FOMO: The international edition

13 Miuccia Prada insights

Miuccia Prada is the billionaire head designer of Prada. She is also the founder of Prada's subsidiary, Miu Miu. For Laureen, she is the kween of Milan.

1. Women often don’t want to admit that they like clothes and fashion. Yet clothes enthral everyone, from the taxi driver to the mega-intellectual. I have often wondered why this is. I don’t know the answer.
2. I love clothes. Maybe I can say I don’t love fashion, but I love clothes completely.
3. I hate the idea that you shouldn't wear something just because you’re a certain age.
4. Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I’m attracted by nostalgia, but I refuse it intellectually.
5. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contact is so quick. Fashion is an instant language.
6. Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it’s newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.
7. I don’t believe in people who think that clothes are not important.
8. I love uniforms because they allow you to hide. No one knows what you are thinking, so it’s a very appropriate and correct way to be yourself.
9. Women have the stress of being beautiful, of age and youth. Men don’t have that at all. And with women, that causes a lot of mistakes and bad choices — a lot of not being their true selves.
10. One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.
11. Craziness in a shoe is great — you can have much more freedom and exaggerate, and it does not feel stupid. But having too much craziness near your face would just feel weird.
12. To have to be sexy? That I hate. To be outrageously sexy? That I love.
13. I think more and more, if you live in the current world — and live internationally — the same people that are interested in fashion are interested in movies, art and culture.

What you want to know this week

The world’s cleanest airports

#1 Haneda, Tokyo, Japan
#2 Incheon, Seoul, South Korea
#3 Singapore Changi
#4 Hamad, Doha, Qatar
#5 Chubu Centrair, Nagoya, Japan
#6 Narita, Tokyo, Japan
#7 Kansai, Osaka, Japan
#8 Hong Kong
#9 Taiwan Taoyuan, Taipei
#10 Zürich, Switzerland

Fashion trends spotted by Laureen on the streets of Milan

• Flowers, flowers, flowers
• Pastel colours — peppermint, pink and lots of white
• Crocheted, embroidered, embossed, woven and knitted
• Transparent
• Romantic
• Empire line
• Titanic vibes
• And lots of half-circle handbags

Where women rule

The election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico's president will bring the number of women serving as heads of state or government to 27, according to CNN's list, when Sheinbaum takes office on October 1:

Africa
DR Congo / Ethiopia / Moldova / Togo / Tanzania

Europe
Bosnia and Herzegovina / Denmark / Estonia / Greece / Italy / Latvia / Lithuania / Malta / North Macedonia / Slovakia / Slovenia

Asia
Bangladesh / Georgia / India (president)

Americas
Barbados / Dominica / Honduras / Mexico / Peru / Trinidad and Tobago

Oceania
Marshall Islands / Samoa

What you (might) want to know

Front page

Oprah's BFF, 69-year-old CBS Mornings anchor Gayle King, appears on the cover of the 60th Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (she follows last year’s cover model Martha Stewart, who broke records by making her Sports Illustrated debut at 81). 

Alcohol is so last season

Seen in Air Mail, an American online publication edited by Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair.

The most stylish drinkers in America are now imbibing the stronger stuff — cocktails that intoxicate with THC instead of alcohol. 

“It’s a different feeling. It’s sort of mild and nice, it’s a little bit floaty, it’s a little gentle.”

A new study reveals that cannabis has eclipsed alcohol in the US as the daily drug of choice. Other factors are hitting alcohol sales hard: more people are extending dry January and sober October to full-year abstinence. The rise of Ozempic and similar drugs has turned former drinkers into near-teetotallers. Not all liquor sectors are hurting but scotch, rum and gin are sputtering, and wine sales sagged by 13.2% in January compared to the previous year.

Last word

Milanese quote of the week

Seen in a coffee shop in the university city of Bologna

“Silence is sexy.”

Video of the week

♦ VWB ♦

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