Exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making approach to fashion

When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

Exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making approach to fashion

When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

Exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making approach to fashion

When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

Investigation finds three were hacked by Paragon spyware at same time, potentially fuelling questions for government

Italian prosecutors investigating a domestic spying scandal say they have independently confirmed that two immigration activists and a journalist were hacked at the same time in late 2024 , suggesting all three were part of the same “infection campaign”.

The development could bring more questions for the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, who has denied any involvement in the hacking of the journalist, the Fanpage editor-in-chief, Francesco Cancellato.

Investigation finds three were hacked by Paragon spyware at same time, potentially fuelling questions for government

Italian prosecutors investigating a domestic spying scandal say they have independently confirmed that two immigration activists and a journalist were hacked at the same time in late 2024 , suggesting all three were part of the same “infection campaign”.

The development could bring more questions for the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, who has denied any involvement in the hacking of the journalist, the Fanpage editor-in-chief, Francesco Cancellato.

Investigation finds three were hacked by Paragon spyware at same time, potentially fuelling questions for government

Italian prosecutors investigating a domestic spying scandal say they have independently confirmed that two immigration activists and a journalist were hacked at the same time in late 2024 , suggesting all three were part of the same “infection campaign”.

The development could bring more questions for the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, who has denied any involvement in the hacking of the journalist, the Fanpage editor-in-chief, Francesco Cancellato.

Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion; Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith; Strange Architectures by JL Williams; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion (Faber, £12.99)
From his 1978 debut through his laureate elegies for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, death remains a major preoccupation for Motion. And for good reason: his mother’s accidental fall from a horse and subsequent premature death catalysed an unshakeable elegiac pattern, the poet as chronicler of loss – and, by extension, love. But something has subtly shifted in this latest gravitational turn. No longer the bewildered and ambivalent Englishman, who in his previous book, Randomly Moving Particles, emigrates to the US, here we see a more rooted and resolute eye surveying the mortality of others as well as his own. An opening sequence of eight roughly sonnet-like poems mourning the Baltimore poet Joseph Harrison contrasts the American’s dying courage with the poet’s English reticence. “You talk. I will – but warn you, Joe, / talk is not first nature. I blame Dad, / his silence fathomless. I tried.” An awkwardness relegates grief back to its private place, giving way to alternatives sometimes hopeful or outright hilarious. In Autumn Light a sequence for familial dead begins “Andrew Motion has also died … He was a fool in his own opinion”, mixing pathos and bathos. In English Elegies John Berryman appears as a “staggeringly drunk” spirit guide, advising against the melancholic pull of home. “ That place was done for, England , and so on, / John said.” Wisely, Motion resolves, “High time / it is that I, like everyone, set out to die alone.”

Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Scribner, £ 12.99)
The “toxic grammar” of home mediates a different form of filial elegy in Rabbitbox, where male violence terrorises the boy, or “boy-rabbit”. Here we mourn not the dead but those prevented from living: a young mother and her child besieged by a shadowy husband and father. “The mother one time locked herself unable / behind the door of the downstairs toilet / to elude the rage that thumped against it / and the mind recalls the dinner cold upon the table”. In nine unnumbered sections, we understand that for Holloway-Smith the mind recalling is a dismembered remembering by “a narrator who doesn’t want to look / his story too directly in the eye”. Inspired partly by Joseph Pintauro’s 1970s mystical children’s book, The Rabbit Box, the boy-as-rabbit is a kind of trickster looking for safety and love. He is also a shadow puppet projected on to a wall, a two-dimensional illusion of hands. Hiding in a wardrobe, the boy’s only escape is via a broken fairytale, his mother’s painful song “that had known him all its life”. Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles.

The Californian creative navigates seamlessly from bass-driven disco to sparse electronic beats on her expansive debut album

From Richmond, California
Recommended if you like Molly Nilsson, Chromatics, the 1975’s 1980s pastiches
Up next Self-titled debut album out 10 April

For those of us who can’t resist the pull of melancholy synth-pop, Californian artist Hannah Lew is set to become a new obsession. Soon to be released via Night School Records – home to the likes of Tristwch Y Fenywod and Teresa Winter – Lew’s self-titled debut is one of those albums that could easily be a greatest hits, with nine irresistible, single-worthy tracks all saturated with neon-lit heartbreak.

Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion; Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith; Strange Architectures by JL Williams; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

Gravity Archives by Andrew Motion (Faber, £12.99)
From his 1978 debut through his laureate elegies for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother, death remains a major preoccupation for Motion. And for good reason: his mother’s accidental fall from a horse and subsequent premature death catalysed an unshakeable elegiac pattern, the poet as chronicler of loss – and, by extension, love. But something has subtly shifted in this latest gravitational turn. No longer the bewildered and ambivalent Englishman, who in his previous book, Randomly Moving Particles, emigrates to the US, here we see a more rooted and resolute eye surveying the mortality of others as well as his own. An opening sequence of eight roughly sonnet-like poems mourning the Baltimore poet Joseph Harrison contrasts the American’s dying courage with the poet’s English reticence. “You talk. I will – but warn you, Joe, / talk is not first nature. I blame Dad, / his silence fathomless. I tried.” An awkwardness relegates grief back to its private place, giving way to alternatives sometimes hopeful or outright hilarious. In Autumn Light a sequence for familial dead begins “Andrew Motion has also died … He was a fool in his own opinion”, mixing pathos and bathos. In English Elegies John Berryman appears as a “staggeringly drunk” spirit guide, advising against the melancholic pull of home. “ That place was done for, England , and so on, / John said.” Wisely, Motion resolves, “High time / it is that I, like everyone, set out to die alone.”

Rabbitbox by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Scribner, £ 12.99)
The “toxic grammar” of home mediates a different form of filial elegy in Rabbitbox, where male violence terrorises the boy, or “boy-rabbit”. Here we mourn not the dead but those prevented from living: a young mother and her child besieged by a shadowy husband and father. “The mother one time locked herself unable / behind the door of the downstairs toilet / to elude the rage that thumped against it / and the mind recalls the dinner cold upon the table”. In nine unnumbered sections, we understand that for Holloway-Smith the mind recalling is a dismembered remembering by “a narrator who doesn’t want to look / his story too directly in the eye”. Inspired partly by Joseph Pintauro’s 1970s mystical children’s book, The Rabbit Box, the boy-as-rabbit is a kind of trickster looking for safety and love. He is also a shadow puppet projected on to a wall, a two-dimensional illusion of hands. Hiding in a wardrobe, the boy’s only escape is via a broken fairytale, his mother’s painful song “that had known him all its life”. Devastating, sharp with skilfully wrought language, this book is an ambitious leap into a lyricism that dissembles.