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Paris, France |
Emma Watson, the actress and activist who made her name as Hermione Granger in the "Harry Potter" films, joined the board of the French fashion giant Kering Tuesday, in a major coup for the world's second biggest luxury group.
The British star, who was born in Paris, is the face of the Good On You app, which rates fashion brands on their ethical and sustainability credentials.
Although Kering is seen to have the environmental edge on its rival LVMH, its top labels Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga are only rated "Not good enough" or "It's a start" by Good On You.
Saint Laurent has also run into trouble with feminists and the regulators over a 2017 "porno chic" advertising campaign that was condemned as degrading to women.
Watson "is one of the world's most popular actors and best-known activists," Kering said in a statement after on the appointment of the 30-year-old, a high-profile women's rights advocate as well as a UN goodwill ambassador.
"Emma Watson is also a pioneer in advocating for sustainable fashion," Kering added.
She was nominated onto the board alongside the Ivory Coast-born former CEO of Credit Suisse Group Tidjane Thiam and Jean Liu, the president of "the Chinese Uber" Didi Chuxing, by shareholders at Kering's AGM.
- Millennial moral compass -
Since the end of the "Harry Potter" franchise in 2010, Watson, has combined acting in hit films such as "Little Women" with going back to university, championing reading groups and heading up the UN's HeForShe gender equality campaign.
She also coined the phrase "self-partnered" to describe her contentment as being single.
Having lost Stella McCartney -- arguably the world's most ethnical luxury label -- to LVMH earlier this year, recruiting Watson is a coup for Kering which is keen to win over millennials.
Watson is often seen as a moral compass for her generation.
Thiam, 57, resigned from his position at Credit Suisse in February following a scandal involving internal espionage of former executives of the bank, of which he said he had no knowledge.
"Throughout his career, Mr. Thiam has led organisations in both the private and public sectors, and has developed projects and programmes that stimulate businesses and economies," Kering said.
The appointment of Jean Liu, 42, president of the mobile transport platform Didi Chuxing, means that China, a crucial country for Kering in terms of sales, is represented on the board for the first time, said Sophie L'Helias, lead independent director.
Kering chairman and CEO Francois-Henri Pinault -- who is married to Hollywood star and activist Salma Hayek -- welcomed the appointments.
"Their respective knowledge and competences, and the multiplicity of their backgrounds and perspectives will be invaluable additions," he said.
"The collective intelligence that comes from diverse points of view and the richness of different experiences are crucial to the future of our organisation."
The Kering group employed more than 38,000 people worldwide at the end of 2019. Its turnover stood at 15.9 billion euros ($17.9 billion) last year, for a net profit of 2.3 billion euros.
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Paris, France | The American streetwear designer Matthew M. Williams was named as the new head of aristocratic French fashion house Givenchy.
Ceské Budejovice, Czech Republic |A Czech sculptor has teamed up with a group of architects to create a 3D-printed house prototype that could become a holiday home for the future.
Abidjan, Ivory Coast | The stakes are big, and so are the egos.
London, United Kingdom |London's West End has traditionally drawn people from all over the world to see its shows but theatres have been forced to reinvent themselves because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Fifteen million tickets are sold each year for performances including top attractions such as "The Phantom of the Opera", "Les Miserables" and Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap", a play that has been performed since 1952.
But the pandemic brought the curtain down on venues in March, leaving theatres facing an uncertain future where continued social distancing measures threaten their existence.
Louis Hartshorn and Brian Hook, co-founders of Hartshorn-Hook Productions, are among the first to adapt to the new reality, announcing the reopening of an immersive adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" to open in October.
"The show will be reimagined as a masquerade ball," Hook told AFP.
Spectators are invited to wear masks, which they can integrate into their disguise, and gloves if they wish.
The audience will also be reduced to 90, down from 240 previously, and the schedule has been changed to allow for thorough clean-ups.
The good news is that tickets are "selling and people want to come back", added Hook.
But Hartshorn admitted that "we have to do extremely well in order to break even because the numbers are against us".
- Tourist trouble -
Another immediate challenge is the lack of tourists, with hotels, restaurants and museums closed until at least early July.
The introduction on June 8 of a 14-day quarantine for most travellers arriving in the country has also tempered hopes of a swift recovery.
"Around a third of attendees in London theatres are overseas tourists... and for the moment of course there is very little prospect of having overseas visitors," Julian Bird, head of the UK Theatre lobby group, told a recent parliamentary committee.
Up to 70 percent of theatres could go bankrupt by the end of the year, he warned.
- Immersive experiences -
The current crisis has left a £3 billion ($3.7 billion, 3.3 billion euro) hole in theatre revenues this year, a fall of more than 60 percent, according to a study by Oxford Economics for the Creative Industries Federation.
This estimate does not take into account the possible reluctance of the public to return when allowed, with the federation warning of 200,000 job cuts without government intervention.
To survive, some theatres are offering alternative products.
At London's Old Vic Theatre, actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith, stars of the hit TV series "The Crown", will perform the play "Lungs" without an audience, while keeping their distance.
Each performance will be filmed and broadcast live to the 1,000 people who purchased tickets at the usual prices of between £10 and £65, although all will enjoy the same view.
It's a bold gamble when many other theatres, such as the National Theatre in London, have posted free online performances of plays filmed before the pandemic.
Shows that involve audience participation could be the big winners, according to Brian Hook.
"We were already on a boom for immersive theatre before this crisis... I think now might be a very positive time for that," he said.
One Night Records will launch one such project in early October, taking ticket-holders on a journey through musical genres from the 1920s to the 1950s in a secret location called "Lockdown Town".
"Because the venue is so large and because immersive has this special gift -- which is territory, you know, space. That's why we're able to do it," One Night Records general manager Tim Wilson told AFP.
But he, too, has had to adapt, selling tickets in groups of four and transforming the free stroll into a linear route.
- Performance anxiety -
In the traditional world of theatre, social distancing measures are a real headache.
With people having to remain two metres (six feet) apart, under current rules, the Royal Shakespeare Company said it can only accommodate 20 percent of its usual audience.
"With the furlough scheme changing in nature over the coming months and then coming to an end, that's a moment of extreme vulnerability," Catherine Mallyon, executive director of the Stratford-upon-Avon based company told AFP.
"And how would we do the performances with social distancing? 'Romeo and Juliet' two metres apart, it's quite hard to imagine," she said.
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© Agence France-Presse
Tokyo, Japan | Koji Ishii can't help himself: whenever he sees a lost glove on the streets of his hometown Tokyo, he just has to stop and document it.
Paris, France |Scientists believe Leonardo da Vinci's super-fast eye may have helped him catch the enigmatic magic of Mona Lisa's smile.
This superhuman trait, which top tennis and baseball players may also share, allowed the Renaissance master to capture accurately minute, fleeting expressions and even birds and dragonflies in flight.
Art historians have long talked of Leonardo's "quick eye", but David S Thaler of Switzerland's University of Basel has tried to gauge it in a new study published Thursday alongside another paper showing how he gave his drawings and paintings uncanny emotional depth.
Professor Thaler's research turns on how Leonardo's eye was so keen he managed to spot that the front and back wings of a dragonfly are out of synch -- a discovery which took slow-motion photography to prove four centuries later.
The artist, who lived from 1452 to 1519, sketched how when a dragonfly's front wings are raised, the hind ones are lowered, something that was a blur to Thaler and to his colleagues when they tried to observe the difference themselves.
Thaler told AFP that this gift to see what few humans can may be the secret of Leonardo's most famous painting.
"Mona Lisa's smile is so enigmatic because it represents the moment of breaking into a smile. And Leonardo's quick eye captured that and held it," he said.
- Freeze frame -
"So often our memories are of a fixed image, not a movement. Leonardo and perhaps other artists had that ability to pick up the point of breaking into a smile" or emotion.
Thaler suspects the Japanese painter Hokusai -- best known for "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" -- had the same ability.
The Edo master (1760-1849) also picked up the difference in dragonfly wings, which led Thaler to wonder if "he saw (in) the same freeze-frame way as Leonardo".
Thaler applied "flicker fusion frequency" (FFF) -- similar to a film's frames per second — to try to judge Leonardo's extraordinary visual acuity in the study for the Rockefeller University in the US as a part of a wider Leonardo DNA Project looking at the Renaissance polymath.
Because of our slower FFF, we construct a single 3D image of the world by jamming together many partially in-focus images, he said.
Leonardo realised he could freeze the separate snapshots with which we construct our perception, Thaler believes.
Thaler told AFP that he was fascinated by the case of Ted Williams, an American baseball legend who claimed to have trained himself to see the seams of a baseball as it flew towards him.
"It is said that elite batters can see the seams" even when the baseball is rotating 30 to 50 times per second, Thaler said.
In Leonardo's case, Thaler estimated that to see the difference in batting dragonfly wings clearly, the artist would have to have an FFF range of 50 to 100 frames per second.
The average person's is between 20 to 40 per second.
Thaler told AFP it was not clear if the gift was genetic or if it could be learned.
- Da Vinci's 'evening' portraits -
The researcher also described in another paper how Leonardo used psychophysics -- much of which still remains a mystery today -- to communicate beauty and emotion.
He said Leonardo's mastery of the sfumato technique -- which subtly blurs the edges of images and creates a 3D effect -- allowed him to render lifelike expressions and gave an intimate gaze to his portraits.
He believes that Leonardo achieved selective soft focus in portraits by painting in overcast or evening light, where the eyes' pupils enlarge to let in more light but have a narrow plane of sharp focus.
The enlarged pupils of his sitters -- also a sign of affection or attraction -- were a mark of beauty in Renaissance portraits.
It appears to confirm what the artist himself wrote in his notebook: "In the evening and when the weather is dull, what softness and delicacy you may perceive in the faces of men and women..."
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