Posts in category: Life Style

“Taking space, however that looks for you, lets you reflect on and accept the end of your romantic relationship,” Sharoni explains. “That way, you can approach a potential friendship with a clear mind and avoid dragging unresolved feelings into your new dynamic.” Of course, you’ll have to follow your gut on this one, but a telltale way to know when you’re ready, per Sharoni, is when you view the breakup in a more neutral way. Speaking of…

3. Do you still feel hurt, resentment or nostalgia about the breakup?

“The way your past relationship ended can also be a significant factor in whether you can stay friends,” Sharoni says—regardless of how much time has passed. It’s more likely to work, for instance, if the breakup was mutual or driven by external situations (perhaps both of you wanted to focus on your careers and couldn’t commit to a serious relationship).

Suppose one of you cheated, though, or was otherwise blindsided and bitter about never getting closure. In these cases, Sharoni says it’s hard to genuinely be friends when potential emotional baggage (in the form of anger, hurt, bitterness, or heartbreak) is still weighing you down.

4. Is this decision mutual?

Maybe only one of you genuinely wants to remain pals—while the other is agreeing to avoid awkwardness. It doesn’t matter who’s in which situation, Dr. Shaw says: A friendship can’t thrive when there isn’t mutual interest and effort.

“You have to ask yourself not just, ‘What feelings do I have?’ but also, ‘What feelings might they have?’” Dr. Shaw says. Having a straightforward conversation (“I just want to make sure we’re both on the same page about keeping things strictly platonic”) can save you both from mixed signals and unrealistic expectations. “Because even if you’re fine being cordial and have zero attraction left, your former partner may not be in the same place,” she adds.

5. Do we have enough in common to be friends?

While dating, lots of things can make your bond feel special—emotional vulnerability, electrifying chemistry, even great sex. But when those affectionate elements are gone, there may not be much holding this friendship together.

“If you’re struggling to find conversation—or only revolving it around your past, then this dynamic may not be friendship material,” Dr. Shaw says—in which case, going your separate ways could be a better move. But if you have lots of shared interests and hobbies (a mutual love for playing tennis or an appreciation for A24 films), then there’s a foundation for meaningful companionship.

6. Do I have other friends, or will they be my only support?

Even if they used to be your go-to person for everything, your ex can’t keep playing that role. Otherwise, it becomes much easier to blur the lines between friendship and something more, Sharoni says—which is why it’s important to rely on more than one person for validation, emotional security and advice.

It’s hard to pinpoint why I find women screaming at each other on TV so relaxing. I wonder whether it’s just a dopamine thing—it’s pure entertainment, which in itself is de-stressing. It’s also just low-stakes TV—you don’t need to be keeping up with the plot points at all times, this isn’t Succession—so you can sort of dip in and out of their fights like you might an episode of EastEnders, except with botox-ed 50-something hotel owners rather than pub landlords wearing leopard print. It’s also familiar—they go to a party, they fight, you pick a side—making it more like watching a sitcom or WWE than the sort of real, cortisol-spiking argument you might encounter elsewhere.

I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way about women screaming at each other on-screen. TikTok users post about it all the time. “Nothing like unwinding to the soothing sounds of women arguing on TV,” posted one user. “Relaxing morning routine as a Bravo fan,” posted another, while serenely eating cereal to the sound of unhinged screams. “My relaxing skincare routine as a Bravo fan” said another, dabbing cleanser on her face while Angie K delivers the aforementioned zinger. Clearly, the Bravo effect is widespread. Women and gay men especially—and it is exclusively women and gay men who post about this—are unwinding en masse to these spectacular, glass-shattering rows.

When I reached out to other reality TV fans, I was surprised by the sheer number of people who said that watching women go HAM was more than relaxing—it was cathartic. “There’s something about being a woman and being angry that’s quite hush hush,” said Phoebe, 21. “Yet these women, no matter the issue, scream and yell.” Sophie, 26, agreed: “Women are mostly socialised to be polite and deferential, so it’s satisfying seeing them express unlimited emotion.” “It’s refreshing to see women respond in a way that is emotion-driven and actually being praised and more successful because of it,” added Annabelle, 29.

If your mind immediately went to the Von Trapps after hearing the word ‘Edelweiss,’ you’re not alone. But before you break into the tune from The Sound Of Music, the cinematic fame isn’t all that the wildflower is known for. Today, its uses extend to skin care, where its extract is known for soothing redness, calming irritation, and deeply hydrating the skin. Its rich anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties are what make it so effective in calming redness and irritation. Additionally, edelweiss extract is also an excellent hydrator that helps maintain and nourish the skin’s protective barrier, leaving it soft and supple. It’s an underrated ingredient for dry and sensitive skin. Here’s why it deserves more recognition.

What is edelweiss extract?

“Edelweiss extract is derived from the edelweiss flower, a resilient plant that grows in high altitudes of the Swiss Alps,” says Dr Chytra V Anand, founder of Kosmoderma Clinics and SkinQ. “The extract of the flower is what’s rich in antioxidants—flavonoids and tannins, and is harvested through environmentally sustainable methods to preserve its active properties.” Grown in the rugged alpine regions, the flower has evolved to withstand harsh environmental conditions. According to Dr Trupti Agarwal, consultant dermatologist at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital, its extract is obtained through a gentle process, where the leaves and flowers are harvested and processed to preserve their potent compounds. “These compounds—flavonoids, phenolic acids, terpenoids—work together to provide skin robust protection from environmental stressors, making edelweiss a staple in many skincare products.”

Benefits of edelweiss extract

Hydration: A humectant in nature, edelweiss extract draws moisture from the environment and locks it into the layers of your skin. It is an excellent moisturiser for dry skin and can even help balance and control sebum levels for oily skin.

Anti-ageing: Thanks to its antioxidant properties, this skincare ingredient helps protect the skin from free radical damage and aids in reducing the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines.

Soothing: The anti-inflammatory properties present in edelweiss extract aid in reducing any sort of redness or inflammation, which also makes it a perfect fit for sensitive and irritated skin.

Anti-bacterial: Did you know that other than skincare, edelweiss extract can also be found in oral hygiene products? Its antibacterial properties help protect your skin and mouth from harmful bacteria, keeping any sort of infections at bay.

For world-leading gemstone producer Gemfields, an association with Los Angeles-based goldsmith and jewellery designer Rachel Quinn resets imaginations in more ways than one. It’s not the usual deployment of Zambian emeralds or Mozambican rubies to craft an expected set of tennis bracelets, studs, or an array of dainty rings. The collection, Crazy Love, forays into tackling and expressing the most intangible abstractions of a universal emotion— love, in its most raw, authentic, and bittersweet forms.

The ‘Lover’s Eye Brooch’ and the ‘Radiant Heart Pinky Ring’ from the Rachel Quinn + Gemfields Crazy Love collection

A “temporary insanity”, is how Quinn describes the collection. Her pieces often vacillate between the dainty and the chunky, apt for making a statement while passing as modern heirlooms laced with stories—an externality seamlessly designed to express the internal. For this venture, Quinn explored a certain liminality found within love, tapping into its nerve-wracking qualities, sans roses and rainbows. “I knew I wanted a narrative, an overarching concept of sorts as a pillar to bring to life love’s multi-faceted journey. My focus was never a limited definition of the emotion.”

Quinn’s reimagined romanticism is refreshing in a world that forces to be as concise or transactional in our strivings. However, her precision as a designer peaks through the assortment of playfully poignant offerings, each distinct in its design and sentiment. Some of Quinn’s favourites include the ‘Kiss perfume bottle’, a small vial suitable to carry your lover’s scent, as well as the ‘Lover’s eye brooch’—a memory-inducing totem—one of the first things that Quinn sketched while ideating for this collaboration.

Similarly, the large onyx heart stands as an emblem of a broken heart. “I wanted to evoke the feeling of trepidation, doubt, yearning, and being lovesick. The onyx heart was my playful take on a heart that’s shattered, especially with the little spots. And yet, that brokenness holds a lot of space for healing and growth, as on some days you’re on cloud nine while on others you’re constantly yearning. So love isn’t this one succinct emotion. It’s always in motion and ever-evolving,” Quinn tells Vogue India.

How did you define your approach to “Louvre Couture”?

It was very precise. The Louvre doesn’t have fashion collections and never will, those collections belong to other institutions like the MAD (Museum of Decorative Arts) next door and the Galliera. But we do have 32,000 art objects, among them 300 works left to the Louvre by Madame Carven, pieces that belonged to Jacques Doucet and a beautiful diamond box that belonged to Yves Saint Laurent.

When you look at that, and the birth of haute couture, and how collecting allowed all these designers to consolidate their social status, there are deep cultural, societal, sociological reasons for us to do this. So our question was: how did designers look at the works in the Louvre, draw inspiration from them, reinterpret them? When you take a step back, fashion is everywhere you look—in Antiquity, in Babylon, in Athens, in Venetian painting and French sculpture, absolutely everywhere.

From left to right: Wool crepe suit with handmade brass bust, from the “Inferno” haute couture collection by Schiaparelli, spring 2023. “Cathedral” dress in copper-plated 3D-printed polyamide (Selective Laser Sintering), Iris van Herpen, spring 2012. Minidress in stretch silk knit with mesh overlay in horn and lambskin, Hermes spring 2021. Blue cotton top with copper wings by Jonathan Anderson for Loewe, fall 2023.

Photo: Musée du Louvre / Nicolas Bousser

Could you highlight a few examples for those who aren’t in Paris right now?

The idea was really to follow the chronological order of the collections by blocks, from Byzantine to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Empire, the Second Empire, etc. That way, we could show that, in his final couture collection, Karl Lagerfeld was inspired by an 18th-century blue and white lacquered commode. Sometimes, the interpretations are freer, as with Versace, but you can see that designers are interested in moments in the history of objects. More broadly, it’s interesting to observe how the decorative arts influence them personally: we all know the photos of the interior decor in Lagerfeld’s, Dior’s and Saint Laurent’s homes; with young talents like Blazy or Pieter Mulier, design and photography is always very present.

With the men’s collections in full swing and Couture right around the corner, the Louvre Museum today will unveil Louvre Couture, the first major exhibition to place masterworks of modern fashion—and their inspiration—within the broader context of French history and decorative arts.

Keeping company with tapestries, armour, jewels, enamel, goldsmithing, bronzes, cabinetry, porcelains and other ornamentations that embody the glory of French craftsmanship are looks by 45 houses and designers, among them Balenciaga by both Cristobal and Demna, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior by John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry, Nicolas Ghesquière for Louis Vuitton, and pieces from final collections—by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and by Gianni Versace—as well as leading indies like Marine Serre, Erdem, Undercover, Thom Browne and Iris van Herpen.

In all, about 100 pieces of couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories dating from 1949 to the present day are sprinkled throughout the Decorative Objects department on the first floor of the Richelieu wing. “Louvre Couture” will be fêted in grand style on March 4 with the first annual Grand Diner du Louvre, an event sponsored by Visa Infinite. At press time, organisers announced that 30 tables had already been auctioned off, meeting the fundraising goal of 1 million euros.

Star fashion curator Olivier Gabet, the new director of the decorative arts department, spoke with Vogue about the making of the exhibition and what the world’s most famous museum brings to fashion—and vice versa.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

From the Louis Vuitton spring 2018 collection by Nicolas Ghesquière, a sporty, urban riff on 18th century French style, one of several pieces by the designer included in this show.

Photo: Musée du Louvre / Nicolas Bousser

Though we now live on different continents, we persist with our annual ritual whenever we are back home. Each time, I undertake the task of claiming ownership and growing into her clothes. Unknowingly, this has revealed itself to be a practice of slow, sustainable fashion. And the fundamental consequence of this act of borrowing has been the development of my sense of personal style.

Along with the clothes, I have received an appreciation for what I now consider to be the art of putting an outfit together. It has helped me understand how to combine colours, textures, fabrics, and shapes and make them interact with each other. I am no expert at this endeavour, but I do try. It is upon this foundation that I have been continuously learning and experimenting. And it has also enabled me to unlearn certain notions of gender roles and normative binaries that we are boxed into: Yes, I am in fact wearing women’s trousers, and what about it?

The author wears a bag, wide-legged trousers and a navy cardigan. All of them once belonged to his sister.

On this journey of self-fashioning, I have been intentional about being sustainable in whatever ways I can. This newfound interest leads me back to my sister’s wardrobe, thrift stores, and labels that offer more than just a product. Clothes no longer represent something I can hastily put on and head out, but an ensemble of people and experiences that have created them, and lived in them. While they give me a way to express and assert myself, they also root me in a larger community.

The 2020s have been all about the alternative. When a pandemic hit at the end of the decade, it didn’t just deracinate the world order, it also rearranged it. The world as we knew it—and its structures—changed. And relationships were no exception.

An OECD study found that marriage rates declined by an average of 20% across 32 OECD countries in 2020. For dating singles in India, a 2023 Bumble survey found that about 60% of single Indians view ethical non-monogamy (including open relationships and polygamy) as the way of the future. At the heart of the shift away from traditional relationship structures has been female agency—financial, emotional and sexual. And with their powers combined emerges the Captain Planet of relationship trends for 2025: solo polyamory.

A solo polyamorist, by the simplest definition, is someone who has multiple intimate relationships with people, but with an independent lifestyle. They essentially do not live with partners, share finances or have a desire to reach the traditional relationship milestones that make their lives more enmeshed with their partners’. It can be a permanent or temporary lifestyle choice, but when you’re in (regardless of how many partners you have), you are, at your core, ‘independent’.

It took some degree of trial and error for Poorna T, 37 and divorced, to find her way to solo polyamory. She married her high school sweetheart when she was 23, and after nine years of growing discomfort in monogamy, she realised she wanted out. “I like having my own life and I always felt it had to be one or the other—be single or be in a ‘serious’ relationship,” she says. Poorna didn’t even realise she was a solo polyamorist until a friend in an open marriage pointed it out. “She said it so casually one day over brunch, back in 2021, when I mentioned feeling guilty about dating two people. Monogamy was so deeply programmed in me that I hadn’t even considered the idea that multiple relationships could work in a healthy way.” Four years later, with two partners in her city and one long distance, Poorna has managed to carve out emotional fulfilment as well as her own space.

Amira G, 26, is new at this. Both polyamory and solo polyamory are fairly nascent concepts in her life but she finds herself taking to them. “My friends have always called me a serial monogamist because, until last year, I hadn’t been single since I was 15.” But after her last relationship ended (“on good terms”, she hastily adds, lest we think of this as a recoil reaction), she decided to explore other structures. “I currently have just one primary partner and I’m casually dating. But wherever this relationship or any new ones that form go, I like the independence of this structure.” Her life is busy with work, friends, boxing training thrice a week and her cat Bingus. “I tend to lose myself in my relationships. This has helped that not happen.”

In a somewhat unprecedented move, Justin Baldoni’s team has upped the ante in his ongoing disagreement with Blake Lively over what happened on the set of It Ends With Us, what transpired leading up to the release of the film, and what, if any, public relations manipulation occurred after it hit theatres: They’re launching a website.

On the same day that Baldoni’s team released raw video footage from the set, his lawyer, Bryan Freedman, and associates told People, “Justin Baldoni and team…have the right to defend themselves with the truth…This is what we will be continuing to show with the upcoming website containing all correspondence as well as relevant videos that quash her claims.”

Instances of sexual harassment, retaliation and other forms of subtle or overt abuse of power are often difficult to prove. However, in this case, both sides have claimed to have concrete evidence to back up their accusations and defences, so it will be interesting to see what, exactly, Baldoni believes will “quash” Lively’s allegations.

As of this writing, Team Lively has not responded to the leaked footage or the threat of a website; our last public statement from her side is in reaction to Baldoni’s lawsuit against Lively and Reynolds, to which her lawyer responded, “[They] are trying to shift the narrative to Ms. Lively by falsely claiming that she seized creative control and alienated the cast from Mr. Baldoni…while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail.”

That statement also promised, “The evidence will show that the cast and others had their own negative experiences with Mr. Baldoni and Wayfarer. The evidence will also show that Sony asked Ms. Lively to oversee Sony’s cut of the film.” So, more evidence is supposedly forthcoming.

Now the question is, Will it end with this? Yeah, probably not.

This article first appeared on Glamour.com

For Khanna, this collaboration was at once about the spirit of Mumbai and Starbucks’ growing omnipresence as it was about a creative process that resonated with her emotionally.

“The most interesting thing about working on a collaboration like this is that it challenges you to the core. I get to step out of my comfort zone—beyond the conventional fashion space, venturing into something completely different. For me, everything is an emotional journey and if I can’t resonate with something, whatever the rewards might be, I just won’t do it.” Rightly so, Khanna’s far-from-minimal flair perfectly channels an infectious energy, a sliver of impeccable design transformed into slice-of-life collectables, meant to be worn, withered and generously valued. Owe it to Khanna’s preferred almond milk cappuccino or Starbucks’ mercurial local presence, this association of seemingly far-off worlds only feels natural.

Ahead of the launch of Anamika Khanna + Starbucks, Vogue India speaks to the designer about the joyous process behind capturing Mumbai’s spirit.

Vogue India: What were some of the initial ideas that birthed life into this collaboration?

Anamika Khanna: The whole idea was based around Starbucks’ 100th store milestone in Mumbai. It is a connection over shared belief to tell stories, create memories and connect in ways that eventually reach the heart. It was not just about collaboration or creating a product. It was more of a conversation that deeply delved into our strengths and what we stand for to arrive at an idea that aptly celebrated Bombay, its hyperlocal energy, and its layered localities to provide everyone with a piece of the city.

Ritik Mehta