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Get the best deals on new-to-you laptop and desktop computers this Memorial Day
Get the best deals on new-to-you laptop and desktop computers this Memorial Day
Computers, both desktops and laptops, will cost you a big chunk of money these days.
2023-05-29 17:59
Instagram might be working on a Twitter killer
Instagram might be working on a Twitter killer
Twitter sucks, and it looks like Instagram is coming for its users. Lia Haberman first
2023-05-20 23:47
32 Under-$100 Buys R29 Editors Tried & Loved In April
32 Under-$100 Buys R29 Editors Tried & Loved In April
We’ve officially reached the part of the year where the jackets have been phased out of regular rotation and summer vacay plans are well on the horizon. But you could tell that based on the literal receipts of what R29 shopped this month. For the latest installment of our under-$100 favorites, we polled our savvy coworkers on the best purchases of April; per usual, they did not disappoint. (No gatekeeping here!) From on-sale travel backpacks to luxe lip balms, whimsical fuzzy tees, and more, our monthly MVPs are equal parts cheerful and practical. Ahead, scope out 32 of our editor-approved finds from the past month.
2023-05-10 01:19
MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo’s daughter speaks out for first time since his death
MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo’s daughter speaks out for first time since his death
Ava Zonfrillo, the eldest daughter ofMasterChef Australia judge Jock Zonfrillo, has spoken out for the first time since his unexpected death on 30 April. The celebrity chef died suddenly at the age of 46. His death was confirmed by Network 10 on 1 May, as well as by his family, who shared a statement. Posting a series of photographs and videos of her father, Ava wrote on Instagram: “Still can’t accept that we’ll be remembering you for more time than we had you, but doesn’t mean we’ll love you any less.” The 22-year-old added: “I love you dad, always.” Her poignant post included a photograph of her as a toddler with Zonfrillo, with both wearing comedy glasses with thick black eyebrows and large plastic noses attached. Other more recent photos show her posing with her father at various events. Ava also shared two clips of Zonfrillo, with one of him blowing a kiss at the camera. Friends of the family sent Ava love and well wishes in the comments. Chef Alex Prichard wrote: “We are all here for you! Love you both.” Meanwhile, Australian designer Collette Dinnigan sent “so much love” to Ava and wine expert Samantha Payne said: “Love you dearly and will be giving you the biggest of hugs soon, my darling friend. We’ve got you.” Zonfrillo was laid to rest at a private funeral two weeks ago. The service was attended by his wife, Lauren Fried, and their four children. A select group of family and friends, some who flew to Sydney from other countries, were also in attendance. During the service, Fried said in her eulogy: “We were two halves that found each other at the exact moment in life when we were ready. “We were ready for that big love to live a life of adventure, to become parents together, to imagine extraordinary things and to actually make them happen.” The late chef, who was born in Glasgow, was found at a hotel in Melbourne on Lygon Street the day before the 2023 season of MasterChef was set to be aired. The show was postponed following news of Zonfrillo’s passing. According to Daily Mail Australia, police believe that Zonfrillo died of natural causes and nothing unusual or suspicious was discovered in the hotel room where he was found. As news of his sudden passing broke, many in the food industry paid tribute to Zonfrillo, including Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. Pierre White praised his former apprentice chef and said: “Very few chefs have an inquisitive mind, an intellectual mind and a creative mind. That’s what makes him special, that’s what makes him rare.” Read More Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay pay tribute to chef Jock Zonfrillo MasterChef Australia to return with ‘full support’ of Jock Zonfrillo’s family following his death Jamie Oliver shared selfie with late MasterChef Australia judge Jock Zonfrillo hours before his death
2023-05-22 15:23
OpenAI expands ChatGPT 'custom instructions' to free users
OpenAI expands ChatGPT 'custom instructions' to free users
OpenAI's custom instructions feature that rolled out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers in July, is now
2023-08-11 18:47
More women sue Texas, asking court to put emergency block on state's abortion law
More women sue Texas, asking court to put emergency block on state's abortion law
More Texas women who were told they could not end pregnancies with fatal fetal anomalies or that endangered their health are challenging the state's restrictive abortion laws
2023-05-22 20:48
Buying a Ferrari With Crypto Is Now Possible
Buying a Ferrari With Crypto Is Now Possible
It's now possible to purchase a Ferrari luxury sports car in the US without spending
2023-10-16 20:56
Save 25% on this premium encrypted email and VPN bundle
Save 25% on this premium encrypted email and VPN bundle
SAVE 25%: A one-year subscription to Proton Mail Plus is on sale for £41.26, saving
2023-08-09 12:19
Subway plans to open nearly 4,000 stores in China in one of its biggest deals ever
Subway plans to open nearly 4,000 stores in China in one of its biggest deals ever
Subway, the world's biggest sandwich chain, announced Tuesday that it would open almost 4,000 new stores across the country over the next 20 years, increasing its current retail footprint there by more than seven times.
2023-06-07 12:55
Victoria’s Secret was never feminist – why are they bothering to try now?
Victoria’s Secret was never feminist – why are they bothering to try now?
Wings! Fake tans! Low body mass indexes! For millennial women, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was an annual reminder of the myriad ways in which we were failing to adhere to exacting and exhausting beauty standards. When it was cancelled in 2019, few mourned it. But fashion loves a comeback story, and today the company unveiled Victoria’s Secret: The Tour ’23 on Amazon Prime Video, its first televised catwalk event in five years. According to the company, the feature-length film is the “ultimate expression” of their ongoing efforts to rehabilitate a brand that has been mired in scandal. Alongside long-standing criticisms over promoting an unrealistic body image, the company’s former marketing executive Ed Razek was also accused of behaving inappropriately with models in a New York Times report (he described the allegations as “categorically untrue, misconstrued or taken out of context”) and a recent Hulu documentary Angels and Demons explored troubling links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Visually, strategically, everything about it is the incarnation of where the brand is going,” Victoria’s Secret president Greg Unis has said. Instead of the usual structure, which was centred around a straightforward runway show, The Tour ’23 is roughly divided into quarters, each focusing on one of four locations: Lagos, Nigeria; Bogota, Colombia; Tokyo, Japan; London, the UK. In each city, a local designer has dreamed up their own fashion collection to be modelled by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Emily Ratajkowski, Adut Akech, and Gigi Hadid, who does double duty as the show’s narrator. In London, the chosen designer is Michaela Stark, whose corsets aim to celebrate a diverse range of body shapes, rather than constrict them. She agreed to take part in the VS show 2.0, she suggests, so that she could counteract the damaging messages put out by the original runways. “It was a big thing” when she was a teenager, she recalls, “but it was also that culture around it, of not wanting to eat after you saw it”. Her comments inadvertently raise a question that looms over the whole production: can you ever truly detoxify a brand practically built on the insecurities of a generation of women? Founded by Roy Raymond in the late Seventies, who felt awkward buying lingerie for his wife in his local department store, Victoria’s Secret began life as a women’s underwear shop aimed specifically at men. In 1982, Raymond sold the business to Limited Stores founder Les Wexner for $1m; Wexner went on to transform the brand, envisaging it as a more affordable version of the fancy European label La Perla. In 1995, when the company was facing competition from Wonderbra, the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It proved successful enough to become an annual event. In 1999, the show was streamed on the internet for the first time, prompting the website to crash as 1.5 million users tried to tune in. Two years later, the VS show celebrated its inaugural TV broadcast, during which the National Organisation for Women (NOW) protested outside a New York branch of the shop. “Some people are terribly blase about this, that this is not a big deal, that we ought to be used to this kind of daily sexuality,” Sonia Ossorio, NOW’s vice president for public information, said at the time. “But I think we need to keep questioning the ever-extending sexualisation of women in mass media.” The following year, NOW branded the event a “softcore porn infomercial”. By then, the blueprint for future VS shows had been set. A lineup of models would don bras encrusted with millions of pounds worth of jewels and embarrassingly themed lingerie (never forget Cara Delevingne’s god-awful outfit circa 2013: a sort of miniature shell suit likely pitched in the boardroom as “sexy football fan”). Somewhere between the models, a famous singer would pop in for a brief performance; if they were a woman, they’d be decked out in a VS creation of their own (Taylor Swift got a particularly raw deal in 2013, too, when she had to wear a Union Jack-inspired number, complete with a tiny red, white and blue top hat). This glittering, over-the-top spectacle, much closer to a beauty pageant than a Fashion Week presentation, spotlighted the world’s most beautiful women – who were not just genetically blessed but worked hard, too, we were told ad nauseam. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules. These wing-wearing “Angels” were selling a dream, one that we lesser mortals could supposedly buy into by picking up some synthetic underwear at our nearest Victoria’s Secret branch. But it was their painstaking fitness regimens, not the pants they were wearing, that were the real focus of fascination. In endless interviews, the models were asked to detail exactly how they whittled themselves down to “Victoria’s Secret ready” size – so that we could try and copy them. To combat the criticisms of objectification, the brand relied on its models to pay lip service to just how “empowering” the whole circus was, offering up their take on choice feminism. “There’s something really powerful about a woman who owns her sexuality and is in charge” – model Karlie Kloss was peddling this line to the media as late as 2018. “A show like this celebrates that and allows all of us to be the best versions of ourselves. Whether it’s wearing heels, make-up or a beautiful piece of lingerie – if you are in control and empowered by yourself, it’s sexy.” Naturally, it was very convenient that this “best version of ourselves” aligned with the oppressively narrow conventional standard of sexiness Victoria’s Secret was selling. By the late 2010s, though, as the fashion industry began to (slowly) address its diversity problem, Victoria’s Secret started to seem more and more like an anachronism. As other brands took small steps to spotlight plus-size models on their catwalks and in their advertising campaigns, the VS show remained the preserve of the extremely thin. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules Placing white models in culturally insensitive outfits (see: Kloss walking down the runway wearing a Native American-inspired headdress) only added to the glaring PR problem, which was later exacerbated when the brand’s marketing boss Ed Razek made controversial comments about transgender people and plus-size models to Vogue in 2018. “It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in your show?” he said, apparently recalling questions from critics. “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy.” Elsewhere, he claimed “no one had any interest” in seeing bigger bodies on the VS catwalk. Razek later apologised, admitting that his “remark regarding the inclusion of transgender models in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show came across as insensitive”. His comments about plus-size bodies went unaddressed. In 2019, against a backdrop of plummeting TV ratings and declining sales, the brand confirmed that the VS show had been cancelled; instead, they said, the company would focus on “evolving” their marketing. The news came just a few months after the revelation that Jeffrey Epstein had provided financial advice to Victoria’s Secret founder Wexner – and had exploited his personal connection to the brand as a means to lure in young women. “Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved, is something that I’m embarrassed I was even close to,” Wexner said to investors. “But that is in the past.” He left the company the following year. Since then, Victoria’s Secret has made some high-profile attempts to rectify past missteps. The company brought in a majority female board of directors; they ditched the “Angels” concept in favour of the new “VS Collective” whose ranks include actor Priyanka Chopra, US football star Megan Rapinoe, and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser. Last year, an ad campaign featuring a more diverse array of women was accompanied by the slogan “we’ve changed” – supposedly into something “ever-evolving” and “real”. How much has Victoria’s Secret “changed”, really? The latest show features a handful of plus-size models, Elsesser included, but many of the old VS cohort are present and correct, including Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, and Adriana Lima. The nods to body diversity can’t help but feel a bit cursory when the overriding vision is still one of impossibly thin women parading up and down a runway – albeit a runway that now snakes around a Brutalist building in Barcelona as opposed to a swanky New York City hotel. The outfits too, are more arty, less skimpy this time around and mercifully there hasn’t been the usual media battery of stories on extreme exercise and diet in the run-up – but that doesn’t mean those practices have ended altogether. “We haven’t forgotten our past, but we’re also speaking to the present,” the brand’s chief creative director Raul Martinez said before the film’s launch. In an era when more inclusive, dynamic lingerie labels, like Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty, reign supreme, the VS show can’t help but seem like a relic. And as long as its legacy of impossible body standards lives on for many of us, any attempts to dress the spectacle up as empowering feel very hollow indeed. Read More Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Victoria's Secret overhauls its racy fashion catwalk in its latest moves to be more inclusive Chioma Nnadi at Vogue: All hail the era of the Black female fashion editor Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Kim Kardashian debuts buzz cut and thin eyebrows for new photo shoot Travis Kelce wears ‘1989’ inspired outfit after leaving NFL game with Taylor Swift
2023-09-27 13:45
Threads is finally adding a search function
Threads is finally adding a search function
There are a lot of things that Threads, Meta's Twitter (X?) replacement, cannot do. Users
2023-09-01 00:55
Roborock is having huge discounts on robot vacs for Prime Day
Roborock is having huge discounts on robot vacs for Prime Day
Ready for a vacuum upgrade this summer? Here are the best Roborock deals this Prime
2023-07-12 03:25