Today, The Newtons & TheGrandma have arrived to New York City. They are going to spend some weeks in this amazing city, enoying its people, history and places.
They have arrived with enough time to assist to the Met Gala, where they were some of the main guests. They have arrived with another compatriot, Rosalia, and they have spent a wonderful night together discovering the last tendencies infashion and design.
During their travel by plane from Barcelona to New York City, they have been studying some English grammar. They have started with the ABC, the numbers and the articles.
The Met Gala, or Met Ball, formally called the Costume Institute Gala or the Costume Institute Benefit, is an annual fundraising gala held for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City.
It is popularly regarded as the world's most prestigious fashion event, and an invitation is highly sought after. Celebrities from various professional spheres, such as fashion, film, television, theater, music, business, sports, social media, and politics, are invited to the gala, organized by American fashion magazine Vogue.
The gala is held annually on the first Monday of May. It marks the opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibit on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Many of the attendees are depicted on the covers and pages of Vogue. Each year's event celebrates the specific theme of that year's Costume Institute exhibition, which sets the tone for the formal attire of the night. Guests are expected to curate their fashion to match the theme of the exhibit, which is generally haute couture. American journalist Anna Wintour, who is the editor-in-chief of Vogue, has chaired or co-chaired the Met Gala since 1995.
The Met Gala was established in 1948 by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert as a fundraiser for the newly founded Costume Institute to mark the opening of its annual exhibit. The first gala was a dinner and tickets were fifty dollars each.
Over the first few decades of its existence, the Gala was simply one of many annual benefits held for New York charitable institutions. Accordingly, the attendees of the early galas were almost entirely members of New York high society or the city's fashion industry. From 1948 to 1971, the event was held at venues including the Waldorf Astoria, Central Park, and the Rainbow Room.
When
Diana Vreeland became consultant to the Costume Institute in 1972, the
Gala began to evolve into a more global and glamorous affair, although
one that was still aimed at the societal set.
The event started to become higher profile celebrity-oriented with attendees like Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Madonna, and Cher intermixing with the city's elite. It was during the Vreeland years that the Gala was first held at the Met and that Gala themes were introduced.
The Gala is widely regarded as among the most prominent and most exclusive social events in the world. It is also one of the biggest fundraising nights in New York City, with US$9 million raised in 2013 and a record of $12 million the following year.
The Met Gala is one of the most notable sources of funding for the Institute, with total contributions surpassing $200 million for the first time after the 2019 event. Anna Wintour, the chairperson of the event, assumed the chairmanship of the Institute in 1995. Also, The Met Gala is held on the first Monday in May, according to Wintour. Her guest list grew to include celebrities globally from the worlds of fashion, entertainment, business, sports, and politics who would eventually grace the pages of Vogue.
Since 1948, the Met Gala has occurred consecutively each year, except in 2000 and 2002.
The 2020, the Met Gala was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Gala resumed in 2021, but was held in September rather than in May that year.
In 2022, the Gala returned to holding its traditional May ceremony.
Today, The Grandma has received sad news. JoanDidion, the Americanwriter,has died in Manhattan today at 87. The Grandma wants to talk about her life and her career.
Joan Didion (December 5, 1934-December 23, 2021) was an Americanwriter who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine.
Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the '60s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Herpolitical writing often concentrated on thesubtext of political and social rhetoric.
In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.
In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007.
In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold,directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalled writing things down as early as the age of five, though she said that she never saw herself as awriter until after her work had been published. She identified as a shy, bookish child
who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public
speaking. She read everything she could get her hands on. She spent her
adolescence typing out Ernest Hemingway's works to learn more about how
sentence structures work.
In 1956, Didion
received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of
California, Berkeley. During her senior year, she won first place in the
Prix deParis essay contest sponsored by Vogue,
and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine, having
written a story on the San Francisco architect William Wurster.
During her seven years at Vogue, Didion worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor.
In January 1960, Mademoiselle, published Didion's article Berkeley’s Giant: The University of California.
While at Vogue, and homesick for California, she wrote her first novel, Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family as it comes apart. Writer and friend John Gregory Dunne helped her edit the book, and the two moved into an apartment together.
In 1968, she published her first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. The New York Times referred to it as containing grace, sophistication, nuance, [and] irony.
Didion's novel Play It as It Lays, set in Hollywood, was published in 1970, and ABook of Common Prayer appeared in 1977.
In 1979, she published The White Album, another collection of magazine pieces that previously appeared in Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The NewYork Times, and The New York Review of Books.
Didion's book-length essay Salvador (1983) was written after a two-week trip to El Salvador with her husband. The next year, she published the novel Democracy,the
story of a long but unrequited love affair between a wealthy heiress
and an older man, a CIA officer, against the background of the Cold War
and the Vietnam War.
Her 1987 nonfiction book Miami looked at the
different communities in that city.
In a prescient New York Review of Books piece of 1991, a year after the various trials of the Central Park Five had ended, Didion dissected serious flaws in the prosecution's case, becoming the earliest mainstream writer to view the guilty verdicts as a miscarriage of justice.
She suggested the Five were found guilty because of a sociopolitical narrative with racial overtones that clouded the court's judgment.
In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve geographical essays and a personal memorial for Henry Robbins, who was Didion's friend and editor from 1966 until his death in 1979.
In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic thriller. Dunne and Didion worked closely together for most of their careers. Much of their writing is therefore intertwined. They co-wrote a number of screenplays, including a 1972 film adaptation of her novel Play It as It Lays that starred Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. They also spent several years adapting the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch into the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer film Up Close &Personal.
Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking, a narrative of her response to the death of her husband and the severe illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, on October 4, 2004, and finished the manuscript 88 days later on New Year's Eve.
Written at the age of seventy, this was her first nonfiction book that was not a collection of magazine assignments. She went on a book tour following the book's release, doing many readings and promotional interviews, and said that she found the process very therapeutic during her period of mourning.
In 2006, Everyman's Library published We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live,a compendium of much of Didion's writing, including the full content of her first seven published nonfiction books (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The WhiteAlbum, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From),with an introduction by her contemporary, the critic John Leonard.
In 2007, Didion began working with English playwright and director David Hare on a one-woman stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking.
Produced by Scott Rudin, the Broadway play featured Vanessa Redgrave.
Although she was hesitant to write for the theater, eventually she found
the genre, which was new to her, quite exciting.
Didion wrote early drafts of the screenplay for an HBO biopic directed by Robert Benton on The Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham. It was untitled. Sources say it may trace
the paper's reporting on the Watergate scandal which led to President
Richard Nixon's resignation.
In 2011, Knopf published Blue Nights, a memoir about aging. The book focuses on Didion's daughter, who died just before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. It addresses their relationship with stunning frankness. More generally, the book deals with the anxieties Didion experienced about adopting and raising a child, and about the aging process.
In 2021, Didion published Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of 12 essays she wrote between 1968 and 2000.
A photo of Didion shot by Juergen Teller was used as part of the Spring/Summer 2015 campaign of the luxury French brand Céline.
New Journalism seeks to communicate facts through narrative storytelling and literary techniques. This style is also described ascreative nonfiction, intimate journalism, or literary nonfiction. It is a popular moment in the long history of literary journalism in America.
Didion viewed the structure of the sentence as essential to her work. In the NewYork Times article Why I Write (1976), Didion remarked, To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed... The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind...The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture.
Didion was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught her the importance of how sentences work in a text. Her other influences included Henry James, who wrote perfect, indirect, complicated sentences, and George Eliot.
Didion died from complications of Parkinson's disease at her home in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
The Grandma feels better today. She has decided to go out and walk a little. She has gone to her favourite newsagent's to buy her Vogue magazine and follow the last trends in fashion and lifesytle around the world.
Vogue was born on a day like today in 1892 and it has become in one of the most popular and prestigious magazines around the world.
Before going out, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 45).
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine covering many topics including fashion, beauty, culture, living, and runway. Vogue began as a weekly newspaper in 1892 in the United States, before becoming a monthly publication years later.
The British Vogue was the first international edition launched in 1916, while the Italian version has been called the top fashion magazine in the world. As of today, there are 23 international editions.
Vogue & Coco Chanel
In 1892, Arthur Baldwin Turnure, an American business man, founded Vogue as a weekly newspaper in the United States, sponsored by Kristoffer Wright;the first issue was published on December 17 of that year, with a cover price of 10 cents, equivalent to $2.73 in 2017.
Turnure's intention was to create a publication that celebrated the ceremonial side of life; one that attracts the sage as well as debutante, men of affairs as well as the belle. From its inception, the magazine targeted the new New York upper class.
Vogue glamorously recount[ed] their habits, their leisure activities, their social gatherings, the places they frequented, and the clothing they wore...and everyone who wanted to look like them and enter their exclusive circle. The magazine at this time was primarily concerned with fashion, with coverage of sports and social affairs included for its male readership. Despite the magazine's content, it grew very slowly during this period.
Condé Montrose NastpurchasedVogue in 1905 one year before Turnure's death and gradually grew the publication. He changed it to a unisex magazine and started Vogue overseas in the 1910s. Under Nast,the magazine soon shifted its focus to women, and in turn the price was soon raised. The magazine's number of publications and profit increased dramatically under Nast's management. By 1911, the Vogue brand had garnered a reputation that it continues to maintain, targeting an elite audience and expanding into the coverage of weddings.
According to Condé Naste Russia, after the First World War made deliveries in the Old World impossible, printing began in England. The decision to print in England proved to be successful causing Nast to release the first issue of French Vogue in 1920.
The magazine's number of subscriptions surged during the Great Depression,and again during World War II. During this time, noted critic and former Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield served as its editor, having been moved over from Vanity Fair by publisher Condé Nast.
Vogue & Coco Chanel
In July 1932, American Vogue placed its first color photograph on the cover of the magazine. The photograph was taken by photographer Edward Steichen and portrays a woman swimmer holding a beach ball in the air.
Laird Borrelli notes that Vogue led the decline of fashion illustration in the late 1930s, when they began to replace their celebrated illustrated covers, by artists such as Dagmar Freuchen, with photographic images.
Nast was responsible for introducing color printing and the two-page spread. He greatly impacted the magazine and turned it into a successful business and the women's magazine we recognize today and greatly increased the sales volumes until his death in 1942.
In the 1960s, with Diana Vreeland as editor-in-chief and personality, the magazine began to appeal to the youth of the sexual revolution by focusing more on contemporary fashion and editorial features that openly discussed sexuality. Toward this end, Vogue extended coverage to include East Village boutiques such as Limbo on St. Mark's Place, as well as including features of downtown personalities such as Andy Warhol's Superstar Jane Holzer's favorite haunts.
Vogue also continued making household names out of models, a practice that continued with Suzy Parker, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Veruschka, Marisa Berenson, Penelope Tree, and others.
In 1973, Vogue became a monthly publication. Under editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella, the magazine underwent extensive editorial and stylistic changes to respond to changes in the lifestyles of its target audience. Mirabella states that she was chosen to change Vogue because women weren't interested in reading about or buying clothes that served no purpose in their changing lives. She was selected to make the magazine appeal to the free, working, liberated woman of the seventies. She changed the magazine by adding text with interviews, arts coverage, and serious health pieces. When that type of stylistic change fell out of favor in the 1980s, Mirabella was brutally fired. Her take on it: For a magazine devoted to style, this was not a very stylish way of telling me."
Vogue & Adele
In July 1988, after Vogue had begun to lose ground to three-year-old upstart Elle, Anna Wintour was named editor-in-chief. Noted for her trademark bob cut and sunglasses, Wintour sought to revitalize the brand by making it younger and more approachable; she directed the focus towards new and accessible concepts of fashion for a wider audience.
Wintour's influence allowed the magazine to maintain its high circulation, while staff discovered new trends that a broader audience could conceivably afford. For example, the inaugural cover of the magazine under Wintour's editorship featured a three-quarter-length photograph of Michaela Bercu, an Israeli model, wearing a bejeweled Christian Lacroix jacket and a pair of jeans, a departure from her predecessors' tendency to portray a woman's face alone; according to The New York Times, this gave greater importance to both her clothing and her body.
As fashion editor Grace Coddington wrote in her memoirs, the cover endorsed a democratic new high/low attitude to dressing, added some youthful but sophisticated raciness, and garnished it with a dash of confident energy and drive that implied getting somewhere fast. It was quintessential Anna.
Throughout her reign at Vogue, Wintour accomplished her goals to revitalize the magazine and managed to produce some very large editions of the magazine. In fact, the September 2004 edition, clocked in at 832 pages, the most ever for a monthly magazine. Wintour continues to be American Vogue's editor-in-chief to this day.
The name Vogue means style in French. Vogue was described by book critic Caroline Weber in a December 2006 edition of The New York Times as the world's most influential fashion magazine: The publication claims to reach 11 million readers in the US and 12.5 million internationally. Furthermore, Wintour was described as one of the most powerful figures in fashion.
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