Condé Nast Magazines Ban Fur After Decades of Protest. Is it a Turning Point or Another Fashion Fad?

Is Conde Nast's decision not to use fur in its magazines' editorial campaigns a tipping point or a fashion fad? 

By Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne

For decades, animal rights activists, campaigners and ethical designers have.: fought to strip fur fashion of its glamour and expose the cruelty behind it.

From bold celebrity-led protests to quiet shifts in consumer values, these efforts have slowly reshaped the fashion landscape.

Now, one of the industry’s most influential gatekeepers, Condé Nast – publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour – has announced it will no longer feature “new animal fur in editorial content or advertising” across its titles.

The decision, which includes exceptions for what are outlined as “byproducts of subsistence and Indigenous practices”, marks a symbolic turning point within the fashion media landscape due to Condé Nast’s global reach.

It is especially significant given Vogue’s legacy in glamorising fur and its historically unwavering support under former editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, one of fur’s most powerful advocates in fashion media and a long-time target of the anti-fur movement.

Wintour remains involved at Condé Nast in the role of chief content officer, and as Vogue’s global editorial director.

Anti-fur campaigns

The announcement by Condé Nast follows a nine-month campaign led by the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade. This activist group staged more than a hundred protests targeting Condé Nast executives, editors and affiliated businesses.

Demonstrations ranged from picketing outside the homes of Vogue editors to disruptive actions inside stores linked to Condé Nast through board affiliations.

Demonstrators protesting against Vogue’s use of fur earlier this year. Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade/Alastair Mckimm

While this campaign undoubtedly influenced the publisher’s decision, it was likely the culmination of anti-fur advocacy dating back to the early 20th century.

The long tail of the movement

Animal rights activism in fashion can be traced back to the late 19th century, when the feather trade decimated bird populations and led to the extinction of species prized for their plumage.

Anti-fur activism followed. It gained momentum in the 1970s, and with the founding of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980.

Through high-profile campaigns exposing the cruelty of fur farms, PETA enlisted celebrities and models to pose nude in its iconic “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” ads.

These efforts led to tangible change. Calvin Klein dropped fur in 1994, citing animal advocacy. Since then, fur-free policies have become a relatively easy win for brands navigating the increasingly complex ethics of animal materials.

TV personality Khloe Kardashian unveils her PETA ‘Fur? I’d Rather Go Naked’ billboard on December 10 2008, in Los Angeles. Charley Gallay/Getty Images

A new standard for luxury fashion

Several US states have banned fur sales, and fur farming is now outlawed in countries including the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Austria, Italy and Norway.

Condé Nast’s new position places it alongside other media and fashion leaders. Elle magazine went fur-free in 2021. Major luxury brands such as Max Mara, Burberry, Chanel, Prada, Valentino and Versace have adopted similar policies, as have retailers including David Jones (Australia), Macy’s (US), Nordstrom (US), Saks Fifth Avenue (US) and Hudson’s Bay (Canada).

In 2022, French luxury conglomerate Kering also committed to a fur-free policy across its brand portfolio.

The largest remaining holdout is LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE) – the parent company of Dior and Fendi – which faces mounting pressure to follow suit.

The fur paradox

Despite these shifts, fur remains a fascination within fashion, and periodic revivals are still celebrated in the press.

TikTok’s 2024 “mob wives” aesthetic, featuring oversized fur coats and animal prints, sparked a return of fur on winter runways. Singer Sabrina Carpenter even wore a special edition Louis Vuitton fox fur coat on the day of the Met Gala.

This paradox reflects fashion’s cyclical and often contradictory nature. Faux fur and faux shearling are increasingly used to replicate the luxury aesthetic without the ethical baggage. Yet debates about the environmental impact of synthetic fur complicate this narrative.

What’s next?

Condé Nast’s fur-free stance comes at a time when many fashion brands are rethinking or rolling back their sustainability commitments.

Some industry observers worry climate goals are being deprioritised. Ralph Lauren, for instance, has dropped its net-zero emissions target. Also, the Vestiaire Collective, a platform for pre-loved luxury item resale, has started monetising its activities by selling carbon credits, demonstrating the difficulty of navigating current market conditions.

Still, there are signs of progress. Stella McCartney’s Summer 2025 Paris Fashion Week show featured feather alternatives made of plant-based materials.

This year also marked the first Australian Fashion Week in which fur, feathers and exotic leathers were banned from catwalks.

Animal rights advocates, such as Collective Fashion Justice founder Emma Hakansson, continue to push for the industry to reduce its use of leather, wool and other animal-derived material.

This space is dynamic and evolving. Whether Condé Nast’s decision is a tipping point, or another fashion fad, remains to be seen.

Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Enterprise, Torrens University Australia

From Sonata to Sensation: How 19th-Century Virtuoso Franz Liszt Invented Pop Stardom

A portrait of the highly expressive composer Franz Liszt, who drove his audiences into delirium when he performed, painted by Henri Lehmann at the height of Lisztomania in 1839. 

By Timothy McKenry

In 1844, Berlin was struck by a cultural fever critics labelled Lisztomania. The German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term after witnessing the almost delirious reception that greeted Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt in concert halls across Europe.

One widely circulated drawing from the 1840s crystallises the image. Women swoon or faint, others hurl flowers toward the stage. Men also appear to be struck by the pianist’s magnetic presence (or perhaps by the women’s reaction to it).These caricatured depictions, when paired with antagonistic reviews from contemporary critics, may still shape our cultural memory of Liszt.

He is often depicted not simply as a musician but as the first modern celebrity to unleash mass hysteria.

This 1840s drawing captures

Lisztomania in action with 

a swooning audience of 

women. Theodor Hosemann.

What happened at Liszt’s concerts?

We know a great deal about Liszt’s hundreds of concerts during the 1830s and ‘40s, thanks to reviews, critiques, lithographs and Liszt’s own letters from the time.

His programs combined works by the great composers with his own inventive reworkings of pieces familiar to audiences. Virtuoso showpieces also demonstrated his command of the piano.

Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata or Pathétique Sonata might appear alongside Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, performed in Liszt’s highly expressive style.

Schubert was represented through songs such as Erlkönig and Ave Maria, reworked for piano alone.

Liszt also turned to the most popular operatic works of his time. His Réminiscences de Norma (Bellini) and Réminiscences de Don Juan (Mozart) transformed familiar melodies into large-scale fantasies. These demanded both virtuosity and lyrical sensitivity.

In these works, Liszt created symphonic structures on the piano. He wove multiple themes into coherent musical dramas far more than simple medleys of well-known tunes.

Liszt often closed his concerts with the crowd-pleaser Grand Galop Chromatique. This encore demonstrated his showmanship and awareness of audience expectations.

As critic Paul Scudo wrote in 1850:

He is the sovereign master of his piano; he knows all its resources; he makes it speak, moan, cry, and roar under fingers of steel, which distil nervous fluid like Volta’s battery distils electrical fluid.

His audience’s response, it would seem, regularly spilled beyond the conventions of polite concert etiquette and social decorum.

Another Romantic portrait of Liszt

by Friedrich von Amerling in 1838.

Artist and showman

In a series of 1835 essays titled On the Situation of Artists, Liszt presents musicians such as himself as “tone artists”, condemned to be misunderstood. Nevertheless, they have a profound obligation to “reveal, exalt and deify all the tendencies of human consciousness”.

At the same time, a letter to the novelist George Sand reveals Liszt was acutely aware of the practicalities of concerts and the trappings of celebrity.

He jokes that Sand would be surprised to see his name in capital letters on a Paris concert bill. Liszt admits to the audacity of charging five francs for tickets instead of three, basks in glowing reviews, and notes the presence of aristocrats and high society in his audience.

He even describes his stage draped with flowers, and hints at the female attention following one performance, albeit directed toward his partner in a duet.

This letter shows an artist who is self-aware, sometimes amused, and sometimes ambivalent about the spectacle attached to his art.

Yes, Liszt engaged with his celebrity identity, but clearly also felt a measure of distance from it. He was aware the serious side of his art risked being overshadowed by the gossip-column version.

Much of the music criticism of the time functioned in exactly this way. It was little more than the work of gossip writers, many disgusted by the intensity of audience reactions to Liszt’s performances.

Gossip, poison pens, and the making of Lisztomania

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm of Liszt’s audiences. Some critics attacked both his playing and the adulation it provoked.

In 1842, a writer using the pseudonym Beta described the combined effect of Liszt’s performance and the public’s response, writing that:

the effect of his bizarre, substance-less, idea-less, sensually exciting, contrast-ridden, fragmented playing, and the diseased enthusiasm over it, is a depressing sign of the stupidity, the insensitivity, and the aesthetic emptiness of the public.

Similarly, poet Heinrich Heine suggested Liszt’s performance style was deliberately “stage managed” and designed to provoke audience mania:

For example, when he played a thunderstorm on the fortepiano, we saw the lightning bolts flicker over his face, his limbs shook as if in a gale, and his long tresses seemed to drip, as it were, from the downpour that was represented.

These and other accounts fed the mythology of Lisztomania, portraying women in his audience as irrational and hysterical.

The term mania carried a medicalised, pathologising tone, framing enthusiasm for Liszt as a form of cultural sickness.

Lithographs, caricatures, and anecdotal reports amplified these narratives, showing swooning figures, flowers hurled on stage, and crowds behaving in ways that exceeded polite social convention.

Yet these accounts are not entirely trustworthy; they were shaped by prejudice, moralising assumptions, and a desire to sensationalise.

Liszt’s concerts, therefore, existed at a fascinating intersection: extraordinary artistry and virtuosity, coupled with the theatre of audience reception, all filtered through a lens of gossip, exaggeration and gendered panic.

In this sense, the phenomenon of Lisztomania foreshadows the dynamics of modern celebrity. (It was also the subject of what one critic described as “the most embarrassing historical film ever made”.)

Just as performers like the Beatles, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift provoke intense public devotion while simultaneously facing slander and sensational reporting, Liszt’s fame was inseparable from both admiration and the poison pen of his critics.

Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

Five Unusual Ways to Make Buildings Greener (Literally)

Belgian architect Luc Schuiten's vision of the 'Vegetal City'. Luc Schuiten. 

By Paul Dobraszczyk

Buildings adorned with plants are an increasingly familiar sight in cities worldwide. These “green walls” are generally created using metal frames that support plastic plates, onto which pre-grown plants are inserted. These plants are able to survive without soil because they’re sustained by nutrient-packed rolls of felt and artificial sprinklers.

Some are fabulously rich tapestries of luxuriant vegetation, like French botanist Patrick Blanc’s coating of part of the Athenaeum hotel in London. Here, small shrubs sprout from an almost tropical green wall, with an abundance of mosses and ferns. In summer, butterflies peruse the flowers. All this next to Piccadilly, one of the busiest streets in central London.

Others are objects of ridicule: the sadly common outcome of poor design and a lack of maintenance (all green walls need careful planning and a great deal of care). If they’re not carefully tended, green walls will quickly turn into brown ones, with the plastic supports all too visible beneath the dying plants.

But there are many others ways of integrating plants into buildings beyond simply trying to grow them on walls. Here are five examples that straddle the mundane and the marvellous.

A wilted green wall in Tokyo, Japan. Wikimedia Images, CC BY

Growing buildings

German architectural practice Baubotanik (a word that means “botanic building”) has taken the radical step of creating buildings that flout the conventional idea of architecture as static and inert. After all, plants grow – they are living organisms.

Baubotanik uses pre-grown trees to create multi-storey structures, with trees replacing the conventional steel girders of most tall buildings. Its Plane-Tree-Cube in Nagold, begun in 2012, is made of plane trees supported on a steel scaffold, with a built-in irrigation system to water the trees until they’re large enough for the steel to be removed.

Baubotanik’s Plan-Tree-Cube is intended to grow into a usable structure. Baubotanik

It’ll probably be another ten years before this structure is ready to be used, but as what? It’s hard to imagine making a home in such an unruly structure, let alone plugging in your internet or other electrical appliances.

Building in trees

Baubotanik takes grafting, an age-old horticultural technique, and uses it to create structural frames for buildings. Grafting joins the tissue of plants so that they can grow together (it’s most commonly used in the cultivation of fruit trees).

As the architects themselves acknowledge, there are many interesting historical precedents, such as the Lindenbaum concentrated in a small region of rural Germany in northwestern Bavaria.

These are accessible platforms built into large lime (linden) trees to accommodate dancers in a yearly ritual known as the Tanzlinden (“dance linden”), which originated in the middle of the 17th century and still happen in early September.

In the surviving Lindenbaum in the small village of Peesten (one of around 12 that are still around), a stone stairwell spirals up to the wooden platform built inside the tree: dancing happens on this platform, while musicians provide accompaniment beneath.

Lindenbaum in Peesten, Germany. Wikimedia Images, CC BY

Weaving buildings

It’s possible to take this practice of integrating buildings and trees one step further and imagine whole cities redesigned in this way. This has been the lifelong preoccupation of Belgian architect Luc Schuiten, particularly in his speculative drawings of “vegetal cities”.

These are urban environments in which the branches of trees and the stems of climbing plants have become completely enmeshed with buildings made of steel and glass. One of his designs, called Habitarbres, imagines a house constructed within a living tree. The structure would flex as the tree grows, while hot-air pipes and other infrastructure would be embedded in the trunk. It’s an attempt to envisage how the infrastructure of our buildings – pipes, wire, cables and the like – can be accommodated in a living structure with its own vascular network.

With Habitarbes, Schuiten proposes a house built within a living tree. Luc Schuiten

It’s a speculative proposal, but perhaps not so different from a common building type normally associated with enterprising children, namely treehouses. Schuiten is merely taking a human desire – to live in a tree – and suggesting how it might be squared with our equally strong desire for comfort.

Architecture as compost

When plants die and decay they create the conditions for the next cycle of vegetal growth; they are sustainable in a way that the vast majority of our buildings are not. While there is a drive to recycle existing building materials (metals and plastics mostly), it’s another thing entirely to make buildings truly regenerative.

Martin Miller and Caroline O’Donnell’s “Primitive Hut” project from 2017 created a building that does just this. They made a wooden lattice structure to support the growth of four red maple saplings. Another lattice decomposed over time, providing food for the growing trees. Eventually the whole structure was overwhelmed by the trees.

Martin Miller and Caroline O’ Donnell’s ‘Primitive Hut’. OMG!

In calling this a primitive hut, the architects questioned how western architectural thinking tends to see indigenous architecture as both an origin point and a model for more sustainable forms of construction. It asks whether the industrial technologies that dominate construction in the global north should be more informed by architects that have continued to build with natural and compostable materials for centuries.

Letting be

It’s worth remembering that we don’t have to design green buildings; given enough time, they will happen anyway.

Moss on the roof of the Sandringham estate’s visitors’ centre in Norfolk, eastern England. Wikimedia Images, CC BY

The sloping roof of my house, directly below the window where I’m writing this article, is gradually acquiring its own green patina of lichen and moss. The roof is old and I’ve been told it needs to be replaced soon. A cloud of spores and seeds peppers this and every single roof every day with the prospect of new life.

Without any human intervention whatsoever, this process of vegetal succession can produce a complex ecosystem of not only plant but also animal life (from microbes to insects). That architects so rarely call such a surface “green” betrays something that’s deep-seated in ideas about green design. For it is precisely the absence of human control that allows vegetation to colonise a building; there is, in effect no design involved at all – unless, of course, we accept that plants have designs of their own.

Paul Dobraszczyk, Lecturer in Architecture, UCL

New Exhibition: Dangerously Modern ~ Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940

Helen Stewart 'Portrait of a woman in red,' 1930s, oil on canvas,64.5 × 49.3cm. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarew, purchased 2006 with Ellen Eames Collection funds © estate of the artist. 

By Victoria Souliman

When art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked “why have there been no great women artists?” in 1971, her point wasn’t that women lacked talent. It was that the art world had systematically excluded and erased them from history.

In the 50 years since, scholars and curators have worked to reclaim these forgotten women artists. But change has been slow.

The Guerrilla Girls’ activism in the 1980s, the Countess Report’s damning statistics on gender inequality in Australian galleries, and the National Gallery of Australia’s recent Know My Name initiative show the fight for recognition is ongoing.

Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 marks an exciting new chapter in this project. The new exhibition, from the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, makes a groundbreaking contribution to recovering the stories of overlooked women artists.

The global stage

With 222 works from 34 collections, Dangerously Modern celebrates the boldness and resilience of the first wave of professional Australian women artists who left for Europe between the turn of the 20th century and the second world war.

They went seeking advanced artistic training and the chance to compete on the global stage. Their time abroad was transformative.

Intimate portraits and domestic interiors by Florence Fuller (1867–1946) and Bessie Davidson (1879–1965) capture moments of quiet reflection. These artists navigated unfamiliar cultures, engaged with cutting-edge artistic movements and built new creative networks.

They lived far from home and maintained connections across two continents – often celebrated in one and forgotten in the other.

Bessie Davidson, Jeune fille au miroir (Girl in the mirror), 1914, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, gift of Andrée Fay Harkness through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2020. © Art Gallery of South Australia

The exhibition sheds light on these expatriate artists. They engaged in artistic communities from bustling cosmopolitan centres like Paris and London to regional France, England, Ireland and North Africa.

It reveals the variety of artistic styles in which they worked while weaving together five themes that explore human experience and artistic purpose.

Truly modern

Bold and vibrant paintings by artists like Iso Rae (1860–1940) show their engagement with modern artistic movements.

Through painting en plein air (outdoors) and post-impressionist techniques (using vivid colours and expressive brushstrokes), these women expressed their own experience of modern life. For some, this included portraying their female lovers.

Art can help heal personal trauma. Here, in particular, these women looked at the devastation of war.

The pairing of paintings by Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884–1961) is especially powerful: The Pink Scarf (1913) glows with light, texture and delicate beauty; These Gave the World Away (1917) depicts her husband’s lifeless body on the battlefield.

Hilda Rix Nicholas, The pink scarf, 1913, oil on canvas, 80.5 x 65 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia, gift of Mrs Roy Edwards through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1993 © Bronwyn Wright

By retracing the achievements and journeys of 50 expatriate women artists, the exhibition presents works never seen before in Australia. From the celebrated New Zealand artist Edith Collier (1885–1964), Girl in the Sunshine (c.1915) is notable for its bold use of colour, flattened perspective and simplified forms.

It also features works that haven’t been seen in Australia for over a century. A winter morning on the coast of France (1888) by Eleanor Ritchie Harrison (1854–95) was recently rediscovered and donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The exhibition also reunites works by artist friends who painted side by side.

Edith Collier, Girl in the sunshine, c1915, oil on canvas, 78.7 × 59.7 cm. Collection of the Edith Collier Trust, in the permanent care of Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery © the Edith Collier Trust

Women at the forefront

We are privy to moments of breakthrough in these artists’ creativity and careers.

The exhibition brings together landscapes Grace Crowley (1890–1979), Anne Dangar (1885–1951) and Dorrit Black (1891–1951) painted together in 1928 while studying under the French artist André Lhote (1885–1962) in the hilltop village of Mirmande in southeastern France.

These works, to which the artists applied cubist principles (breaking down forms into geometric shapes and showing multiple perspectives), testify to both artistic freedom and each woman’s individual vision and skill.

Dorrit Black, Mirmande, 1928, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 73.8 cm. Elder Bequest Fund 1940, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Though such works placed them at the forefront of French modern art movements, these artists were largely overlooked back in Australia.

Why? At the time, Australia’s conservative art establishment promoted a nationalist agenda. They favoured masculine depictions of labour and Australian landscapes painted by male artists working in Australia.

This elite group marginalised not only women artists but also expatriates who participated in international artistic developments. The resulting nationalist narrative long overlooked the themes this exhibition explores.

Nora Heysen, Self-portrait, 1936, oil on linen, 63 × 50.5 cm. Private collection © Lou Klepac

Nora Heysen (1911–2003), daughter of celebrated landscape painter Hans Heysen, exemplifies this dual marginalisation. Despite becoming the first woman and youngest artist to win the Archibald Prize in 1938, her self-portraits – which reveal her search for identity and assertion during her London years – remained hidden from public view until the 1990s.

When Thea Proctor (1879–1966) returned to Sydney from London in the 1920s, she wrote, as the catalogue quotes, “it seemed very funny to me to be regarded by some people here as dangerously modern”.

“Dangerously modern” perfectly captures the spirit of the exhibition. These expatriate women artists were seen as threats to tradition, gender roles and to the prevailing definition of what Australian art should be.

Agnes Goodsir, Girl with cigarette, c1925, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 81 cm. Bendigo Art Gallery, bequest of Amy E Bayne 1945, photo: Ian Hill

Beyond reclaiming the place of these women in the history of Australian art, the exhibition emphasises the importance of migration in shaping artistic identity.

By recognising works created abroad as integral to Australia’s artistic story, this exhibition transforms how we understand both Australian art and modernism as a global movement.

Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until February 15 2026.

Victoria Souliman, Lecturer, French and Francophone Studies, University of Sydney

Sotheby’s Paris Breaks French Record with €89.7 Million Sales; Modigliani Work Tops at €27 Million

Amedeo Modigliani's Elvire en buste (1918-19) sold for a record-breaking 27 million euros in Paris. 

Paris has once again asserted its growing dominance in the global art market. During Art Basel week, Sotheby’s Paris shattered its own record with a combined total of €89.7 million across its Modernités and Surrealism and Its Legacy auctions, the highest result ever achieved by the auction house in France. The sales underscored both the vitality of the Paris scene and collectors’ resurgent appetite for 20th-century masterpieces, writes Jeanne-Marie Cilento

The Sotheby's auction in Paris

where the Modigliani painting

went under the hammer.

AN HISTORIC moment at Sotheby's in Paris ignited a fierce bidding war among seven collectors for Amedeo Modigliani’s Elvire en buste (1918–19), before selling for €27 million, the highest price ever paid for the artist in France and a new record for the auction house in the French capital. 

The work, unseen in public for half a century, had remained in a private collection since 1974. Its appearance on the market marked the first time any portrait of Elvira by Modigliani had been offered at auction.

The result more than quadrupled its initial estimate, anchoring a night that confirmed the Italian painter’s continued magnetism among global collectors. Another of Modigliani’s works, Raymond, believed to depict the writer Raymond Radiguet, fetched €10.6 million after spirited bidding, further underlining the artist’s enduring appeal.

Together, the two paintings accounted for over a third of the Modernités total, which reached €62.8 million, surpassing pre-sale expectations by more than €10 million. Strong results also came from Alberto Giacometti’s Figurine, which more than doubled its estimate at €571,500, and Wols’ L’Oeil de Dieu, which achieved a record €1.9 million. A complete set of Pablo Picasso’s Séries 347 etchings, one of the rarest print series in his oeuvre, sold for the same amount, setting a French record for any Picasso print series.

René Magritte’s La magie noire doubled its estimate to reach €10.7 million, a record for any work from the Belgian artist’s celebrated series

Rene Magritte's La Magie noire 

doubled its estimate at auction, 

The Surrealism and Its Legacy sale followed with equally impressive results, bringing in €26.9 million, the second-highest total ever for a Surrealist auction in France. 

René Magritte’s La magie noire (at right) led the session, doubling its estimate to reach €10.7 million, a record for any work from the Belgian artist’s celebrated series. Paul Delvaux’s Woman with a Rose also set a new French benchmark at €2.4 million, while Óscar Domínguez, Konrad Klapheck, and Wols each achieved personal bests in the country.

Adding to the momentum, Salvador Dalí’s Swirling Sea Necklace exceeded expectations at €736,600, and Francis Picabia’s Lu-Li more than doubled its estimate at €508,000. In all, nearly 90% of lots sold, with over 60% making their auction debut, and a notable one-third of Surrealist buyers hailing from the United States, a sign of Paris’s growing international draw.

Presented in collaboration with the French fashion house Celine, the twin auctions demonstrated how Paris, long regarded as the cultural heart of Europe, is reclaiming its stature as a powerhouse in the global art economy. The record-setting performance follows a string of strong sales in London and New York, but the magnitude of this result, more than 50% higher than last year’s edition, signals a broader shift.

For Sotheby’s, the outcome cements its Paris headquarters as a concourse for the international market. For collectors, it reaffirms that the French capital, once again, is where art history and market confidence converge, and where the legacy of modern and Surrealist masters continues to inspire feverish competition under the auctioneer’s gavel.

‘AI actor’ Tilly Norwood is Dividing Hollywood But Real Acting Requires Humanity

Tilly is an 'AI actor' created by Particle6 Studios a UK-based AI-focused film production company. 

By Nicholas Scrivens

Tilly Norwood is the hottest actor in Hollywood right now.

Her career has been covered by Variety, the BBC and Forbes, to name just a few publications. All of this is publicity that a young actor at the start of their career can only dream of. But Tilly doesn’t dream. Nor is she actually acting in the strictest sense of the word, because Tilly is an AI actor, created by Particle6 Studios, a UK-based AI-focused film production company.

There have, of course, been AI actors before. Carrie Fisher was famously resurrected for The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. James Cameron used background “actors” to populate Titanic in 1997, but until now no AI creation has achieved the media cut-through that Tilly has. This is partly due to her creator – Eline Van Der Velden – and her team. They have launched Tilly into the marketplace as a persona: something designed to act and emote.

As Van Der Velden told entertainment news site Screen Daily: “[Tilly is] an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance.” There is technological craft in her creation, certainly. But there is also a grey area, where that creation draws on the work, voices, physiognomy and artistry of others – blended into code, shaped for modern media and packaged in a soft-focus comedy video just meta enough to deflect criticism.

Tilly Norwood appears in an AI sitcom sketch.

My work with actors has always been deeply rewarding. At the Guilford School of Acting, where I teach, the approach is grounded in the belief that acting is born from a combination of craft, empathy, collaboration and above all a genuine exploration of what it means to be human. The story of “Tilly’s” creation has stirred a powerful response among the students I have been working with: a mix of horror, fear and, perhaps most chillingly of all, resignation. Resignation that this may indeed be the direction in which the creative industries are heading.

The outcry from established actors was immediate and heartfelt. On hearing that agents were already contacting the production company in hopes of representing it, A-lister Emily Blunt told interviewers: “Good lord, we’re screwed. That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.”

The human connection is the point. The Russian theatre practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose work consistently urged actors to seek inner truth and humanity, summed it up well. Writing in his book An Actor Prepares (1936), he explained: “To break that rule of using your own feelings is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part.”

In a recent podcast interview with Jay Shetty, actor Emma Watson reflected on how the “movie star” version of herself had become something of an avatar in her mind. She spoke candidly about her journey from the Harry Potter films, the hypersexualisation she endured in the media and the scrutiny now placed on her every word and stance.

For producers, directors, and studios, a compliant, commodified figure like Norwood is an attractive prospect: an actor who doesn’t need an intimacy coordinator, won’t go off-message on social media or perhaps more disturbingly, might. As impressive as the technological achievement is, the choice of an elfin-thin, 20-something female “actor” is also highly questionable.

In a world where power dynamics and abuses are finally being called out through the #MeToo movement, it’s perhaps no surprise that the coded, painted and constructed Tilly Norwood has arrived. The “actor” is programmable and usable. It looks human but is, at its core, deficient. And will always remain so. Because what makes an actor is that ineffable thing: humanity.

Nicholas Scrivens, Programme Leader - MA Musical Theatre, University of Surrey

Taylor Swift has Branded Herself a Showgirl: These Hardworking Women have a Long and Bejewelled History

Taylor Swift as the showgirl on her new album. Photograph: TAS Rights Management. 

By Emily Brayshaw

The iconic feathered showgirl was born amid the chaos of the first world war, when the wealthy, global French superstar Gaby Deslys entertained Parisians and Allied soldiers in a 1917 show called Laissez-les tombe! (Let Them Fall), a dazzling spectacle of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and beauty.

Although showgirls first appeared in late-19th century music halls, the red, white and blue feathered costumes in Deslys’ revue offered Paris something new and triumphal. The massed plumes, wild dancing and bodily displays celebrated French aesthetics and extravagance and communicated that France and her allies would not bow to Germany.

Gaby Deslys, resplendent in ostrich plumes and jewels, photographed in 1919 by Henri Manuel. Wikimedia 

Prior to 1914 Deslys’s expensive jewellery, haute couture and expansive feathered hats – along with her affairs with powerful men such as department store magnate Harry Selfridge and King Manuel II of Portugal – created countless headlines.

But she was also outspoken about a woman’s right to support herself financially and worked tirelessly during the war raising funds for the Allies. Deslys was so passionate about aiding the devastated Parisian nightlife that she paid for all the costumes in Laissez-les tombe! herself.

Deslys’s cultural impact has inextricably linked feathers, high fashion, celebrity and showgirls ever since.

From France to Broadway

Feathered showgirl revues were so popular that they quickly went global. In 1920s New York, impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld staged luxurious Broadway productions that glorified the American showgirl.

But he made exceptions to American women. One of Ziegfeld’s most famous showgirls, Dolores, was born into poverty in London’s East End as Kathleen Mary Rose. She rose to become a supermodel who walked for the couturier Lady Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile.

Ziegfeld considered Dolores one of the world’s most beautiful women. Tall, slender and graceful, she drove audiences wild when she glided across Ziegfeld’s stage and posed in opulent costumes.

The famous haute couture model and showgirl known as ‘Dolores’ posing as the White Peacock in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolics (1919). Wikimedia Commons

On becoming a showgirl, Dolores used her modelling ability to make her fortune, earning today’s equivalent of US$10,000 a week by 1923.

Other performers harnessed the feathered showgirl aesthetic, including the celebrated twins Jenny and Rosie Dolly, who came from humble origins and used their beauty, talent and hard work to dominate American and European stages in the 1910s and 1920s.

Ziegfeld paid the Dollys the equivalent of US$64,000 weekly in 1915. Like Deslys, they became notorious for their consumption of fashion and affairs with famous men.

The Dolly Sisters, famous performers in the Ziegfeld Follies of the 1910s and 1920s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

However, stage revues became unpopular around 1930 due to their vast expense and the rise of cinema – so the showgirl travelled to Hollywood.

There, she was celebrated in biopics such as The Great Ziegfeld (1936) with its glittering, feathered costumes by the designer Adrian.

In the second world war, showgirls boosted troop morale, like Deslys did in 1917.

Hollywood made feel-good films including the biopic The Dolly Sisters (1945), which reimagined the brunette twins as all-American blondes by casting 1940s pinup stars Betty Grable and June Haver.

From Hollywood to Vegas

From there, the American showgirl arrived in Las Vegas, performing in every hotel and casino on the strip during the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the showgirls of yore, these performers’ allure was their grace, beauty, and extravagant, expensive costumes, produced by the world’s leading designers.

Showgirls remained a fixture of Las Vegas entertainment throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Choreographers including Donn Arden and Madame Bluebell (who also worked in the Parisian revues) created hallmark, visual spectacles featuring costumes by Bob Mackie.

Jubilee!, which opened at the old MGM Grand casino in 1981, was one such revue. In addition to the vast volume of plumes, it was claimed the show had caused a global shortage of Swarovski crystals because the costumes had used them all.

In 1986 the old MGM Grand became Bally’s Casino, but Jubilee! stayed. The costumes, some of which cost more than US$7,000 each (roughly US$25,000 today), were used six nights a year for 35 years and maintained by 18 wardrobe staffers.

Jubilee! closed in 2016, but its costumes live on as valuable cultural artefacts that celebrities borrow to reinterpret the American showgirl for 21st-century audiences.

This includes demonstrating that showgirls are independent, hardworking and talented women.

From Vegas to Taylor Swift

Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese draws on the American showgirls’ legacy by wearing costumes from Jubilee! in her Las Vegas cabaret, and called the 1945 Dolly Sisters film one of her inspirations.

Pamela Anderson wore Jubilee! costumes in The Last Showgirl (2024), a film that highlights the sacrifices female performers often have to make to pursue their dreams.

Taylor Swift is the latest superstar to harness showgirl iconography. Photographs from her new album show Swift wearing the Jubilee! “Diamond” and “Disco” costumes by Mackie.

Another photograph shows Swift in a cloud of ostrich plumes and rhinestones wearing a dark, bobbed wig: a direct reference to 1920s American showgirls and performers such as the Dolly Sisters.

Swift’s stage costumes are by the world’s leading fashion designers, while her songs often reference historical celebrities to critique how the entertainment and media industry treat female performers.

Choosing Mackie’s Jubilee! costumes allows Swift to become the American showgirl (Taylor’s Version), by tapping into a century of glamour and signalling that she too has worked hard and made sacrifices to reach the top.

Emily Brayshaw, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney