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The Olsen Twins Go to the Beach

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The Olsen Twins Go to the Beach

There was a Cybertruck parked on Main Street in East Hampton, outside the Altuzarra store. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, and traffic stalled for a moment. Even the rich are not immune to rubbernecking a brutalist behemoth.

The monster truck marked the end of an avenue of monograms — the island’s main luxury shopping drag, with $850 raffia handbags and $15,000 decorative surfboards. You know their names: Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Lululemon.

Two and a half miles down this same street, however, quaintness emerged. East Hampton turned into Amagansett, and that flashy boutique strip became a town square with white wood-paneled cottages. There was a shoe store called Brunch, a children’s clothing chain called Pink Chicken, a jewelry and gift shop called Love Adorned. A Cybertruck here would read as a declaration of war.

It was near these cottages that the Row, a brand founded in 2006 by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, quietly opened a store on Memorial Day weekend.

Quietly is how the Row tends to operate. Not only in its clothing — often described as “quiet luxury,” a term used to describe very expensive basics — but also in its communication.

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The founders rarely give interviews, advertise or otherwise promote their line. While the Row did announce its Amagansett opening on Instagram, that account is more outwardly devoted to sharing modern art than to moving product. In February, the brand caused a stir at Paris Fashion Week by asking its runway show attendees to “refrain from capturing or sharing any content during your experience” — which is, for many, the primary reason for attending a fashion show. The audience was encouraged to write down thoughts instead.

Somehow this stance works. In an industry overrun by influencers, the Row’s silence is stark. Monasticism is chic. There is an impression of exclusivity and taste, buoyed by the extreme prices. One of the Row’s most popular items, the Margaux bag, ranges in price from $3,490 to $6,810, depending on size and material. It is timeless and ladylike, the kind of purse that might remind Kendall Jenner of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The Row’s stores also have a reputation for being intimidating at times, even among seasoned high-end shoppers.

One loyal Row customer told me she felt like “peasantry” in the Los Angeles store, which houses an untouchable swimming pool. At the store in Manhattan — a townhouse with a limestone spiral staircase — “there is one guy who works there that all my friends are afraid of, who radiates a very ‘you can’t sit here’ vibe,” said Jess Graves, the writer of a shopping newsletter called The Love List, “even to girls I know who walk in wearing the brand head to toe.”

The Amagansett shop is different. It operates out of a house with roots in the 19th century, formerly occupied by Tiina the Store, the Hamptons’ Gap for billionaires. (Tiina stocked the Row.)

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It has a porch and a screen door and a woven beige carpet. The fitting rooms are harshly lit behind denim patchwork curtains. (By contrast, the spacious wood-floored dressing rooms at the Upper East Side store, where I recently tried on a $1,550 white cotton poplin tent dress that made me look, tragically, like a hospital patient, have soft lighting and softer robes.)

There is no statement artwork in Amagansett, unlike the London store, where an oval light installation by James Turrell greets visitors at the entrance. The vintage furniture is noteworthy — there’s a black chaise shaped like a person from the 1970s by Olivier Mourgue Bouloum and a white painted wooden lounge chair from the 1930s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. But the décor, with its Asian and African influences, is not the point.

The point of the store is the large selection of jewelry, home wares, snacks and skin care by more than 20 brands and artisans that are not the Row. Shampoo from Florence. Beaded necklaces from Greece. A mother-of-pearl caviar set. A bronze lighter carved to resemble tree bark. A packet of dried mango and a jar of raw almonds. Vintage glass candlesticks that can be purchased only in a set of a dozen for $16,000.

There are racks of ready-to-wear clothes made by the Row, of course, the selection tailored to this beach town: bike shorts ($1,050), denim shirts (also $1,050), ribbed tank tops ($670), sleeveless silk maxi-dresses ($1,890). Ms. Graves bought herself a raffia bag here earlier in the season. (“It felt very appropriate while I’m out here this summer,” she said.)

But the Row confirmed that the Amagansett store is its first attempt at a “local” store concept. What this presumably means is a space that is more relaxed, filled with objects that complement the brand’s vision of itself, staffed by sales associates who do not scare people away but warmly help shoppers track down sold-out jelly flats. Not that the Row’s fans are easily scared away: Even those who are intimidated don’t stay away for long, these masochists for cream-colored cashmere.

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In retrospect, the popular jelly shoes, along with the beach towels that models wore as scarves on the Row’s runway in September, may have been a sign that the brand was loosening up — that brightness and humor were coming to this austere world. (Its most recent look book showed a silky camisole dress layered over pants, Y2K-style.)

A British client of the Row visiting the Amagansett store marveled at the vibe shift. Where was the icy indifference? “I don’t think it would fly with the audience here,” she said.

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Jodie Foster plans more French roles after ‘A Private Life’

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Jodie Foster plans more French roles after ‘A Private Life’

Jodie Foster has her first solo lead role entirely in French in A Private Life.

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After dozens of films over a storied six-decade career, Jodie Foster is trying something new, playing the lead role in a French film for the very first time.

There’s hardly a trace of an American accent in Foster’s turn as Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner in A Private Life (Vie privée) and she appears to be very much at home.

The character she plays is an American woman who built her career in France. So director Rebecca Zlotowski added some small asides — and swearing — in English because of Foster’s brisk and fluent French. “People suddenly were just completely confused that I wasn’t a French person,” the actress said.

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All apparent ease aside, “I have a different personality in French than I do in English,” Foster told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a recent visit to NPR’s New York studios.

Her voice has a higher pitch in French, something she attributes to the French ladies who taught her at the private school she attended, Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. Foster also had some smaller roles in three French films prior to A Private Life, including in 2004’s A Very Long Engagement.

“I’m just much more insecure and kind of vulnerable because I never know whether I’m communicating properly. And, you know, am I going to find that word at the last minute?” Foster said.

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This frustration is also built into the script itself. When we first meet Steiner, she’s constantly frazzled, barely listening to her patients and hardly sparing a minute for her newborn grandson.

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) and Gabriel Haddad (Daniel Auteuil) rekindle an old flame in A Private Life.

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) and Gabriel Haddad (Daniel Auteuil) find love again — for each other — years after their divorce in A Private Life.

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Then, her eyes start watering constantly, something someone more grounded would call crying, but not Steiner, who grows increasingly frustrated that water is coming out of her eyes.

It turns out to be especially fitting for someone who is a Freudian psychoanalyst. “In true Freudian fashion [she] is having a physical demonstration of a psychic ill,” Foster explains.

That psychic ill is caused by the death of a patient (the Franco-Belgian social drama star Virginie Efira), purportedly by suicide.

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But Steiner suspects her patient has been murdered and launches her own — inconclusive, darkly comedic — investigation, enlisting help from her ex-husband (played by Daniel Auteuil, a mainstay of French cinema), and rekindling their old flame in the process.

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All of those disparate plot lines play into the film’s French title, Vie privée, which Foster explains is a double entendre: “So private life, meaning everything that you think that would mean the opposite of a public life — an internal life. But private also means has been deprived of, so somebody who has been deprived of life, meaning somebody who’s died potentially.”

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In her own life, Foster said she’s had to fight for privacy, ferociously. “I had to say I will go to Disneyland and I will not have a film crew following me… I will go to college and I will not give everything to the public eye, in order to make sure that I survived intact,” she explained.

After a frenetic pace of filming in her teens and twenties, Foster says she became more deliberate about the roles she accepted so that she could bring more depth to the screen. “I really was careful to make sure that I had real life and I worked more sporadically than most other actors,” she said.

In a dream sequence, Lilian (Jodie Foster), left, is transported to WWII-era Paris, where she knows her present-day patient Paula (Virginie Efira) under a different light.

In a hallucinatory dream sequence while under hypnosis, Lilian (Jodie Foster), left, is transported to WWII-era Paris, where she and her present-day patient Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) were lovers.

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Today, she’s especially excited about working with women directors. She also directs herself. Recounting that she only worked with one female director — Mary Lambert for 1987’s Siesta — in the first four decades of her career, Foster said she’s now working more with women.

“It’s been a shift that’s a long time coming… But it came very, very late,” she added, noting that the prevailing bias against women directors has only “recently” changed in mainstream cinema.

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Foster also hopes to take part in more French movies, maybe even direct a film in France. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that would be a great challenge for me,” she said.

Director Rebecca Zlotowski, shown her on the set of A Private Life, says she long had dreamed of directing a film featuring Jodie Foster.

Director Rebecca Zlotowski, shown here on the set of A Private Life, says she had long dreamed of directing a film featuring Jodie Foster.

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She urged American audiences to embrace learning to speak languages other than English.

“It’s surprising how Americans don’t hear other languages… how you can go your whole life without really hearing other languages spoken in your state,” she said. “We have to make an effort to connect to a wider world and understand that we’re all part of the same universe.”

The broadcast version was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.

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Gene Hackman’s House Goes Up for Sale Less Than a Year After Deaths

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Gene Hackman’s House Goes Up for Sale Less Than a Year After Deaths

Gene Hackman And Wife
Death House Hits Market For $6.25M

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Tig Notaro talks growing up in Mississippi, parenthood and her friendship with poet Andrea Gibson : Wild Card with Rachel Martin

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Tig Notaro talks growing up in Mississippi, parenthood and her friendship with poet Andrea Gibson : Wild Card with Rachel Martin

A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: Tig Notaro has built a career dissecting her own life. In her stand up, podcasts, even a TV show – Tig has brought her audience into some of the most personal parts of her own living: growing up as a gay kid in the South, falling in love with her wife, and her struggle through breast cancer.

But in her latest creative project, Tig turned the spotlight on a close friend of hers – the poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea died from cancer last year. Tig produced a documentary about Andrea’s incredible life – it’s called “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

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