Category: 5. Entertainment

Cynthia Erivo, the award-winning actor and star of Wicked, will play Jesus Christ at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles between August 1 and 3 2025.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the casting of the Wicked star as the son of God in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s provocative rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has caused upset on social media. Accusations of blasphemy have been made based on Erivo’s gender, sexuality, race – and even hairstyle.

The UK-based Christian magazine Premier Christianity responded to the outcry, featuring articles on whether a female Jesus was “inclusive” or “offensive”. Erivo laughed it all off.

I’m an expert in the reception of Biblical narratives. As such, I believe the outrage over this particular casting choice misses the fact that women have been involved in reimagining and retelling the Jesus story since antiquity.

The earliest gospels were originally written anonymously. They have only retroactively been ascribed to male authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Within a few generations after Jesus’s death, a work titled the Gospel of Mary was written from the perspective of Mary Magdalene, positioning her as Jesus’s favoured disciple and bearer of secret knowledge.

While we can’t prove the Gospel of Mary was written by a woman any more than we can prove the four canonical gospels were written by men, within the text the male disciple Peter attacks Mary precisely for being a woman. This suggests that the author was clued into gender dynamics, especially in the context of early Christian discourse and authority.

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As Christianity was gaining state approval within the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, the elite woman poet Faltonia Betitia Proba and the Byzantine empress Aelia Eudocia composed their own gospel retellings. They reconfigured the Hebrew Bible and gospel stories by using verses from Virgil and Homer.

These ancient works offer a distinctively female perspective. Their retellings pay careful attention to the experiences of female characters who are often marginalised in the canonical tradition, depicting the particularly gruelling experience of Mary’s maternal grief when her son was crucified.

These retellings aren’t apocryphal outliers – they belong to the same literary tradition of the four gospels Bible readers know today.

Just as Matthew and Luke (and possibly John) very clearly reworked Mark by adapting and rearranging scenes and strings of words, so too the Gospel of Mary retells the resurrection scene from John. Proba and Eudocia combine and rearrange gospel material to tell the story anew again.

Women continue to retell the Jesus story today, sometimes focusing more on the female characters. In Edinburgh, director Suzanne Lofthus has been writing and directing the city’s annual Passion Play for the last 20 years. Her 2024 and 2025 productions reimagined Jesus’s masculinity and placed the experiences of women at its centre. This year, she showed Jesus willingly getting stuck into the “women’s work” of making bread at the house of Mary and Martha, and questioning the culpability of the man in the story of the woman caught in adultery.

Catherine Hardwicke, meanwhile, best known for directing the first Twilight movie, directed The Nativity Story in 2006, a tender portrayal of Mary’s journey through her pregnancy, with particular emphasis on the women around her.

These creative contributions are really quite different to brutal, hypermasculine retellings such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), for which a sequel is reportedly in development. Hardwicke herself contrasted The Nativity Story with The Passion, noting striking differences “especially [in] the quarts of blood per frame”.

Women playing Jesus

The role of Jesus is often played by women in these retellings. Erivo herself sang the role of Mary Magdalene in a 2017 New York concert that led to two all-female concept albums, controversially titled She Is Risen. The project was the brainchild of singer and actor Morgan James, who performed the role of Jesus.

Just last year, an all-female cast performed Jesus Christ Superstar in Santa Barbara, California. And a gender-blind casting led to the role of Jesus being given to Mina Kawahara in a 2017 production of the hippy-ish retelling of the gospel, Godspell, at Villanova Theatre, Pennsylvania. She followed a precedent of other female leads in this musical. The Japan-born Kawahara donned a white pantsuit with flowers in her hair.

A Japanese woman named Yuko Takeda took on the role of the son of God in the 2010 Helsinki Passion Play – another casting choice that enraged some conservative Christians. The female director, Miira Sippola, commented that the decision would free the audience from focusing too much on whether the performer resembles the Jesus of medieval artwork – already so far from the historical Jesus.

Over in New Jersey, a 15-year-old American girl played the role of Jesus in a 2023 passion play, carrying a 12-foot cross for over two miles in bare feet. These are a mere smattering of examples, of which there are many more.

The controversy over Erivo’s casting reveals more about cultural assumptions than historical precedent. The Hollywood Bowl’s Jesus Christ Superstar continues the often-overlooked tradition of women who have long participated in retelling, reshaping and performing the story of Jesus — on the page, on screen and on stage.

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Enthusiastic push

A stolen glance across a crowded room, a shadowy figure slipping through a doorway, a lover hidden behind a curtain – adultery has long been a drama of secrecy. From Renaissance masterpieces to tabloid snapshots, the act of romantic betrayal has not only shaped personal lives but also left its mark on art history. Painters across the centuries have turned this most intimate of transgressions into art, inviting viewers to become voyeurs of passion, guilt and desire.

Historically, artistic representations of adultery have been used to raise questions about the importance of love and sexual desire in marriage. Artists have also used their works to explore themes of culpability and punishment, and to explore the consequences of infidelity for the families of the adulterers.

Renaissance and Baroque artists picked up on the theme of adultery by depicting episodes from the Bible. Portraying scenes that were set in eras during which the punishment women faced for adultery was death, artists including Rembrandt, Rubens and Tintoretto, explored religious disciplinary processes and the difficulties of pronouncing moral judgments.

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Rembrandt’s The Woman Taken in Adultery (1644) tells the story of how Christ’s compliance with Jewish law was put to the test by a council of Pharisees (members of a biblical Jewish sect who were fanatic about obeying religious laws), who bring an adulteress before him.

The punishment for her crime according to Mosaic law was to be stoned to death. Christ’s response, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” emphasised the moral hypocrisy of the men who stood as judges.

Although the figure of Jesus is prominent in the painting, the adulteress is central. She appears penitent, dressed in white and bathed in light – a striking contrast to the dark male figures that surround her.

That is not to say women were always portrayed as vulnerable. Throughout early modern Europe (circa 1450-1800), perceptions of women were heavily influenced by biblical figures such as Eve.

Women were largely believed to be the more lustful sex, weaker and more likely to succumb to temptation, and to be more deceptive and manipulative than men. The German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach demonstrated this belief in The Fable of the Mouth of Truth (1534).

The painting depicts another married woman surrounded by men who are scrutinising her. But in this case, she is not repentant. Instead, she is trying to trick her way out of receiving any punishment for her infidelity with the help of her lover, who is masquerading as a fool.

Certain artistic genres were employed to publicise and critique changes to laws regarding adultery and divorce. For centuries, church courts dealt with marital disputes and adultery in Britain.

A full divorce (that allowed both parties to remarry) was only possible by act of parliament, which made it unobtainable for all but very wealthy men.

The art of divorce

After the Matrimonial Causes Act was passed in 1857, divorce became a matter for the civil courts, and therefore a viable option for a greater proportion of British society.

Several pre-Raphaelite artworks, including Augustus Egg’s Past and Present series, depicted the damage that infidelity and subsequent divorce could have on the family unit. Egg’s work emphasised that women, who were often ostracised and cut from their social and familial networks after divorce, were punished more severely than men for their transgressions.

Satirists including James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson chose very different devices to critique laws concerning adultery when they ridiculed “Criminal Conversation”, a civil suit that was introduced in the early 18th century, and only ended with the 1857 Act.

“Crim con” allowed a man to sue his wife’s lover for robbing him of her affections and domestic support. If his suit was successful, the husband could claim financial compensation from his rival, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such suits were most often pursued by members of the landed gentry and the aristocracy. Moreover, as they were heard in the Court of the King’s Bench, which was open to journalists and the public, the salacious details of the affairs were published in newspapers and pamphlets.

Crim con suits were much deplored by contemporary moralists. They emphasised the impropriety of a man receiving money from another man for the sexual services of his wife, as well as the debauchery of some elite husbands, who were viewed as being culpable and complicit in their wives’ affairs.

The crim con trial of Worsley versus Bisset in February 1782 attracted a considerable amount of publicity and was depicted by several of London’s best satirists. A story about the affair that inspired many satirical prints had been discussed at length in court. Lady Worsley had been enjoying a dip at Maidstone bathhouse, when her husband allegedly hoisted her lover, Captain Bisset, on to his shoulders, so that he could see her naked body.

The notion that Worsley was a voyeur who had pimped his wife out for his own delectation was so popular that it even influenced the judge, who awarded him a humiliating one shilling in damages.

The satires were meant to entertain and titillate their audiences, but they also raised awareness of the apparent profligacy of the ruling elite. Representations of the adulterous liaisons of celebrities, including military heroes like Admiral Lord Nelson, politicians like Charles James Fox, actresses like Mary Robinson, and even royals, such as George IV, were used to highlight their moral corruption, and they provided much fodder for activists demanding political reform.

The history of adultery in art draws attention to the intersections between personal relationships and the public realm. Even today, when consensual relationships between adults are not formally policed, affairs continue to prompt public discussions about private morality, ideal marriages and the suitability of casting judgment. We continue to enjoy the opportunity to moralise while being entertained by the salacious portrayals of other people’s affairs.

At the height of her career in the late 1950s and early 60s, Connie Francis, who has died aged 87, occupied a unique slot in the American record industry as she amassed sales that comfortably outstripped most of her male contemporaries. She scored her first big hit with Who’s Sorry Now? in 1957, and by 1967 had amassed 35 Top 40 hits in the US and sold 35 million records worldwide.

She was blessed with a voice that could handle everything from amusing novelties such as Stupid Cupid (1958) or Pretty Little Baby (1962) to intimate ballads, tales of heartbreak and even full-blown epics such as the flamenco-flavoured Malagueña (1960).

She was also versatile enough to embrace the Nashville sound, and her performances of songs such as When the Boy in Your Arms (1963) or Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You (1962) carry echoes of country artists such as Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn.

Having grown up in an Italian-Jewish neighbourhood in New Jersey, she was fluent in Italian and Yiddish and familiar with Hebrew, and recorded several albums of Italian songs as well as a disc of Jewish favourites and other recordings in German, Italian and Spanish. Her theme song for the 1960 film Where the Boys Are was recorded in six languages, while Die Liebe Ist ein Seltsames Spiel, her German translation of her 1960 US chart-topper Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, sailed to the top of the West German chart.

Mama, her version of Cesare Andrea Bixio’s evergreen Italian classic Mamma – covered by Beniamino Gigli, Luciano Pavarotti and many more – gave her a deliciously lachrymose Top 10 hit in 1960. Francis’s success with that song helped her to broaden her audience from teenagers to the more sophisticated adult audiences in upmarket nightclubs in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe. Elvis Presley came to see her perform at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas not long after his mother had died, and when she sang Mama he burst into tears and had to leave the theatre.

She was born Concetta Franconero in the Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey, to George and Ida (nee Ferrari-di Vito). Her father was the son of Italian immigrants and worked as a docker and roofer. He was also a keen musician, and he gave his daughter an accordion when she was three.

Her parents encouraged her musical progress, and she made her performing debut at four, singing Anchors Aweigh at the Olympic Park in Irvington, New Jersey, to her own accordion accompaniment. She appeared regularly on the TV show Startime, with the show’s producer, George Scheck, acting as her manager, and featured in Marie Moser’s Starlets, Original Amateur Hour and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. It was Godfrey, struggling to pronounce her surname, who suggested she change it to Francis.

Scheck secured her a recording contract with MGM in 1955, and she was employed to overdub her singing voice for film actresses, including for Tuesday Weld in the movie Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956) and for Jayne Mansfield in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958). However, her efforts under her own name were initially unsuccessful, and she recorded 10 singles for MGM that all flopped.

She had been contemplating giving up music in favour of a pre-med scholarship at New York University when opportunity knocked with her 11th release, Who’s Sorry Now?, a song dating back to 1923. She disliked it and recorded it only as a favour to her father, who took a robust guiding interest in his daughter’s career. However, his instincts proved correct. Boosted by exposure on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand TV programme, it shot into the US Top 10 and sold a million copies. It also topped the British charts.

That lit the fuse on a run of hits which would see her scoring nearly 30 Top 40 successes on both sides of the Atlantic over the next six years, including Stupid Cupid (which reached No 4 in the US and No 1 in the UK), My Happiness (1958), Lipstick on Your Collar (1959), Among My Souvenirs (1961) and Mama.

She notched up her first US chart-topper with Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, and repeated the feat with My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own (both 1960) and Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You (1962). In addition, Stupid Cupid marked the start of her long and fruitful collaboration with the songwriters Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, based in New York’s songwriting mecca, the Brill Building. Also working there was Bobby Darin, who wrote several songs with Francis in the course of the pair becoming lovers. However, they split up after Francis’s father threatened Darin with a shotgun.

The latter part of Francis’s career was marred by a succession of tragedies. In 1974, after she had performed at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, she was raped at knife-point at the hotel where she was staying. She won a $2.5m award in court (reduced in a later settlement) after suing the hotel for failing to offer adequate security, but the event triggered years of depression during which she rarely left her New Jersey home. In 1981 her brother George, an attorney who had testified against organised crime, was murdered by the Mafia. Though Connie tried to resume her recording and touring career, she was diagnosed with manic depression, and in 1984 she attempted suicide.

She eventually made a comeback in the 90s, appearing in Las Vegas and making several recordings, including the album With Love to Buddy (1996), a tribute to Buddy Holly. In 2018 she retired to her new home in Florida. She wrote two autobiographies, the New York Times bestseller Who’s Sorry Now? (1984) and Among My Souvenirs (2017).

Married and divorced four times between 1964 and 1985, Francis was in a relationship with the psychologist Tony Ferretti from 2003 until his death in 2022. She adopted a baby son, Joey, during her third marriage.

Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures

Ash Millman

In the sunlit boardroom of a sleekly understated West Hollywood hotel, the gentlemen of Above & Beyond sign hundreds of posters of themselves. The trio — Paavo Siljamäki, Tony McGuinness and Jono Grant — form an assembly line as they put their respective names (first, only) onto each image from the three inch stack, their silver Sharpies dulling from use.

Based in London (Grant and McGuinness) and Finland (Siljamäki) the guys are jet-lagged but a bit giddy from an interview they did earlier today with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, an occasion they flew to Los Angeles for, and for which McGuinness says they were “incredibly nervous.” They’re one of the most beloved groups in dance music, yet they seem gobsmacked by the mainstream recognition.

That interview, and this one, are puzzle pieces of an album campaign that launched in March with the announcement of Bigger Than All of Us, the trio’s fifth studio LP in a catalog going back to 2006. The campaign hit overdrive three months ago with a primetime performance at Coachella’s Outdoor Stage, a promo cycle that compounds upon itself here on the glass conference table as they sign posters bearing an image of that show.

In it, the trio appear in miniature at the center of a giant circular stage rig, a huge digital full moon rising on the LED wall behind them and a sprawling audience ahead. What’s cut out from the image is the additional 40,000 people who were in the crowd that night.

“We went to the stage the night before at the same time and there were about 10,000 people seeing the band there,” says McGuinness. He thought A&B would pull a similarly sized crowd. He was wrong. They walked onstage and “I Iooked out and it was just one of those moments where you go ‘Wow,’” he says. “I think it was one of the most extraordinary gigs we’ve done, seeing the people going on forever.”

Given that A&B has been commanding giant crowds for upwards of 25 years, since coalescing in the U.K. in the Y2K era, that’s saying something. At Coachella, the trio debuted a handful of never-before-heard album tracks, ramping up to a place of anthemic ecstasy over the hour. Watching via livestream from his living room in Los Angeles, the album’s A&R Dave Dresden was observing closely.

“I could feel the tension in them when they started,” he says. “They started with a song nobody had ever heard before, and it wasn’t really crafted for the dance floor, but they won that crowd over in a way that I wasn’t even expecting.” By the end of the set, Dresden was crying. Given the heart-on-sleeve vibe that’s long been A&B’s signature, he likely wasn’t the only one.

Out today (July 18) Bigger Than All of Us is the group’s first entirely electronic album since 2018’s Common Ground. (2019’s Flow State is a continuous mix of ambient music made for yoga and meditation.) The plan wasn’t necessarily to wait seven years between albums, but when the pandemic hit, the guys were in different locations and each just went about making a solo project.

When the trio started touring together again post-pandemic “it quickly became evident that we needed new music, because we were playing mostly old stuff,” says McGuinness. “It was like there needed to be a new Above & Beyond album, or there would be no more Above & Beyond.”

“If you don’t keep going, you sort of become a legacy act,” says Grant. “It was like, ‘If we don’t do a new album, what are we going to do? What’s the point?’”

“We could probably always play the major festivals,” Siljamäki continues, “but that’s not really as exciting as it is to go out there and play new material.”

So at a 2023 lunch with their manager James Grant, (who’s also Jono’s brother), they decided that It Was Time. Luckily, they had a lot of pre-existing ideas to pull from. Unfortunately they weren’t convinced any of them were very good.

This is where Dresden entered the picture. Half of longstanding dance duo Gabriel & Dresden, he’d long known James Grant and the crew at Anjuna, the family of labels (Anjunbeats, Anjunadeep and Anjunachill) that’s home to a sprawling ecosystem of artists and events, with A&B at the center. (James Grant is also the head of Anjunadeep.) Dresden says he’d previously “planted the seed” with James Grant that he’d be an astute A&R for the label, but he didn’t expect to work with its star act.

“I think they’d been working on the album for a year and weren’t feeling like they’d gotten anywhere,” says Dresden. “They needed outside perspective.”

He was offered the A&R role, but didn’t immediately say yes. Instead, he downloaded the audio book of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, digested its messages about how to get the best from an artist, then spent a day listening to the complete Above & Beyond discography. “I really felt like I understood what they achieve in their records,” he says, “and I felt like I could do it.” He accepted the job.

The trio sent Dresden approximately 40 unfinished songs, and he sorted them into five categories ranging from “‘Sun & Moon’ Level,” (a reference one of their biggest hits) to “I don’t really understand this.” His benchmark for quality was specific: “The framework, he says, “Was that the songs need to be so good that people will be willing to tattoo the lyrics on their bodies.”

Siljamäki, McGuinness and Grant gave Dresden a few weeks to digest the music, then they had their first meeting. “They’d sold me on this idea they were lost,” says Dresden. “In that meeting I said to them, ‘I know you’re not going to believe me, but you already have an album.’”

“That completely changed the vibe,” says Siljamäki. “We had him saying ‘This track you did five years ago, this is really good, did you realize?’ He really helped bring us together.”

“What was great is that there were bits in there that we maybe believed in individually, but maybe the group didn’t believe it,” says Jono Grant. “Having Dave go, ‘This is a great song’ … Whoever didn’t make the track would listen up and go ‘Okay!’ He broke through the egos and the bulls–t and just got down to what’s really good here.”

Through this process, the guys saw that they had roughly two thirds of the album already done. From there, they scheduled weekly virtual meetings where they’d play through the progress of each song and everyone would provide feedback. “It felt a little bit corporate at times, but it was good to have some accountability,” says Jono Grant. “They sort of squeezed an album out of us.”

“We typically resist meetings,” says McGuinness. “We work together sometimes, but it’s very rare for all three of us to be in the room at the same time. That’s never been the way that we work. I work with Jono. Jono works with Paavo, then with me. There are different iterations.”

Amid process, they brought in their longtime collaborators Zoë Johnston, whose ethereal voice is arguably one of the calling cards of the A&B sound, as well as Richard Bedford and Justice Suissa. It’s essentially a given that these guests will be on any new A&B album. “We’re not reinventing the wheel every time we do a record,” says McGuinness. “Having those recognizable voices helps us with radio and helps us to signal that we’re back.”

Eventually, they had 16 tracks, and Bigger Than All of Us was officially completed in May.

The project, James Grant says, “is pretty much the most exciting thing that can happen on Anjunabeats,” with the label putting a third of its global team on the album campaign, from streaming to events to management to merch. In terms of success, he says there’s “no single factor that just changes the game and the campaign. It’s more a cumulative effect of doing lots of things well.”

A huge piece of the puzzle is the upcoming tour, for which A&B will take the same giant stage rig from Coachella to 13 North American amphitheaters from August to October, being one of only a handful of electronic acts able to play this level of venue. (Other acts at this level might include Odesza.) A&B fans are famously dedicated, and among the more welcoming crowds in electronic music, no doubt a trickle-down effect of the group and its focus on wellness, inclusivity and therapeutic crying on the dancefloor.

“I really feel like we have a voice that we need to use in the electronic world,” says Siljamäki, who’s been open about the period of severe burnout and depression he experienced during the pandemic, and how clubbing helped him come back from it. “What we created is so awesome that even if it’s hard, it’s worth going through the hard stuff.”

“The backbone has to be the love of music to keep me engaged,” says Grant, “But the responsibility drags me through the bits when I’m tired on tour and can’t get out of bed in a hotel room.”

This sense of responsibility extends to the core operation itself. “I feel that responsibility every time I go in the office and see how many people we’ve got working there,” says McGuinness. “Without Above & Beyond, Anjunabeats is a very different size company from the one that that we’ve got with us.”

But the size in question here isn’t just the number of Anjuna staff or the number of streams the album will amass or the number of posters sitting here on the table. Above & Beyond’s music is big and anthemic, but it’s also subtle and often understated — opening track “Stepping In” spends its first minute weaving together sounds of wind, bird calls and children playing before really lifting off. “Blood From a Stone,” like so much of the album, is as celestial and contemplative as it is thumping. When Above & Beyond talk about proportions, its never been just about numbers, but the weight of impact their music has on the individual and the global collective that’s its brought together. Ultimately, that’s the size that most matters.

Says McGuinness: “It’s not called Bigger Than All Of Us for no reason.”

The dilapidated studio of renowned textile designer Bernat Klein is to go on sale with a guide price of £18,000.

The studio, which nestles beside the A707 near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, was built for Klein in 1972.

The two‑storey concrete and brick structure was designed by Peter Womersley who is considered to be one of the greatest brutalist architects to have worked in Scotland.

However the building, which was granted a category A listing in 2002, has been in a state of decline for more than 20 years.

Klein, a Serbian-born designer who died in 2014, collaborated with major European fashion houses such as Dior to design some of the most beautiful textiles of the 20th century.

His studio was built as a workspace for design, weaving and exhibiting samples.

It lies adjacent to his home, High Sunderland, built by Womersley in 1958 and also a listed building.

Historic Environment Scotland (HES) describes the studio as a “very fine sculptural late Modernist building designed by Peter Womersley”.

It says the building was designed to connect harmoniously with its setting on the sloping wooded site.

The severe horizontality of the concrete elements succeed in contrasting with the verticals of the trees around it, HES says.

The property is being auctioned by Savills, which describes it as in need of modernisation, with further potential, “subject to requisite consents”.

“It remains a masterpiece of structural elegance integrated into its wooded landscape,” Savills say.

Womersley other works include Netherdale, the football stadium he designed for Gala Fairydean FC in 1963, the boiler house of the former Dingleton Hospital in Melrose and part of Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital.

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How to avoid romance scams

What’s a gal with a fabulous scarf collection to do during these hot, humid months? Enter Jennifer Lawrence, who is all in on repurposing the versatile silk scarf for summer.

Today, Lawrence and her husband Cooke Maroney, were spotted walking arm-in-arm in New York City. The actor, who has a well-documented love of tomato red (transcending baseball caps, jelly flats, and handbags alike) opted for a brightly colored T-shirt, lending a pop of color to an otherwise-neutral look. On the bottom, Lawrence wore a pair of flowing white trousers with black leather slides.

Diamond / BACKGRIDUSA

An expert accessorizer, Lawrence has finally hopped aboard the scarf skirt trend, trying a beige silk scarf with black trim and a surreal checkerboard print around her hips. She isn’t the only one who is embracing the asymmetrical overskirt. In April, Chloë Sevigny, wore a Vaquera number that, while not a 1:1 comparison, helped kickstart the scarf-as-skirt trend again. Soon after, Alexa Chung traipsed through the streets of London, a brown Gucci scarf tied around her waist. Meanwhile, in Tuscany earlier this month, Kylie Jenner coordinated hers to her floral bikini top.

With Jennifer Lawrence joining this list of stylish women, we’ll call that another ringing endorsement for the scarf skirt.