temper, her selfishness or any of the diva-like behaviours that, while doubtless exaggerated by the media at the time, were not untrue.

 

The remaining decades of her life after the tapes end are compressed into the last seven or so minutes of the film. So we hear only briefly about her time being treated for drink and prescription-drug addiction at the Betty Ford clinic (no hint of it was made regarding the years covered by the tapes, when it was already under way), and there is nothing about either her marriage to Larry Fortensky (whom she met there), or her devoted friendship with Michael Jackson, all of which were emblematic of the far less composed or wise side than we get from the Meryman interviews. Her fearless and compassionate Aids activism, in the days when the disease still carried a terrible stigma, is given its due.

 

However partial, though, and however little new material it has to offer, even for the amateur fan like me, the film remains a heady treat. Because it is about Elizabeth Taylor. They don’t make them like they used to – and they probably never will again

Real Estate Mogul & Husband of Mama & Tata Influencer Candice Miller at 43 / How an Instagram-Perfect Life in the Hamptons Ended in Tragedy

How an Instagram-Perfect Life in the Hamptons Ended in Tragedy

 

Candice and Brandon Miller showed the public a world of glittering parties and vacations. The money to sustain it did not exist.

 

Katherine Rosman

By Katherine Rosman

Aug. 8, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/nyregion/brandon-miller-suicide-debt.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

In the modern Gilded Age of New York, where Instagram is awash in unrestrained displays of wealth, Brandon and Candice Miller were royalty.

 

At their 10th wedding anniversary “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, they celebrated with a few dozen friends in the backyard of their 5,500-square-foot vacation home in the Hamptons.

 

Beautiful women in gowns watched with their handsome husbands as the couple renewed their vows near a swimming pool strewn with peonies and rose petals beneath a canopy of lights.

 

It was a grand public display of their perfect life and marriage. Ms. Miller told a lifestyle blogger who wrote about the party that her husband’s speech “made me cry by the end with his authentic, raw emotion and romantic words.”

 

It all culminated in the kind of envy-inducing images anticipated by the roughly 80,000 followers of “Mama and Tata,” Ms. Miller’s popular Instagram feed, which featured a near-constant stream of photographs and videos of her glittering life.

 

The Midsummer Night party was in 2019. Five years later, the glamorous image that Ms. Miller cultivated and promoted has disappeared, replaced with heartbreak, anger and a mountain of once-secret debt.

 

Her husband is gone. The home they so ostentatiously lived in, saddled by several mortgages, is not truly their own. Lawsuits from creditors, business bankruptcies, botched investments and even a repossessed boat — the “Miller Time” — indicate that the wealth needed to maintain their lifestyle had evaporated, if it ever truly existed.

 

Mr. Miller, 43, died on July 3 at a Southampton hospital. A suicide note indicated he had killed himself while his wife and children were on vacation on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, according to a Suffolk County law enforcement official. He said Mr. Miller wrote that a business deal he had hoped would ease the family’s financial strain had collapsed.

 

His family was stunned. When Ms. Miller was contacted for comment, a family spokesman said she and the children were overwhelmed by grief. “Candice is devastated by the loss of her soul mate, and her two young daughters’ lives are forever impacted by the loss of their beloved daddy,” he said.

 

The Millers’ downfall has become the focus of obsessive talk in the Hamptons and among internet sleuths who have scoured Ms. Miller’s social media presence for clues to what went wrong.

 

This account of the family’s rise and fall is drawn from property records, legal filings and interviews with those who knew and worked with Mr. Miller. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, few agreed to be cited by name.

 

That Mr. Miller’s death occurred in the Hamptons during the height of the social season almost certainly has added to the intrigue, said Neil J. Young, a historian who is writing a book about the Hamptons. Here, the only thing as fascinating as opulent wealth is its sudden disintegration.

 

“This place is predicated, for a certain set, on showing off,” Dr. Young said. “It’s the homes one has, the things one does out here — from the restaurants to the workouts to the parties. But it’s a place where one can get overextended really quickly, where a house of cards can suddenly collapse.”

 

A chasm separated the Millers’ shimmering public lives and painful private reality. But their fall is also a source of very real grief — a story about trying to have it all, and what happens when you cannot.

 

“What people aren’t discussing in all of this is the loss of my little brother, someone I have loved unconditionally,” Mr. Miller’s sister, Maurley Miller, said in a statement after being contacted by The New York Times. “I have a hole in my heart that will never be filled. I am completely devastated.”

 

Perhaps no place in America is as perfectly Instagram-ready as the Hamptons, where striking natural beauty and extravagant wealth are juxtaposed in abundance. Lifestyle and fashion influencers spend their summers at the eastern end of Long Island, documenting their sumptuous lives.

 

Ms. Miller, 42, added to that canon when she and her sister, Jenna Crespi, started the “Mama and Tata” website and Instagram account in 2016 to provide fashion, shopping and decorating tips for wealthy women.

 

The account highlighted people in Ms. Miller’s orbit, like Ivanka Trump and Ms. Miller’s cousin-by-marriage, Arielle Charnas, an Instagram personality who influenced her influencer aspirations. The fitness impresario Tracy Anderson and the fashion designer Rachel Zoe made regular appearances.

 

But it mostly showcased Ms. Miller’s personal life and tastes. “Mama and Tata” became an alter ego and self-promotional marketing machine. Ms. Miller and some friends even started a fashion label that she celebrated with a launch party at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Her followers got regular glimpses of her active social life against the backdrop of grand homes in Manhattan and Southampton, European resorts, private planes, classic sports cars and speedboats.

 

She was known for her vintage designer gowns and for private fitness sessions (about $250 per hour on top of $900 monthly studio membership fees) that she filmed and shared online.

 

The Miller children’s birthdays were also an opportunity for Ms. Miller to entertain on a grand scale — for friends and for online fans. A Coachella-themed party for one daughter spawned a torrent of Instagram posts tagging the vendors Ms. Miller hired: a party planner, a florist and a DJ. Helping to keep it all afloat were nannies, housekeepers, drivers, boat captains and personal chefs.

 

But while “Mama and Tata” reveled in luxury, it spent no time delving into how the splendor was being paid for.

 

Though Ms. Miller poured time into her Instagram feed, it did not generate much revenue. Instead, “Mama and Tata” enhanced her profile in other ways.

 

In a 2019 article for an online magazine about the Millers’ Manhattan home — “our townhouse in the sky,” she called it — she posed for photographs with her two young daughters. The living room was decorated in all white, down to the white-spined books on the shelves. “It is so beautiful to sit in, as long as you aren’t wearing anything that bleeds, and exclusively drinking water,” she said.

 

Mr. Miller, on the other hand, eschewed social media — he primarily used a flip phone. Friends described him as a movie buff, basketball fan and car aficionado.

 

But when it came to his wife’s devotion to sharing their life online, she said he was all in. “I have the most supportive husband who encourages me to do whatever I love,” she told a lifestyle blog.

 

Off camera, they maintained traditional separations of duties, said a person familiar with their family dynamics. Ms. Miller oversaw the daily care of the children, and Mr. Miller focused on his business, which they rarely discussed.

 

She had visited his office only once, and she met his business partner just three times — including, most recently, beside her husband’s grave.

 

Brandon Miller developed commercial and residential projects in TriBeCa, Harlem and the Meatpacking District. He appeared to be a successful businessman in a city filled with them.

 

Yet by last fall, he was under so much pressure that when he attended a business meeting in a Midtown high rise, according to three people familiar with what happened, Mr. Miller sat at a conference table and began to weep.

 

He was in a financial free-fall that confidants are now struggling to piece together.

 

Mr. Miller began working in real estate a few years after graduating from Brown University, joining his father’s firm. Early in his marriage, the company developed a residential building in TriBeCa, and Mr. Miller acquired Unit 3 — the penthouse — for his family.

 

He and his father also bought two connecting lots in the Hamptons, one on the water and one behind it. They built homes on both, and sold one on the open market. Mr. Miller kept the other — a lavish home with expansive grounds that easily accommodated sit-down dinners for 60 friends.

 

The homes acquired from his father’s firm allowed the Millers to live as if they were mega-millionaires.

 

But Mr. Miller’s primary focus was commercial development. In a typical project, he raised money from investors to secure a long-term lease on a parcel of land before commissioning architects to plan a building. Once permits were in place, he sold the lease, the building plan and its permits to another developer for a profit, or took on more debt to cover construction costs.

 

Even when such projects go smoothly, the work can require developers to leverage many assets to secure loans that will carry them through the process.

 

“You’re dealing with people who can lose everything,” said Jay Neveloff, a real estate lawyer in New York.

 

Mr. Miller’s father, Michael Miller, managed that risk for many years, but his assets were highly leveraged when he died unexpectedly in 2016. His company and survivors were hit with lawsuits.

 

After his father’s death, Mr. Miller took over the company, alongside his father’s former partner. But soon, the pandemic made a challenging business even more difficult, as the city’s real estate market plunged. And while the residential market rebounded, the demand for office space did not return to prepandemic levels.

 

Mr. Miller found himself in a financial crunch. In 2021, near the bottom of the pandemic market, he sold the family’s TriBeCa home for just over $9 million, according to city records. The family set their sights on living uptown, in the type of co-op building that Mr. Miller had grown up in. But buying on the Upper East Side would have required significant cash.

 

Instead, they rented a 4,382-square-foot, five-bedroom apartment on the corner of Park Avenue and East 71st Street, according to court records — keeping up appearances for $47,000 per month. They decorated with rented furniture for which they paid $180,000 for one year, according to a lawsuit filed this spring, and $12,000 per month after the first year.

 

If this was downsizing, it wasn’t enough.

 

Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million.

 

And he leveraged the family’s prize asset, the Hamptons home, piling one mortgage atop another. He took out a $6.1 million loan from a conventional bank. Then, records show, he arranged another $2 million mortgage from a company that advertised cash loans that close in less than 24 hours.

 

The Millers continued to entertain in high style. In August 2022, they hosted a “Love Boat” party at Duryea’s, a beachfront restaurant in Montauk. Ms. Miller posed for photos with friends in a sleek white dress.

 

But Mr. Miller’s desperation was growing. A few weeks later, he borrowed yet more money against the house: a $2 million mortgage from a lender in Naples, Fla., facilitated by a family friend, Ryan Nivakoff, who contributed cash to the loan, according to public records and three people familiar with the Millers’ finances. Mr. Nivakoff declined to comment.

 

None of this was apparent to Ms. Miller’s online audience. In a video posted by Hamptons Magazine last July, Ms. Miller, in a strapless summer dress, answered questions about her preferred hot spots. Chicest shopping? “Chanel, East Hampton,” Ms. Miller answered.

 

By the fall of 2023, Mr. Miller could no longer hide the strain. His friends, aware of both his family’s expensive lifestyle and the sluggish real estate market, assumed he was struggling with debt.

 

Three of them arranged an intervention of sorts, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

 

The day before the meeting, the friends spoke by phone to discuss their approach. As they did, one of them searched the internet for a property that Mr. Miller was ostensibly developing in Brooklyn. The friend had invested $1 million in the project and had encouraged several colleagues to invest an additional $500,000 in all.

 

What he found online was alarming: The property had been purchased more than a month earlier by a developer with no connection to Mr. Miller.

 

Mr. Miller arrived at the meeting looking glum, according to three people familiar with what happened. He had just visited his father’s grave on the seventh anniversary of his death — an event from which those close to Brandon say he never fully recovered.

 

The friend who had given him money for the Brooklyn project told Mr. Miller that he felt misled and angry.

 

Mr. Miller broke down in tears. He insisted he had not done anything wrong but lamented that he had let his friend down.

 

The friend became teary-eyed and walked out. After a 15-year friendship, he and Mr. Miller never spoke again.

 

Reached for comment, the friend said their fractured relationship and Mr. Miller’s death have devastated him, and he otherwise asked for privacy. He has told others that he believed Mr. Miller had sincerely intended to use his money as a business investment before the deal went awry. Then, he believed, Mr. Miller let his financial burdens cloud his judgment.

 

Mr. Miller’s business troubles did not abate. He took over a land lease near the High Line in Manhattan that would require annual payments of more than $2 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. He immediately borrowed $1.5 million against it, according to public filings and people familiar with the transaction.

 

Within months, Mr. Miller fell behind in making the lease payments, Benny Barmapov, the landowner, said in an interview.

 

The pressure intensified when a private equity firm that had lent Mr. Miller’s company $36 million to help finance a development tried to collect on the overdue repayment.

 

At home, creditors were demanding money too. The marina that serviced the Millers’ boat sued for $55,000. The furniture rental company claimed in a lawsuit that he owed $100,000 in fees and had refused to return $64,000 in borrowed furniture.

 

Although his friends could sense something was wrong, Ms. Miller has said she was unaware of the family’s financial crisis, according to two people familiar with her thinking.

 

In January she was quoted in The Times, extolling the benefits of an $800 facial over filler injections and plastic surgery. “This makes you feel like your face doesn’t need that stuff,” Ms. Miller said, “if you’re truly committing to going every week or every other week.”

 

A canceled vacation

Candice and Brandon Miller at a summertime party in East Hampton sponsored by Hamptons Magazine.Credit...Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images For Hamptons Magazine

Earlier this year, the Millers were invited to spend a few days in the Bahamas at the home of Mr. Nivakoff, the friend who had helped underwrite one of Mr. Miller’s mortgages. But as the trip approached, Mr. Nivakoff wanted Mr. Miller to tell his wife about the debt or forget about the trip, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.

 

Mr. Miller canceled the trip, but Mr. Nivakoff did not relent.

 

In May, he called Ms. Miller directly, according to two people she told, and informed her that her husband owed him money. Her family, Mr. Nivakoff told her, was broke. Her house was carrying several mortgages, including one he had invested in.

 

Ms. Miller confronted her husband and asked to see their financial documents. He arranged a call with a lawyer to reassure her and eventually persuaded her that everything was under control.

 

Even then, their financial straits were growing more perilous. In early June, he borrowed $208,000 against the house from a company offering short-term loans. He never paid it back, according to the lender.

 

Later that month, the family had plans to travel to Europe, but Mr. Miller told his wife he had to stay home to close a deal that would help their financial situation, according to three people familiar with the discussion. He encouraged her and the children to go without him — after all, he told her, the trip was already paid for.

 

Ms. Miller took their daughters abroad and posted photographs from Spain and Italy. Only later did they learn the trip had not been paid for; after her credit card was declined, her travel agent had to guarantee the hotel bill would be paid.

 

On June 28, Mr. Miller texted his wife to tell her the deal intended to ease their money crisis had closed, according to two people familiar with the situation.

 

But he also reached out to at least one friend that week for a loan that should have been pocket change for someone like him: $1,000, according to two people aware of the request. On June 29, he attended a polo match and barbecue in the Hamptons.

 

On June 30, the police were notified that a carbon monoxide alarm had gone off at the Millers’ home. Emergency medical workers found Mr. Miller unconscious in a white Porsche Carrera that he had rigged to poison himself, a Suffolk County law enforcement official said. Rescue workers found a photo of him, his wife and their children in the car.

 

Mr. Miller was rushed to a hospital and placed on life support.

 

In an email left for his wife, Mr. Miller admitted he had lied. The business deal he hoped would save them had fallen apart, he said.

 

He expressed his love for his wife and children. He wrote that he believed he was doing what was best for them — the note mentioned two life insurance policies totaling about $15 million. He wrote that he had struggled against dark feelings for years.

 

In a graveside ceremony attended by family and a small circle of friends, he was laid to rest next to his father.

 

The dismantling of their dream life began almost immediately. A mortgage lender sued Ms. Miller for $800,000 in missed payments and interest. The Miller Time was repossessed. And the “Mama and Tata” Instagram account was pulled offline.

 

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.

 

Lauren Hirsch contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

 

Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players and individuals making an imprint on New York City. More about Katherine Rosman

Fashion … or fascist? The complicated history of the Fred Perry polo shirt

 

The complicated history of the Fred Perry polo shirt A symbol of all countercultures, first left and then right

 

October 2nd, 2020

Author

Lorenzo Salamone

https://www.nssmag.com/en/fashion/23747/fred-perry-polo-shirt

 

In 2020 everything is political, even clothes. Recently, for example, Fred Perry had to withdraw a black and yellow polo shirt from the North American market because it had become the unofficial uniform of the Proud Boys, a radical alt-right group also mentioned by Donald Trump in his last presidential debate with Joe Biden. The removal of polo from the market is perhaps the brand's first move to redefine the culture surrounding its polo - a common item in itself but on which layers of political meanings have accumulated over the years, first left and then right.

 

Le origini

In the 1960s, in England, the children of immigrants from Jamaica and Barbados, who came to Europe after World War II, introduced musical genres such as ska and rocksteady among the young people of the English working class, and the aesthetics that became known as that of the rude boys. Influenced by American jazz culture, the rude boys of Jamaica dressed in tailoring suits, micro-ties and felt hats. Don Letts, director of the documentary The Story of Skinhead recalls those years:

 

«You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together […]. Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. […]They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things».

 

The polo shirt was a central garment in this movement originating in the working class because on the one hand it was an economic version of the shirt - garment much more expensive at the time - and on the other it was associated with the world of tennis, a sport typical of the English elite. Fred Perry was an athletics brand, its name still linked to the aristocratic imagery of Wimbledon, and his products far more accessible than the expensive suits that mods of the time got made at Savile Row. The white polo became therefore both the symbol of a social aspiration through which young people of the street could appropriate the visual language of the higher classes, and a distinctive and identitarian sign of their generation and class of belonging. It was at this time that the Fred Perry pole was associated with the left-wing political movements.

 

Meanwhile, the political situation in the United Kingdom was beginning to become turbulent at that time, with a climate of distrust and xenophobia that resulted, in 1968, in a famous speech by the conservative Enoch Powell, which went down in history as the Rivers of Blood speech. The MP drew the coals of intolerance, drawing a gloomy picture of immigrants who came to England stealing work from white Britons, and further tightening the already problematic attitude that part of society at the time had towards multiculturalism.

 

Stadiums, clubs and shaved heads

The aesthetics that the children of migrants had brought to England, of that working class that was now internally divided and full of hostility towards multiculturalism, then flowed back to the young white and disillusioned of the industrial cities of the north of England who found in football a valve of vent to their problems, their isolation and anxiety about the future – issues that emerged in the violent culture of hooligans and skinheads. Fred Perry's polo shirt, already, acquired new cultural meanings as it laid the groundwork for the birth of the casual hooligan aesthetic that over the decades would incorporate brands such as Stone Island and Lionsdale.

 

At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s the main groups of hooligans were formed, having already behind a tradition of clashes and violence: between '61 and '68 there was an average twenty-five violent episodes each football season. In the early 1970s, cultural tensions were rising, choirs and racist abuse were commonplace for footballers of Afro-Caribbean origin and, as always happens in times of economic hardship, far-right groups were experiencing a new life. The U.K. National Front, the main of these groups, recruited new members right at the exit of the stadiums and, to attract young people, began to open clubs in the various cities, where they could gather, listen to live music and dance. The only requirement: to be a party member.

 

 The strategy began to work and more and more young whites from the northern English working classes joined the party. Meanwhile, the term skinheads, born around 1968, had become increasingly popular as the ranks of the movement swelled. Their main trait, as the name implies, were the shaved heads while their uniform consisted of jeans or military trousers with suspenders, Dr. Martens boots and the inevitable Fred Perry polo shirt covered by a bomber jacket or a harrington jacket, whose collar and tennis inspiration were the synthesis of the motto: "Dress well and behave badly". The multicultural element of this proletarian aesthetic disappeared both in terms of inclusivity and musical: the musical genres Oi! were born and punk rock, a mixture of rock played in National Front pubs and stadium choirs.

 

In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher implemented her neoliberal and isolationist policies in the United Kingdom, neo-Nazi and far-right demonstrations increased dramatically. Amid those demonstrations, skinheads began to appear whose outfits were becoming increasingly politicizing, associated with members of the National Front. Skinheads hanged in the streets of Bethnal Green, harassing Bangladeshi immigrants and citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent. It was at this time that the skinhead aesthetic forever linked to right-wing nationalist movements.

 

From UK to USA

When Ronald Raegan became president of the United States in 1981, his conservative policies gave new impetus to that neo-Nazi substrate that had remained, until then, more or less dormant in the United States. A historical and cultural juncture that allowed the skinhead culture to spread overseas with all its various cultural significances – including the now iconic Fred Perry pole. Young white right-wingers, rejected by the anti-Republican values of punks, found skinhead culture a cultural platform to express their identity. So much so that when the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the leading civil rights organizations, inserted Fred Perry and Dr. Martens into their skinhead identikit in the early 1990s.

 

A new change came in the 1990s and early 2000s. The youth subcultures of past decades became a visual archive of reference that the Brit Pop generation exploited in full, stripping it in part of its political connotations and transforming it into the mainstream image of the English rock singer. Pete Doherty and The Libertines, Oasis, Blur and later Amy Winehouse all appropriated the edginess of the skinhead movement - retaining the idea of rivalry and social anger of the working class but eliminating the nationalist element that survived within the more underground circles that were increasingly extreme in England as well as in America. The Fred Perry polo shirt at that time became a symbol of the British style whose political resonance remained, due to its mainstream commercialization, at least partly indistinct.

 

Today, groups known as the alt-right, such as the Proud Boys, are not too proud to associate directly with neo-Nazis, even if their political ideals are completely aligned with this political ideology. Although the skinhead culture has come to an end and the movement loses relevance, the visual and identity imagery of Fred Perry's polo has migrated to groups like theirs, following the ideal union trait of white supremacy.

 

Members of the alt-right prefer to reconnect with the social anger of 1960s skinheads to say they are going against the system - without obviously realizing that they are cultivating retrograde, conservative rather than progressive values. Each of these groups feels the need to create a sense of internal cohesion that is developed through rituals (beating and getting beaten, swearing, demonstrations) and through a uniform, Fred Perry's yellow and black polo shirt. A type of unofficial cultural twinning to which the brand has given in recent days a strong and decisive cut withdrawing from the market from the pole. A noble move by Fred Perry that will help to give visibility to the movement – whose members could now react by further reinforcing the cultural and ideological imagination of which the Fred Perry pole has been forcibly cloaked. 

Fashion … or fascist? The long tussle over that Fred Perry logo

This article is more than 3 years old

The polo shirt has been sported over decades by pop stars, football fans, ska-lovers and gay revellers, but now also by the far-right Proud Boys

 

Nosheen Iqbal

Sun 4 Oct 2020 08.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/oct/04/fashion-or-fascist-the-long-tussle-over-that-fred-perry-logo

 

When British tennis champion Fred Perry became the first player to win a career grand slam in 1935, he might have hoped his legacy would be defined by the stunning bit of history he made, still just 26 years old. It’s unlikely he could have predicted his name would be used in 2020 to uniform a far-right male militia jacked up on violence and misogyny. And yet, Proud Boys, an organisation allegedly founded as a joke by Gavin McInnes in the run-up the 2016 US election, has become instantly recognisable by its allegiance to Fred Perry’s black and yellow trim polo, forcing the brand to publicly distance itself and announce last week that it had withdrawn sales of the shirt in the US and Canada a year ago.

 

McInnes, 50, is the Scottish-Canadian co-founder of Vice Media, and lives in Brooklyn. He believes western culture is under siege and that feminism is a cancer. His group, much like an enraged Reddit sub-forum given vein-popping physical form, has been described as an alt-right fight club and hate group by Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), as white supremacists by Joe Biden,and classified as an extremist group by the FBI – even though McInnes rejects the notion that Proud Boys are racists . It is not, by a long stretch, a good look for Fred Perry.

 

“It is incredibly frustrating that this group has appropriated our black and yellow twin-tipped shirt and subverted our laurel wreath to their own ends,” the company said on its website last week.

 

The statement added: “We are proud of its lineage and what the laurel wreath has represented for over 65 years: inclusivity, diversity and independence.” Fred Perry is unequivocal that it has “absolutely nothing” to do with Proud Boys and that “that association is something we must do our best to end”.

 

That embroidered circular flick, modelled on the original Wimbledon logo, has been adopted by many subcultures since the first polo was launched in 1952.

 

“It is easy for the piece to be taken up as uniform because it is designed to look like one. It is stern and sensible and needs a distinctive kind of look to pull it off. That look is not a very large and very aggressive and very pink man,” said fashion writer Tony Glenville.

 

In May, Fred Perry launched a new line with a publicity shoot featuring only models of colour. In pure Twitter bait, fury and counter-fury spewed online as some white customers claimed they would boycott the brand for “spreading diversity bollocks”. In a statement to Dazed and Confused magazine, Fred Perry replied: “We believe actions speak louder than words … Our real fans know what we stand for, and their response to this speaks volumes.”

 

It is not the first time the brand has been fashionable for groups on the fringes of society; part of the appeal of a neat, utilitarian Fred Perry polo is that it is subversively nonconformist. There is an ironic fashion joke at play: the aesthetic might look objectively square, but its spirit is rebellious.

 

Few brands have been tussled over as hard by competing subcultures. From tennis nuts to Jamaican rudeboys, skinheads, mods, ska-punks, indie kids and Camden popstars, all have done the Perry polo before Proud Boys came along. The brand has been worn by racist skinheads before McInnes’s lot and, despite its current wobble, is certain to be worn by music fans for some time still.

 

Amy Winehouse sported hers all over London and ended up collaborating with the brand in 2011 on a collection of Perry classics with Winehouse twists (collars turned up, sleeves capped in semi-sheer fabric). The line still sells well, particularly in the Far East. Damon Albarn, Britpop’s poster boy for the knitted cotton Perry pique shirt, was able to request a specific style of eight shirts which he wore for Blur’s reunion gigs in 2009.

 

Musicians have been essential to the brand’s credibility, be it the Specials and the Jam or Arctic Monkeys and Skepta. In a project for the brand’s 60th anniversary in 2012, Don Letts made a series of films tracing the line of cultural scenes and musical hierarchies that emerged in Britain since the teddy boys of the 1950s. Fashion was key, but it’s intriguing to see how little the look has shifted for Perryheads, whether they’re on scooters revving around Southend in the 60s or dancing at the 100 Club in the 90s.

 

Perry was the son of a textile factory worker born in Stockport. He first became a world table tennis champion at 19 before going on to win three consecutive Wimbledon titles. Despite his record-breaking success, he was treated with contempt by the elite who ran the sport in Britain. To Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at Westminster University, it is this contrast between Perry’s underdog status and unquestionable personal glamour that has helped define the brand.

 

“The working-class authenticity of both Fred Perry the man and Fred Perry the brand allows it to resonate with each new generation,” he said. “Its no-nonsense design has enabled it to be reinterpreted by each emerging subculture in a way that gives it additional layered, and sometimes contradictory, meanings. Fred Perry was worn on the terraces at Chelsea but also in the gay bars on Old Compton Street; by skinheads at NF rallies but also by Jamaican rudeboys.”

 

Perry was a heartthrob: he dated Hollywood actresses, including Marlene Dietrich, and married four times. He moved to the US and took up citizenship there before launching his sportswear line with Australian footballer Tibby Wegner in the late 1940s. The company was kept in the family until Perry died in 1995, when it was bought by Japanese company Hit Union.

 

Groves believes the brand has been able to transcend each decade because of the way it has been reinterpreted by new fashion tribes. “It’s ironic therefore to see this particular shirt adopted by the Proud Boys,” he said, “given that within gay culture, a black polo shirt with yellow tipping on the collar usually signifies that the wearer is into watersports.”

 

What Fred Perry would think about all the symbolism at play on his bestselling shirts is another matter.

 

Style wars

 

New Balance

In the early 00s, the athletics brand was adopted by neo-Nazi groups in Germany. The company clawed back credibility by sponsoring anti-racist music events.

 

Burberry

The Burberry check, whether real or counterfeit, became so synonymous with football hooligans and thugs that in 2004, two Leicester pubs banned any customer from wearing the pattern. It was a long crawl back to its contemporary reinvention as a super luxury British brand.

 

Stone Island

In the mid-1980s, the then obscure Italian sailing label became huge on the terraces with football casuals, who matched designer clothes with lairiness. The look went “weekend suburban dad” after some time, but the brand was given a surprising new twist when the rapper Drake began wearing it.

‘MONEY ROWS!’ Why the King won’t take Prince Harry & Meghan Markle's calls

Kamala Harris Is Dressing to Be President

 

Kamala Harris Is Dressing to Be President

 

With very little time to prepare for the campaign trail, the vice president is sticking to her suits — a political move of its own.

 

Vanessa Friedman

By Vanessa Friedman

July 30, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/style/kamala-harris-presidential-style.html

 

Over the last week, as Kamala Harris has stepped into the spotlight as the likely Democratic nominee for president, she has done so with a high-wattage smile, a pop culture boost and a cascade of endorsements. Suddenly everything about her seems to have been electrified, except one thing.

 

Her clothes.

 

In her campaign stops in Milwaukee; Indianapolis; Wilmington, Del.; Pittsfield, Mass.; and Central Florida, Ms. Harris has appeared in the neutral pantsuits she adopted as her vice-presidential uniform, in shades of black, dark blue, burgundy and beige, with the occasional jolt of salmon pink or baby blue. The rest of the world may be embracing the “Kamala is brat” meme in all of its acid green glory, but the candidate herself is not.

 

Instead she is wearing her usual tone-on-tone silk shells and pussy-bow blouses. Her usual signature pearls and 70-millimeter Manolo Blahnik heels. For the last four years, that was the perfect camouflage of the country’s No. 2 executive: somber, deferential, kind of dull.

 

But does it look presidential?

 

In an election in which so much about one candidate is potentially pioneering — she could be the first female president, the first female president of color, the first president of South Asian descent — that is a key question.

 

“How you present yourself as a woman in leadership is an issue every woman in leadership has to consider,” said Ashley Allison, the chief executive of Watering Hole Media and a former Biden-Harris campaign adviser. Ms. Harris, she said, “is trying to break what is potentially the biggest, thickest, largest glass ceiling there is.” How she equips herself for that matters.

 

It’s not really about some objective measure of chic. It’s not about being endorsed by Vogue, though Ms. Harris was. It’s about what voters read into what Ms. Harris wears; how they relate to it. Clothes become, in many ways, a stand-in for all the inchoate feelings the electorate has about a candidate, good and bad, and especially about a female candidate.

 

The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on women in politics, has christened this factor “the imagination barrier.” When people are asked to close their eyes and conjure up a president, most of them picture what they have seen in the past: white, straight, male. Jennifer Palmieri, the former director of communications for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, said her team used to call it the TJSAH issue because it came up so often: There’s just something about her.

 

“Voters don’t have a stereotype of what a woman in office looks like,” said Amanda Hunter, the executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. Ms. Harris is inventing it as she goes.

 

Threading the Fashion Needle

Ms. Harris knows this well. She has proved herself more than able to dip into fashion symbolism when she likes: She wore three different Black designers for President Biden’s inauguration, including Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss, Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson. She wore a white Carolina Herrera suit in honor of the women who came before her on the evening Mr. Biden declared victory in the 2020 election — the first time she had done so during the campaign. Her decision to stick with her suits is not a default. It’s tactical.

 

“We know perfectly well that she’s going to be scrutinized for her appearance more than a male candidate,” Ms. Hunter said. “We found in a study done two years ago that voters have even less tolerance for flyaway hair and a wrinkled collar for a woman candidate than a man.” They see it as a tell, an indication of sloppy thinking.

Clothes have historically been the territory of the first lady. She is the one who has been charged with using her image as a tool of soft diplomacy to reach across borders. With being relatable. With representing a local industry. Clothes, when it comes to elected office, have been used to diminish women, to make them seem less substantive than they are.

 

For years the solution was what might be called lady-politician garb, as popularized by such leaders as Mrs. Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Angela Merkel and Elizabeth Warren. Which is to say, a man’s suit in fruit salad colors, like a compromise made to bridge the masculine-feminine divide. It is only recently that fashion has been seized on by women themselves as a potential weapon for good. Mrs. Clinton used to joke about her rainbow closet. Nikki Haley used actual dresses (and skirts and shoes) to underscore her difference from every mini-me Republican contender on the debate stage.

 

Ms. Harris, however, has taken a different approach.

 

“I call them ‘just the facts, ma’am’ clothes,” said Tammy Haddad, a former consultant on the HBO show “Veep” and the president of Haddad Media. “The one key thing for any female candidate is how you walk across a stage. You want to have impact, but not too much impact. You want clothes that are flattering, but not too flattering. You want to look commanding, but not too commanding.”

 

If you are Ms. Harris, you want to be buttoned up, but with only one button. You want a heel, but a medium one. You want to suggest fashion without being too fashionable. The occasional dip into casual wear — Ms. Harris is a fan of Chuck Taylors — helps. As does her solution to black-tie work events (sequins), which allows her to stand out while sticking to her own sober color palette and straight lines.

 

What Does a President Wear?

Realistically, Ms. Harris didn’t really have a choice — and not just because the move from vice president to presidential candidate happened so quickly that she couldn’t rush out and buy a whole new wardrobe. Rather, any clear style switcheroo could have been weaponized against her, any example of flip-flopping and vanity.

 

“People would notice, and that would be the story,” Ms. Haddad said.

 

Instead Ms. Harris went for consistency, a bit of real politik that serves a variety of purposes. It is a visual refutation of the caricature Donald Trump and JD Vance have been trying to create of the crazy liberal (or Lara Trump’s comparison of Ms. Harris and a designer “trash bag”). It underscores the idea, Ms. Palmieri said, that she was “drafted,” rather than inserting herself like a pushy woman. And it’s a reminder of the last four years (for good or bad) and the way Ms. Harris looked while meeting with world leaders, or walking under the White House portico with Mr. Biden.

 

Still, the attention is going to become more and more intense in the run-up to the election. Is it unfair? Yes, of course. Barack Obama acknowledged the double standard when he said of Mrs. Clinton: “She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backward in heels. She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her.”

 

When Mrs. Clinton didn’t do it — when she stuck her hair back in a ponytail — it led to an entire discourse on the meaning of the scrunchie.

 

As much as possible, Ms. Harris, by wearing the same old same old, has taken fashion off the table as a talking point, the better to focus on her actual talking points. That may be frustrating to those who want her to represent … what? The country, women, Black women in a more exciting way?

 

And perhaps, if she won the election, her wardrobe would change to meet the moment. There will be plenty of people happy to weigh in on how that should look if the time comes, no doubt.

 

For now, however, it is likely she will keep her uniform, just as pretty much every candidate has before her, because, as Mr. Obama once said, it lessens the number of decisions she has to make in a day. It is fit for purpose.

 

Ms. Harris “seems to have internalized that idea a long time ago,” Ms. Palmieri said.

 

But also, what does a president wear? He wears a dark suit. Maybe in November Ms. Harris will have the opportunity to smash that barrier, too. But not yet.

 

Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014. More about Vanessa Friedman

About The VOU

 

About The VOU

Old Money Elegance for Successful Gentlemen

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 The VOU is London’s premier styling agency for gentlemen seeking to master the art of business-casual dressing to achieve a refined, timeless, old-money aesthetic.

 

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Initially launched as a fashion magazine, The VOU has evolved – at the demand of our audience – into a boutique styling agency for successful and confident men that master the art of old-money dressing, the hallmark of true gentlemanly style.

 

Obsessed with fashion’s magical power to transform one’s appearance, feelings, and even social status, we have the tools to empower discerning gentlemen like you harness the transformative power of impeccable, old-money dressing.

 

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In an age of fleeting trends and self-proclaimed “fashion influencers,” The VOU is your trusted source for genuine, expert guidance on cultivating enduring personal style. Think of The VOU as your sophisticated older brother – worldly, cultured, and always ready with invaluable advice to help you navigate your style journey with finesse.

 

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King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget

King Charles’ €500K lobster dinner blows hole in French presidency’s budget

 

A state dinner with the U.K.’s king cost the French nearly €500,000.

Emmanuel Macron hosted King Charles in September last year at Versailles, the historical home of the French monarchy. |

 

July 30, 2024 12:45 pm CET

By Judith Chetrit, Océane Herrero, Jason Wiels and Victor Goury-Laffont

https://www.politico.eu/article/lobster-fill-royal-dinner-dig-hole-french-presidency-budget-king-charles-emmnuel-macron/

 

PARIS — A decadent dinner costing nearly €475,000 for the U.K.’s King Charles III helped push France’s Élysée Palace — the office of President Emmanuel Macron —to a record high deficit last year.

 

France’s love for grand gestures and opulent dining are fully in evidence in the pages of a damning yearly audit of the Élysée’s budget, released on Monday by the Cour des Comptes, France’s top audit court.

 

The Élysée’s spending, which includes costs related to the president’s diplomatic and presidential duties as well as administration, personnel, security and estate management, reached a whopping €125 million, plunging the books €8.3 million into the red.

 

Among the biggest deficit drivers were two luxurious state dinners, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and King Charles III.

 

Macron hosted the British head of state in September last year at Versailles, historical home of the French monarchy, for a star-studded feast with at least 160 invitees including Rolling Stones’ singer Mick Jagger and British actor Hugh Grant.

 

The dinner, during which guests enjoyed blue lobster and rose macaroons cost the French presidency close to €475,000 — including over €165,000 on catering and over €40,000 on wine (including a bottle of 2004 Château Mouton Rothschild) and other drinks.

 

Third-party caterers and decorators led costs to surge for receptions held outside the Elysée, as was the case with Charles III and Modi, who was welcomed at the Louvre and was shown some of France’s most-visited museum’s masterpieces by Macron himself. Total cost: upwards of €400,000.

 

France’s audit court nonetheless acknowledged some cost-saving efforts, underlining the Élysée’s thriftiness when hosting “cocktails for less than 100 people,” events during which the Palace’s in-house kitchen staff is usually preferred over external contractors.

 

The Cour des Comptes also slammed the French presidency’s poor travel-planning skills, pointing to a loss of over €830,000 generated by the cancellation of 12 apparently non-refundable trips. A planned but subsequently cancelled trip to Germany in July 2023 alone led to a loss of nearly €500,000, mostly due to transport and accommodation costs.

 

Responding to the sums involved after the publication of the report, the Élysée said: “France maintains close diplomatic relations with a large number of countries, which organize equivalent events when they receive the Head of State.”