Bluestocking Oxford

By Julia Ledesma Led through a side door and down a flight of stairs in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, I emptied into the Grand Rex’s Grande Salle: a dimly lit, wine-dark sea of velvet chairs. A VIP ticket meant favourable seats and champagne; the bar of Alain Ducasse chocolate was already in my purse. Christopher Nolan […]

By Raluca David Sometimes a small woman can be a real presence. So was Professor Anne Campbell. Whenever this inconspicuous woman with a short white bob entered the amphitheatre of the Psychology Department at the University of Durham, where she taught me in the early 2010s, the room became silent. Her figure was a metaphor […]

By Dolla Merrillees We all have one tucked away in an album: a photobooth portrait taken in our teens, perhaps with friends, perhaps alone. Smiling, pulling faces or striking a pose, these small strips of photographs capture fleeting moments of youth and self-discovery. Among the hundreds of images in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Marilyn Monroe: […]

By Ava Doherty The modern age required a new feminine archetype—a woman chic yet relatable, touched by capitalism in crisis. She was decidedly post-2008 in both outlook and fashion. Gone was the ostentatious clothing, and in came the cable knit, the block colours, the French minimalism, because the economy had contracted, and so had her […]