Facing the music: Philippe Jaroussky

How do you mostly listen to music?

I listen to music when I’m travelling, which means my iPhone becomes one of my travel companions, and also on my computer with headphones. YouTube is also a fantastic way to discover music and to listen to repertoire I don’t know.

What was the last piece of music you bought?

Theodora by Handel played by les Arts Florissants and William Christie I am singing this oratorio for the first time next October and need to work a lot in advance on my English pronunciation.

What’s your musical guilty pleasure?

If you found yourself with six months free to learn a new instrument, what would you choose?

The cello, for sure. When I started studying music I was a violinist; I would love to learn a bass instrument. That would be very useful too, because I would love to conduct in the future.

Is applauding between movements acceptable?

It depends on the situation. During a symphony I prefer not, but for example after a movement of a concerto, if people are particularly happy, why not? More and more I try to make programs with links between the pieces to avoid too much applause. A meaningful silence can be so magical. Having said that, it is the audience who always decides!

Philippe Jaroussky in Il Sant’Alessio, the 1632 “dramma musicale” by Stefano Landi, directed by Benjamin Lazar at Caen theatre, 2007. Photograph: MYCHELE DANIAU/AFP/Getty Images

What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert?

I think the format works well, that’s probably why it hasn’t changed very much this last century! Just one frustrates me - sometimes, in order to have the chance to attend certain performances or subscription series you need to buy tickets six months, even one year, in advance. Maybe we should keep back some tickets for sale only a month ahead so as to give people who are not so used to going to classical concerts and booking very early the chance to go.

What’s been your most memorable live music experience as an audience member?

The first time I heard a concert in the Berlin Philharmonie. It happened to be my favourite symphony by Shostakovich, the 10th, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. Of course I cried!

What was the first ever record or cd you bought?

I remember this perfectly. It was Paganini’s 24 Caprices played by Itzhak Perlman. I was 11 and a violin student. I always listen to this recording with emotion. He was my idol when I was young.

Do you enjoy musicals? Do you have a favourite?

Yes, but I’m touring all the time so I haven’t had the chance to see a musical for so long.

How many recordings of the Goldberg Variations do you own? Do you have a favourite?

I have Glenn Gould and Pierre Hantaïs Goldbergs. Difficult to have more opposite versions, but I like them both.

American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Photograph: PA/EMPICS

Which conductor of yester-year do you most wish you could have worked with?

I would have loved to work with Leonard Bernstein. What a talent! You can feel this by watching his videos, how inspiring he was for all. My dream would be to work with Nikolaus Harnoncourt too. Maybe in the future? For me he is the conductor who really changed the way we now play Bach, Mozart, Beethoven…

Which non-classical musician would you love to work with?

In the baroque spirit... Lady Gaga performs live at London’s 02 Arena on 23 October, 2014. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

Lady Gaga. I was very impressed by her last jazz album with Tony Bennett. She is totally in the baroque spirit. I have already worn costumes as crazy as hers in some baroque opera productions!

Imagine you’re a festival director here in London with unlimited resources. What would you programme - or commission - for your opening event?

I would produce a “Handel night” ( a four to five hour show) with different baroque groups, choirs and of course singers. Because he is just the best!

What do you sing in the shower?

Mostly phrases of arias I will be singing in public the next days… it’s a good way to win some time!

Philippe Jaroussky’s new album Green explores settings of poems by Paul Verlaine is out now on Erato. He performs at the Konzerthaus, Vienna on 11 March and tours Germany and Switzerland until 17 April. Details: warnerclassics.com/philippe-jaroussky/tourdates

Move over Sienna Miller: Thea Porter is the mother of bohemian fashion

If you think that boho fashion is all about Sienna Miller in a kaftan in 2005, you need to make your way to London’s Fashion & Textile Museum this month for its new exhibition on Thea Porter. Though she’s no longer a household name, Porter basically owned the boho look from the late 60s onwards, and this retrospective is a long-overdue celebration of her impact on fashion then and now. Here are five things to know about her.

1. Growing up in the Middle East had a lasting influence on her designs

Porter was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Damascus and studied in Beirut. Eventually settling in London in the mid-60s, the influences of her upbringing made her designs feel new. She brought the flowing robes and rich textures that she’d seen as a child to a London crowd who had been dressing in the Op Art and modernist styles of the early 60s. Moroccan djellaba robes, Iraqi Samawa carpets and 17th-century Persian paintings were all inspirations. A shirtdress made from the Damascus tablecloth fabric, aghabani, became a bestseller

Thea Porter maxi coat made from Sheila Hudson’s Persian print. Photograph: Courtesy of the Venetia Porter collection/© V&A Photographic Studio

2. She started out with interiors, and menswear followed

Her first shop, on Soho’s Greek Street, is being reconstructed for the exhibition and sounds like quite the hangout. It opened in 1966, and sold Porter’s ornate, colourful furnishings, including wall hangings and curtains. The Beatles snapped them up to decorate their short-lived Apple Boutique. Rock royalty liked her menswear designs, too. Elton John was an early fan and Pink Floyd wore her embroidered jackets and vibrant shirts on the cover of their appropriately trippy debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967.

Floral cotton voile dress, 1969. Photograph: Courtesy of the Venetia Porter collection/V&A Photographic Studio

3. She also excelled at womenswear

Porter fitted into the floaty, feminine mood of the time that other designers – Bill Gibb, Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley – were also exploring, but made it her own with several signatures. Along with the aghabani shirtdress, her so-called “gipsy” dress – layers of vibrantly printed chiffon, with a tight bodice and flowing sleeves – had the requisite wild romanticism, especially when worn with swashbuckling boots. For those who fancy trying to recreate the look now, East, the high street store sponsoring the Fashion & Textile Museum show, has produced a capsule collection in homage.

Thea Porter in her workroom at the back of the Greek Street shop. Photograph: Patrick Hunt

4. She had a good business brain on her chiffon-clad shoulders

By 1969, Porter had expanded overseas, with a concession in New York department store Henri Bendel. A stand-alone store followed in 1971, and Porter sold her designs successfully in LA, too. Her success partly came from an ability to evolve her aesthetic. The very ornate designs gave way to simpler pieces in the 1970s, influenced by the classical lines of 30s fashion. At this time, she also hired a young Katharine Hamnett who worked for Porter while still studying at Central Saint Martins.

Elsa Peretti modelling a harlequin print silk dress at the opening of the New York shop, July 1971. Photograph: Courtesy of the Venetia Porter/© V&A photographic studio 

5. Her clothes were loved by a well-heeled crowd

A regular in the pages of British Vogue – where luminaries including Lauren Hutton, Penelope Tree and Rudolf Nureyev modelled her clothes – the likes of Barbra Streisand and Faye Dunaway were clients in the Greek Street store and Elsa Peretti modelled in her shows. While Porter’s name faded into obscurity in the 1980s and 90s, it’s since become a cult favourite on the vintage scene, with original pieces fetching more than £1,000 on eBay. Kate Moss, Nicole Richie and the Olsen twins – all very fond of the modern-boho look – are latterday fans. One look around this exhibition, and we bet you will be too.

Justin Bieber for Calvin Klein – but who would buy his pants?

Last night, Calvin Klein underwear unveiled its latest star – singer Justin Bieber. Given his teenage girl fanbase and the brand’s iconic coolness, is this a mistake?

Justin Bieber in Calvin Klein’s 2015 campaign. Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/Calvin Klein
After several days of drip-fed teasers, last night saw the unveiling of Calvin Klein’s newest underwear model: singer Justin Bieber.
The black and white campaign, shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, features the topless 20-year-old in various poses, staring with his familiar “who me?” look of bemusement alongside Calvin Klein model Lara Stone. Tanned, heavily-tattooed and clearly no stranger to planking, Bieber’s casting makes aesthetic sense. There’s just one issue: if the aim of the campaign is to boost sales, who is it aimed at?
We know that Bieber’s audience is primarily pre-teen and teenage girls. This suggests that the adverts are aimed either at girls with both a disposable income and a desire to turn their boyfriends into Biebers, or boys who either want to look like Bieber (unlikely) and/or please their girlfriends. This might seem sad or misguided: historically, Calvin Klein’s underwear models scream cool, whereas last year, Forbes declared Bieber one of the most overexposed celebrities in the world. But as with Kim Kardashian and her ilk, we know there’s no link between saturation point and selling power.

Bieber’s immeasurable popularity, born on YouTube and nurtured at an impressive rate by social media, has seen him become more of a brand than a singer. Short of selling tampons, Bieber has successfully endorsed everything, from bags and dolls to shower curtains and acne cream, earning an estimated $58m last year. In 2012, his Girlfriend fragrance was the best-selling celebrity licensed perfume. He is a cash cow first, artist second.
With Lara Stone. With Lara Stone. Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/Calvin Klein
The main issues with his casting is not his target market; rather it’s how the rest of the world sees him. In the past, Calvin Klein have cast their underwear models from one of two pools: relative obscurity or celebrities with edge. To wit, former models Antonio Sabàto Jr, Australian Travis Fimmel (who reportedly became the first male model to earn six figures for a single campaign) and Jamie Dornan pre-The Fall, alongside rapper Marky Mark (Mark Wahlberg, who appeared with Kate Moss), actor Djimon Hounsou and footballer Freddie Ljungberg, the latter appearing in one of the brand’s most successful campaigns to date.
Extremely famous and deeply uncool, Bieber is in neither camp. His recent dance with controversy, which saw him charged with assault and dangerous driving, might neatly echo the narrative of proto-Bieber, Mark Wahlberg, who had several drug and assault offences to his name by the time he appeared in his Calvin Klein boxers in 1992, but that’s where the similarity ends. Furthermore, it’s unlikely the brand would actively choose to be seen promoting or courting controversy.
In his defence, Bieber is a longtime fan of the low-rise jean, wearing logoed Calvin Kleins with shameless visibility for several years, for once suggesting this is case of product following placement. It’s just whether you’d buy underwear from a man who sings: “Stay in my backpack for ever, stay in my backpack for ever/ You know I gotta find my spaceship, my planet’s outside there waiting”, six pack or not.

Scout Willis Considers Miley and Rihanna 'Performance Artists'

Photo: Getty Images
The tabloids are right! Celebs really are just like us—at least when it comes to stalking their kids online. “My dad [Bruce Willis] doesn’t have any social media presence, and my mom [Demi Moore] doesn’t any more, either,” Scout Willis said this weekend at Art Basel. “But they’ve figured out how to follow me anyway. They know what I’m doing,” she confirms, referring to her topless #FreeTheNipple photos on Twitter. “Believe me,” she said with a laugh, “they know!”
Okay. But what do they think? “They’re totally behind me,” she said. “They support me 100% in whatever I do, which is such a gift. But I’d be lying if I said they didn’t question my methods sometimes.”
23-year-old Willis was visiting the week long art festival to help Glenn O’Brien host his famous TV Party, a annual ritual that began a decade before she was even born. “When he asked me to come, I didn’t really know what ‘TV Party’ meant,” she admitted, “so I started researching it. And the more I discovered, how Debbie Harry and The Ramones were part of it, but so were modern artists and random people off the street, the more I loved it. It was an honor to be part of something so historical and also so punk rock—but still something so rooted in art.”
Willis also considers megacelebrity to be a kind of art, especially when it defies social norms. “I grew up in the [Hollywood] culture, and it’s always been weird. But lately, celebrity has gotten pushed to a place of such absurdity because of the way we can consume images 24/7. So the cool thing is that now it’s become a kind of performance art, where certain celebrities—especially young women—are taking ownership of the invasiveness that comes with fame, and they’re turning it on its head. Rihanna’s a good example. She’s like, 'I’m gonna do whatever I want,' and that’s cool. People like her, and like Miley Cyrus, they’ve been told they have to play into this role of being a ‘glamorous’ young woman, and they get shit on with this madonna-whore complex. And if they refuse to play the game—be a perfect, prim, good girl and have your shit together and wear what your stylist tells you—then you’re labeled crazy, like Miley.”
“So this reaction against looking perfect, wearing perfect runway looks on the red carpet—there’s obviously a hunger to push against that ideal in a public, visual way. And so Miley and Rihanna have become performance artists, they’ve become surrealist artists, they’ve taken ownership of their own image back. In a much smaller way, I guess, that’s what happened with me and #FreeTheNipple. I made my Instagram public because I wanted to have a little ownership of my public image. Other people had been writing about me and my family for my whole life. And the stories out there—they didn’t sound like me. That moment on social media was the first time I ever made myself public about something I believed in. And I’m really impressed by celebrities like Rihanna and Miley because they’re doing that on a much bigger scale.”
Someone else who impresses Willis: Kim Kardashian. “I admire her a lot,” Willis said earnestly. “Not necessarily from an art perspective, but definitely as a businesswoman. I really do. To parlay being friends with Paris Hilton into making every single member of her family individually famous for basically nothing—you can’t knock that hustle even if you want to.”

Director Jennifer Kent on Her Sundance Horror Hit 'The Babadook'

Photo: Courtesy of Company

Heading home from any big film festival, you can't help gnawing your manicure, knowing that you must have missed something amazing. At Sundance this year, for me it was The Babadook, pegged as a horror film and repeatedly shown at midnight. When I caught up with it later, I just had to talk to its Australian writer-director, Jennifer Kent, if only on the phone from Sydney.
I love this line from your director's statement: "Despite its horror, The Babadook is a love story, a mother moving through the center of hell towards her child."

I wanted this film to be scary and have an emotional quality, but also be quite beautiful.

Is the mother in this story based on an actual woman?

I had a friend who was finding it very hard to love her son. She just couldn't connect with him, didn't like him. I felt he was killing her in a lot of ways emotionally, and it was really having an effect on him. He was seeing what he was calling a monster man everywhere, and the mother found that the only way to deal with it was to see it as real. And then I had this thought—Well, what if it was real?

How are audiences responding to this theme?

I thought maybe I'd be criticized for showing a mother in this light, but I've encountered the opposite reaction. Women have been relieved and grateful to see a complex female character up there who's struggling with motherhood and many other things.

Essie Davis is amazing as the mother, and Daniel Henshall, the boy, is extraordinary. So much is conveyed in his eyes, and you don't expect that from a child.

Davis is a highly skilled, extremely talented actress, but she's not yet someone you'd call a star. And Henshall is a very deep soul. On the set, his mother once asked him why he was so focused here but not at school, and he said, "Well, this is important."

Your movie is singular, in that most horror movies offer up a kind of cookie-cutter menu of brutality and terror.

Horror is a very underrated genre, and it's seen by a lot of people as trash, but when you look at films like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake, or the original one, there's a lot of beauty. I think horror gets a bad rap. Its origin lies in fairy tale—these dark, dark stories that were myths, really, and that's why they still survive. They have the power to reach us all.

This article appears in the November 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.

Angelina Jolie Sunglasses Fashion Trends

Angelina Jolie is an American actress and director. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011.

For most people, sunglasses protect the eyes from the sun, but Angelina Jolie sunglasses are an accessory, taking an already glorious face and simply adding an exclamation point. Like many celebrities, Angelina tends to wear the grand, face covering sunglasses more to cover than to simply set her eyes from that urge hour glare, but she also is known to buy a pair of shades that can be smart, classy, and revealing. Whether it's on the site or hanging out with her family, she always seems to catch the perfect get for the moment.

Another pair you may collect in the Angelina Jolie sunglasses wardrobe is the Camila by Tom Ford. The plastic frame with a steel bar on top takes that aviator watch Angelina seems to like and converts it into something else. While it does camouflage her eyes more than the Strummer, the frame screams classy, while not throwing a party out to distract you. In a simple, no-nonsense inspect, the Camila takes a different come at the "spacious perceive" sunglasses to veil without making you see like an extra in a bee movie. The last thing anyone wants is to lose their identity with a pair of sunglasses.

Angelina Jolie loves to mix up her sunglasses, but she keeps the same inspect at the same time. Sometimes though she takes a different come, like when she wears her Josephine 2 sunglasses from Christian Dior. It's a more conservative gawk than the aviator glasses, and the D logo is not intrusive. Angelina's strong cheekbones aren't overshadowed, but the glasses stand out, creating the perfect blend and a classic leer. She can wear sunglasses with style, without losing her possess air of class. Check out our website for more about Angelina Jolie sunglasses preferences as well as those of other famed people.