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The Communiqué News

Mumbai [India], December 5: After representing India at Cannes 2022, actor Deepika Padukone has once again made all Indians beam with pride.


Swati Bhat

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As per a source, Deepika will be flying to Qatar to be part of the most-watched sporting event in the world FIFA and will be unveiling the FIFA World Cup trophy at the jam-packed stadium.

The FIFA World Cup final will be played on 18 December 2022 at the Lusail Iconic Stadium. Meanwhile, on the film front, Deepika will be seen sharing screen space with Shah Rukh Khan and John Abrahm in 'Pathaan', which is scheduled to release on January 25, 2023. Helmed by Siddharth Anand, the action-packed 'Pathaan' was shot in eight countries.

Talking about the same, Siddharth said, "Locations always play a huge role in my films and they became even more important for Pathaan as we intended to deliver an action spectacle for audiences that they have never seen before. To achieve that scale and variation in visuals we went to 8 countries to shoot the film and its lavish action sequences!" "We were clear that every scene of Pathaan needs to be breath-taking and we meticulously went about planning to achieve this. I remember the pre-production of Pathaan took close to two years because we wanted to be absolutely sure that we are going to try and raise the bar of action spectacles in India," he added.

Apart from 'Pathaan', Deepika will also be seen with Amitabh Bachchan and Prabhas in 'Project K'. She also has a special cameo in her husband Ranveer Singh's film 'Cirkus'.



Tweety Pie, one of Looney Tunes most beloved characters, is celebrating its 80th anniversary with several fashion and beauty collaborations, including with MCM, Loungefly and Ugly Dukling Beauty.


Swati Bhat

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MCM


Tweety Pie, one of Looney Tunes most beloved characters, is celebrating its 80th anniversary with several fashion and beauty collaborations, including with MCM, Loungefly and Ugly Dukling Beauty.

Each of the collaborations, organised by Warner Media Global Brands and Experiences, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, pays homage to the adorable yellow canary to showcase Tweety’s “endearing personality” ahead of the animated character’s birthday on November 21.

Pam Lifford, president of Warner Media Global Brands and Experiences, said in a statement: “For eighty years, Tweety has marched to the beat of his own drum, inherently representing what it means to be unapologetically yourself. His endearing personality has made him a pop culture favourite and he’s known for making appearances in the most unexpected ways.

“As a key member of the Looney Tunes franchise, we definitely wanted to celebrate Tweety’s 80th in a big way and are excited for the year-long celebration ahead. Keep your eyes out for him to pop up anywhere, from fashion to collectibles and more.”

One of the highlighted collaborations is with luxury leather label MCM, which has launched a 30-piece capsule collection featuring Tweety on totes, crossbody bags, and backpacks, as well as jacquard mohair sweaters, organic cotton hoodies, T-shirts and a bucket hat.

The Looney Tunes x MCM collection is available online, in MCM stores and global pop-ups. The brand has also decorated its stores with Tweety imagery and added augmented reality effects to offer an immersive experience with sharable social moments for fans.

Fan-focused accessory company Loungefly is also celebrating the yellow canary with two all-new, Tweety-inspired products, including a plush backpack with Tweety’s big, blue eyes and wings, as well as a wallet, crafted from vegan leather, featuring the bird with Sylvester.


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Loungefly


While Ugly Dukling Beauty has created a limited-edition box collection of luxury 3D magnetic eyelashes allowing fans to recreate Tweety’s adorable yet mischievous eyes. The curated collection features four classic statement lashes, presented in a Tweety-themed keepsake packaging.

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Ugly Dukling Beauty


When Kid Cudi attended the CFDA Fashion Awards last year, he wore a lace wedding gown with a matching veil and a five o’clock shadow. When Lil Nas X went to the MTV Video Music Awards in 2019, he paired a silver suit with a ruffled lace shirt. And earlier this year, when Jared Leto promoted his Marvel film “Morbius” at a Los Angeles premiere, he wore a flowing cape made of white lace.

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The trend is not limited to red carpets. In recent years, lace has appeared on the men’s wear runways for Burberry, Moschino, Saint Laurent, Versace and other labels. Even mainstream stores including Walmart and Amazon now sell lace shirts and accessories for men. Once consigned to bridal wear and women’s lingerie, lace is being embraced by a new generation, particularly younger men, who are drawn to the fabric’s history and craftsmanship, and by more relaxed attitudes about gender-fluid clothing. “Maybe lace is the final frontier” in men’s wear fabrics, said Michele Majer, a textile historian, who with Emma Cormack and Ilona Kos, organized “Threads of Power,” an exhibition about lace that opened in September at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. The show, the first major one about lace in New York City in almost 40 years, charts five centuries of the gauzy material as it morphed from an aristocratic accessory flaunted by both sexes to an everyday consumable worn almost exclusively by women. Illustrated with pieces from the Textilmuseum in St. Gallen, Switzerland, “Threads of Power” documents how lace originated in 16th-century Europe in two primary styles: bobbin lace, which is made by twisting flax or silk threads around pins to create elaborate motifs; and needle lace, in which the airy, patterned fabric is built up with tiny stitches.

Both methods are excruciatingly slow, labor-intensive and expensive. Kingdoms passed sumptuary laws to keep lace off the riffraff. (They wore it anyway.) And while some highborn women picked up lacemaking as a hobby, it was mostly made by women or girls working for scraps in cottages or convents, beyond the protection of artisanal guilds. With the French Revolution came a repudiation of frippery. Men’s wear became fitted and monochromatic, and remains that way more than 200 years later, while lace returned to women’s fashion and became more democratic with the improvement of machine-made textiles. Lace by its very nature is paradoxical. It covers and reveals at the same time, managing to be both chaste (like wedding veils) and provocative (like underwear). This peekaboo quality amps up the eroticism, and yet lace is also the stuff of grandmotherly hankies and doilies. This is why lace became “kind of taboo for men,” Ms. Majer said. So what accounts for its newfound unisex popularity? Claire Wilcox, the senior curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, sees lace as the latest effort by some men to reclaim their inner peacocks. In mid-18th century Britain, wealthy dandies known as Macaronis returned from Grand Tour sojourns in Italy wearing flamboyant outfits that were the sartorial equivalent of the silky, flowing pasta they dug into. In the late 19th-century, Oscar Wilde personified an aesthetic rebellion against the stovepipe rigidity of Victorian men’s wear. In the 1970s, glam rockers wore colorful, flouncy clothing to defy postwar propriety. “I think this literal loosening of the fabrics was associated with the loosening of the morals,” Ms. Wilcox said. Lace also fits into a broader shift toward gender-fluid fashion, with younger consumers blurring the lines between what was traditionally considered male and female. “Everything is softer, more fluid, more decorative,” Ms. Wilcox said. In “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear,” an exhibition at the V&A, which Ms. Wilcox organized with Rosalind McKever and runs through Nov. 6, there is a pink satin men’s ensemble with a lace jabot, or neck frill, designed by Harris Reed, who was recently named the creative director at Nina Ricci. The garment evokes 18th-century British aristocracy by way of the New York Dolls. “It’s a new form of dandyism and lace very delightfully has got a part to play in this,” Ms. Wilcox said.

Whereas past generations might have worn lace for shock value, young men today are simply indulging in free expression, said Mathew Gnagy, a textile maker and historian who heads the costume center at Colonial Williamsburg, the living-history museum in Virginia. Mr. Gnagy points to the ease with which Harry Styles turned up at the 2019 Met Gala in a sheer black blouse by Gucci that was frilled with lace. “It’s not about masculine or feminine,” Mr. Gnagy said. “Anybody with any presenting gender can wear that outfit. That’s the essence of what unisex ought to be.” Mr. Gnagy was less complimentary about the clothes he sees on runways that simply translate conventional men’s wear into machine lace. “When lace is handmade, it has unique properties that allow seams to be eliminated, making garments look like they organically grew into a particular shape,” he said. “I would love to see designers going a little bit further.” One of those designers may be Kasuni Rathnasuriya, who has been working with lacemakers in her native Sri Lanka to produce women’s clothing for her label, Kúr, since 2012. At the urging of some clients, she offered men’s wear for the first time this year, including $250 cotton shirts with panels of handmade bobbin lace. “I was surprised by the fact that people accepted it,” she said. “I didn’t receive a single negative comment about it.” Other designers are drawn to the stories that lace can tell, whether it’s the pattern that has evolved across centuries and continents, or the history of its makers and owners. For Emily Bode, 33, the designer behind the handcrafted men’s wear label Bode, lace evokes 1950s America, “when people had more frequent formal dining in their houses” and other social rituals, she said. “It is a material that has so much depth to it.” Since founding her label six years ago with an emphasis on upcycling, Ms. Bode said she has noticed more “sentimentality” around dressing that extends to emotional fabrics like lace. “I don’t think it’s completely mainstream yet, but I think people are really thoughtful about what they buy.”

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Tristan Detwiler, the founder of Stan, a Los Angeles surfer-inspired label, wearing a jacket, shirt and shorts made from antique lace.


Antique lace also speaks to Tristan Detwiler, 25, the Southern California founder of Stan, a surf-inspired label that also uses vintage fabrics. His first formative encounter with lace involved a table runner that belonged to a friend’s grandmother, and he’s been incorporating it into his men’s wear ever since. An 18th-century lace tablecloth from England, for example, was crafted into a $5,000 shawl-collared blazer, with the original scalloped hem used as edging and the inverted cherubs falling in perfect symmetry at the shoulders. The fabric is a little yellow, but details like that, according to his website, “are reminders of its history.” “Even the grungy skaters and surfers want style,” he said. While most lace today is made by machine, the art of making lace by hand has not been entirely lost.

Six years ago, three lace artisans in New York City founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild to teach traditional lacemaking to a new generation. Elena Kanagy-Loux, 36, a textile artist and historian who has 400,000 followers on TikTok, traveled to Slovenia in the 2010s to learn the craft. Devon Thein, another founder, learned 50 years ago from a Danish sea captain’s wife in New Jersey.

Both women said the pandemic was a boon to lacemaking, not just because crafting was huge, but because lacemaking, it turned out, could be taught on Zoom. The guild holds demonstrations with bobbins, needles and shuttles at the Bard exhibition on weekends through December.

The guild’s motto, Ms. Kanagy-Loux noted, is, “Lace is for everyone.”


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