Apéritif DANIELE TANTARI
Kim Kardashian West Kanye West
3. 7.
Roger Federer
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Queen Elizabeth II
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Banksy Jeff Bezos
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Two years ago, the Business of Fashion (BOF) interviewed Kim Kardashian West and her “momager” Kris Jenner, about the family’s leap from reality-TV stars to fashion and beauty moguls. With 188 million followers on Instagram and 66.6 million on Twitter, Kim is one of the most visible women on the planet. So this week’s announcement that the family will cease its reality series after the 20th season is by no means a “goodbye” but more an acknowledgement that the show has served its purpose. That is, launching a business empire that has, many would argue, eclipsed the value of the TV show to their brand.
T HE
show premiered 13 years ago, when Kim was better known as the assistant to hotel heiress Paris Hilton and the subject of a leaked sex tape with rapper Ray J. So how did Kim – and indeed the wider clan, including her half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner – go from being just another case of famous for being famous* to a
style icon who has been on the cover of Vogue eight times?
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But Wintour stuck to her guns, later saying it would have been a “misstep” for Vogue to ignore that “Kim and Kanye were a part of the conversation of the day”. For one thing, Kim, who married rapper Kanye West in 2014, turned existing beauty standards upside down. In that 2018 BOF interview, she said: “I don’t really look at the traditional forms ... I do what I want to do. I have always been really confident in the image I want to put out there.” Just prior to their marriage, US Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour received major backlash when she made the decision to feature Kim and Kanye on the cover of the style bible. Highprofile women, including the actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, threatened to cancel their subscriptions. Others dismissed the couple as vulgar and having no place in high fashion.
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By any calculation, 2019 was a big year for the Kardashian-Jenners. Kylie Jenner, then 22, sold a 51 per cent stake in her Kylie Cosmetics brand to beauty giant Coty for $US600 million ($824 million), and is now thought to be expanding into baby and hair products, based on trademark applications filed with US authorities. Kim has KKW Beauty and a shapewear line called Skims which, despite attracting a cultural-appropriation controversy over its original name, Kimono, reportedly sold $US2 million in product within minutes of launching. Adding to these powerhouses, Khloe Kardashian has Good American, a size-inclusive denim brand; Kendall Jenner is one of the world’s top-earning models and is also launching a selfcare brand; and, by extension, there is Kanye West’s Yeezy clothing brand, as well as earnings from his various music interests.
Stephen Wigley, associate dean of Fashion Enterprise at RMIT University, agrees. He believes the Kardashians’ “key contribution” to fashion has been elevating the athleisure trend into the mainstream. “Some designers might be a little snobby or ... reticent to fully acknowledge the role they play but inevitably they play a very powerful role,” he says. In the same way as the Duchess of Cambridge or Meghan, Duchess of Sussex can move product, the Kardashian-Jenners have made an impact on brands, even by posting a single image on social media. Just this week, Kylie posted a photo of herself wearing a tracksuit designed by Australian brand Atoir in collaboration with influencer Rozalia Russian to her 195 million followers. Unsurprisingly, sales skyrocketed.
Russian says although the KardashianJenners will always have their critics, their influence over fashion cannot be downplayed. “You need to put your opinion aside in terms of whether you like them or not and have a look at the numbers ... You can’t deny they’re hard working,” Russian says.
“W for li ould I loo But i fe advice? k up to h n ter er Mayb m e s not. of be fashi a o u n who’s , name ty and so more influ meone entia l.”
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When Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” was released in 2004, the song was praised for boldly bringing discussions of faith into hip-hop. Fifteen years later, Mr. West’s contemporaries continue to speak of its impact.
It is this persistent reverie and good will for “Jesus Walks” that Mr. West has banked on since starting Sunday Service, a series of obliquely religious pop-up gatherings featuring a gospel choir (wearing attire from the rapper’s clothing line Yeezy) this year. The set lists fluctuate from week to week. But the linchpin of the productions, which segue from traditional songs of mercy and salvation to bolder reconfigurations of modern secular hits, is in that subversive single from his debut album,
“The College Dropout” — the artist jubilantly recites the final verse of the song, flexing his cadence in lock step with the choir.
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But the endeavour reads like a blatantly self-serving appropriation of black faith traditions, and the Sunday Service performances are in fact little more than concerts trading in aimless aphorisms and the cult of Mr. West’s personality — so much so that it has become a running joke that he’s running an actual cult. Black Christians have expressed scepticism about his intentions, and the rapper’s past comments about how he views the relationship between hip-hop and church provide reason for their concern.
“Hip-hop is a religion to a certain extent, and the rappers are the preachers, the music is the scriptures, you know?” Mr. West says in an archival clip resurfaced in the docu-series.
“It’s just like church, because you go to a concert, you raise your hands in the air, you sing songs and you definitely pay some money. It’s just like church.”
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The description of Sunday Service provided by his wife, Kim Kardashian West, during an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” doesn’t help: “There’s no praying, there’s no sermon. There’s no word. It’s just music, and it’s just a feeling.” The reduction of the black faith tradition to “just music” is precisely what has become of a similar profit-making endeavor for some black places of worship. For nearly 30 years there have been Sunday church service tours of Harlem landmarks such as Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York City’s oldest black church) and Abyssinian Baptist Church, with foot traffic accelerating at the turn of the century. Tourists pay concert ticket prices to enter into a hallowed spiritual ground for a glimpse of a famed choir, as opposed to consuming a spiritual service the significance of the churches’ histories. Gospel is reduced to a commodity, as opposed to a legacy. The early, more conventional musical invocations of praise and faith from the choir gave way to a freestyle performance, as Mr. West claimed to be a rapper “with a purpose, not just for surface.” The choir, filling in the first few pews of the church as opposed to the traditional positionizng on the stage platforms, reacted exuberantly, dancing, jumping and engaging in unison while the churchgoers — several of whom reportedly walked out — looked on.
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Even if “Jesus Walks” isn’t as wholly original as his peers would have you believe, there remains a power in the song’s origins that seems to have been lost today. It’s a distinct call of faith and conviction, the essence of which Mr. West, at his best, distilled into the hook of “Jesus Walks” in 2004, which samples “Walk With Me”: “God show me the way, because the Devil’s trying to break me down.”
If “Jesus Walks” is a song that he created to focus on the sins of man, as his co-writer Rhymefest (born Che Smith) has stated, his first reckoning should be with the paradox of spreading the farce of original thought as dictated through the filter of the church of Kanye West.
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It is nearly two decades since Roger Federer first stepped on to Centre Court and began the greatest act of seduction tennis has seen. In July 2001 he was 19, talented but untested in the white heat of grand slam battle. On the other side of the net stood Pete Sampras, the greatest grass-court gunslinger of them all, with a demon serve and volleys as crisp as a fresh banknote. The American had won seven of the previous eight Wimbledons and more grand slams than anyone else, yet such was the audacity of Federer’s shot-making in his epic fourth-round victory that he quickly held the crowd – as well his racket – in the palm of his hand.
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“BUT I THINK HE IS A LITTLE MORE EXTRA SPECIAL THAN THE OTHER GUYS.”
Sampras gave the equivalent of a papal blessing to his young opponent. “There are a lot of good players coming up, and Roger is one of them,” he said. “But I think he is a little more extra special than the other guys.”.
Sport is primarily a numbers game and for now the 38-year-old has them on his side. He has won 20 grand slams, more than any other male player, and has been world No 1 for a record 310 weeks. That said, tennis’s history books are not written in permanent marker. Nadal is breathing down his neck on the all-time list with 19 slams, while Djokovic has 17. Both have winning head-to-head records against Federer, as well as age on their side.
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They could yet knock him off that particular perch. But even if they do, there is another way of teasing out Federer’s greatness. Imagine you had to pick a player for a match to save your life – only you didn’t know the surface, the opponent, or whether a modern racket or an old wooden one would be used. Who would you pick? Clearly you would want someone with an all-court game, who could serve and volley as well as hit punishing ground strokes. That man would surely be Federer, given he is the only player to win at least 10 titles on three different surfaces.
Federer is undoubtedly the greatest player on turf, having not only won more grass-court titles, 19, than anyone else but more also than Sampras (10) and John McEnroe (eight) combined. His greatness is also shown by his longevity, with a span between grand slam victories of nearly 15 years, from Wimbledon 2003 to the Australian Open in 2018, when he was 36. To put that into perspective, Sampras won his last slam at 31, Rod Laver at 31 and Andre Agassi at 32.
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What makes Federer’s late period even more impressive is that for nearly five years, between 2012 and 2017, he failed to win a slam, partly because of various back and knee injuries. The era when his racket played like a Stradivarius, and the American writer David Foster Wallace compared watching him to a religious experience, appeared over for good. Yet the old dog learned some new tricks, including the SABR – the Sneak Attack By Roger – which involved Federer moving up the court to hit a half-volley on his opponent’s second serve – as well as improving his topspin backhand, to launch one of the great sporting comeback stories. An under-appreciated point of Federer’s greatness was made by the ATP tennis analyst Craig O’Shannessy recently. Having crunched all the numbers from the ATP Tour since 1991, O’Shannessy found that even in the matches he lost,
Federer claimed almost 48% of points – more than any other player in defeats. You would never guess it from his demeanour, but the Swiss player is one of the toughest outs in tennis.
For many, though, Federer’s greatness does not only come down to the numbers, but something more mystical. You see it in the balletic grace of his movement and those impossibly high-tariff ground strokes; and how he makes the outrageous appear effortless. You see it in the symphonic variety of his play and how in an era of baseline grunters he is also a wizard at the net; using his racket as a wand as well as a weapon. And most of all you hear it with the gasps of the crowd as another sublime winner finds its mark.
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Queen Elizabeth II becomes Britain’s longest-serving monarch – live. As an adult, the closest thing to this ritual either happens on the few occasions I attend synagogue and hear a rabbi’s sermon, or on Christmas Day when the Queen delivers her annual message. It’s by far my favourite part of the whole festive period. My family gathers around the TV - standing for the national anthem with a glass of bubbles in hand - and listens to our monarch’s pearls of wisdom. If it sounds quaint and odd, then so be it.
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But this tradition has formed a central part of my lifelong relationship with Her Majesty. And my mother’s too. For the duration of both of our lives, (Her Majesty’s coronation, in 1952, was the year my mum was born) this woman has been on the throne. In a way, she links us as mother and daughter, as we live our lives in parallel within 21st century Elizabethan Britain. The Queen has been aptly described by Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood as a “permanent anchor in a fast-moving world”. She has also become, for many, a feminist icon. I shared this view on BBC’s News at Ten earlier this week, and promptly received this sneering tweet from an angry Scottish woman. I can only assume she was inferring that someone so incredibly wealthy and who’d inherited her position cannot possibly be viewed as an icon – and a feminist one at that.
We are regularly told by teachers, politicians and the like, that girls “can’t be what they can’t see” and about the grave importance of role models. Now I’m not suggesting for one moment that growing up aspiring to be a queen or a princess is a viable career path (cue Kate Middleton jokes). But in a world still dominated by men at the upper echelons of society, there has been something comforting and bloody brilliant about having a female monarch at the helm of our country year in, year out. A no nonsense monarch at that - who in World War II fixed cars as a truck mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, who thought nothing of taking the late (and alarmed) Saudi King Abdullah for a fast spin in her Land Rover (even though his
country continue to prohibit women from driving) and most recently, quietly oversaw the change of royal rules of succession allowing an eldest girl to always accede to the throne. I don’t raise these things as a way of proving Her Majesty’s feminist credentials. Although I strongly suspect she is a woman’s woman – especially after her telling words at this year’s centenary celebrations of the Women’s Institute (of which she has been a member since 1943):
“There has been significant economic and social change since 1915. Women have been granted the vote, British women have climbed Everest for the first time and the country has elected its first female prime minister.”
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She added: “In the modern world, the opportunities for women to give something of value to society are greater than ever, because, through their own efforts, they now play a much greater part in all areas of public life.” But if the Queen hasn’t exactly donned a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt, nor has she stood in the way of progress. One gets the sense, from speeches such as her WI talk, that she quietly approves any advancement British women make “through their own efforts” in smashing the remaining glass ceilings.
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I’d argue that recognition and awareness can be more powerful coming from a woman who’s so often accused of inheriting a position that cost her no effort at all.
For me personally, the Queen has become a feminist icon, whether she wanted to or not, simply by never letting her gender define her. Stoic, modest and capable are three words that spring to mind when I think of our Queen. She’s a safe pair of hands - and one thing you can’t inherit as a monarch is the respect of your people, which she has earned in buckets over the last six decades. Her gender has always been irrelevant to her capacity to do her job. But by doing that job stoically and with the utmost dedication, she’s inadvertently done a great deal to normalise the idea of having a woman in charge – which after her reign won’t be the case for at least three generations of the Royal Family. Moreover, her selflessness is a welcome antidote in our increasingly selfish and selfie-obsessed world.
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K. AT TAC T R A IS A N TACK. “THIS AN ART AT ? Y S THIS I S…” BANKS I S I TH This week, a very convincing theory went viral: that former Art Attack presenter Neil Buchanan is, in fact, the elusive graffiti artist known as Banksy.
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The 58-year-old was forced to deny the suggestion after he was “inundated with enquiries” about it. “Neil Buchanan is NOT Banksy,” a statement on the artist’s website reads. “We can confirm that there is no truth in the rumour whatsoever.” Sounds like something Banksy would say IMO. For those who don’t know, Liverpool-born Buchanan rose to fame as the charming presenter of children’s TV show Art Attack, which he hosted from 1990 until 2007. As well as his red Art Attack sweatshirt and catchphrase, “Here’s one I made earlier”, Buchanan was known for his large-scale works (see: The Queen’s head made out of money) and inventive, easy-to-follow creations.
Admittedly, this sounds like a lot of work to juggle alongside being an anonymous, world-famous street artist. Nonetheless, how plausible is it that Neil Buchanan could be Banksy? “Outwardly, there’s not a huge amount that’s similar between Banksy’s work and Neil Buchanan’s,” Paul Gough, vice chancellor at Arts University Bournemouth, artist, and author of Banksy: The Bristol Legacy, tells Dazed. “However, they both use the moving image – short film, explanatory text, compelling storytelling – to share their methods and materials.”
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“Both prefer figuration and representation to express their ideas, and they both have a tendency to rely on the human form to convey the narrative,” adds Gough, before asserting that this is where the similarity ends. “Whereas Buchanan prefers rather coy, poetic, and, at times, maudlin images, Bansky is renowned – indeed revered – for his shrewd, ironic, and acerbic imagery.”
Unlike Buchanan, who describes himself as an artist and photographer, and hosted one of the most famous children’s TV shows in the UK, Gough asserts that Banksy “would never call himself an ‘artist’; never appear knowingly on television; prefer not to charge for entry to see an exhibition or installation of his work (except for charity); and likes to kick hard against the establishment, the academies, and the institutions which represent authority and epitomise crass hypocrisy”.
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However, Gough does admit that Buchanan’s photographs “show a fine sensitivity of motif”. He adds: “They are deeply tonal, often more experimental in their composition and design, and restricted to black and white, which gives them a moody intensity.” And who else often works in black and white, and is a little bit moody? Banksy.
So, what’s the conclusion?
“I don’t think it matters,” says Gough, “we need to ignore the ‘whodunnit’ fixation, look at the work, consider its message, and marvel at the ingenuity and comic timing of an increasingly sophisticated artist-disruptor.”
“For over a decade, people have been speculating about Bansky’s identity, but it has become a distraction from actually looking at the work, or at the causes he’s trying to address,” Gough continues. “Our Western world has become unhealthily obsessed by salacious celebrity stories, by ‘kiss and tell’ confessions, and conspiracy theories. As a result, Bansky has largely been viewed through the lens of ‘whodunnit’.”
“Although he has millions of addicted fans, there are those who feel that Bansky has forsaken street cred for credit in the bank. Yet no one really talks about the art itself; the practice, the innovative visuals, the extensive and challenging graphic language, nor the extraordinary curatorial and filmic skills that make Bansky one of “Perhaps that’s where the the most diverse popular random connection of Banksy practitioners and Buchanan has been of our time.”
made,” concludes Gough.
“They both present well to camera, reveal their methods and motives, and create object-based work which is ‘revealed’ on film.”
There you have it, folks, Neil Buchanan is obviously BANKSY.
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When the future king of the world deigned to meet with Simon Murdoch, he led with a threat. It was 1998 and Jeff Bezos, the head of a fledgling American e-commerce company called Amazon. com, had invited the British entrepreneur to an impressive duplex hotel suite in Kensington to propose a deal.
Amazon, Bezos explained, would soon be expanding into the UK, which would mean competing with Murdoch’s own company, Bookpages. But might it not be better for the two firms to work together? Might both make so much more money if Amazon bought Bookpages?
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“That was one of the key points we took away from the meeting: ‘consider this carefully or prepare to be squashed’. He said that to us not being aggressive or nasty, just being factual... and I know for a fact they talked to at least one of our competitors. He is a very ruthless businessman... he is the smiling assassin.” Not that he is satisfied. Amazon continues to expand relentlessly (one of his favourite words), ambushing British supermarkets on Tuesday with the news that it would start delivering groceries in the UK immediately. Like industrialists of yore, Bezos has his own newspaper, the Washington Post, and through his space company, Origin, he even hopes to shape humanity’s future.
Bezos cuts a very different figure to his fellow tech barons. For one thing, he has never testified before, making him an unknown quantity on Capitol Hill. And whereas Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Tesla’s Elon Musk often broadcast their thoughts on social media, Bezos rarely gives interviews, does not appear on TV and does not even join his own earnings calls.
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And yet for the first 26 years of his life, Jeff Bezos too seemed like a typical nerd. Growing up in Texas and Miami, he built home-made versions of toys he could not afford, appeared in a documentary about gifted children, made his siblings read Lord of the Rings at his own summer camp and spent hours playing a Star Trek game on his school’s rented mainframe time.
So, what transformed a man once bracketed alongside the “fuzzy cheeked geek” of the dotcom boom into Earth’s most prosperous human? Born Jeffrey Jorgenson in 1964, Bezos never knew his biological father, whose drinking drove his mother Jacklyn to take her baby and run just 17 months later. His adoptive father (his real one, he says) was Mike Bezos, a Cuban refugee who arrived in the US alone at age 15.
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Later, he studied computer science and worked for technology firms, but at 26 he made the fateful decision to accept a job at a New York hedge fund – albeit one founded by a fellow computer scientist. Bezos’s four years at DE Shaw may well have changed the world. To start with, he met MacKenzie, then a researcher at the firm, and probably absorbed some of Wall Street’s ethos. Perhaps more importantly, it was while managing Shaw’s new internet investments and analysing the nascent e-commerce sector that Amazon began to take shape in his head. In 1994 he left, driving with his wife across the country to Seattle so that they could be close to a massive book distribution hub.
zos Jeff Be
Simon Murdoch came on board four years later, leading Amazon’s new UK arm (and convincing its sceptical American leadership that British consumers would trust “Amazon.co.uk” more than “Amazon.com/uk”). The 59-yearold Yorkshireman, who has since sold two more companies to Amazon, remembers Bezos as an “awesome individual” unfazed by his then net worth of $4bn.
“He seemed very authentic – super smart, very passionate. We instantly felt this was somebody who was charismatic and that we wanted to work with,” Murdoch recalls. He also remembers the occasional “poisonous” remark and a brutal work schedule which caused some employees (including Murdoch) to burn out.
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KIM KARDASHIAN WEST Melissa Singer, (2020) The Sunday Morning Herald, 11 Sep. 20203
KANYE WEST Shamira Ibrahim, (2019) The New York Times, 14 Oct. 2019
ROGER FEDERER Sean Ingle, (2020) The Guardian, 8 Jul. 2020
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Emma Barnett, (2020) The Telegraph, 9 Sep. 2015
BANKSY Brit Dawson, (2020) DAZED, 10 Sep. 2020
JEFF BEZOS Laurence Dodds, (2020) The Telegraph, 19 Jul. 2020