This yr I’ve seen the solar rise in 4 completely different nations. Nicely, nearly. In three of them I watched the darkness inch its method in the direction of mild: daybreak in Berlin in January was gray and melancholy; London a month later was predictably overcast; at dwelling in New York, although town has loved vivid blue morning skies this winter, the skyscrapers make it exhausting to see a dawn.
However this month in Sharjah, I had a soul-expanding view each morning. I might get up, take my hotel-room espresso out on to the balcony and watch because the sky appeared to sew seams of orange, pink and yellow bands of sunshine, earlier than a radiant yellow disc made its method up from the horizon. I watched, mesmerised, till it was glowing-hot white and blinding within the sky.
I’ve lengthy been fascinated by the facility of this distant star, the best way it performs with the environment, casting shadows, streaming mild, illuminating corners and dancing in our midst. Folks previously had a extra pronounced relationship with the solar, an attunement to its day by day rhythms, which industrialisation and expertise have more and more curbed. However we’re nonetheless depending on this celestial surprise, even when we aren’t pressured to recognise that truth day by day. I’m wondering how our lives could be affected if we have been a bit extra attentive to the star whose day by day rising reminds us that, by no effort of our personal, we’ve been blessed to see one other day.
I might gaze all day at Edvard Munch’s “The Solar” (1910-11), a large portray that hangs within the Aula corridor on the College of Oslo. A white radiating orb sits on the centre of the work, holding court docket like a deity. Its mild emanates out on to the water, mountains and greenery in concentric golden circles and pink, blue and white beams of energy. Munch’s solar feels alive, pulsating past the boundaries of the canvas and into our very lives.
Munch’s work appears to honour each the scientific realities of the solar, which holds the entire colors of the spectrum in its blaze, and its expansive, soulful symbolism. It triggers a deep consciousness in me concerning the primacy of galaxies and creation, a reminder of how the residing planet existed earlier than any of our furthest ancestors walked the Earth. Void of human figures, this canvas reminds us that the Earth was completely effective even with out us current. We’re its friends.
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But, as the continuing local weather disaster evidences, our delusive tendency is to dwell on Earth as if we made it, personal it, and may create extra of the sources we abuse and deplete. The phrase that involves thoughts the longer I interact with Munch’s solar is reverence: that blend of homage, appreciation and love due a factor or a being. The solar reminds us of our human limitations. And after we are reminded of our limitations, I feel we’re extra open to a renewed sense of curiosity and surprise, in addition to a recognition of our must collaborate with others. Reverence is simply one other doorway to an illuminated and lively creativeness, the place all our actions and behaviours, good or dangerous, start.
The bronze sculpture “Anyanwu” was created in 1954-55 by Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu. A towering, lithe girl is wearing conventional apparel, with a headdress and jewelry from Benin. She arches her physique forwards, her arms stretched gracefully out. The sculpture symbolises a imaginative and prescient of a brand new nation rising in the direction of independence. It is usually an imaginative illustration of Ani, the Igbo goddess of the Earth, as she rises to salute the solar, which to the Igbo is a spirit deity referred to as Anyanwu. In Igbo the phrase interprets to “eye of the sunshine”.
The solar as a life supply has impressed peoples throughout historical past and cultures, from the traditional Egyptians to the Greeks, Aztecs and past. Apart from the class of type and sheer aesthetic great thing about Enwonwu’s sculpture, I’m drawn to it as a result of it’s like an icon, a picture suggesting a religious worldview that has the potential to form our behaviour, our beliefs and our mental concerns.
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The sculpture’s posture can be superbly symbolic, prompting me to ask, to what can we first flip our personal our bodies initially of every new day? The place can we first direct our consideration every morning? In the direction of worries, fears, gratitude, reward? As a result of I feel that no matter we bend in the direction of is what influences us, and shapes the selections we’ll go on to make.
“The gradual lifetime of daylight” is made out of handblown panes of colored, layered glass, set diagonally right into a shelf created from driftwood from Iceland. The overlapping panes create a blended spectrum of orange, yellow and inexperienced, and have massive circle and ellipsis cut-outs and gold reflective discs. The arcing sample provides the phantasm of gradual motion and the passing of time. To me, it invitations meditative reflection.
Eliasson’s work makes me consider our grand phantasm that the solar is pirouetting its method throughout the sky, when all of the whereas it’s the Earth that’s spinning on its axis, taking us from dawn to dawn. We really feel nothing, however we’re always in movement.
We might mark time by the solar however, just like the phantasm of the solar’s motion throughout the sky, our time demarcations are illusory as nicely. They’re constructed to present us a way of order, to assist us with the discomfort of chaos and uncertainty. What I really like about Eliasson’s sculpture is that, even when we dwell throughout the perceived security of constructing order by marking time, ultimately it’s what we do within the current that issues. And there’s a radiant magnificence and life-force power to that realisation.
Our lives are a sequence of now moments. What we do with them determines the kind of mild we ourselves would possibly shine on to the world.
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Observe Enuma on Twitter @EnumaOkoro or e mail her at enuma.okoro@ft.com
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Benny Gantz has threatened to leave Israel’s emergency government if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not commit to a new plan for the war with Hamas in Gaza and its aftermath.
In a televised statement on Saturday evening, Gantz, an opposition figure and former general who joined Netanyahu’s coalition in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, said that his centrist National Unity party would leave the government if his demands were not met by June 8.
Gantz’s ultimatum brings to a head months of tensions within Netanyahu’s government over the handling of the war, and comes just days after defence minister Yoav Gallant slammed Netanyahu for the lack of a postwar plan for Gaza, the enclave Hamas has ruled since 2007.
A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.
At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.
According to police, the mother contacted a construction crew and requested that they call 911. They added that she had minor injuries and it remains unclear how she managed to escape.
In a press conference on Friday, Surprise police spokesperson Rick Hernandez said: “She believed the baby was in danger … Officers responded to the residence and, upon arrival, they heard multiple rounds of gunfire coming from inside the residence.”
Hernandez continued: “That was when the officers forced entry. Upon forced entry, our understanding is that officers almost immediately located the injured child, took that injured child and got the child to care.”
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“That baby sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was airlifted to a nearby hospital with serious injuries,” he said, adding that the child’s injuries, which were in its lower extremities, were believed to be non-life-threatening.
While police, including multiple Swat teams, were at the scene, the house caught fire as the child’s father was still inside.
Describing the scene to Arizona’s Family, the news outlet’s drone operator, Hector Holguin, said: “Next thing you know, there was smoke. And after the smoke, there’s a huge ball of fire coming from the back of the house and it just spread from the back all the way to the front … It just progressed. It collapsed the roof.”
As the house burned, a number of nearby residents self-evacuated when they were contacted by police while others chose to shelter in place, said Hernandez, adding: “As the incident progressed, many were asked to leave.”
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Firefighters were able to control the flames by using two ladder trucks to hose down the house as well as the house next door, and were largely able to put out the fire by 4:30pm, Arizona’s Family reports.
It remains unclear how the fire started or what condition the father is in. According to police, an investigation remains under way and the father is not in custody.
“Once the [tactical units] get the clearance to go into that residence, we might have an update on him,” Hernandez said.
It was the image that launched a social media sensation: football superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi hunched over a chess game set atop Louis Vuitton’s signature luggage.
That 2022 campaign image broke the record at the time for most likes on Instagram. Now the world’s biggest luxury house, with more than €20bn in annual sales, is looking to capitalise once again on one of the sporting world’s biggest duos in a new campaign featuring rival tennis virtuosos Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
The pairing is a coup for Vuitton chief executive Pietro Beccari. It has been just over a year since he took on one of the luxury sector’s biggest jobs with a mandate to further grow the LVMH-owned brand — which had its origins as a 19th-century luggage-maker — by transforming it into a cultural juggernaut.
“There is no household in the world that doesn’t have [contact with] Louis Vuitton products,” Beccari tells the FT in a video interview from Paris. “There are not a lot of brands that can say they enter the lives of people like we do.”
We are already active in lifestyle and believe we need to be about much more than just buying bags’
Beccari is not just talking about sales of handbags and ready-to-wear fashion — though those more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, according to estimates from HSBC. Now, under the guidance of LVMH chief executive Bernard Arnault and Beccari’s leadership, Louis Vuitton is further pushing back luxury’s boundaries in a bid to reach an ever-wider audience.
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“We are in books, in writing, in editing. We are in music,” the 56-year-old Italian executive says. “We are very much in sports . . . so we are very much covering a spectrum of life that interests people. It is like a magnet for them to become attracted to the brand.”
For Beccari, however, weaving a deepening web of overlaps between popular culture, entertainment and brand identity is strategic and key to the megabrand’s future: “For every show Pharrell has done so far, we have always had new songs coming out” — the latest of which was produced for Miley Cyrus and played for the first time at Louis Vuitton’s latest autumn/winter 2024 menswear show.
Within the same season, “Pharrell also launched the cowboy hat and now you’re seeing that in the US just about everywhere. Even Beyoncé has an album supporting cowboy culture [for which Pharrell has also written a few songs]”, says Beccari. “These are examples of our brand in luxury, not just in selling bags, but having an influence on culture.”
However, the increasing ubiquity of Louis Vuitton presents its own challenge as the brand attempts to balance accessibility against losing the veneer of exclusivity that is essential to commanding the prestige and price points of luxury. “We’ll see if I’m good at it or not in two to three years . . . but this is an eternal dilemma,” says Beccari.
Louis Vuitton’s control of its distribution network and policy of never discounting its products are another advantage, according to Beccari. He also points to its care system, which allows customers to bring back products purchased from the brand to be repaired.
“We need to preserve our desirability despite our visibility and that’s the biggest challenge that we have,” Beccari says. “We are making sure that the levers we put in place will pay off in the long term, and I believe that this campaign [with Nadal and Federer] will help increase the desirability of the brand in the long run.”
Still, taking Louis Vuitton to the next level is being made more challenging due to a sector-wide slowdown in luxury sales following a multi-year boom during the pandemic. Brands with a broader, more aspirational client base such as Louis Vuitton have been hit harder by the slowdown than competitors like Hermès, which cater to the top tier of wealthy clients.
The darkening outlook in the key Chinese market, which fuelled growth for much of the past decade, also presents a challenge to the sector as a whole. “Beccari comes at a pretty difficult time because the industry is going through quite a bit of a slowdown, and notably the rebound in Chinese consumption is not at the level most industry managers would have hoped for a few months ago,” says Erwan Rambourg, global head of consumer and retail research at HSBC.
We sell excellence, quality, success and optimism. In a way, the notion of travel and adventure in life is a mirror of that’
Beccari, however, has a naturally competitive nature, having previously been a professional footballer in Italy’s second division in his early life, as well as a coach. Born in a small town in Italy’s Parma region, Beccari was recruited to LVMH from mass market shampoo-maker Henkel in 2006.
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He quickly rose through the ranks at the luxury group, first leading fashion brand Fendi before being appointed CEO of Dior, the group’s second-biggest brand by sales, in 2018. Under his leadership, Dior’s sales quadrupled, according to HSBC estimates, by expanding its market share across women’s and men’s fashion, leather goods, jewellery and homewares. He also oversaw the renovation of Dior’s flagship at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, which includes a museum, restaurant and private suite.
Beccari has similar ambitions to leverage Louis Vuitton’s pedigree to expand its offering in hospitality. It already operates an airport lounge in Doha and restaurants in Osaka, Chengdu and Seoul. A large-scale project on Paris’s Champs Elysées, still currently under construction, is widely expected to include a Louis Vuitton-branded hotel.
With Federer and Nadal, Beccari is making good on a project he first conceived back in 2007, when he was executive vice-president of marketing and communications at Louis Vuitton, with Antoine Arnault, Bernard Arnault’s eldest son and then-director of communications at Louis Vuitton.
It is a revival of the Core Values campaign that first began in 2007 and ran into the 2010s. The latest iteration shows Federer and Nadal, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, trekking through the jagged peaks of Italy’s Dolomites mountain range, both sporting branded backpacks (Federer in a classic monogram Christopher style and Nadal in a monogram Eclipse version).
Was it difficult getting the two superstars together? “Not at all,” insists Beccari. “They are good friends and see each other privately. It was a rivalry that became a friendship. They are proud of it and I think they set an incredible example.”
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“We sell excellence, quality, success and optimism. In a way, the notion of travel and adventure in life is a mirror of that,” Beccari continues, and the driving force behind LVMH’s sponsorship of this summer’s Paris Olympics.
For the executive, Nadal and Federer epitomise the Olympic spirit. “I think nobody more than them represents this extreme, ferocious competition that becomes friendship, which is exactly what sports should be.”
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