Let's write about high end art collectors

This strange report describes how the valuable paintings are treated like family photographs. Surreal!

A Matisse by the Tool Drawer (...or the Picasso under the piano)

Phyllis Hattis, who lived with the late moma curator William Rubin in art-crammed adjoining apartments (his was rent-controlled), gives a tour, hammer in hand. Published in The New Yorker "A Matisse by the Tool Drawer" written by Zach Helfand.

Phyllis Hattis, who lived with the late moma curator William Rubin in art-crammed adjoining apartments (his was rent-controlled), gives a tour, hammer in hand.

Phyllis Hattis and William Rubin preferred living separately for the first twenty-four years of their twenty-six-year courtship. Hattis was an art adviser. Rubin, who died in 2006, was the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture—maybe the world’s most powerful curator. She liked her independence. He liked his (subsidized😔😨) rental. 

Indeed, he lived at the top of a forty-eight-story building on the Upper East Side, where he kept his personal art collection. “He was proud to tell me that he had the highest salary of any curator,” Hattis said recently. “But it was still low enough to need rent control (❓) ❗” Eventually, in 1990, the other portion of the penthouse came up for sale. Hattis relented, and pulled some cash together to buy it. So, she said “I sold a Picasso”. 

Their conjoined apartment—specifically the art they continued collecting in it—is the subject of a new book by Hattis, “Masterpieces: The William Rubin Collection—Dialogue of the Tribal and the Modern.” The book presents the works via a tour of the apartment: Picasso above the piano, Matisse by the tool drawer, tribal masks on the windowsill. (There are also personal notes from Frank Stella and Richard Serra.) The other day, Hattis offered a real-life trip through the penthouse.

“So, we had a little disaster yesterday,” Hattis said, emerging from the kitchen. She was wearing green corduroy pants, a gray sweater, and a gray scarf, and was carrying a carved mask. “We had a sculpture fall on the floor,” she went on. Her Pomeranian-Siberian husky, Banksy, was lobbying for a belly scratch. “We opened the door to the balcony so he could go pee. A gust of wind blew it forward.”

She walked into a living room. The square footage was ample. The carpet was a little worn. Buzzy lights, modernist furniture. “Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Mies van der Rohe,” Hattis said, pointing to couches and tables.

She stopped in front of a Picasso over a daybed, flanked by a headdress from the Baga people of Guinea and a mask from the Songye, in Congo. 

“These are the big guns,” she said. Rubin bought the headdress from a collector, with a briefcase full of cash. “A masterpiece,” Hattis said. The Picasso depicted the artist Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover, bent over a drawing. Hattis once asked Gilot about two medallions on her apron, in the place of breasts. “She said, jokingly, ‘He used to tell me that my tits were drooping after we had two children,’ ” Hattis said.

Rubin became friends with Picasso when he acquired his Cubist sculpture of a guitar for moma, in 1971. After Picasso died, Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s wife, came to the opening of one of Rubin’s moma shows. “She got to the door, and the guard said, ‘I’m sorry, the museum is closed,’ ” Hattis recalled. “She said, ‘But I’m Jacqueline Picasso.’ And he said, ‘And I’m Jesus Christ.’ ”

Rubin started his collection with some money from his father, who owned textile mills. He eventually got a loft in lower Manhattan and filled it with Abstract Expressionists. Hattis pulled out some photographs of the space. “This is Rothko,” she said. “This is Motherwell. That’s Frankenthaler. This is Larry Poons. He sold the Pollock to build a house in the South of France.”

After Rubin moved uptown, and Hattis bought the neighboring unit, he proposed combining apartments. “I said, ‘We can have an adjoining door,’ ” Hattis said. At one point, they almost split up. “So we closed the door,” she said. “That lasted a couple of weeks or something. Then we opened the door.”

She continued into another wing, opening a heavy door. The old bachelor pad. Banksy trotted with her. They turned a corner, coming to a wall-size Stella color-field mural, near a Stella relief painting. Hattis isn’t particularly interested in selling. (“To be an investor collector, where the art is stored in warehouses and in free ports to avoid taxes, I’m not that,” she said. “That’s a shame.”) But the bigger pieces, like the relief painting, required some sacrifices. “I could’ve put a television screen there for movies!” she said.

Onward: an Arp, a Matisse, a Warhol inspired by a Matisse. Near a desk by the balcony were two kafigeledjo figures from the Senufo people of West Africa. “These two guys are my buddies,” she said. She calls one Max, for Max Ernst, and one Jean, for Jean Dubuffet.

There were some actual Dubuffets, too. One was in a box under the big Picasso. It used to be on the wall, but she hadn’t found the right spot to rehang it. “I miss it,” she said. There was open wall space right next to little Jean, if she shifted over a Matisse. “Let’s just do it,” she said. She produced a hammer and began whacking. “What do you think?” She stepped back to appraise, and furrowed her brow. “Let’s live with it for a while,” she said. Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Picasso Over the Couch.”

Let's write about Ukranian resistance art

Echo opinion published in the The Washington Post:

Anna Husarska is a journalist and policy analyst. 

Mikhail Reva is a painter and a sculptor.

The horrors of war transformed a Ukrainian artist, throwing him into a nation’s effort to resist.

Two years ago, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Mikhail Reva, a sculptor, was working on a fountain in Dnipro, a city in the center of the country that is now close to the front lines. 

Before the full-scale invasion, on Feb. 24, 2022, Reva was known for public sculptures that could be found around the country. After the invasion, he became known for something else: protest art.
Through his work, Reva joined the resistance, as he puts it. He screamed his outrage with ink and paint on paper and, later, by welding chunks of shrapnel, broken shell casings and ragged missile fragments into giant metal sculptures. He used wartime materiel to craft a huge Russian bear titled “Moloch, the Beast of War”; he gathered spent bullet casings to create “Russian Souvenir,” a 1,200-pound nesting doll.

Reva lives and works in his hometown of Odessa. In 2022, his workshop was hit by a missile while he was in Bucha, the site of a searing Russian atrocity. His sculptures endured a close call when a missile hit the Odessa National Fine Arts Museum, in November.

Reva is now preparing a project for the Venice Biennale; it will be made from machine gun bullets. 😯😳

To my eyes, Reva’s work, like the spirit of Ukrainians, shines 🌞through even in the darkest of times. 💙
— Anna Husarska

Let's write about "Doubt: A Parable" as an American theater classic

 Doubt (Broadway):  Recalling Meryl Streep’s “Half-Assed Genuflection”

Amy Ryan, as Sister Aloyslius, Zoe Kazan as Sister James and Liev Schreiber as Father Flynn

As a Roman Catholic, my opinion about the play "Doubt" is to consider it an American theater classic, because the story (based on an actual experience) describes the classic struggle women have encountered when speaking truth to power. This story is based on the life experience of the play's author, but I know if readers check the Archdiocese of Baltimore's website, they can find a report about a similar incident that occured at Saint Rita's Parish, in Dundalk Maryland.  

Sister Margaret McEntee inspired the play “Doubt,” by her former pupil John Patrick Shanley. Her fellow Sisters of Charity went to see the Broadway revival. Review by Michael Schulman published in The New Yorker.  

To her friends, Sister Margaret McEntee, of the Sisters of Charity of New York, is Sister Peggy. In 1956, when she was a twenty-one-year-old rookie teacher at St. Anthony School, in the Bronx, she was Sister James, a name that she shed in the late sixties, after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. 

Among her first graders was a shy kid named Johnny. “Every day, he’d raise his hand: ‘May I sharpen my pencil?’ ” she recalled recently. “The pencil sharpener was at the end of four windows, and he watched everybody going by. Finally, I said, ‘Johnny, you don’t have to sharpen your pencil. You just want to see what’s going on out there!’ ”

Decades later, in 2004, Sister Margaret found out that her former student, John Patrick Shanley*, had written a play called “Doubt,” in which a young nun named Sister James, who teaches in the Bronx, is torn between a charismatic priest, Father Flynn, and her rigid supervisor, Sister Aloysius, who suspects the priest of molesting a schoolboy. Sister Margaret attended a performance Off Broadway, and Shanley nervously watched her watch his rendering of her younger self. “It’s magnificent,” she told him. 

In fact, she saw the play again when it moved to Broadway, and met with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams when Shanley turned it into a film. “They would sit together with the habit on, and they’d be knitting,” Sister Margaret recalled of the two actors. “I said, ‘Oh, I knit,’ and I used to bring my baby booties over. The three of us, we had this little knitting circle.” Streep thanked her by name when she won the sag Award.

“Doubt” is now back on Broadway, in a Roundabout revival, and Sister Margaret, a cheery, chatty eighty-eight-year-old, had once again met with the cast, including Zoe Kazan, who plays Sister James. “They always pick a good-looking young actress to play me,” Sister Margaret boasted. She sat in a former novitiate, now an administrative building on the Riverdale campus of the University of Mount St. Vincent, which the Sisters of Charity founded as a women’s academy, in 1847. (About sixty Sisters live in the on-site convent, and the “Doubt” film was shot at the chapel.) 

Sister Margaret had seen the revival two nights earlier, but some thirty Sisters were about to catch the Saturday matinée. They boarded a chartered bus, wearing cardigans and trousers and blazers. “Doubt” is set in 1964, when the Sisters still wore black robes and bonnets, but the order abandoned the habit in the late sixties, post-Vatican II, to be more accessible to the community. 

Many of the nuns had short white hair and spoke in honking New York accents. Sister Donna Dodge, the order’s current president, had enjoyed the movie, but was critical of Streep’s “half-assed genuflection.”

In the sixties, there were more than a thousand Sisters in New York, but their number has dwindled to a hundred and forty, with a median age of eighty-five. 

After two decades in which no new members had joined, the Sisters voted to take a “path of completion,” meaning that they will let the order, which began in 1817, die out with them. 

“We prayed about it, and then we asked people to vote, and it was unanimous,” Sister Donna said. Laypeople will continue to run their ministries, including a housing program and a home for foster children. The Sisters, meanwhile, will put their affairs in order while they’re still spry enough—a task akin to drawing up a will. “Women have a lot more opportunities to serve in whatever way they want,” Sister Donna noted. “It’s just not an attractive life style, for some reason.”

They arrived at the theatre and filed through metal detectors. After the show, they convened in an upstairs lounge and snacked on pretzels. The play brought back memories of the old days. “The whole idea of ‘the priest is always right,’ ” one Sister said. “Sisters had a place and shouldn’t overstep their boundaries.” Another found the bows on the actors’ bonnets “a little droopy.” The cast emerged from the elevators, to cheers. Kazan, who had changed into a T-shirt and ripped jeans, hugged Sister Donna and said, “I’m so moved that you guys all came.” 

Someone asked her to sign a Playbill. The nuns had strong feelings about Sister Aloysius, played by Amy Ryan. “She was such a bitch!” one salty Sister told Kazan. “I felt very bad for you.”

They took a group photo; Liev Schreiber, who plays Father Flynn, towered above the Sisters. “Was your cap tight on your ear?” Sister Mary Sugrue, who joined in 1955, asked Kazan.

“It itches sometimes,” she confessed. They traded notes: Kazan used part of a milk jug to stiffen her bonnet; Sister Mary had used a Clorox bottle. “I keep thinking, Sister James is a nun even on her day off,” Kazan said. “She’s always got to wear this habit.”

“It took a while for that to change,” Sister Mary said. “Then they allowed us to wear white habits in the summertime, which was much better.” ♦

* John Patrick Shanley  Maine Writer post script:  Shanley created a theater classic about a deep rooted cultural epidemic in the Roman Catholic Church, a story that exposes the damage caused by inequities between women and men in the religious life.

Let's write an ode to Louisa May Alcott

MEG, JO, BETH, AMY: The Story of “Little Women” and Why It Still Matters echo essay by Anne Boyd Rioux
Illustrated. 273 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
Echo essay in The New York Times Book Review:

One reason I learned to read, writes Francine Prose, was so that I could understand “hard books” like “Little Women,” which was read aloud to me as a preliterate child. 

Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House created this exclusive notepaper to commemorate the 1992 decennial production of Litttle Women, by the Concord Players. Based on the beloved classic written at the House in 1868, the script was adapted for the stage by David Fielding Smith; the silhouette used here was designed by Steve Moyle.

I remember Louisa May Alcott’s heroines — the March sisters — more vividly than some real people I dimly recall from those years. Now Anne Boyd Rioux’s lively and informative “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy” makes it clear why having these fictive young women implanted in my consciousness has been a good thing, helpful for every girl facing the challenges of growing up to be a woman.

Rioux’s book features a useful, highly compressed biography of Alcott and an account of how her most famous novel was written. Like Charlotte Brontë, Alcott was obliged to support a household. Her father, Bronson Alcott, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau and the founder of Fruitlands, a short-lived utopian community, was so focused on leading “a spotless spiritual life” that he’d forget he had a family. His periods of instability, his delusions and his refusal (or inability) to earn a living meant that the Alcotts moved often and were frequently separated. Yet Bronson recognized and nurtured his daughter’s gifts. Louisa was publishing stories at 20, and, after serving as a Union nurse in the Civil War, she began to write novels. Reluctant when her publisher asked for a book about girls, she told a friend, “I could not write a girls’ story, knowing little about any but my own sisters & always preferring boys.” But she persevered, and when “Little Women” was published in September 1868, 2,000 copies were sold in two weeks. In fact, the book has never gone out of print, and has appeared in hundreds of editions and dozens of foreign translations.

Katharine Hepburn (left) and Jean Parker in “Little Women.”Credit...RKO
Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003- d. Connecticut)

A chapter on the adaptations of the novel — for radio, stage and screen — is a compendium of fun facts, much of it about casting. It’s pleasant to imagine how liberating it was for Katharine Hepburn to play Jo March as a full-on tomboy in George Cukor’s 1933 film. Other roles were less successfully cast, a problem that would persist in films that valued star power over fidelity to the novel. In the 1933 film, “Amy, who is supposed to be 12 years old, was played by 23-year-old and secretly pregnant Joan Bennett. When she could no longer hide her condition, her costumes had to be altered. … Douglass Montgomery makes a much-too-polished Laurie, who is supposed to be 15; Montgomery was 26 and looked 30.”

Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, tracks the literary works that owe a debt to Alcott: “Just as Hemingway claimed that all of American literature (by men) came from ‘Huck Finn,’ we can also say that much of American women’s literature has come from ‘Little Women.’” She considers the debate about “whether ‘Little Women’ tips toward realism or sentimentalism” and the ways in which feminists have praised — and critiqued — the novel for its (cramped or expansive) view of female experience. Ultimately, she argues for the positive influence exerted by the book and in particular by the character of Jo, who chooses the life of the mind over the lure of privilege, pretty clothes and boys. More recently the book’s readership has declined, and it’s only rarely taught in schools, where, Rioux suggests, many educators believe that requiring a boy to read a book with “women” in the title will forever turn him against reading.

“Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy” does what — ideally — books about books can do: I’ve taken “Little Women” down from the shelf and put it ontop of the books I plan to read. I’m curious to check in on the March sisters, and — inspired by Anne Boyd Rioux — find out how they seem to me now.

Francine Prose’s most recent book is an essay collection, “What to Read and Why.”

Let's write about finding our moment of clarity in meditation

A meditation published in Holy Moments, A handbok about th erest of yur life: by Matthew Kelly.

A moment of clarity:  When I was fifteen years old, I had a great spiritual mentor. I do not know how my life would have unfolded if I had not met him.  But, it is difficult for me to imagine that life wuld have been anywhere near as fruitful of rewarding as it has been.

Because, he encouraged me to read the Gospels.  He taught me how to pray.  He showed me how to care for the poor and visit the lonely.  He encouraged me to read great spiritual books.  He watched wthout judgement as I foolishly wrestled with God. He listened patiently to my questions, doubts, excuses and resistance.  And, perhaps most of all, he encouraged me to honor those sacred truths, that were emerging in my soul.  Somthing is missing, there is more to life, and you do have more to offer.

One of the fruits of this friendship was a moment of clarity so piercing that it has defined. my life.

I was walking home from meeting with him one day, when everything we had been discussing for months came together in a single clarifying thought.  Some moments are holy, some moments are unholy and our choices can guide a moment in either direction.

It was a rare moment of clarity in a chaotic and confusing world.  It was also a moment of intense joy.  I can still see myself walking down the street. I know exactly where I was in that moment of awakening.

Everything good in my life has been connected to that moment.  And, all the pain and disappointment I have caused myself and others has been the result of abandoning the wisdom that was revealed in that moment.  

It only took a moment in that moment I realized what was possible.  In that moment, I learned to collaborate with God and create Holy Moments.  It was a moment of grace like none other.  And, I have spent my life trying to help others to discover that same clarity and joy.  It is the only way I know to express my graitude for the infinate blessings that moment brought to my life.

It was a moment of awakening a moment of realization, a moment of discovery, a moment of clarity and a moment of pure unmitigated joy. It was a Holy Moment.

Now, it is your turn.  It is all of our turns.  This is our moment.  This is my moment.  The moment when we realize that despite what our lives have been up until now, and regardless of anything we have don in the past or what I have done in the past, what matters most is what you do next.  Let us meditate about how to choose to do good.

Let's write more about book censorship

Echo report published in The New York Times by Elizabeth Williamson:  Rich Boulet, the director of the Blue Hill Public Library, in Blue Hill Maine, was working in his office when a regular patron stopped by to ask how to donate a book to the library. “You just hand it over,” Mr. Boulet said.

‘My Heart Sank’: In Maine, a Challenge to a Book, and to a Town’s Self-Image.  Wealthy, liberal-leaning Blue Hill, Maine, prided itself on staying above the fray — until the library stocked a book that drew anger from the left.

The book was “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” by the journalist Abigail Shrier. The book posits that gender dysphoria (IOW, feeling dissatisfied) is a “diagnostic craze” fueled by adolescent confusion, social media and peer influence, and that teenagers are too young to undergo potentially irreversible gender transition surgery.

Many transgender people and their advocates say the book is harmful to trans youth, and some have tried to suppress its distribution.

Residents of Blue Hill, Maine, who objected to the book, “Irreversible Damage”, confronted the library director, library staffers and board members in the grocery store, post office and the library itself. Credit...Tristan Spinski for The New York Times

“If I’m being totally honest, my heart sank when I saw it,” Mr. Boulet recalled.

Founded in 1796, the library has a $7.9 million endowment in a coastal enclave popular among affluent summer residents. Blue Hill delivered a 35-point victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020, presidential race. The communities around it are a blend of liberal, conservative and none-of-your-business, all of which helped its library resist political proxy battles like those roiling the nation’s libraries.

But in mid-2021, the Blue Hill library and its leadership were tested in a way none of them anticipated.

“Irreversible Damage” did not reflect Mr. Boulet’s personal views, nor those of his staff. But because “I want the library to be there for everybody, not just people who share my voting record,” Mr. Boulet said he gave the book the same consideration he would any other, and concluded it should be on the shelves.

“I felt like it filled a hole in our collection of a lot of materials on that subject matter,” he said. His staff supported the decision.

Less than a week after the book went on display, the parent of a transgender adult told Mr. Boulet that she found it harmful.

“She and I have known each other for years, and we talked about it calmly,” he recalled. The patron filled out a reconsideration request, asking that the book be kept “under the desk,” available only by request.

The library’s collections committee voted unanimously to keep the book in circulation. “But I knew it wasn’t over,” Mr. Boulet said.

Residents who objected to the book confronted him, library staffers and board members in the grocery store, post office and the library itself.

“They would say ‘I can’t believe that the library is allowing this,’” said John Diamond, the library board president. “My feeling was, ‘I can’t believe the library would not allow it, based on its position on free access to information.’”

The harshest criticism was reserved for Mr. Boulet. One patron told him that if a trans youth checked out the book and died by suicide, “that’s on you,” Mr. Boulet recalled. 

Critical Facebook posts and negative Google reviews poured in.

Mr. Boulet defended the decision on the library’s Facebook page, which only fanned the discord. Painfully, Mr. Boulet knew many of the negative commenters.

Mr. Boulet appealed to the American Library Association for a public letter of support, which it offers to libraries undergoing censorship efforts. “They ghosted me,” he said. (IOW, no response.)

Asked about the letter, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the A.L.A.’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said Mr. Boulet’s request had generated internal debate, and delay.

“Our position on the book is, it should remain in the collection; it is beneath us to adopt the tools of the censors,” she said in an interview. “We need to support intellectual freedom in all its aspects, in order to claim that high ground.” Months after Mr. Boulet requested the letter, Ms. Caldwell-Stone saw him at a conference and apologized.

Mr. Boulet wrote an open letter in the local newspaper stressing that the library welcomes everyone, “not just your or my slice of the community.”

“The presence of an item in the library is not an endorsement of the ideas contained therein,” he added.

A friend of Mr. Boulet’s, a high school teacher, posted a response on social media, and sent it to the library board.

“The ‘All Lives Matter’ stance the Blue Hill library is taking is biased, harmful and manipulative hate speech,” it read. 

Irate, Mr. Boulet confronted the teacher in person, and the two are no longer friends.

And then by the end of 2021, the furor quieted, and the book remained.

Before the controversy, “I hadn’t really given intellectual freedom as much thought as I should have,” Mr. Boulet said. His conclusion, he said, is that “intellectual freedom or the freedom of speech isn’t there just to protect ideas that we like.”

Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. 

Let's write about how to predict fashion trends! What every fashionista wants to know!

I found this weirdly fascinating short fashion echo essay in The New Yorker, reported by Lauren Collins.

Maine Writer:  So, fashionista trends are reduced to dull data entries? Let me get this right?  If wearing sneakers on a fashion runway is determined to be trending down by 34 percent, this means the women who dare to wear ankle length cocktail dresses should not also wear sneakers at the same time?  I don't get it.  Haha.....I am of the age when the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor and Lauren Bacall were the data trendies.

Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index

The cerulean sleeve and the smoky eye have long been the province of whim, but Alexandra Van Houtte (the catwalk’s Bill James) is changing all that with fashion-data analysis.

Fashion is an emphatically subjective industry. “Pink is the navy blue of India” (Diana Vreeland). “There is a famine of beauty, honey” (André Leon Talley). “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat” (Karl Lagerfeld). “An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles while walking is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen” (Valentino). A whim or a feeling can seal the fate of a cerulean sweater, a smoky eye, or a mutton sleeve.

Yet, just as sabermetrics transformed baseball, data is coming for fashion, supplementing the hemline index—the theory that skirt lengths rise and fall with the stock market—with data lakes, traffic-share analyses, and lots of graphs. The other day, Alexandra Van Houtte, the Bill James of the catwalk, was sitting in a conference room in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris. Her company, Tagwalk, is known as “Google for fashion.” But, instead of typing “weird rash” or “post office hours” into its free search engine, you can search every runway look by season, city, designer, color, model, and trend. “People are always scared of data, but data is inspiring to creativity,” Van Houtte said.

Van Houtte—in Chloé sneakers, soft black pants, and a long black coat embroidered with frangipani and chrysanthemums—founded the company in 2016. At the time, she was assisting a stylist, who was preparing for a shoot with Angelina Jolie and needed to see black dresses: every single one on the market. Van Houtte got to work, clicking through slide shows, screenshotting looks, compiling them into PDFs, and compressing the documents, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. “It was massive torture,” she recalled. Now a buyer or a designer or an editor can enter “black dress” into Tagwalk and, within seconds, find seventeen thousand four hundred and ninety-seven of them, from a 2019 fish-net number by Dolce & Gabbana to a one-shouldered mini from Balenciaga’s recent show in L.A.

Tagwalk’s business model relies on two sources of revenue: smaller brands can pay to have their images appear on the site, while big brands buy trend reports that tell them who’s looking at what where. “I don’t care who’s cool, and it’s not my place to care,” Van Houtte said. The day’s order of business was to finalize a book—the first volume in a series—of takeaways from the Spring/Summer 2024 collections, which had concluded in Paris just a few days earlier. Van Houtte and a trio of analysts gathered around a table and opened their laptops.

“You have these other trend reports that are, like, ‘Orange is the color. We think leopard’s going to be a really big thing,’ ” Van Houtte said. “There’s this thing where data’s becoming cool, so sometimes people are just throwing numbers everywhere, like, ‘Data, but make it fashion!’ ” She pulled up an Instagram post, which claimed that a certain brand had enjoyed “140% more press” during Paris Fashion Week. “Compared to what? Compared to when?” Van Houtte said. “I really do not know how this was calculated.”

A draft of the book appeared on a wall-mounted screen. “O.K., let’s go!” she said.

A slide ranking the “20 Hottest Brands” according to Tagwalk users’ searches filled the screen. Miu Miu was No. 1, followed by Chanel, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino. The team moved on to trends, which the site tracks using descriptive tags. Each look can have up to thirty, including americana, androgynous, babydoll, bantu knot, chapka, chelsea boots, dominatrix, earmuffs, equestrian, face jewels, gavroche cap, minaudiere, nomadic, oceanic, pastoral, polka dot, rave, round buckle, schoolgirl, spaghetti strap, taupe, visible underwear, and zig zag.

Van Houtte’s team cycled through a series of slides. glittery was surging (+783 per cent), as were ladylike (+235 per cent) and skirt (+30 per cent), while technical, animal print, bodycon, and pink were all trending down. Next came a pie graph (N.B.: it’s called a “Camembert” in French), which examined the colors of the season.

“There’s no more green!” she exclaimed. “It’s crazy.”

A two-page spread dealt with accessories, but she thought it needed more of a narrative.“If I was to buy this book, I’d be, like, ‘I spent this money, but you’re telling me that models carry bags and wear jewelry, which isn’t really groundbreaking information,’ ” Van Houtte said. They decided to go more granular. “O.K., a hundred and fifty per cent more bags were carried by hand?” she said. “That’s interesting.”

She had a hunch that she’d seen fewer sneakers on the runway, but she wanted to know whether the data bore it out. The team went searching in their spreadsheets, and a few minutes later returned with confirmation: sneakers were down thirty-two per cent.

Van Houtte looked at them excitedly. “Guys, this is like gold!” ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, with the headline “Designer Data.”

Let's write more about Henrietta Lacks

The donation of Henrietta Lacks' cells began what was the first, and, for many years, the only human cell line able to reproduce indefinitely. Her cells, known as HeLa cells for Henrietta Lacks, remain a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells used in research around the world.

HeLa cells were the first discovered immortalized human cell line (cells that can be continuously grown) in 1951 and have since become one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

Henrietta Lacks Family, Thermo Fisher Settle Cell Use Lawsuit

The settlement with the Massachusetts-based company came more than 70 years after doctors took Lacks' cancer cells without her consent.  Echo report by Megan VerHeist published the Dundalk (Maryland) Patch.

BALTIMORE, MD — Lawyers for the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent more than 70 years ago, said a settlement had been reached with the biotechnology company they sued in 2021.

What many people using this cancer cell line did not know, was that these cells were unknowingly harvested from a 31-year-old African-American woman being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. This woman’s name was Henrietta Lacks.

The settlement with Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher came after Lacks' family accused the company of using Lacks' cells for "unjust enrichment" and accused its leaders of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.

The family did not ask for specific monetary damages in the lawsuit, according to reports.

The settlement came after closed-door negotiations that lasted all day Monday inside the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Several members of the Lacks family were in on the talks.

Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Lacks family, announced the settlement late Monday. He said the terms of the agreement are confidential.

"The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement," Crump said in a statement.

The lawsuit against biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific claimed Lacks' cells were taken while she was receiving treatment at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Lacks, who was from Baltimore County, died at 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave. A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, she was raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in her cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.

The cells taken from Lacks became the first human cells to be successfully cloned, according to a report from The Associated Press. Now called HeLa cells, they have enabled numerous scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, and even COVID-19 vaccines.

HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. This exceptional quality made it possible to cultivate her cells indefinitely — they became known as the first immortalized human cell line — making it possible for scientists anywhere to reproduce studies using identical cells.

The discovery and the science involved were detailed in a 2010 bestselling book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie based on the book.

Johns Hopkins said it never sold or profited from the cell lines, but many companies have patented ways of using them.

In their complaint, Lacks' grandchildren and other descendants argued that her treatment illustrates a much larger issue that persists into the present day: racism inside the American medical system.

"The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history," the complaint reads. "Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism."

Thermo Fisher previously argued the case should be dismissed because it was filed after the statute of limitations expired, but attorneys for the family said that shouldn't apply because the company is continuously benefitting from the cells.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.