Category: 5. Entertainment

DOWNTOWN — The perfect Lollapalooza weather defied all odds and continued into Saturday for the third day of showstopping performances.

Chicago’s own Chance the Rapper played a “surprise” 15-minute set on the Perry’s stage Saturday afternoon. Despite getting on stage a few minutes late, he started off strong with “No Problem” from his 2016 album “Coloring Book.”

He went on to perform songs like “All Night,” “Cocoa Butter Kisses,” “The Highs & The Lows” — and new music from his upcoming album “Star Line.”

“Star Line” comes out Aug. 15 and will be Chance’s first album in six years, he told the crowd.

Grammy-winning rapper Doechii was also among the highlights of the day, drawing in a massive crowd during her evening set on the T-Mobile stage. Doechii and her dancers commanded the audience through a school of hip-hop, portraying classmates during the masterclass performance.

Doechii performed singles like “Anxiety” and “Nosebleeds” and fan favorites from her mixtape “Alligator Bites Never Heal,” which won Best Rap Album at the Grammy’s earlier this year.

The crowd went wild as she rapped “Boiled Peanuts,” “Nissan Altima” and “Denial is a River.”

After hinting at a special guest, the Tampa native also brought out City Girls’ JT for “Alter Ego” — and dropped the news that she’ll be headlining her first tour.

Doechii’s website has a countdown clock to 9 a.m. Monday, when more details are expected to drop.

Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra

Across Grant Park on the Tito’s stage, more than 100 young local musicians made history. The Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra became the first teen ensemble to perform on Lolla’s main stage, playing classical ballads, “Star Wars” songs, pop medleys of “Poker Face” and “Hot to Go!” and more.

The crowd they performed to was a unique mix of family members, orchestra alumni, basketball jersey-wearing teenagers and more.

The experience was both foreign and familiar to anyone who had gone to an orchestral performance. There was both quiet from the crowd as the orchestra performed, but also loud hoots and cheering from the younger crowd as they shouted out their friends in the band.

It was an emotional, hour-long performance led by Music Director and conductor Allen Tinkham, as loved ones both cheered and cried from the crowd.

Ashish and Ujjaini Shah were emotional as they watched as they watched their 17-year-old son Arjun play the violin on stage.

“It was amazing, I was literally in tears almost,” Ujjaini said. “Knowing how much hard work he’s put in over 12 years [of playing violin], all the rehearsals.”

They said they’re grateful for the orchestra for giving the kids not just an opportunity to showcase their talent on stage at Lollapalooza, but also to play music and meet kids from all over Chicago.

“Chicago is home to a huge number of very, very talented kids that are musicians in every different way,” Ujjaini said. “These kids in CYSO are keeping different forms of classical music and jazz alive and well with our youth, so it’s amazing to bring that to wider audiences around Chicago.”

Dhaval Patel, whose son Neel plays violin in the orchestra, said he’s really proud of the ensemble. He hopes this performance inspires young musicians to aim high.

“They all start somewhere,” Patel said. “Keep going, keep the passion and keep playing.”

TWICE Makes History

TWICE ended the night strong, making history as the first K-pop girl group to headline the festival.

The nine-piece group dazzled on stage with flared, bejeweled denim pants, matching boots and white cropped tanks as fireworks and drone lights lit up the sky above them.

They opened their set with “The Feels” and played hits like “This Is For” — the title track from their latest album — “Takedown,” “More & More,” “What is Love?” and “Queen of Hearts” — an ultimate ode to the group’s girl power as they played over 20 songs across their 90-minute slot.

Australian alternative dance trio Rüfüs Du Sol were also headliners last night. Though electronic artists are usually delegated to Lolla’s Perry’s stage, they claimed the T-Mobile main stage.

“Feels good to be representing electronic music and Australian music tonight,” said keyboardist Jon George, alongside bandmates Tyrone Lindqvist and James Hunt.

Their setlist included some of the group’s biggest hits like “Innerbloom,” “You Were Right” and “On My Knees.”

Earlier in the afternoon, English actress Naomi Scott made a debut performance in the United States by performing at Lollapalooza.

The star from films such as “Lemonade Mouth,” “Aladdin” and “Smile 2” drew a much larger-than-usual crowd to The Grove stage, including superfan Christina Signorile. She drove from New Jersey to just see Scott perform.

“I’ve been a fan since ‘Lemonade Mouth.’ I have got all of her records, recordings, the whole nine yards,” Signorile said. “I’ve seen all of her films. She is probably my top three artists/actresses of all time.”

After Scott’s performance, she greeted a few fans — including Signorile. “That was incredible,” the fan said.

And from there, it’s on the road back to New Jersey for Signorile, but with an unforgettable fan experience and some artist merch.

Lollapalooza concludes Sunday night in Grant Park.

See more photos from Day Three:

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Sydney Sweeney registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Donald Trump won a second US presidency, it has been revealed, as the public continues fixating on a new jeans ad campaign featuring the actor and a pun about her genes.

The Euphoria and White Lotus star registered to vote in Florida on 14 June 2024 – shortly after buying a mansion in the Keys – and listed her party affiliation as Republican, according to publicly available records reviewed by the Guardian on Sunday. That was about two weeks after Trump, another registered Republican Florida voter, was convicted in New York City of criminal falsification of business records and before he secured a return to the White House in November’s presidential election.

It was also about two years after Sweeney, 27, faced criticism from some US media consumers after she was photographed at her mother’s birthday party where several of the guests were seen wearing hats that called to mind those which bear Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) slogan. The native of Spokane, Washington, subsequently issued a statement on social media pleading with the public to “stop making assumptions”.

“An innocent celebration … has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention,” Sweeney’s statement added at the time.

Sweeney has not addressed her Florida Republican voter registration, the existence of which went viral on social media on Saturday and was later reported on by traditional news outlets.

The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company’s denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle’s campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.”

In one video, “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans”. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body’s composition “is determined by … genes”.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts.

Some social media users dismissed the campaign as tone deaf, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse.

One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying “it’s literally giving … Nazi propaganda”.

US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on “woke” advertising, invoking a term some use to criticize DEI measures.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on social media that criticizing Sweeney’s collaboration with American Eagle was “cancel culture run amok”.

Nonetheless, many have judged backlash to Sweeney and American Eagle’s collaboration as exaggerated and overblown.

American Eagle’s stock has reportedly risen in the wake of its Sweeney-centered campaign. A statement from the company on Friday defended the campaign, saying: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.”

That outcome cut a stark contrast with the 2023 Bud Light advertisement involving trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. A conservative-organized boycott against Bud Light substantially drove sales down. The brand lost its place as the US beer market’s top seller. And Bud Light’s owner, Anheuser-Busch, sought to distance itself from Mulvaney in a statement which blamed the promotion on an “outside agency without … management awareness or approval”.

“No one was trying to cancel Sydney Sweeney,” said a post on the X account Wu Tang is for the Children, which counts on more than 270,000 followers. “And no one cares if she’s Republican or not.”

But these visitors aren’t here to venerate the ancient martyr; they’ve come in service of something equally important to the city’s identity. Hailing from Belgium, France, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Brazil, these men and women are all aspiring pizzaioli (traditional Italian pizza makers), and they are about to take the biggest pizza test of their lives.

It’s always a surprise when ecstasy arrives. Recently, I’ve found myself waking early, with dawn on the horizon. I think it might be beautiful to catch the sunrise, and in those quiet moments, I am reminded of the bustle of the city, or a lover’s hand in mine, or the words that I couldn’t quite say, and, looking back towards the sky, find the sun already risen. I rue that I’ve missed it; I’m surprised it arrived so quickly. But for a moment, the light shines bright; and briefly, the parts of myself I don’t always get to are illuminated. In these moments, I’m reminded of our aliveness.

Much of my writing practice is concerned with closing the gap between emotion and expression. The sense of loss in this chasm is inevitable; it’s impossible to translate the excitement of seeing a loved one across the room, or the bodily jolt that arrives when you pass a friend on the street and realise you have become strangers. But still, I try to write, as Virginia Woolf did, not so much concerned with knowledge, but with feeling. And since language won’t always get you there, I employ music, rhythm.

Woolf does this masterfully in Mrs Dalloway. She was not just concerned with the notes of an instrument, but moments when a pianist’s hands might hover over the keys, or the break before a trumpeter blows; and even before that, what route did the pianist take to work today? What did the trumpeter say to his wife before they slept the night before, and what did she say back? And even further back: what might the musician have witnessed, at 18, which has shaped their life? How did Sally Seton kissing Clarissa Dalloway – a moment Woolf describes as a revelation, a religious experience – shape both their lives? The question that pulses through this novel: how do we come to be? They may not be musical notes but these questions and their answers are all music of some kind.

Woolf also writes with a painterly touch. The images she conjures remind me of work by my favourite painter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in which the interior preoccupations are externalised in the strokes on the canvas, both tender and sure; in the ways characters fill the frame with their bodies, their personhoods; in the ways the backgrounds speak as much to the narrative as the foremost subject does.

In Woolf’s work, there are rarely any direct gazes. Everyone looks away, unable to wrangle with the feeling of being seen, or they glance away when caught. And you understand. It can be scary to be seen. All these emotions and feelings, preoccupations and fears, all out in the open, with nowhere to hide. And yet, if we don’t show ourselves, Woolf suggests, it’s impossible to truly live.

Speaking of backgrounds, allow me a couple of indulgences here: the first, the city. Specifically, the city of London, which I’ve always known as home, have always known and loved, for all its ways. In Mrs Dalloway, London is not just a backdrop but an essential character. It is a living, breathing organism, to be held, touched, traversed, poked and prodded. To be, in some way, loved. Woolf writes in relation to our love of London, foolish as it may be. And yet, I cannot resist the allure of the city, because it’s home to me. The way the streets speak; the frenetic pace of its workers; the all-knowing boom of Big Ben, followed by St Margaret’s; “the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands”; the way quiet breaks open on entering St James’s Park accented only by the slow steps of others, or the flap of ducks swimming in the pond; the way the symphony starts back up as soon as you break out of the park, on to the streets, a distinct hum being heard all round, rising up from the ground. The city hums.

But the hum isn’t coming from the pavement. Home, whether it is a city, or town, or village, can only really be its people. The London of Mrs Dalloway, the London I know, is filled with parents and children, lovers and enemies, strangers and familiar faces; filled with love and envy, ambition and grief; filled with an immense beauty, a beauty she, I, might witness “in people’s eyes”. And if we look closely, as strangers and lovers pass us, we might see this beauty as further evidence of our aliveness.

And, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to speak briefly on love. When I mention the ecstatic or this notion of aliveness, I’m speaking to the moments that are at the height and depths of the human experience. Love encompasses all of these categories. Early on in the novel, Woolf broaches Clarissa’s relationship with Sally Seton: “had not that, after all, been love?” It makes me wonder, is love a question, or does it make us question? Does it make us ask “who is that?” when confronted with our pull towards another? Does it make us reframe this pull as something that cannot be resisted, as if desire is something to be resisted, as if it is weakness and not virtue?

There are no answers, only more questions. But I’d like to point to ecstasy, to one person’s lips meeting with another: “the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling”. Is this not how it feels to be closest to oneself? To feel the most alive? There are no answers, only more questions. But I think, this is what love does. It expands our lives and the ways we express ourselves by making space for our truest, deepest desires, even if we’re only glimpsing these needs for a moment. It questions how we came to be, and what we need to go on; it finds us in the space between who we have been and who we are trying to become. And right there, in the midst of it all, love holds up a mirror to see ourselves, our full selves.

Grief, I think, is both love’s opposite and companion. The grief of a life you might have lived. The grief of a person you might have been. And grief arrives not as loss but its inarticulacies. Clarissa is able to say what happened to her sister, Sylvia, felled by a tree, but she struggles to say how it made her feel. She’s able to understand that if she had married Peter, “this gaiety would have been mine all day!” but she struggles with the emotional heft of this possibility. Some people never find the language to express their grief, or else it tumbles down the chasm between emotion and expression; but we try. “It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels”, but we try. Sometimes, the moonlight briefly vanishes as night does; the sun doesn’t blaze but a new dawn breaks; and with that first light, that early sunshine before any clouds appear, the grief eases. And, doused in sunlight, once more, we are reminded, we are alive.

Despite dishing out chokeholds and clotheslines, the country singer took the loss in his battle with the social media provocateur

Two injured seal pups have been released back into the wild after eight weeks of life-saving care at an RSPCA wildlife centre.

Skittles and Hopscotch, both around five months old, were found underweight and suffering from injuries and parasites on the Sussex coastline.

The RSPCA said their condition was so serious they would not have survived without help.

Following weeks of round-the-clock care, including being fed fish soup then later whole mackerel and herring, the pups were released at Hastings seafront.

The seals were initially rescued by British Divers Marine Life Rescue before being transferred to the RSPCA’s Mallydams Wood Wildlife Centre near Hastings.

Peter Smith, centre manager at Mallydams Wood, said: “Both seal pups required life-saving medical treatment to recover from the injuries to their flippers.

“They were also hand-fed four times a day to start by staff, until they learned to feed themselves.

“There was a point during their rehabilitation that we weren’t sure if the pups would pull through, so their release was a particularly special moment for our team.”

The BBC has launched an investigation into alleged cocaine use by two stars of Strictly Come Dancing.

The Sun on Sunday reported that the two stars’ alleged drug use was “talked about widely among the cast” of the BBC One primetime show.

The newspaper also claimed that others had reported allegations of drug taking on the show to the BBC.

The cast members involved in the investigation were not named by the newspaper.

According to the Sun on Sunday, the allegations were made in a legal submission by the law firm Russells in March on behalf of a former contestant, the Welsh opera singer Wynne Evans.

A BBC spokesperson said: “We have clear protocols and policies in place for dealing with any serious complaint raised with us. We would always encourage people to speak to us if they have concerns. It would not be appropriate for us to comment further.”

The newspaper said the BBC had appointed a law firm to lead the investigation. It is understood that the corporation often appoints external law firms to help lead investigations and report back to an internal team.

Evans, who was a celebrity dancer in last year’s series, was dropped by the BBC for using “inappropriate language” during the launch of the Strictly tour.

He apologised for language that he called “inappropriate and unacceptable” after the Mail on Sunday reported that he was heard making a remark to a woman in a video filmed during the Strictly launch event.

The singer announced in May that he was leaving his BBC Radio Wales show after the BBC decided not to renew his contract.

This latest investigation comes after the BBC launched a review of Strictly in 2024 that looked into allegations of bullying and harassment against the former professional dancer Giovanni Pernice, made by his former dance partner Amanda Abbington.

The corporation upheld some, but not all, of the complaints made. In June last year, the BBC confirmed Pernice’s departure from the show.

Another Strictly professional dancer, Graziano Di Prima, also left the show last year after allegations about his conduct with a past participant.

The BBC announced a series of new measures in July 2024 aimed at improving welfare on the show. These include the introduction of chaperones who are present at all times during training room rehearsals, two new welfare producers, and providing additional training for the professional dancers, production team and crew.

In June, the EastEnders star Jamie Borthwick was suspended by the BBC after a video emerged of the actor using an ableist slur during Strictly rehearsals in November.

Borthwick apologised and a BBC spokesperson said at the time: “This language is entirely unacceptable and in no way reflects the values or standards we hold and expect at the BBC. We have robust processes in place for this.”

Everyone needs a hobby, and for 40 years mine was booze. I was 17 when I drank enough to throw up for the first time, and 57 when I stopped. In between I spent most nights, and thousands of lunchtimes and afternoons, with at least a gentle buzz on. One cheeky pint would turn into three, four, a binge. I blacked out. I had fumbling, regrettable sex. I vomited out of cars and on to lawns. I drank wine at 50p a bottle and £15 a glass – and a sea of lager, lager, lager. There was vodka flavoured with everything, from raspberries to rhubarb and bacon, plus gin and armagnac and amaretto and tequila and eggnog and crème de menthe and Baileys and sherry and blue curaçao and bourbon and cider and Kahlúa.

Some evenings I would laugh and laugh and laugh; other times drinking felt more like a grim duty.

I talked bollocks, I slurred my words, I lost the ability to speak, I had drunken arguments. I stole a huge block of cheese, a library book, a punt, a traffic cone. (I was arrested for the last one, and when I was being cautioned the officer said I seemed like a bright lad, and had I considered a career in the police?) I slept terribly, waking to a splitting head and a sweaty fear of what I might have got up to.

All this again and again and again and again. Account for inflation, and I spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on drinks I didn’t particularly enjoy, meals I didn’t need, clubs, taxis, all the crap you’d never buy if you were in your right mind. That’s the price of a house down the drain.

Most of this happened in London, when I worked in an office and there was always someone to drink with, but in my 40s I lived on my own in deepest rural France, and that wasn’t much better. Drop in on a neighbour, even at 10am, and you’d be offered a tumbler of wine. My little house in the woods had a cellar, and booze flowed in and out of it like the tide: beaujolais, bordeaux, bourgogne, côtes du Rhône, corbières, corbières-boutenac; Grimbergen, Blanche de Bruxelles, Leffe Blonde, Leffe Brune, Leffe Triple …

I arrived in 2003, and sat out that year’s heatwave in a deckchair, drinking Pelforth in the shade of my favourite spruce, and using the bilberries that grew all around to flavour supermarket spirits. Every now and again, I would send photos of dewy glasses to friends back in Britain: look at me, I’m living the life, this stuff is practically free!

My home was in the mountains, on the side that caught the storms. On summer nights lightning would hit the power lines, plunging the house into darkness. One August, as thunder shook the forest, I sat under the tallest tree, thrilling to the flashes, knocking back the vodka and oblivious to the fact that the next bolt might be aimed at me. Most evenings, though, I would open a bottle of rasteau and sit on the terrace to enjoy the sunset. One night, polishing off a last few glasses by starlight, I spotted a man with a rifle lurking near the house – and decided it would be a good idea to chase him through the woods, while shouting that I had a gun of my own, which I didn’t. Most shamefully of all, I’d been drinking with my grownup daughter, and I dragged her along with me.

I didn’t wrong anyone so badly that I can’t look myself in the face, but there are a lot of people I ought to say sorry to.

It wasn’t all bad. I had some lovely drunken meals, drunken chats and drunken romances. I’m shy, and booze helped me unbend, make friends and meet women. Without it, I might never have got more than a hug from the woman who is now my wife. All the same, the more I drank, the more I tired of the crap that went with it – not just the misbehaving and the hangxiety but the knowledge that none of this was good for my health.

Ask Dr Jeevan Fernando, an associate at the charity Alcohol Change UK, how booze can damage your body and he’ll mention liver disease, of course, and sleep problems, and osteoporosis and drunken falls. “But one that I worry about most is the risk of dementia and cognitive decline,” he says. “Heavy alcohol use is very strongly related to the decline and atrophy of your brain. There is a normal shrinkage that occurs with age, but alcohol can increase that – and the risk of dementia later in life. Then there’s mental health. There is very, very strong evidence of a link to increased anxiety and rates of depression.”

There’s more. “Also, chronic alcohol use is related to cardiovascular issues. You have a much higher rate of heart attacks, strokes; your blood pressure is worse. Alcohol is also a known carcinogen – heavily related to breast cancer, liver cancer, bowel cancer …”

By my mid-50s, I had seen one close friend drink herself to death. Had I already pushed my own luck too far?

I would occasionally attempt to cut down, to have just a few drinks rather than a session, but never got very far. One mouthful was enough to get me in the zone and wash away my resolve. “This is nice,” my mind would say. “More will be even nicer.”

As for stopping completely, that wasn’t on my radar. Booze was how I switched off after a stressful day, how I put a smile on my face. How would I relax without it? How would I fill the evenings? I could hardly become Teetotal Phil if I couldn’t even visualise Teetotal Phil.

But then, five years ago, on 2 August 2020, I just packed it in. This may not mean much unless you’re a hardened drinker, but I have got through Christmas parties sober, and office leaving dos. I have survived two wedding receptions on nothing more than alcohol-free wine and beer. Oh, and cocaine, but I never set out to give that up.

Joke! I have barely touched drugs in my life, apart from the liquid, legal, socially acceptable one. I’m not about to start now.

I’m not going to lie: I don’t socialise as readily as I used to. Right now, as I write this, I could be at a summer drinks party with my workmates. But I know that as the evening wears on we’d drift apart, like radios that can’t hold a frequency. I’d bring everyone down, the dry ghost at the feast. This is a me-problem, as other non-drinkers seem to cope. Practice would help – but, although I have never thought of myself as tight, the new me struggles with the idea of paying 30 or 40 quid for a round when I’d be knocking back Diet Coke.

How have I filled the hours when I would have been drinking? I watch more TV than I used to, and fuss over our two dogs, who soak up attention like hairy sponges. And I exercise – running, yoga, Hiit, calisthenics. A class here, a workshop there. I’ve set up some gymnastics rings in the garden. I’m studying to be a personal trainer. I’d like to learn to juggle. I meet more people than I ever did, and I can actually remember their names afterwards. I’m happier and more stable than I used to be, and now that I have learned there are other ways to handle stress, I don’t worry that some disaster will send me back to the bottle.

I was struck – and inspired – by something that the personal trainer Tara LaFerrara posted on Threads last month, after the sudden death of her mother. The two had a “tough” relationship, which left a lot to untangle. “I could have easily drunk alcohol during this time of grief, family drama and loss,” LaFerrara wrote, “but I have not. Not one sip of alcohol in almost 1,000 days. Proud of that.”

She gave up on her first wedding anniversary, almost three years ago. “I just realised it wasn’t serving me any more,” she tells me. “I didn’t like the taste or how it made me feel during or after. Now I sleep better, have more energy, more clarity, better relationships with my friends and my partner.”

How did she take her mind off her mum? “Getting outside in nature, walks, meditation, and working out has helped more than anything else.” And drinking? “I wasn’t tempted. Sitting in this pain and really feeling your raw emotions is wild.”

The wild thing about my own journey, at least to me, is not that I gave up, but how easy it was. I had – still have – the occasional wistful longing for a cold beer on a hot day, or a glass of red when I’m cooking, but that’s it. I didn’t need hypnosis, medication or a support group, although I am not against any of those things. I didn’t feel ashamed about taking antidepressants when I needed them, or getting therapy for insomnia and anxiety. I am aware of how very lucky I have been. Cold turkey will not be right for everyone. “If you are a very heavy drinker,” Dr Fernando warns, “abruptly stopping may cause withdrawal symptoms, so you should speak to your GP.” All that said, and without wishing to trivialise anyone dealing with addiction, not everyone will find abstinence an uphill struggle.

What helped me? Clearly – and miraculously – my dependency on alcohol was far more psychological than physical. Despite the amount I had been drinking, stopping didn’t give me headaches, or jitters, or overpowering cravings. And I was lucky enough to have a good marriage, to a woman who had also drunk her fill. Hannah was the one who first decided to take a break from booze, and I just tagged along, partly to support her. She wasn’t a world-class boozehound like me, but she did enjoy a drink. “Ever since I was little,” she says, “it has been the ultimate treat, the ultimate reward, the ultimate celebration, the ultimate commiseration.”

On the downside: “As I got older,” she says, “my hangovers were fucking biblical.” The day after my 57th birthday, “absolutely annihilated”, she announced she was taking three months off the booze. Ten days later, when I got back from a long-planned holiday, I followed suit.

When the three months were up, we both decided to carry on. “After a while,” as Hannah puts it, “the idea of going back becomes absurd. And you think, ‘Well, I could maybe drink on special occasions’ – but I don’t know what occasion could possibly be special enough.” There have been no dramas, no relapses, none of that tension you’d get between a spouse who gets sloshed every night and one whose body is a temple. We’re closer now than we were five years ago. The only fly in the ointment is that 10-day head start. Unless she falls off the wagon, she’ll always be slightly more awesome than me. I’m trying to get over it.

A survey of British drinkers last year found 48% wanted to cut down or stop entirely. It’s a similar story in the US and Australia. Do I have any advice for them? Nothing that would qualify me to open a detox clinic. But I will say that even if you think you can’t give up, there may come a point when you find yourself pushing at an open door. And, however much you wish you had done it before, you may not have left it too late. I’ve had a lot of tests in the year or so since I started writing about health, and as far as I can tell my liver, brain, heart etc are all in good shape. My teeth are yellower than I’d like, which I blame on the wine, and there are broken veins in my nose and cheeks, but that’s all the obvious damage.

Despite those 40 stupid years, I’m hopeful I dodged a bullet. Maybe I was staggering so much it didn’t hit me.

Sarah Murray recalls the first time she saw an artificial model in fashion: It was 2023, and a beautiful young woman of color donned a Levi’s denim overall dress. Murray, a commercial model herself, said it made her feel sad and exhausted.

The iconic denim company had teamed up with the AI studio Lalaland.ai to create “diverse” digital fashion models for more inclusive ads. For an industry that has failed for years to employ diverse human models, the backlash was swift, with New York Magazine calling the decision “artificial diversity.”

“Modeling as a profession is already challenging enough without having to compete with now new digital standards of perfection that can be achieved with AI,” Murray told TechCrunch.

Two years later, her worries have compounded. Brands continue to experiment with AI-generated models, to the consternation of many fashion lovers. The latest uproar came after Vogue’s July print edition featured a Guess ad with a typical model for the brand: thin yet voluptuous, glossy blond tresses, pouty rose lips. She exemplified North American beauty standards, but there was one problem — she was AI generated.

The internet buzzed for days, in large part because the AI-generated beauty showed up in Vogue, the fashion bible that dictates what is and is not acceptable in the industry. The AI-generated model was featured in an advertisement, not a Vogue editorial spread. And Vogue told TechCrunch the ad met its advertising standards.

To many, an ad versus an editorial is a distinction without a difference.

TechCrunch spoke to fashion models, experts, and technologists to get a sense of where the industry is headed now that Vogue seems to have put a stamp of approval on technology that’s poised to dramatically change the fashion industry.

They said the Guess ad drama highlights questions arising within creative industries being touched by AI’s silicon fingers: When high-quality creative work can be done by AI in a fraction of the time and cost, what’s the point of humans? And in the world of fashion, what happens to the humans — the models, photographers, stylists, and set designers — performing those jobs?

Sinead Bovell, a model and founder of the WAYE organization who wrote about CGI models for Vogue five years ago, told TechCrunch that “e-commerce models” are most under threat of automation.

E-commerce models are the ones who pose for advertisements or display clothes and accessories for online shoppers. Compared to high-fashion models, whose striking, often unattainable looks are featured in editorial spreads and on runways, they’re more realistic and relatable.

“E-commerce is where most models make their bread and butter,” Bovell said. “It’s not necessarily the path to model fame or model prestige, but it is the path for financial security.”

That fact is running in direct contrast to the pressure many brands feel to automate such shoots. Paul Mouginot, an art technologist who has worked with luxury brands, said it’s simply expensive to work with live models, especially when it comes to photographing them in countless garments, shoes, and accessories.

“AI now lets you start with a flat-lay product shoot, place it on a photorealistic virtual model, and even position that model in a coherent setting, producing images that look like genuine fashion editorials,” he told TechCrunch.

Brands, in some ways, have been doing this for a while, he said. Mouginot, who is French, cited the French retailer Veepee as an example of a company that has used virtual mannequins to sell clothes since at least 2013. Other notable brands like H&M, Mango, and Calvin Klein have also resorted to AI models.

Amy Odell, a fashion writer and author of a recently published biography on Gwyneth Paltrow, put it more simply: “It’s just so much cheaper for [brands] to use AI models now. Brands need a lot of content, and it just adds up. So if they can save money on their print ad or their TikTok feed, they will.”

PJ Pereira, co-founder of AI ad firm Silverside AI, said it really comes down to scale. Every conversation he’s had with fashion brands circles around the fact that the entire marketing system was built for a world where brands produced just four big pieces of content per year. Social media and e-commerce has changed that, and now they need anywhere from 400 to 400,000 pieces; it’s too expensive for brands, especially small ones, to keep up.

“There’s no way to scale from four to 400 or 400,000 with just process tweaks,” he added. “You need a new system. People get angry. They assume this is about taking money away from artists and models. But that’s not what I’ve seen.”

Murray, a commercial model, understands the cost benefits of using AI models, but only to an extent.

She lamented that brands like Levi’s claim AI is only meant to supplement human talent, not take away.

“If those [brands] ever had the opportunity to stand in line at an open casting call, they would know about the endless amounts of models, including myself, that would dream of opportunities to work with their brands,” she said. “They would never need to supplement with anything fake.”

She thinks such a shift will impact “non-traditional” — think, diverse — commercial models, such as herself. That was the main problem with the Levi’s ad. Rather than hiring diverse talent, it artificially generated it.

Bovell calls this “robot cultural appropriation,” or the idea that brands can just generate certain, especially diverse, identities to tell a brand story, even if the person who created the technology isn’t of that same identity.

And though Pereira argues that it’s unrealistic to shoot every garment on every type of model, that hasn’t calmed the fears many diverse models have about what’s to come.

“We already see an unprecedented use of certain terms in our contracts that we worry indicate that we are possibly signing away our rights for a brand to use our face and anything recognizable as ourselves to train their future AI systems,” Murray said.

Some see generating likenesses of models as a way forward in the AI era. Sara Ziff, a former model and founder of the Model Alliance, is working to pass the Fashion Workers Act, which would require brands to get a model’s clear consent and provide compensation for using their digital replicas. Mouginot said this lets models appear at several shoots on the same day and possibly generate additional income.

That’s “precious when a sought-after model is already traveling constantly,” he continued. But at the same time, whenever an avatar is hired, human labor is replaced. “What few players gain can mean fewer opportunities for many others.”

If anything, Bovell said the bar is now higher for models looking to compete with the distinctive and the digitized. She suggested that models use their platforms to build their personal brands, differentiate themselves, and work on new revenue streams like podcasting or brand endorsements.

“Start to take those opportunities to tell your unique human story,” she said. “AI will never have a unique human story.”

That sort of entrepreneurial mindset is becoming table stakes across industries — from journalism to coding — as AI creates the conditions for the most self-directed learners to rise.

Mouginot sees a world where some platforms stop working with human models altogether, though he also believes humans share a desire for the “sensual reality of objects, for a touch of imperfection and for human connection.”

“Many breakthrough models succeed precisely because of a distinctive trait, teeth, gaze, attitude, that is slightly imperfect by strict standards yet utterly charming,” he said. “Such nuances are hard to erode in zeros and ones.”

This is where startup and creative studio Artcare thrives, according to Sandrine Decorde, the firm’s CEO and co-founder. She refers to her team as “AI artisans,” creative people who use tools like Flux from Black Forest Labs to fine-tune AI-generated models that have that touch of unique humanity.

Much of the work Decorde’s firm does today involves producing AI-generated babies and children for brands. Employing minors in the fashion industry has historically been a gray area rife with exploitation and abuse. Ethically, Decorde argues, bringing generative AI to children’s fashion makes sense, particularly when the market demand is so high.

“It’s like sewing; it’s very delicate,” she told TechCrunch, referring to creating AI-generated models. “The more time we spend on our datasets and image refinements, the better and more consistent our models are.”

Part of the work is building out a library of distinctive artifacts. Decorde noted that many AI-generated models — like the ones created by Seraphinne Vallora, the agency behind Vogue’s Guess ad — are too homogenous. Their lips are too perfect and symmetrical. Their jawlines are all the same.

“Imagery needs to make an impact,” Decorde said, noting that many fashion brands like to work exclusively with certain models, a desire that has spilled over into AI-generated models. “A model embodies a fashion brand.”

Pereira added that his firm combats homogeneity in AI “with intention” and warned that as more content gets made by more people who aren’t intentional, all of the output feeds back into computer models, amplifying bias.

“Just like you would cast for a wide range of models, you have to prompt for that,” he said. “You need to train [models] with a wide range of appearances. Because if you don’t, the AI will reflect whatever biases it was trained on.”

The usage of AI modeling technology in fashion is mostly still in its experimental phase, Claudia Wagner, founder of modeling booking platform Ubooker, told TechCrunch. She and her team saw the Guess ad and said it was interesting technically, but it wasn’t impactful or new.

“It feels like another example of a brand using AI to be part of the current narrative,” she told TechCrunch. “We’re all in a phase of testing and exploring what AI can add — but the real value will come when it’s used with purpose, not just for visibility.”

Brands are getting visibility from using AI — and the Guess ad is the latest example. Pereira said his firm recently tested a fully AI-generated product video on TikTok that got more than a million views with mostly negative comments.

“But if you look past the comments, you see that there’s a silent majority — almost 20x engagement — that vastly outnumber the criticism,” he continued. “The click-through rate was 30x the number of complaints, and the product saw a steep hike in sales.”

He, like Wagner, doesn’t think AI models are going away anytime soon. If anything, the process of using AI will be integrated into the creative workflow.

“Some brands feel good about using fully artificial models,” Pereira said. “Others prefer starting with real people and licensing their likeness to build synthetic shoots. And some brands simply don’t want to do it — they worry their audiences won’t accept it.”

Wagner said what is becoming evident is that human talent remains central, especially when authenticity and identity are part of a brand’s story. That’s especially true for luxury heritage brands, which are usually slow to adopt new technologies.

Though Decorde noted many high-fashion brands are quietly experimenting with AI, Mouginot said many are still trying to define their AI policies and are avoiding fully AI-generated people at the moment. It’s one reason why Vogue’s inclusion of an AI model was such a shock.

Bovell pondered if the ad was Vogue’s way of testing how the world would react to merging high fashion with AI.

So far the reaction hasn’t been great. It’s unclear if the magazine thinks it ride out the backlash.

“What Vogue does matters,” Odell said. “If Vogue ends up doing editorials with AI models, I think that’s going to make it okay. In the same way the industry was really resistant to Kim Kardashian and then Vogue featured her. Then it was okay.”