Zoomer Magazine June/July 2021

I first saw my favourite photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales, on one of the countless Instagram accounts dedicated to her life and style. It is of unknown provenance and copyright so I am unable to include it in this special issue to mark her legacy, on what would have been her 60th birthday. The image is of a teenaged Lady Di, dressed up in a strapless evening gown, sitting on a couch alone in a majestic, gilded living room. Her head, with its familiar feathered haircut, is bowed over a magazine that she is intently reading, with a newspaper folded neatly on the floor beside her. The image has an effect on me: I assume it is at Althorp, the Spencer family seat, and fantasize that the sound…

The King of Pop versus His Royal Badness is still good fodder for music supremacy repartee, but while Michael Jackson’s posthumous offerings have stalled, the Purple One’s diehard fans stay winning. Since his death five years ago from an accidental overdose of painkillers, Prince’s estate has put out a memoir, several catalogue compilations and reissues, and turned his Minneapolis area compound into a museum. This summer brings Welcome 2 America, a previously unreleased album of a dozen songs recorded in 2010, unearthed from the prolific creative’s infamous vault. The funky title track features shimmering percussion, lush female harmonies and blistering lyrics delivered spoken-word style by Prince, who recorded songs that explore capitalism, mass surveillance, celebrityculture and disinformation as the world was emerging from the devastating 2007 to 2009 recession.…

Faith in Fashion:  82-year-old La Verne Ford Wimberly of Tulsa, Okla., goes viral after posting her colour-co-ordinated Sunday best on Facebook – wearing a different outfit for virtual services every week for a year – raising spirits and the bar on church-lady “lewks.” This face book deserves a like: Actress Justine Bateman, 55, publishes Face: One Square Foot of Skin, a book of creative non-fiction that challenges negative perceptions about aging female faces. Highclere Holidays: Downton Abbey 2, the sequel to the hit 2019 film, is due out Dec. 22, so have a holly Crawley Christmas. Another reason to catch some zzz: A study shows that sleeping less than five hours a night could double the risk of dementia in older people. In Italy, a 67-year-old man earned the moniker “King…

FOR THE TOKYO Olympics, Italy has Armani. France has Lacoste. And Team Great Britain, previously dressed by Stella McCartney, will be kitted out by mod heritage label Ben Sherman. Team Canada? As part of the official uniform kit, Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athletes will wear a take on the “Canadian tuxedo” designed by the official outfitters, Hudson’s Bay Company. The star of our closing-ceremonies uniform is a denim jacket paired with snug white jeans. The trucker jacket is a reprise of London 2012, when Team Canada wore a version festooned in patches, with shapeless khakis, like an accidental riff on Casual Friday. “The graffiti graphic and unexpected patch placements capture a youthful and celebratory feel,” Hudson’s Bay said in a statement about the collection. Translation: a busy mix of…

RETELLING FAMILIAR children’s stories from the perspective of their resident baddies has proven to be box-office gold, with the stage musical Wicked (soon to be a movie) raking in more than $1.2 billion on Broadway and the 2014 film Maleficent and its 2019 sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, also earning more than $1.2 billion. Now, Disney is making a prequel about Cruella de Vil – the cigarette-smoking, fur-loving villainess from One Hundred and One Dalmatians – set in 1970s London. Cruella stars Oscar-winner Emma Stone as de Vil, a young, aspiring, haute couture designer who embraces the dark side after working under fashion legend Baroness von Hellman, played by fellow Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, 62. Speaking of baddies, Helen Mirren, 75, told Zoomer in 2019 she hoped for her own car-chase scene in a future Fast & Furious film, and she got her wish…

DONNA SUMMER SANG IT, but Halston lived it. The fella who still looms as a poster man for the Studio 54 era – who, “more than any designer … reinvented himself through the nightclub,” as Stephen Gundle wrote in Glamour: A History – is getting the Netflix treatment this month, courtesy of the insatiable U.S. television producer Ryan Murphy. The rise and the fall: that is the spine of the series starring Ewan McGregor in the titular role. In the process, we get the excesses and the muddle, a snapshot of New York City in the late ’70s and early ’80s, his band of “Halstonettes” (the diverse troupe of models who personified his aesthetic), hobnobbing with one-named wonders like Liza and Bianca. Plus, we get the ascent of American…