Category: 5. Entertainment

After a year of musical chairs in fashion, September is gearing up to be one of its biggest show months ever: with debut collections slated from new creative directors at brands including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and ex-Balenciaga designer Demna at Gucci.

On Sunday in Paris, Michael Rider, who recently succeeded Hedi Slimane at Celine, decided to get a head start.

Acting as a sort of amuse bouche for how he plans to shape the brand’s future, Rider showed a mixture of men’s and womenswear.

The show took place at the brand’s sprawling atelier, a short hop from the Tuileries Garden. Guests included the actor Naomi Watts and, fresh from 18 months of South Korean military service, Kim Taehyung, from the K-pop band BTS, who attempted to shelter from the rain under a giant silk foulard that had been erected above a courtyard.

It was a full-circle moment for Rider, an American designer who previously worked under Phoebe Philo during her tenure at the brand from 2008 to 2017.

While fans of her work, known as “Philophiles”, had hoped Rider would reinstate that era of louche tailoring and minimalism, his opening looks quickly curtailed such expectations. Instead of oversized silhouettes, there was a series of skinny jeans and even skinner trousers, hugging calves so tightly, they should have come with a circulation warning.

These lean silhouettes were a nod to his predecessor, Slimane, who honed his signature sharp-edged style during his stints at Saint Laurent and Dior Homme before introducing it to Celine.

Despite initial criticism, Slimane proved lucrative for Celine’s parent company LVMH. According to analysts, he was estimated to have doubled Celine’s annual sales to €2.5bn (£2.1bn), transforming it into LVMH’s third-largest brand, sitting behind Louis Vuitton and Dior. However, in October, he resigned with rumours of failed contract negotiations to blame.

It’s now up to Rider to pick up that moneyed baton.

Rider’s appointment comes at a difficult time in the fashion industry, with a significant slowdown across luxury markets (for the first quarter of 2025, LVMH reported a 4% sales drop across fashion and leather goods).

At the annual general meeting in April 2024, LVMH’s chief executive, Bernard Arnault, said: “Celine is chic, hip, sexy fashion for young people even if the prices are what they are, and it works.”

Rather than wiping the slate clean, during this period of uncertainty, it appears that Rider is set on evolving on the brand’s existing tried and tested formula.

Speaking backstage after the show, Rider said he “did not want there to be a sense of erasure”, adding that “there was a foundation to build on. That to me felt modern, it felt ethical, it felt strong.”

Rider balanced this homage to the past by intertwining it with his own fashion story. There were nods to his American roots and recent stint as design director of Polo Ralph Lauren, with punchy, coloured knitted V-neck jumpers, neat Oxford shirts and striped ties. Simple evening looks in black including an off-the-shoulder dress and satin lapelled blazers seemed to subtly recall his previous time at Celine.

Accessories, which are easier for luxury brands to shift than a £5k coat, were a focus. Models’ fingers came covered in multiple gold and primary coloured rings. Chunky bangles were stacked on forearms. Giant chain link necklaces were mishmashed. Keyrings jingled with everything from dices to miniature Eiffel Towers.

Rider said he wanted to inject an element of fun. “I would never want to be perceived as cynical. Having a sense of humour in the luxury space is a beautiful thing,” he said.

Bags ranging from colossal woven baskets and enormous leather totes to dainty pouches were emblazoned with logos ranging from a simple C to a “Triomphe” monogram, first created by the house’s founder Céline Vipiana in 1971.

Rider said he was drawn to a logo’s fluid nature. “They can move from something really tasteful to quickly something that is very different from that. They can be many things.”

This coming week, the couture shows in Paris will be filled with delightful, hand-crafted fashions on the runway—and the front rows will be filled with A-listers, too. Ahead of all the stylish action kicking off in the City of Light, one such star—Dua Lipa—has already been spotted checking in to and enjoying the opulence of the Ritz hotel. (Where all the fashion VIPs are known to stay during Fashion Month). And naturally, Lipa nailed a perfectly effortless Parisian look.

The pop star—who has been busy touring this summer—found an ideal day-off look that struck the right balance of chic, yet easy-breezy. It’s the French girl way! She paired summery staples like straight-leg blue wash jeans and a striped button-up dress shirt (styled completely open, safe for one button) with more fashion-minded accessories, like a golden quilted Chanel 25 bag and stiletto sandals.

Photo: Backgrid

Now, will Ms. Dua Lipa dial up the fashion ante for sitting front row at the shows this week? You can count it. She was already photographed making a store visit to Schiaparelli, which means we can likely count on seeing her at that star-studded affair. But even before all of the couture chaos begins, the star clearly knows a thing or two about dressing like a local—and eating and drinking like one. Her last trip—avec partner and husband-to-be Callum Turner—saw the pair head to buzzy bistro Chez Janou, the opulent Costes hotel, and for an intimate late-night dinner at Bistrot des Tournelles.

With this elevated casual look, Lipa looked like a true Parisian heading to the café for a croissant. It’s what Emily In Paris fashion only aspires to be.

Since the beginning of the year, Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro have been quietly dating. They’ve yet to have a glitzy red carpet moment together, but there’s been a few brief glimpses of the Hollywood couple at the beach and on vacation. They enjoy keeping a low profile.

But this weekend, at the star-studded Wimbledon tennis tournament in London, the duo decided to make things a little more official. Garfield and Barbaro attended Sonay Kartal and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova’s match together—and not only did they coordinate outfits, but the couple even enjoyed a cheeky courtside kiss, for all the paparazzi and prying eyes to see.

Let’s start with those complementary ensembles, though. Nothing makes it official like a his-and-hers fashion moment: The two actors were photographed heading into the arena wearing all-white looks that were coordinated to perfection. Barbaro wore a silky white slip dress with strappy heels, while Garfield chose a classic button-up, cuffed pants, and a knit sweater tied around his shoulders. Wimbledon is all about preppy style, after all, and the duo clearly did their style homework ahead of attending the match.

Photo: Getty Images

This volume tells the fascinating story of how one of the most iconic buildings of the Victorian era came into being. Bringing material and archival evidence to life, it gives voice to its makers: from artisans and engineers to royalty and policy makers. This extraordinary piece of architecture reveals itself as a gateway to a new understanding of the political, artistic and scientific aspirations of a generation whose legacy still shapes the social and cultural landscape of today.

This groundbreaking study takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial progress to a wider audience, and in so doing increase its cultural and economic reach.

Placing materiality at its core, this volume provides an intellectual history of Victorian ideas about technology, progress, and prosperity. The narrative is underpinned by a wealth of new sources – from architectural models and archival materials to 19^th century newspapers. Each chapter focuses on a particular element of the Royal Albert Hall’s construction, chronicling the previously overlooked work of a host of contributors from all walks of life, including female mosaic-makers and the Royal Engineers.

Lighting, ventilation, fireproofing, ‘ascending rooms’, cements, acoustics, the organ, the record-breaking iron dome, and the organisation of internal spaces were all attempts to attain progress – and subject to intense public scrutiny. From iron structures to terracotta, from the education of women to the abolition of slavery, in the making of the Royal Albert Hall scientific knowledge and socio-cultural reform were intertwined.

This book shows, for the first time, how the Royal Albert Hall’s building was itself a crucible for innovation. Illustrious techniques from antiquity were reimagined for the new mechanical age, placing the building at the heart of a process of collecting, describing, and systematising arts and practices. At the same time, the Royal Albert Hall was conceived as a ‘manifesto’ of what the Victorians thought Britain ought to be, at a crucial moment of its socio-economic history: a symbolic cultural hub for the Empire’s metropole.

This is the Royal Albert Hall: a central piece of the puzzle in Britain’s march towards modernity.

Dr. Simona Valeriani is based at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she is a senior lecturer. She is an historian of architecture and technology with a background in building archaeology. This book is the result of a long standing interest in the topic (see the V&A display ‘Building the Royal Albert Hall’, 2017) and of a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (2018-2020).

The actor Michael Madsen, who has died aged 67 of a cardiac arrest, saw himself as a “throwback” to the era of noir heavies such as Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin. But plying his jocular menace in the modern Hollywood era gave the actor expanded possibilities for movie violence that elevated him, at certain moments, to a timeless screen presence.

When he severed a policeman’s ear in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs, after sadistically bopping to the sounds of Stealers Wheel’s pop hit Stuck in the Middle With You, it became Madsen’s calling-card scene. He had originally auditioned for the part of Mr Pink, the role eventually played by Steve Buscemi, before the director realised his imposing qualities were perfect for the loose-cannon psychopath, Mr Blonde. “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?” Madsen taunts Harvey Keitel’s Mr White, sipping a soda.

This was Madsen’s breakthrough role, in which he incarnated Tarantino’s notions of freeze-dried cinematic cool; the start of a long association between actor and director. The pair fell out for a time after Madsen declined the role of Vincent Vega – the brother of his Reservoir Dogs character – in Pulp Fiction; he was contracted to the now forgotten 1994 western Wyatt Earp.

But after reconciling, Madsen went on to play notable parts in Kill Bill: Vols 1 & 2 (2003 and 2004), The Hateful Eight (2015) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). He appreciated the director’s loyalty: “I would have been dead and buried long ago if it wasn’t for Quentin,” he told Deadline Hollywood.

With his rangy frame, dark Italianate looks and Eastwoodian squint, Madsen was an obvious casting choice for 1990s crime films, convincing as both detective – in the LAPD thriller Mulholland Falls (1996) – and felon –in the 1994 remake of Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and in the revisionist gangster film Donnie Brasco (1997).

Though his brooding aura could also be refashioned to romantic ends – as shown in another early role as Susan Sarandon’s boyfriend in Thelma & Louise (1991) – he was soon typecast as an American badass (also the title of a 2023 documentary retrospective dedicated to him). After his 90s breakthrough, quality control quickly dissipated; his filmography ballooned to more than 300 titles, most straight-to-video dreck with titles such as Piranhaconda, A Cold Day in Hell, and Garlic & Gunpowder.

In the scrabble for a pay-cheque, he rued the narrowing effects on his career. “They bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun,” he told the Independent. “What people don’t always understand is that I established a lifestyle for my family.”

Madsen was one of the dying breed of actors who brought blue-collar grit to the profession. Born in Chicago, he was one of three children of Elaine (nee Melson) and Calvin Madsen, growing up alongside his sisters, Cheryl and Virginia. His father was a second world war Navy veteran and firefighter; his mother worked in finance but, after divorcing “Cal” when Madsen was nine, later became a film producer. Raised by his father, who physically beat him, the wary youth had a delinquent adolescence, including jail terms for car theft, assault and burglary.

Later working as a mechanic at Joe Jacobs Chevrolet dealership, idolising the Nascar champion driver Richard Petty, Madsen was at first more enthused by motor racing than the arts. Watching Mitchum in the 1957 wartime romance Heaven Knows, Mr Allison altered his course. “When I saw that movie, I thought: ‘I could probably do that.’” Not long after having his first child, Jessica, with his girlfriend Dana Mechling, Madsen was stunned by a 1981 production of Of Mice and Men by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago; the star John Malkovich encouraged him to enrol in scene-study classes.

Madsen later downplayed the importance of this tuition, even after appearing in another production of the same play as Carlson, the ranch hand who shoots a dog. This was his true education, he told the Independent: “That fucking dog was the best acting teacher I ever had. When I was really into my character, the dog would get scared and I’d have to drag it offstage before I fired the blank gun. But if I wasn’t into my performance, the dog would just be happy, and when I walked off it would follow me, which was just as upsetting for the audience.”

Aided by his more studious sister Virginia, who already had an agent and would later star in the 1992 horror classic Candyman as well as the 2004 wine-country drama Sideways, Madsen landed an early role in the techno-thriller WarGames (1983); he played an air-force officer with no compunction about pressing the nuclear button.

Still pumping gas at a Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills for stars including Fred Astaire, Jack Lemmon and Warren Beatty, he subsisted largely on TV jobs for most of the 80s, including Miami Vice, Tour of Duty and Cagney & Lacey. Madsen married Cher’s half-sister Georganne LaPiere in 1984; they divorced four years later.

After scene-stealing first as the poet Tom Baker in Oliver Stone’s biopic The Doors, then in Reservoir Dogs, the actor could not convert the Tarantino cachet into leading-man status. He hovered on the fringes of the mainstream in films including Free Willy (1993); the sexed-up Alien rip-off Species (1995), as a black-ops mercenary; and another career high as a rising mafia capo in Donnie Brasco.

But whether because of Madsen’s renegade reputation, or his lesser bankability compared to the rising stars of the time, other roles eluded him. He was outflanked by Woody Harrelson for Natural Born Killers and Russell Crowe for LA Confidential.

During this period, from 1991 to 1995, he was married to the actor Jeannine Bisignano, with whom he had two sons, Christian and Max. In 1996 he married the actor DeAnna Morgan, while filming Donnie Brasco, and they went on to have three sons, Hudson, Kalvin and Luke.

Tarantino kept the faith, casting Madsen as the Stetson-hatted assassin Budd, who buries Uma Thurman alive in the Kill Bill films; then as the saloon-lurking, coffee-poisoning cowboy Joe Gage in The Hateful Eight. A rumoured Reservoir Dogs prequel, featuring Madsen and John Travolta as the Vega brothers, never transpired.

As Madsen upped his output to provide for his multiple families, averaging close to 10 movies a year by the 2010s, he also branched out into videogame voiceover work, including in Grand Theft Auto III and the Dishonored franchise.

The real Madsen had rough edges; he lived a turbulent life, even as a family man in middle age and beyond. With drink-driving arrests in 2012 and 2019, he struggled with alcoholism. But the tough exterior concealed an observant and tender psyche. Though he only fleetingly tapped into it on screen, he gave it fuller rein in several published collections of impressionistic poetry often written on the hoof during his travels; one on his own leg in the back of a New York taxi.

Madsen was devastated by the suicide in January 2022 of his son Hudson, a US army sergeant, at the age of 26; a month later, he was arrested for trespassing in Malibu. He reportedly assaulted his wife in August last year, though charges were later dropped; he filed for divorce in September.

Such full-tilt recklessness, for good and ill, had been his modus operandi since he first broke into Hollywood, as he later told Esquire: “In the early 90s I was constantly running a marathon, and although I won most of the races, I injured myself in the process.”

He is survived by DeAnna, his daughter Jessica, his sons Christian, Max, Kalvin and Luke, his stepson, Cody, his mother, Elaine, and his sisters, Cheryl and Virginia.

“Black Sabbath invented heavy metal and in doing so, they changed the world,” guitarist Mark Morton says of performing Master of Reality classic at Back to the Beginning concert

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Julian McMahon, an Australia-born actor who performed in two “Fantastic Four” films and appeared in TV shows such as “Charmed,” “Nip/Tuck” and “Profiler,” has died, his wife said in a statement.

McMahon, 56, died peacefully this week after a battle with cancer, Kelly McMahon said in a statement provided to The Associated Press by his Beverly Hills-based publicist. He was 56, according to the New York Times.

“Julian loved life,” the statement said. “He loved his family. He loved his friends He loved his work, and he loved his fans. His deepest wish was to bring joy into as many lives as possible.”

McMahon played Dr. Doom in the films “Fantastic Four” in 2005 and “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” which came out two years later.

Additionally, he had roles in the TV shows “Home and Away,” “FBI: Most Wanted” and “Another World,” according to IMDB.

Actress Alyssa Milano, who appeared with McMahon on “Charmed,” mourned his death on social media, saying “Julian was more than my TV husband.”

“Julian McMahon was magic,” Milano said. “That smile. That laugh. That talent. That presence. He walked into a room and lit it up — not just with charisma, but with kindness. With mischief. With soulful understanding.”

In March 2024, Catherine, Princess of Wales, known to many as Kate Middleton, publicly announced that she had been diagnosed with cancer. The announcement came via a video message in which she explained that the cancer was discovered following major abdominal surgery performed earlier in the year.

The exact type of cancer has not been disclosed by Kensington Palace, and no further medical details have been made public. The palace cited the importance of privacy for her and her family, particularly in protecting the well-being of her three children.

Naturally, speculation followed, and some even suggested she was pregnant. Those rumors were quickly debunked. She began a course of preventive chemotherapy in early 2024. By September of that year, it was confirmed that she had completed treatment.

In January 2025, she announced that she was in remission. While she remained largely out of the public eye during her treatment, she gradually resumed limited public duties in 2025.

Inside Kate Middleton’s Very Private Cancer Battle and Public Return!

On July 2, 2025, Catherine, Princess of Wales, made her first public appearance in two weeks with a visit to Colchester Hospital in Essex. This marked one of her first major engagements since confirming she was in remission from cancer earlier in the year.

During the visit, she spent time in a newly opened well-being garden designed to support patients, NHS staff, and visitors.

While speaking with patients and staff, the Princess provided new insight into the post-treatment challenges she has experienced. She explained (via BBC),

You put on a sort of brave face (with) stoicism through treatment. (When) treatment’s done, then it’s like, ‘I can crack on, get back to normal again,’But actually the phase afterwards is really difficult.

You’re not necessarily under the clinical team any longer, but you’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to.

She further emphasized the importance of post-treatment support for mental health and long-term recovery. She described this kind of care as “life-changing “ for patients and their families.

Although she resumed select duties in 2025, she continues to limit her schedule. For example, she withdrew from attending Royal Ascot on June 18, reportedly due to ongoing recovery needs. According to palace sources, she is “listening to what her body is telling her” (as per People Magazine)and gradually reintegrating into public life while prioritizing her health.

The Truth About Kate Middleton’s “Fourth Child”

Although the pregnancy rumors were totally false, it turns out the Princess of Wales may be raising not three but four children, at least according to palace insiders.

Royal expert and author of Yes, Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants, Tom Quinn, revealed to Fox News that Kate Middleton sometimes has to “manage” her husband, Prince William, as if he were another one of the kids.

Behind closed palace doors, it’s been reported that William can be short-tempered when things don’t go his way. That’s where Middleton reportedly steps in, not just as a spouse but as a calming presence who diffuses his irritations much like she would with George, Charlotte, or Louis.

Quinn said,

Occasionally, William has little tantrums and irritations if things aren’t done the way he wants them done [as heir to the British throne]And so, there’s a joke among the staff that Kate treats William as the fourth because he occasionally behaves like one.

She hasn’t had everything done for her throughout her life, so she calms him down when he gets a bit fractious, She says he sometimes has to be treated as her fourth child!

Both William and King Charles III are allegedly said to share this streak, easily irritated, especially when service or events don’t go exactly to plan, as per the expert. As for William, Quinn alleges that his emotional intensity likely traces back to a turbulent childhood, including his parents’ public divorce and the loss of Princess Diana.

Has her experience with cancer changed your view of the royal family’s human side? Let us know in the comments!