We had other plans for this week’s newsletter, but the more time we spent looking back through Dolly Parton’s life, remembering old things and discovering other bits for the first time, the more it felt right to honour her in Capsule.

I’m heading to Italy tomorrow and am excited to pass you over to in my absence <3. I’m trying to be good about having a break so that I actually come back with some thoughts and a revived brain. :)

Have a great weekend!

Holly

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Of course the biggest news of the week is that we lost Dolly. Before we get into the main piece, we rounded up her best quotes

• Those coloured gems will probably be with us for all of two weeks

• Some good, sane quotes from this week: Dua Lipa on leaving behind perfectionism, and Harry Styles on ditching the obsession with productivity

• An emerging trend: the unconventional support act. Learn more here!

• One welcome byproduct of AI: exciting and creative magazine covers. Nothing beats original art!!!

• They should do this for adults too

• Country Taylor will rise again

• Justin Bieber wired headphones are coming

• And by the time you read this, we’ll be at Reading to watch Charli xcx’s only UK show this year. Follow along on Instagram!

Subscribe now

Dolly Parton spent a lifetime proving that kindness and ambition can go hand in hand. This week, we put our planned newsletter aside to spend some time in her life instead – rereading old interviews, discovering new ones, and remembering exactly why she meant so much to so many people.

Her life was so, so rich, and it’s impossible to capture it all. But here are a few key things we feel deeply inspired by, and want to document in hopes of remembering them in our own lives as we move forward.

On living by your values

We talk a lot about what it means to live by your values, and we are inspired by artists who prioritise this in their careers. Whether that’s Phoebe Bridgers committing to a phone-free, community-focused music experience, Lorde baring her soul to talk about thorny issues like sex, gender, and PMDD, or Olivia Rodrigo ditching regular album press to build a festival to support women and girls, we look up to creatives who use their platform for good.

This is vital, especially in a world where it’s more common to put morals to one side in favour of the bottom line. And before we had Phoebe or Olivia, there was Dolly Parton, paving the way for all that came next.

Here are just a few examples of Dolly living by her values:

• After watching her father struggle because he couldn’t read, Dolly set up her Imagination Library, a book gifting programme that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school in participating areas. The library has gifted more than 332 million books since it was set up 31 years ago, and never means-tested kids to take part – everyone was included. For the final book delivery before school, Dolly sent a note. So many children were touched by her and remember it forever.

• Dolly received royalties from Whitney Houston’s version of ‘I Will Always Love You’ because she wrote it and kept the copyright. In 2021, she revealed that she used some of the money to invest in an office complex in a Black neighbourhood in Nashville. In her words:

• In 2020, Dolly donated $1 million to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt. She directly funded the early trials that became the Moderna vaccine, and is credited by name in the New England Journal of Medicine report.

• In 2024, Dolly personally donated $1 million to relief efforts for Hurricane Helene, and announced that her businesses would match the donation.

• And that’s only a fraction of her work. There are dozens more examples through the Dollywood Foundation.

On mothering and intergenerational love

Dolly never had children of her own. She spoke openly about trying to have kids within her marriage, and it not happening for her, yet she spent her life advocating for young people.

We talk about the many ways to mother beyond having biological children, and Dolly was truly the blueprint. Of course there are the books and the scholarships, but also just her general advocacy for the next generation. In this interview, Hayley Williams could not believe Dolly knew the title and story of her fairly under-the-radar solo album, Flowers for Vases, and Dolly also publicly supported stars like Sabrina Carpenter and Kacey Musgraves. But no relationship captures this better than the one with Miley.

Dolly and Miley’s bond is one of the strongest examples of intergenerational love that we have. Many of us were properly introduced to Dolly through Hannah Montana. On the show, Aunt Dolly offered words of wisdom that made teenage dramas feel like rites of passage that would actually help us become the sort of women we hoped to be.

And in real life, Miley shared countless examples of Dolly’s advice and influence on her life. To list a few:

• Miley would call Dolly in the middle of the night to ask for advice. This kind of deep intimacy stops you in your tracks… Think about the love and safety that has to be there for this sort of thing to happen!

• Dolly encouraged Miley to show up as her best self for the Grammys, advocating for a big, confident performance and glamorous look.

• Dolly and Miley’s deep respect for each other is felt so clearly in their performances of each other’s songs. Here’s Dolly performing ‘Best of Both Worlds’ in 2011, and Miley’s 2012 cover of ‘Jolene’ remains one of the best covers of all time.

• And we have Dolly to thank for the Hannah Montana 20th-anniversary special.

On having fun

If you read the long list of Dolly’s philanthropy in isolation, you might expect her to be a specific sort of woman: slightly serious, politician-like. But the opposite is true. She was consistently one of those older women in the public eye who made getting older look like fun, a privilege, and full of mischief.

There was no Dolly without fun. The big hair, the big boobs, the bedazzled everything. The flesh-toned, sparkly gloves to hide her ageing hands. Building Dollywood, a literal theme park with roller coasters and steam trains and butterfly-shaped pretzels. She even left behind a time capsule at Dollywood: a locked box holding a secret song that won’t see the light of day until her 100th birthday in 2046.

Dolly’s sparkle was felt in everything she does, even the more serious things. I love this clip of her talking about doing business. It is the antithesis of the work and productivity content we are fed today – instead of talking about the pressure to succeed and painting work as this difficult burden, she approaches it with a sense of playfulness and authenticity. Dolly made work feel like a human endeavour, not some weird corporate thing that happens in a silo. After watching it this week, I genuinely felt lighter and more sane. How often does that happen?

It is impossible to choose a single Dolly quote to live by, so I’ll leave you with three. Paste these on your desk or save them in a phone note for when you need them. During the work weeks that feel heavy or the nights you can’t sleep because life feels too hard, the simplicity of these words might help you see a way through, or at least realise that we have most of what we need already inside us. I certainly think they hold that power.

Rest peacefully, lovely Dolly.

Leave a comment

This week, Hatchie popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Hatchie is an Australian dream pop singer-songwriter and musician. She has released three studio albums - Keepsake, Giving the World Away, and Liquorice.

📺 Watching: I Want Your Sex in the cinema, this live performance of ‘Liberty Tree’ by Phoebe Bridgers at the Spotify planetarium event, and this vlog on one of my favourite topics: indecision.

📖 Reading: Two style pieces: ’s birthday outfit guide (the season begins!), and this funny take from on the fast fashion outfit combo sported by men across all of Europe.

🎧 Listening to: It Goes On by Westside Cowboy, GOTTA GET OUT, the new album from The Linda Lindas, and ‘serena joy’, the new Olivia Rodrigo song.

We made it to Friday :)

This is the best thing I saw on the internet this week and wanted to share with you:

For today’s Open Tabs essay, I’m delighted to bring you a piece from on how learning more about clothes opened the portal to a better relationship with her body. If you spent your twenties trying to make uncomfortable things work in a changing room, this is for you.

Have a lovely weekend,

Holly

P.S. if this newsletter gets cut off, click to read it in your browser.

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• I was lucky enough to go to the phone-free Phoebe Bridgers show at Union Chapel this week. I drew the stage here, and talked about it here!

• Two Capsule universe birthdays: Phoebe Bridgers (32) and Clairo (28)

• Each summer Paloma Wool styles her niece in her new collection and the photos are gorgeous

• The Matty Healy x Gabbriette wedding photos keep getting better

• The M&S x Aries collection is here

• Lily Allen gave some good soundbites on quitting alcohol and the pressure of success for Perfect magazine

• You can’t really blame Callum Turner for this

• Per Google Trends, searches for “curly bob” have grown by 650% over the past month (cc Zendaya and Julia Garner). Bed Head creative director Philip Downing is calling it the “curly cloud bob”, and part of a wider move away from polished perfection and towards hair that feels more natural, individual and lived-in

• A first look at Florence Pugh in East of Eden

• Speaking of, I found this compelling from Netflix: if you read 15 pages of East of Eden everyday starting now, you’ll be done by October

• Troye Sivan loves Nicole Kidman like we do

• And we’re excited for the new additions to London Fashion Week this year!

Subscribe now

When I was younger, I wanted my clothes to make me look as skinny as possible.

Clothes are often deeply intimate, revealing your hidden dreams, your most shameful insecurities, lying as close to your skin as a lover. How we want to be seen, how we want to feel: getting dressed is like making a wish, and clothes help us form our identities long before they’ve solidified. Growing up, I watched my mother’s huge collection of beautiful dresses flutter in my periphery while she got ready for a dinner-party or cocktails with her friends, a promise of what my life would look like one day.

One dress in particular always stood out to me: a bias-cut slip in turquoise Vietnamese silk, embroidered with pink and white flowers at the hem, and bought by my mother in the late 2000s on Portobello Road. The first time I tried it on, I was sixteen and horrified: it brought out the unfamiliar contours of my hips, my stomach, my ass, my thighs. It insisted upon this brand-new body which had burst, horror-movie-like, from the thin, little-girlish frame that would never again belong to me.

Back then, my friends and I shopped almost exclusively at Urban Outfitters, spending hours and hours in the unflattering light of the wooden changing rooms, trying on piles of clothes we had seen on the internet. We’d stand in front of the mirror, sucking in our stomachs, and then emerge to show each other with a single, never-voiced question quivering behind our teeth. Does this make me look thin? “Trying on clothes is like a trial for your body,” says my friend Sophie, a fellow veteran of the Urban days. “It’s disembodied, because it’s about the visual, not the experience.”

Growing up with social media, we were all about screen-deep understandings of clothes. It took me years to understand why polyester satin moved so differently from the Blumarine dresses that Brittany Murphy wears in Uptown Girls, or why a fast-fashion t-shirt didn’t make me look as free and breezy as Jane Birkin. All the way into my twenties, I tussled with a wardrobe of clothes which, if I posed right and made my friends take a million photographs, looked nice enough on Instagram, but felt unnatural and distracting to actually exist in. The strap of the dress which was forever requiring adjustment; the waistline of the skirt which had to be unbuttoned if I wanted to actually eat something; the metallic-smelling satin of a mini dress which crackled with static when a lover pulled it over my head.

And even in those clothes, chosen in part for their ability to crush and subsume my flesh, I still didn’t like the way I looked. This shouldn’t have been a surprise: how can you hope to feel anything but hatred for the body you’re trying to make disappear?

It’s a high summer’s day in Hackney Wick, and a group of women are squeezing into a repurposed shipping container. One by one, they emerge from behind the curtains of the makeshift changing rooms, twirling in a rainbow of coloured silks from the ‘90s, sequinned tops from designers who don’t exist anymore, and floral skirts which look like they’ve been taken straight out of a Sex and the City episode. Stavi, the owner and curator of the shop, hands out tailoring suggestions, heartfelt compliments, and shiny fragments of fashion history. “It’s sand-blasted silk,” he explains to me, as I smooth a grey Calvin Klein maxi dress over my hips.

Silk is often described as feeling like water: fluid and cool and delicate against your skin. Like my mother’s turquoise dress, the Calvin is bias-cut, which means that, instead of straight up and down, it’s cut at a 45-degree angle to the grain. I wish I could have told my sixteen-year-old self that the point of well-made clothing is not to make you look as flat as the two-dimensional girls on your screen. “The first time I tried on a 100% silk bias-cut dress, I was shocked,” says my friend Alice, whose wardrobe now teems with pure silk. “I suddenly recognised the shape of my body. It made me feel like me, without that being a bad thing to be.”

“Fast fashion is designed mainly to sell online, so it just has to look good in the picture,” says Stavi. “If you’ve grown up in the era of Shein, and then you come across a silk-lined, hand-embellished, 90s dress, you’ll try it on and realise, ‘I’ve never looked this good’.”

A good-quality piece of clothing moves with you: it flows as you walk, it skims your body as if it’s been made with you in mind, even though, most likely, it was designed and crafted long before you were born.

But because we’re not used to understanding our bodies as fluid and alive, this can be a complicated experience. “When you look at yourself posing in the mirror, that’s just not how you act in real life, or how people see you, in these frozen, fixed images,” my friend Layla tells me. She bought a pair of Issey Miyake Pleats Please trousers five years ago, and at first, she didn’t understand how they were supposed to be worn.

The trousers are now her most complimented piece of clothing.

All those dresses I bought or dreamed about buying in my teens are rotting in a landfill somewhere. Most of them split or unravelled before I’d worn them for even an entire season. But my mother’s dress still finds its way to my body on hot summer nights, sugary cocktails in my veins and Donna Summer in my ears, whispering against my bare thighs, liquid and magical. I like to think about it clinging to both of our bodies through time and space, holding us through summers decades apart. Silk contracts and expands with you, contracts and expands with your life: she has worn it pregnant, I have worn it dancing.

I want my clothes to withstand being alive, rather than my life taking a backseat to my clothes. Anaïs Nin once wrote that “an impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.” It’s this embodied attitude which has made me feel more connected and more in love with my body than the body positivity movement ever did. “If I feel free in my body, I feel more safe, but also powerful, but also myself,” Anushka Shah, the founder of slow-fashion brand Casa Nushki, tells me. Good-quality materials and intelligent design are integral to this experience, she says: “There’s freedom, but there’s also a sturdiness, and a feeling of being held in my clothes.”

Stavi says he’s noticing people moving more and more away from fast fashion. Vinted has introduced a ‘materials’ filter, cool-girl brands like Cou Cou Intimates and Paloma Wool are making a point of not using polyester. The resale market is predicted to grow twice as fast as the overall apparel market, according to the ThredUp 2026 Resale Report. And while a lot of us don’t have the existing knowledge to work from, Stavi tells me, the feeling a good piece of clothing gives you is instinctive, instant. “When you see something well-made, it makes you feel something, right away. I get a lot of people having very emotional reactions to the rails, seeing these beautifully-made pieces,” he says.

Around us, his dresses shift and stir quietly in the mid-afternoon breeze, catching my gaze, making me want to touch them, try them on, go dancing in them, live entire lifetimes in them – and then pass them along to the next girl.

By

Leave a comment

This week, The Grove popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

The Grove are a 7-piece indie soul band from South London. Listen to them here.

📺 Watching: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the cinema, this sweet video of fans and Phoebe skating together at a listening party in LA, and for those interested… Camp Rock 3 just came out on Disney+.

📖 Reading: Courtesy of Brandon Sostuy of The Creative Independent, this 2024 essay on crying, written by Phoebe Bridgers. And another resurfaced gem: this The Art of Fiction interview between Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti.

🎧 Listening to: ‘Ugly things’, the new Lizzy McAlpine song, ‘Fur Elise’, the new Blondshell song, and ‘Fell Asleep in the Sun’, the new After song. And of course the Phoebe Bridgers Live Lounge performances.

For the past three months, since Phoebe Bridgers popped up for a tiny surprise show in Roswell, New Mexico, Capsule has followed the whole story. From tracking the phone-free shows to spotlighting the album’s collaborators and visual artists, we’ve covered it with the same rigour a broadcaster would bring to a major global event. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’ve become one of the top sources for Phoebe news on Instagram and TikTok.

I’m a huge Phoebe fan, but I didn’t expect to make this much content about one artist. Yet it quickly became our most popular beat ever - each piece lapped up, shared widely, and used as a resource for a story most outlets don’t cover.

I think that’s the beauty of running a publication where you’re also the audience. There’s no faraway editor calling the shots - it’s just me, sat with Circe, scrolling Reddit threads and X replies, reading fan mailers, like everyone else. We are fans. And this story matters to us all, so we do it with care.

Anyway! All of that work has led us here: Lost Weekend release day. Last night, Circe and I listened to the album together, on the floor of Rough Trade at 11pm. It was magical.

Thank you for being here for this era of Phoebe and of Capsule. We’re just getting started.

Have a great, lost weekend,

Holly

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• First things first: some gorgeous eclipse art

• The Lucy Dacus set at Outside Lands was life-affirming

• To celebrate Phoebe week, we looked at the visual artists in her universe, and tracked how she’d planned her album around the eclipse

• Addison Rae gave us a quote worth returning to

• Need to hang out with Nicole Kidman

• Role Model knows his cover of Olivia Rodrigo was not good

• Troye Sivan’s style evolution continues

• ADÉLA is the first Slovak artist in history to chart on the Hot 100

• Copenhagen Fashion Week is officially more about the street style than the runway shows

• It’s cool that there are no clashes at Olivia Rodrigo’s festival… but will anyone leave the main stage?

Subscribe now

After boygenius won multiple Grammys in 2024, the band announced an open-ended hiatus, and Phoebe said she’d be taking time away from the spotlight. It’s easy to see why she needed the break: in the four years since Punisher, her career exploded, her dad passed away, and interest in her personal life reached a fever pitch.

She’d gone from indie artist – signed to Dead Oceans, reaching audiences through Julien Baker and Conor Oberst – to a godlike figure for Zillennials who love poetic lyrics, folky guitars, and feeling things deeply. As plenty of people have said, she’s the songwriter of a generation. But that kind of praise has a cost: Phoebe has spoken openly about fans violating her personal boundaries, including being swarmed at the airport around the time of her dad’s funeral. Her breakup with Paul Mescal opened the floodgates to even more attention, and she responded by clearing her social media, posting nothing but the occasional MUNA song (the band is signed to her label), and quietly going to live her life.

Most of us will never really know what that’s like: every move watched, every sentence quoted, leaving the house assuming someone will try to follow you home. It’s the part of fame everyone agrees sounds terrible.

Now, after a stretch of normal life, and six years on from her last album, Lost Weekend is here. It’s Phoebe’s way of telling us how the past few years affected her, on her own terms, in songs rather than interviews or covert social media posts.

Circe and I heard the album together last night at a listening party at Rough Trade in London. With 50 other people, we sat cross-legged on the floor, under the blue glow of the Lost Weekend era. I sat facing a wall of records filed under ‘B’ - the Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan. It felt significant.

The music began, and we entered an unspoken but mutually agreed set of rules: be mostly silent, whisper if a big revelation comes, and feel it in your body - which for most of us meant closed eyes, or some unashamed head-nodding. For the next hour, we wrote our thoughts in a notebook, passing the pen back and forth to share musical observations and our first feelings.

Three themes weave through the record, though not always in that order: the isolation of fame, grief, and falling in love.

On opener ‘The Outside’, Phoebe describes the dissociation of playing shows with boygenius while feeling like a spectator in her own life:

The song picks up almost exactly where she left public life. She uses a vocoder - much like Imogen Heap, and more recently Lorde - to separate herself from everyone else. The arrangement places her on the outside, watching, but the slow, almost spoken-word delivery makes it feel more intimate, and real, than anything she has done before. It’s a promise, right at the top of the album, to fill in the gaps of her absence.

That isolation resurfaces throughout the record. On the peppy ‘Liberty Tree’, she sums up fame in one line: “I got too much money, and nothing to lose”. And on ‘The Governor’s Waltz’, Phoebe sings:

Stardom takes Phoebe out of her body - disconnected from the things that used to ground her, including one of the most powerful life forces there is: dreaming. On ‘Lost Weekend (Reprise)’, she sings:

In the middle of all this, her dad dies. Grief runs throughout Lost Weekend, unresolved, the kind that stops you mid-thought. The instrumental ‘Panorama’ feels like a turning point, marking the moment he passed, making way for ‘Still Standing’, the first big grief song: “I can’t imagine you dead / But you are every day.” It closes out with a reverb-filled choir, evoking a near-religious processing of childhood memories and loss.

‘Never Going Back!’ closes with a voice memo from him:

That line makes you gulp. Is any of this worth it? Why is life so painful? Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all? Of course it is, and Phoebe knows it too.

Lost Weekend isn’t an album about wallowing, though. It has some of Phoebe’s bounciest, most life-affirming songs to date. On ‘Bobby’, she asks, euphorically:

Uptempo, Alex G production and ‘ICU’-style vocals propel the song forward, unguarded. I write to Circe in the notepad: “happiest song she’s ever done?!”

Where grief robs you of the will to go on, romantic love hands some of it back. It makes the future worth imagining. On ‘As Above’, Phoebe is back in the driving seat:

She belts the words more powerfully than we’ve heard her before. It almost feels like she’s singing less from her brain and more like the life force has returned to her body: undeniable, insistent on fighting its way forward.

That sense of the record pulling you back into your body recurs in its instrumental passages too - the second half of the title track, for example, at first feels like a glitch. The music jolts Phoebe, and us as listeners, back into our bodies. None of this happens in a straight line, and that feels important. Six years is long enough to learn that feelings are temporary, yes, but also nonlinear. You can think you’ve moved past something only for it to resurface months later. It’s long enough, too, to unlearn the idea that life keeps progressing in tidy six-month chunks, one resolved feeling giving way to the next. Lost Weekend doesn’t pretend otherwise: it doubles back on itself, undercuts its own progress, catches you off guard. Buoyed by the banjo, on ‘Haunted’, she sings:

For an album built on heavy themes, it’s Phoebe’s most optimistic yet. The songs reach joyful crescendos that feel like catharsis and celebration at once - of making music with your friends, of coming through the hard stuff to do it. I don’t think that would have been possible without the time away. Boundaries, it turns out, are what make the rest of it possible.

Not everyone can afford a gap like this - between albums, or between anything. Musicians with less clout have to keep feeding the machine, and the rest of us have paychecks to chase. But there’s something worth learning from the Phoebe Bridgers model anyway. This album, and its unusually thoughtful rollout, isn’t the product of pressure. Following up a Grammy-winning record is stressful, sure - but actually living, processing, getting over things, realising you’re not over them, and getting over them again: that’s what creative work is built on.

Last night, hunched over a notebook on the floor of a record store, I felt that lesson land in real time. Despite looking forward to this album for so long, any sense of pressure or expectation melted away. We just sat with it, in the moment, not forcing a take or capturing a reaction for social media. I guess that’s what Phoebe needed too - to sit with her own life before she could write about it. Taking your time, it turns out, is good advice for making an album, and for listening to one, too.

Before we left for the listening party, my friend Matt shared some parting wisdom: “Try not to put too much pressure on it. She’s just one girl, remember.” It’s stuck with me more than I expected. After everything - the boundaries, the grief, the considered rollout - it might be exactly the perspective she needs from the rest of us going forward. Phoebe is just one girl, here to experience every part of a life, and share it when she’s ready.

Leave a comment

This week, Resa Saffa Park popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Resa is an Oslo-based singer-songwriter and composer creating a distinct blend of cinematic indie, jazz, and soul. A graduate of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), she crafts deeply personal, emotionally honest music that explores complex themes of identity and human connection - as showcased on her album Kendra.

📺 Watching: Audrey Hobert’s great Tiny Desk concert, ‘She’s the Best’, the new Troye Sivan video, and Kristen Stewart on In Your Dreams with Owen Thiele.

📖 Reading: ’s long-form account of going on the road with Charli xcx for Lollapalooza, and Ordinary Abundance, a scroll through a normal apartment, where every object comes with the historical reaction to first encountering it. A case for noticing how extraordinary our ordinary day already is!

🎧 Listening to: Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers, the new POWERSNATCH EP, which is on YouTube, and ‘Twiggy’, the great new Remi Wolf song.

For this week’s Open Tabs essay, I’m delighted to bring you a piece from . It’s about the lack of nudity in our culture and how that leads to a distorted perception of our bodies, which I think is something so many of us feel. How nice is it seeing a real range of bodies on a European beach…

Elsewhere, there’s the news you may have missed this week, Hot + Not, and things to read, watch, and listen to this weekend.

Enjoy your weekend,

Holly x

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Pleased to hear that Ariana Grande will take a break after this tour

• Gabbriette is doing like Dua Lipa and posting her own wedding pics on Instagram. Hers look like a movie

• And elsewhere in the Matty Healy universe: meet the woman who needed to skip The 1975 on her birthing playlist

• You can tell we’re one week away from the new Phoebe album… Here are the album guests, the lyrics we know so far, and all the talk of bed sheets

• Rihanna, we are ready 🥲

• Gracie Abrams is happily settled in London

• Look of the week: Olivia Rodrigo in Balenciaga SS06 by Nicolas Ghesquière

• Looks like Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper got married

• Nobody does a birthday party like Charli xcx

• And don’t sleep on her Lollapalooza set if you missed it!

• John Galliano is the subject of the next Met Gala exhibition, and Anna Wintour promises a warts-and-all look at his past

• And it seemed like Phoebe started a trend with the affordable, pop-up shows…

Subscribe now

I love being naked. On summer nights when my housemate is out, I’ll strip off my clothes, slice up a red onion and make a puttanesca — jazz ricocheting into our garlicky kitchen from the pub across the road. Partially I do this because I live in London, a city that is famously lacking in AC, leaving those who aren’t mega-wealthy schvitzing when temperatures rise. But I also love the feeling of tearing off my tank top, experiencing my body without synthetic borders, beyond the claustrophobic clutches of the world outside.

Of course, public nudity isn’t acceptable in this city (nor in most of the world) — and I should probably care more about the neighbours who can see me sploshing spaghetti from across the street. But it bugs me that I can only count a handful of times when it’s acceptable to be naked in the company of others: in a changing room or at a doctor’s surgery or during sex. What we’re left with is a distorted perception of our bodies: our physical selves reduced to vessels for optimisation or illness, dissected anatomically or through the gaze of erotic appeal. What about everything that lies in between?

You don’t need an anthropologist to tell you that our attitudes around nudity are socially relative. As far back as Ancient Rome, men and women would bathe together in communal baths, while athletes would train and compete completely naked in Ancient Greece. Tudor women wore bodices that revealed their nipples, while in India, the Naga Sadhus reject clothing (alongside other worldly goods). And yet somewhere along the way, we learned to be ashamed of our naked bodies. The Bible will tell you that we have Eve to blame for this (a naughty bite of the forbidden fruit brought eternal shame around being naked, so the story goes). But I have a sneaky feeling that capitalism has something to do with it too.

Over the past two decades, bare, bronzed bodies have been disappearing from Mediterranean coastlines. In 2014, the headline of French Elle read: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” (“Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”). One journalist theorised that the rise of Facebook - and the possibility of being posted naked online - had something to do with the decline. Seven years later, topless sunbathing hit a historic low among French women. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture) association cancelled its 75th anniversary celebrations in 2024 due to “lack of interest”. The group’s “senior nudist” blamed social media for promoting a “perfect body image”.

Across the pond, spaces where public nudity is permitted are shrinking too. In 2015, The New York Times reported that gym designers were making bathroom stalls increasingly private. Two years later, Athletic Business wrote that communal showers without curtains or dividers had pretty much stopped being constructed. As we’ve collectively become more addicted to our phones, watched more porn and spent less time with friends, communal nudity has dwindled.

Here’s why this matters: public nudity is good for us. Research has linked spending time naked with others to improved body image, self-worth and life satisfaction. One study found that the longer someone had been practising naturism for - and the more time they spent doing it - the happier they were. “There’s a growing body of literature showing naturism has physiological and psychological benefits,” academic and queer naturist Dr Helen Bowes-Catton told The Guardian. She continued:

For the past year and a half, I’ve been reporting on the UK’s booming sauna culture, observing how the Nordic sweat boxes have popped up in basements and boats and bars across the nation. While we’re a long way off from Finland, where close to 90 per cent of the population takes at least one sauna a week, basking together in bikinis is quickly becoming a part of British social infrastructure. But there is one clear difference in our respective sauna cultures: our bathing suits. In Nordic cultures, it’s normal to sauna nude.

A couple of winters ago, my sauna reporting took me to Finland and Germany, where I spent a lot of time basking nude with strangers. Sometimes being naked made me feel more connected to the people I was sitting next to — a warm and fuzzy feeling I’d usually associate with intoxication. It made me think about how barristers wear wigs to separate their identities inside and outside the courtroom. Stripping off our clothes in the sauna stripped us of social context. The toasty wooden box became its own solar system.

It’s hard to imagine Brits getting naked with one another, but I think it’s on the horizon. Because our relationship with nudity is crazy! As it stands, British teens are likely to watch porn before they lose their virginity. They’ll ingest shiny videos of shaved vaginas and six-packs and ginormous cocks before they’ve been intimate with anyone themselves. They’ll spend hours watching TikToks and Instagram Reels, comparing themselves to influencers and models, shifting their parameters for what a body should look like. Maybe this content would be less harmful if teenagers saw naked bodies - all sorts of bodies - beyond the screen. Bodies in non-sexual environments. Fat bodies and old bodies. Maybe the cosmetically tweaked and digitally altered and looksmaxxed bodies would feel less normal.

I think there’s an appetite for it. A recent YouGov survey revealed that nearly half of Brits think that being fully nude in saunas is acceptable. Meanwhile, interest in nudism is starting to grow again. In 2020, British Naturism reported its fastest growth since 1964. And the other day, Nikki Tesla, co-founder of Social Sauna Club in Peckham, told me that they’re considering introducing nude sauna sessions. “We’ve done polls of members and people are overwhelmingly for it,” she told me. I hope it happens. I’m ready to get naked!

By

Leave a comment

This week, Charlotte Plank popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Charlotte is a BRIT-nominated artist at the forefront of Gen Z dance music, known for seamlessly blending DnB, rave, and alternative pop. With chart-topping hits like ‘Dancing is Healing,’ performances at iconic stages like Glastonbury, and the release of her EP ClubLiminal, she continues to solidify her position as one of the scene’s most exciting stars.

📺 Watching: The Invite in the cinema, plus another really great Charli interview (sorry she just gives so much more than a lot of artists!), and this excellent performance of ‘SS26’ at BBC Maida Vale Studios.

📖 Reading: ‘All This Staring at Our Faces is Messing With Our Heads’, an essay by for the New York Times, and Merve Emre interviewing Orna from Couples Therapy (you can listen to it here if you prefer).

🎧 Listening to: Blue Island, the new Ravyn Lenae album, XXXXX by Arca, THERAPY AT THE CLUB by FLO, and Lucy Dacus’ cover of ‘Clay Pigeons’.

I come to you having had “one of those weeks,” feeling so ready for the weekend. If this is also you, I see you and I am you. 🫶

This week’s letter is a reflective moment on the summer so far — for long-time readers of Capsule, this is a lot like the sort of stuff I published in the early days. I’d love to hear from you in the comments <3

Have a great one!

Holly x

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• ICYMI: Hayley Williams brought her pandemic love songs to Newport

• Even Hailey Bieber had Matty Healy on her Tumblr in 2014

• This is Euro Summer via Lorde’s camera roll

• And here’s her awesome Lollapalooza set

• Nothing says “I’m back” like showing pubic hair on a magazine cover

• There is no shortage of Zendaya x Tom Holland sweetness

• More reasons to put the mascara down

• Everyone loves Audrey Hobert

• Lizzy McAlpine is sending paper notes to her fans

• Matty and Gabbriette are honeymooning

• Nara Smith is not a tradwife

• Charli xcx put the full version of Music, Fashion, Film on iTunes (including b-sides and unreleased songs)

• Jordan Stephens addressed his breakup with Jade

• And in Phoebe news: the track list is here, and the first review of Lost Weekend gave it five stars (and shared a few devastating details)

Subscribe now

In the final week of May, and I sat down, giddy with anticipation for the summer ahead. The days were getting longer and longer, the weather was picking up, and it felt like we’d realised just in time how good we had it. We need to bottle this feeling, we thought, and vowed to make the most of the weeks ahead.

That intention became our Capsule Summer Bucket List: 25 ideas for fun, reflective, and creative things to do over the sunnier months.

I made a personal note of the ones I liked for myself:

• Visit a vineyard closer to home

• Tackle a DIY/home project

• Take a dusk or dawn dip

This is the part where I tell you that I have not really done any of these things, and while the weeks have had some moments of feeling expansive, they mostly seemed to be over in a flash (where did July go?). Time moves faster in the summer because we wait so long for it to come around. The real thing can’t possibly live up to the expectation.

The pressure to make the most of summer can make it difficult to actually be present and have a good time. I have found myself already obsessing over the days getting shorter, even though they are still long. Did I really make it through winter just to spend this time worrying about its fleetingness? I do this all the time. It’s like taking a while to get into a book, then fearing its end; it’s also like arriving at your hotel for a trip and already panicking that it will be over soon.

I am still figuring out how to better deal with this. Plan less, go with the flow more? Set reminders to do things you realised you wanted to do on one reflective afternoon? Book things to make sure they happen? Stop thinking about it altogether?

One thing I do believe is that even the anxious among us do better than we give ourselves credit for. If I look at my summer so far, there are a bunch of adventurous and carefree things I have not yet done, but there’s also so much that has been nourishing: eating dinner most nights on our balcony or in the park with my partner, randomly getting into coconut water and drinking it daily, talking to my friends and family about complicated feelings and feeling more grounded at the end of it. These are not things you would add to a bucket list, but they are the ones that have made me feel most present and connected over the past few weeks.

I am forever keeping notes on my phone of “things I enjoy” or “learnings from [insert event]” to return to in future. Of course, I only open these in periodic times of low mood and stress; the other 90% of the time, they are forgotten. I hoped to add to my lists this summer, but they remain untouched — a sign that I am just living, without anything to prove or to measure. I am just figuring it out.

So how to approach August? It’s easy to treat August like a high-stakes countdown – the Sunday of summer where we frantically try to squeeze in everything we missed in June and July. But what if we resisted the urge to treat it like a deadline? I do see value in taking a pause to reflect on what you want from these final weeks of warmth. What makes sense to capture in this expanse? I still think the dusk or dawn dip from the bucket list is a great idea, for example, and one that won’t happen unless I make space for it. But our lists of intentions shouldn’t outweigh our real-time energy levels, or the unexpected directions we end up drifting toward.

There is a quote from Sheila Heti’s Motherhood which has stayed with me, and I think helps during these periods:

To me, this means genuine fulfilment is not necessarily waiting on the other side of neurotic planning, but is already within us, ready to emerge when the conditions are right. You can apply this to a lot of things, but it’s a great argument for realising that you could sit and make plans and weigh up Plan A versus Plan B, or you could just live, and let things bubble to the surface without forcing them. That might mean you don’t end up swimming as much as you’d hoped to, but you notice that spending time organising part of your home is doing a lot for you, or that reading more is calming your nervous system and making you feel more creative. Time is not slipping away. It is merely the container in which you can flourish.

Leave a comment

This week, Sam Fischer popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Sam is an Australian singer-songwriter, best known for his viral hit ‘This City’. He is currently working on his second album, and heading home to tour this fall.

📺 Watching: The Charli xcx Zane Lowe interview, Nina Montagne on the paradox of choice (something I think about a lot!), and Gracie Abrams performing at the Bowery.

📖 Reading: The viral anti-reality TV essay, and this Guardian essay by Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson on our current age of decadence without pleasure.

🎧 Listening to: petal, the new Ariana Grande album, ‘Going’, the new Beeson song, ‘brand new chanel$’, the new Slayyyter song, and ‘EVERYTHING I’VE EVER WANTED’ by Tiffany Day.

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

This week’s issue is about the increased interest in being a daughter in pop culture: from music to “eldest daughter syndrome” online, it feels like everyone is reckoning with their daughter identity. But some more meaningfully than others…

The newsletter also contains Capsule news from this week, a great Hot + Not with Ray Hopkinson, and recs for the weekend.

Have a great one!

Holly x

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• In Matty and Gabbriette news: the story of their engagement, and the gothic inspiration behind her bridal looks

• Jonathan Anderson’s next Dior show will be in Ireland

• Did you know these two stars have the same vocal coach?

• The Hailey Bieber Miu Miu campaign, shot by Zoe Ghertner, is great

• Olivia Rodrigo being cool and consistent: this week she platformed the Center for Reproductive Rights, and announced that her new festival merch is made by women-owned Etsy shops

• Lizzy McAlpine is back and in love

• Dua Lipa is still going to Electric Lady every day

• I did not realise this photo of Muna was an Ugg campaign

• A first look at Billie Eilish in The Bell Jar

• Charli popped up at one of the film screenings of her new album (which is great btw)

• Lots of us are sad about JADE and Jordan Stephens : (

• Zosia Mamet joined the cast of Industry

• And Hayley Williams returns to Newport Folk Festival today :)

Subscribe now

Over the past few years, there has been an increased interest in the concept of being a daughter. Ethel Cain released Preacher’s Daughter in 2022, a dark concept album about generational trauma and paternal abuse. A few years later, 2025 proved to be a massive year for music about daughterhood: ‘Eldest Daughter’ by Taylor Swift, ‘Favourite Daughter’ by Lorde, ‘Kill Me’ by Hayley Williams and the album Eldest Daughter by Gatlin all explore the relationships these artists have with “daughter” as an identity. Around the same time, TikTok videos about being the eldest daughter and “Birth Order Theory” more broadly racked up millions of views, encouraging viewers to examine the various burdens they may be carrying. And to bring us to the present day, Gracie Abrams just released her third album, Daughter From Hell. But as pop music grows increasingly obsessed with the identity of the daughter, the result has split: one side sanitises the experience for parental approval, and the other breaks the rules entirely.

Like many people, I expected the new Gracie Abrams album to be grittier than her previous work. And although it is more experimental in parts, the title Daughter From Hell is a bit of a false promise. On the track of the same name, Gracie sings about wanting to be like her mother:

And I want your patience

I want your grace

I want your sugar

And I wanna say

How much I owe ya

I’ve loved your shoulder

We don’t learn much about the supposed hell wreaked by Gracie in her youth; the only detail we get is in the line “Daughter from hell, hungry and loud”. By wishing she had her mother’s patience and grace, we know Gracie lacks these things, but beyond that, the song is sparse and palatable. The distorted Ethel Cain guitars, clearly inspired by Preacher’s Daughter, work to add some realness, but the song never quite gets there.

It might be the lack of detail and the over-reliance on metaphors. But I also think the reason this song is restrained is because Gracie still feels bound by the confines of being a daughter. Her writing is safe enough for her parents to consume without worrying, and vague enough to gesture towards an underbelly without actually exposing it. It’s why the album talks about knives and hell and bonfires but fails to feel dark. Daughterhood on Daughter From Hell is less about being difficult and more about navigating feelings while being observed.

This instinct to remain safe under the parental gaze also haunts Taylor Swift’s ‘Eldest Daughter’. While Gracie stays restrained through vague metaphors, Taylor leans into broad, internet-friendly generalisations.

Every eldest daughter

Was the first lamb to the slaughter

So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire

Elsewhere in the song, Taylor speaks from the “I” register, but she universalises (“every eldest daughter”) when touching on daughterhood. The result feels like an attempt to tap into the “eldest daughter” social media trend while swerving an examination of her own family. She may not owe us this information, but its erasure means a song like this feels weak and insincere. (Unfortunately, this is also the same song with the lyrics “’Cause I’m not a bad bitch / And this isn’t savage.”)

Gracie’s and Taylor’s framing of daughterhood is palatable, but art exploring the experience is vastly stronger when it tackles the taboo. Lorde’s album Virgin (2025) is a great example, a record so openly about “dirty” topics like masturbating, oral sex, and feeling like a man. These are not conversations daughters generally bring to the dinner table, and in pulling them to the fore in the same breath as speaking from the perspective of a daughter, Lorde exposes the limits of the role, and breaks through it.

On ‘Current Affairs’, Lorde does something we rarely see in pop music: she addresses her mother in a song about being overcome with arousal.

You tasted my underwear

I knew we were fucked

My bed is on fire

Mama, I’m so scared

In most pop music, aside from maybe Madonna, songs about sex are distinct from songs addressing family. Both are big topics but it is not common to have a line like “He spit in my mouth like / He’s saying a prayer” in the same verse as calling out to a parent. In marrying the two together, Lorde cracks open the limits of daughterhood, and invites us to see both her and her mother as people beyond their familial roles.

This willingness to break the pristine image of the daughter isn’t just about sex; it also emerges when artists address inherited pain. In ‘Clear Blue’, Lorde puts herself on equal footing with her mother, imagining both as women dealing with passed-down trauma.

There’s broken blood in me, it passed through my mother from her mother down to me

The result is a sense of maturity, and the feeling that Lorde has crossed a threshold that makes her own womanhood as significant as her role as a daughter. On ‘Kill Me’, Hayley Williams takes a similar creative risk:

Eldest daughters never miss their chances

To learn the hardest lessons again and again

Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment

I think I’m where the bloodline ends

Hayley recognises that her issues have been passed down to her without shirking responsibility for having them. Later in the song, she says “Eldest daughters come to stop the cycle”, outlining her plans to interrupt a pattern of pain in her family. Again, these are difficult, unpleasant feelings. To call out your own shortcomings and namecheck your family at the same time is a creative risk, but the payoff is a song that makes ugly feelings relatable. It’s the impact we expected from the Gracie Abrams album, but it cannot happen without genuine ugliness.

Yet, voicing these complex, ugly truths doesn’t have to be a bridge-burning exercise. True maturity in daughterhood involves holding two contradictory truths at once: stepping into your own adulthood while still craving the warmth of maternal approval. Despite pushing boundaries on Virgin, on ‘Favourite Daughter’ Lorde is desperate to impress her mother:

‘Cause I’m an actress, all of the medals I won for ya

Panic attack just to be your favourite daughter

Everywhere I run, I’m always runnin’ to ya

Breaking my back to carry the weight of your heart

The same person growing into her womanhood and sexuality also wants to impress her mother. She fluctuates between being a child and an adult in her own right, which reflects how most of us actually feel about our identity. One week you’ll progress in your career and make a hard decision on your own, the next you’ll need to run everything by your mum because it feels too overwhelming to do it alone.

The daughter trope in pop culture reflects an ongoing tension in young adulthood. It is easy to turn ‘eldest daughter syndrome’ into a cosy aesthetic or a vague statement to show your struggle. But as Lorde and Hayley Williams prove, there is value in striving to exist beyond the constraints of daughterhood. You don’t need to declare yourself a ‘daughter from hell’ to prove you’ve grown up; you just need the courage to exist as a full, flawed adult, especially in front of the people who raised you.

Leave a comment

This week, Ray Hopkinson popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Ray is the founder of Swayed Studio, a culture-defining PR and talent agency, building brands and people who give a sh*t.

📺 Watching: Charli xcx on Tape Notes, plus the excellent ‘Camera’ video, Mina Le on the status of being healthy, and ‘The light in the painting’, the new Lizzy McAlpine song and video.

📖 Reading: arguing against specific vacation wardrobes, and on what makes Hailey Bieber so appealing to consumers.

🎧 Listening to: Music, Fashion, Film, the new Charli xcx album, ‘Welcome to My Brain’ by The Buoys, ‘Belt Loop’ by Tiny Habits, and ‘Ain’t in LA’ by ADÉLA.

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

Today’s issue is about some of the ~strange~ responses to Rihanna’s return to the stage this week. If you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them!

As ever, scroll for news from this week, Hot + Not, and recs for the weekend.

Happy Friday,

Holly x

P.S. This issue is quite long so you may need to click to read it in your browser to see all the bits <3

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Zendaya and her makeup artist Ernesto Casillas raised the bar this week

• Charli’ xcx’s pop-up shows felt a little like the Phoebe Bridgers approach, which she then confirmed with this

• And the best pop song according to her is…

• Suki Waterhouse loves Vinted

• Phoebe Bridgers debuted ‘Lost Boys’ on Fallon and it was all very School of Rock

• And here’s how you can listen to the whole album early

• This was a sweet way for Gracie Abrams to involve her fans

• Lana Del Rey has not one but two albums on the way

• Lorde loves euro summer

• …and hates those Spotify AI song descriptions

• Hoping Dua Lipa’s excellent outfits at Electric Lady are a sign of good things to come

• Take a look inside Matty Healy’s stag-do, which included a The 1975 tribute band

• And we found the wine that Lorde had in Lisbon to try ourselves. Here’s how it went :)… p.s. follow us on Instagram!

Subscribe now

After one of the most talked-about hiatuses of all time, Rihanna returned to the stage this week at Jay-Z’s show in New York. Attendees had no idea she’d be there, despite her stepping out in a Roc-A-Fella jersey a few hours earlier. And surprise appearances were not exactly top of mind when a security scare meant guests had to wait around four hours to even get inside Yankee Stadium.

When the music kicked in for ‘Run This Town’, fans expected Rihanna’s vocals to come through the backing track. But then she appeared in the flesh, mic in hand, wearing custom YSL and sunglasses. She was back! Performing in a stadium for the first time since 2016 (minus her Super Bowl special), she greeted Jay-Z’s musicians - it all felt familial - and stayed out to perform ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’. Tagging on a song of her own was significant: this was more than just a favour. And if the usually reliable Tour & Music Leaks account is correct, this isn’t just a fleeting cameo, but the first step of a new campaign.

Video footage from the night is a joy to watch: Rihanna beaming and laughing, A$AP Rocky standing proud in the crowd, the entire arena cheering on their feet. Billboard said of Rihanna’s performance:

“No one got a bigger response from the Sunday night crowd than Bad Gal RiRi, and her aura was simply one-of-one. The second her heels clicked down the tunnel walkway to the militant “Run This Town” beat, the entire stadium’s energy shifted.”

So there it is, a threshold crossed, Rihanna returning to fill the gap she left in music.

But then the criticism began to appear. You do not have to look very far in posts and comment sections across all social media platforms to find the other side of the reception to Rihanna’s return. It’s not pleasant, but to give you a flavour:

The majority of the criticism is the same: Rihanna doesn’t “have it” anymore, and now that she’s a mother, she’s lost both her talent and sex appeal. Of course every cultural moment generates a range of viewpoints, and that’s part of it, but this specific reaction taps into something many of us fear and then experience: the belief that motherhood marks the end of so much of one’s appeal as a woman.

In Western countries like the US and the UK, there is a lot of chatter about declining birthrates and how to encourage more people to start a family. Collectively, we talk about the cost of living, the cost of childcare, and the shifting ambitions of women. With our friends, we talk about the fear of pausing our careers, comforting each other with the promise that “you’ll come back even better,” or at the very least “there’s never a ‘good time’ for this so you might as well do it anyway.” And, mostly in our own heads, we spiral about losing our sense of self: who will we be when our routines collapse and our headspace centres on something totally new? How will we feel carrying the title of ‘mother’ above all else?

Although 99% of us live vastly different lives to Rihanna, she is a public figure who has experienced a version of this shift in front of us. In the cultural conversation so far, her entry into parenthood has largely fallen into two talking points: her pioneering pregnancy style, and her delayed ninth album.

On style, photos of Rihanna’s maternity looks are undoubtedly on the moodboards of other pregnant celebs, and her commitment to accessorising her bump with the same vigour as any other time in her life has trickled down to so many other women. “Motherrr!”, the comments read. There is pregnancy style before and after Rihanna; her impact cannot be overstated.

Meanwhile, the wait for R9 has become a meme in and of itself: Rihanna has witty interactions with reporters on red carpets, and jokes about her own absence on Instagram. Although millions of people wish her return had already happened, the general tone of this debate is playful and reverent. We accept it might take time, but we’ll be here with open arms when she is ready.

Yet, the swift pivot from worshipping the aesthetic of Rihanna’s pregnancy era to mocking her actual return exposes a deep cultural hypocrisy. We celebrate the mother when she is a passive, aspirationally beautiful image, but not when she appears IRL, showing the human, slightly rusty reality of postpartum life. And if it’s this hard for Rihanna, what about everyone else?

Rihanna has talked openly in recent years about the impact motherhood has had on her self image and her appetite to do certain things, particularly those connected to her public sex appeal.

While we might look longingly at the old music videos and live performances (‘Birthday Cake’ at the Diamonds World Tour comes to mind), it’s unfair to expect this version of Rihanna to be frozen in time for our consumption. Life is continually evolving, and expecting stars to stay wedded to a version of themselves created in their twenties is its own kind of prison. (On the other hand, we also know what it’s like when an artist attempts to do just that – it’s the fastest way to get called old, out of touch, followed by “why can’t she just age gracefully?”).

The double standard is also blatant everywhere you look. Jay-Z, a 56-year-old father-of-three, headlined Yankee Stadium to celebrate the 30th and 25th anniversaries of Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint. He is treated as an elder statesman of hip-hop, performing on his own terms and in a state of relaxed authority. His performance is not scanned for sex appeal or physical dynamism, but seen as a moment to acknowledge the grace of his legacy.

The very same stage can be used to crown one legend (Jay-Z) and undermine another (Rihanna). It highlights the invisible clock that exists only for female icons, demanding they remain frozen in the exact physical and aesthetic state in which they first captured our attention, or fall off.

For Rihanna, that peak moment was the late 2000s and early 2010s. She released an album almost every year from 2005-2016, completed huge world tours, and was generally optimised for public consumption. When we weren’t fed a new single, we got a music video, a feature, or a media appearance. This was an era of mammoth productivity in the public eye, which she later pivoted toward building her Fenty empire. In hindsight, it looks like this pivot was laying the groundwork for the future family she wanted to have; a way of preparing for the mother she wanted to be. (This was obviously hugely successful – Fenty Beauty made Rihanna a billionaire in 2021).

But motherhood changes things, and the Rihanna music churn of the 2010s may not be compatible with the life she wants now. Raising a family offers a new kind of beauty and fulfilment, but it takes time, disregards old priorities, and brings physical transformation. Kate Winslet is another famous parent who often credits becoming a mother at a young age with helping her maintain mental stability in the entertainment industry.

The response to Rihanna’s performance this week feels like a dismissal of this evolution – sneering that she is “out of shape” and should have “stayed home with the kids” implies that her value has disintegrated.

But in refusing to chase impossible expectations, Rihanna is doing something far more valuable than delivering a perfectly executed performance. She is showing us that it is okay to take a breath out and just let the clock run. And if we’d like to live in a world where regular women can briefly step away from work to raise families without fearing identity erasure or professional demotion, we have to let others do the same. Rihanna’s “rusty” but joyful performance felt like proof of her humanity: a woman returning to her career on her own terms, in her own body as it is, and in her own time. And that’s something we need an icon for.

Leave a comment

This week, Karin Ann popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Karin is an actor and musician. She featured in The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2024), and Orion (2025), and stars in and soundtracked a feature film coming later this year. Listen to her songs ‘Wicked Game’ and ‘i was never yours’.

📺 Watching: The Odyssey in the cinema, Phoebe Bridgers’ surprise Jimmy Fallon performance, plus the acoustic one, and Charli xcx on The Pop Pod.

📖 Reading: Jessica DeFino’s advice column on the pressure to look perfect at your wedding and this Ask Polly piece from a reader who moved home and is feeling bad about it.

🎧 Listening to: Daughter From Hell, the new Gracie Abrams album, Beard, the new Syd album, and Oh yeah?, the new Steve Lacy album.

Hope everyone is well 🫶

Pleased to say that is back with another piece for this week’s newsletter. She explores the origins of her struggles with summer and I’m sure a lot of us will be able to relate!

Speak soon,

Holly x

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Like Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift will share her own wedding pics when she’s ready

• Zendaya looked amazing in white this week (see here and here)

• Outlets reported on Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff breaking up this week, but fans had speculated for a while because of her Instagram habits. It is impossible to be online and hide a breakup

• Dior couture by Jonathan Anderson got this reaction from Anna Wintour

• Gracie Abrams has a great stylist

• A day in the life of Lorde: you begin hanging with your boyfriend in NYC clutching a pot of (likely) melatonin gummies, then you wake up in Madrid and play a festival set like this

• A great campaign: Cazzie David for Paloma Wool

• Daisy Edgar-Jones is the next person to get a Szilveszter Makó photo shoot

• Charli xcx held a small album listening party for fans. Here are the notes/album manifesto

• The event also featured new video footage, which included cameos from Lorde, Troye Sivan, Rachel Sennott, and Addison Rae

• And here’s a look at how we prep for holidays at Capsule :)

Subscribe now

I am part of the cohort that gets S.A.D. in reverse: summer has always made me miserable. Autumn is undeniably glorious - I think we can agree on this universally - and winter provides a welcome excuse to hibernate. But the dread kicks in by spring (some residual hangover from exam season, I think), and when summer starts to properly catch on, that feeling intensifies.

The obvious things are true: I always feel that I have nothing to wear, the pressure to “make the most of it” gets to me and I resent that the world continues spinning even when the pavement is shimmering under almost 40-degree heat. But when I dig into the reasons I feel this way, they all lead back to being a teenager - it’s all tangled up in paranoias that have stuck with me since, buzzing around my head like the Maybug that once got caught in my hair (another reason to dislike the season).

I grew up in a seaside town that was bleak during the winter and somehow bleaker in the summer. It’s part of what was formerly an island, supposedly named after the Greek Isle of the Dead because of its Bronze Age burial mounds - more than can be found anywhere else in Britain. It eventually merged with the mainland but kept its curse to itself. Later, it became a destination for wealthy holidaymakers after a railway link connected it to London in the 1840s, and for famous but sickly writers and poets to recuperate. But over the past 200 years, it lost that grandeur and was forgotten. The area became home to weirdos (the very bad kind, like Oswald Mosley and Nigel Farage) and ghosts (my house is haunted, though only one person believes me about this). I didn’t like the place.

As a teenager, a six-week summer holiday felt like a frivolously large amount of time to fill. In a place like my hometown, it takes a dedicated and creative mind to use it wisely, and I wouldn’t say I had one.

The summer stretches I can remember have melded into one at this point, but a few memories of misadventures poke through. That time I spent at least a month in the back of a friend’s car as we drove a magician we’d found to gigs across the south of England. The time another friend and I were convinced the house opposite her bus stop was haunted, so we took the camera I got for Christmas and went to investigate. I still have footage of us rummaging through their bins (I do not condone this behaviour!), only to discover that someone was very much alive and living in there. Sourcing cigarettes and booze in any way we could so we could smoke and drink on the beach. Probably some other things I don’t want to conjure up right now.

Looking back now, I think I actually did have fun. But I know that at the same time, I was constantly stressed about whether or not I was. I’d think about what I imagined teenage life should look like - learnt, of course, through books, movies, and the relatively few shreds of social media that existed at the time - and constantly cross-reference that against my own life: “This is what a teenager would do, so I should do it.” Though this was a theme all year round, it was always most intense in summer.

After school, these feelings subsided. I had a (mostly) brilliant time at university and went on to do an exciting Master’s in New York City, where everything felt impossibly huge (I’d never seen pavements this big), fast, and absurd. I was working so hard and meeting so many interesting people that I no longer had that expanse of time to agonise over small things the way I used to. Summer there just felt like life.

Then Covid hit, and I had to come home - back to the haunted house and the bleak, sleepy town, now quieter than ever. That summer, after graduating from my childhood home in an online ceremony that my university, no joke, held on a Minecraft server, I had absolutely nothing to do. At almost 22, I felt like that teenager again.

My relationship to both summer and my hometown was back at square one. The combination of lockdown, a pandemic-stricken job market and my dislike of my surroundings turned me into a bit of a hermit, and I spent most of summer 2020 - which friends still laud as one of the greats - indoors. I wanted the excuse to hibernate that cooler seasons bring, but instead it was the time of year you’re meant to be experiencing the outdoors and, worse, enjoying it. That urge to overanalyse returned, and from it I learnt that something inside me did want to be a summer person, to have fun at the beach and say yes to plans, heatwave or not. At the time, I reasoned that the only thing holding me back was where I was, and that I had to leave.

So I made it back to a city - this time, London - and faced my fear of the season. Sometimes pressure is there for a reason. I forced myself to do the things I thought summer was for: picking up active, outdoor hobbies, drinking in pub gardens under blistering heat, swimming in local ponds. Turns out, things you don’t enjoy might just be things you haven’t done yet and, once you do them, they can be fun, even. Something eventually shifted, and though I wouldn’t say I’m now a “summer person”, I no longer dread it. I can even see a few of its charms.

I recently went to a talk by New Yorker essayist and art critic Adam Gopnik, who told the story of his eccentric, stoic therapist who, after years of sessions, bestowed upon him his greatest insight: “Life has many worthwhile aspects.” I loved that utterly unenthusiastic but optimistic bit of wisdom; I think it applies here. Things can be good even if not transformative.

This June, I took a trip back to my hometown and realised that, though the ghosts were still there, that bad taste it had once left was gone. In the sun, it can be beautiful, with its beach bars and interesting coffee and book shops and friendly people who’d probably let you off the train before they board. Many worthwhile aspects. I’d managed to have a good time there finally; all it took was 10 years of distance.

(I have to say, it still makes me happy to see rain in July.)

Leave a comment

P.S. If you hadn’t yet Googled, I grew up in Broadstairs.

This week, Avery Cochrane popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Avery is your next favourite pop star. She is playing at Oslo Hackney on July 15th, her first time in London.

📺 Watching: The Invite in the cinema, Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo in conversation with each other for Spotify, and the new self-directed video for ‘Planting Tomatoes’ by Lucy Dacus.

📖 Reading: ‘The perpetual present tense’, an essay by on heteropessimism, and the Daisy Edgar-Jones profile for British Vogue, which is lovely.

🎧 Listening to: Three fun new collabs: ‘Closer’, the new Linda Lindas song with Hayley Williams, ‘the bridge’ by Kelela and PinkPantheress, and ‘Running’ by Dahi and Childish Gambino.

This newsletter is about the ways in which some of our favourite artists are refusing to follow the rulebook and what we all gain as a result. I think it’s a great time to be a music fan!

As ever, scroll for the news you missed this week, Hot + Not, and recs to add to your queue this weekend.

Sending love and good vibes,

Holly x

Earlier this week, a post complaining about Lily Allen’s West End Girl tour went viral, with the user taking issue with the concert length, cost, and the lack of audience interaction.

Lily saw it soon after, and responded to defend her decisions. She pointed out that the show was always advertised as just West End Girl in full, and that it was her artistic choice not to talk to the audience, to help with storytelling. She’s also performed in plays in recent years, so it’s clear to see how that experience would bleed into her music.

This interaction sparked much debate, including over 400 comments across Capsule’s Instagram and TikTok. Some people agreed that for £86+, the show should be longer, and that Lily should interact with the crowd, at least to show her appreciation for their attendance. This side of the discussion illustrates how rising ticket prices have commodified live music: when fans pay premium prices, they increasingly view the concert as a financial transaction for a specific product (the big hits, crowd interaction, 2hrs+ length) rather than an invitation to witness an artist’s uncompromising creative choice.

But most of the comments were from actual attendees of the show, who agreed that the theatrical approach and refusal to break the fourth wall actually heightened the experience. Many people said the show was unlike any other gig they’d been to, and praised Lily for creating an album and concert that felt more like a play.

When I first saw the review, I secretly admitted to myself that I, too, would be disappointed by a musician’s onstage silence. It is a singular experience to be in the same room as an artist whose work means a lot to you, and those small moments of conversation, however rehearsed, forge a connection that is impossible to replicate through a screen. It feels like a lame opinion to have - like jumping up and down with waving arms begging someone to see you - but live music is special and sometimes makes you do embarrassing things.

But that instinct only got me so far. The fan experience, however magical, should not come at the expense of artistic integrity. The issue is muddied when ticket prices and the general notion of the “transaction” are prioritised, but if we truly believe in creative freedom, we must also accept that sometimes we’ll be disappointed: with the length of a show, with the lack of enthusiasm on stage, with the realisation that those heartfelt Instagram captions are written by someone else.

Lily declined to follow the script of what’s expected at a pop show and followed her own values. That’s something I’m increasingly noticing with other artists, too. For decades, the uncompromised creative genius or “auteur” was a label reserved for film directors or indie-rock frontmen. But it feels like we’re entering a new era of pop auteurism, driven by female musicians fiercely pushing for and protecting their vision. (The gendered point is significant, especially when we think about the nature of the parasocial contract and how it disproportionately affect female artists who are expected to hand over so much of themselves and play nicely at the same time.)

Another example is Lorde. It was the one-year anniversary of her album Virgin this week, and most of us expected the rumoured deluxe album to drop. Fans had tracked snippets of potential new songs, and those music rumour accounts had long hinted that another release was coming. Maybe that was the plan at one point, but on the anniversary Lorde did things her own way instead: she uploaded to her website the raw demos and voice notes that would become Virgin. The output was messy: multiple tracks per song, idiosyncratic titles, no uniform way of naming files. She called it ‘XRAYS,’ to reflect her interest in creating art that truly shows who she is, warts and all.

The deluxe album is a well-oiled music industry machine. It’s a chance to milk as much as possible from a creative project, wrapped up in a bow with a few new photographs and more vinyl iterations. It is a masterclass in productising art, each unit with dollar signs attached. To abandon that for a messy dump of fragments – which are also untethered from streaming giants – is a clear defiance of the rulebook pop stars are expected to follow. Lorde announced that her ‘X-rays’ would be available more formally at some point in the future, though not with the big players but on Lume, a soon-to-launch, album-centric music platform built for superfans to buy and own “the world of an album”. This approach is a direct rejection of the algorithmic optimisation of platforms like Spotify, in favour of a method that invites deeper connection. Adding friction supports the act of world-building: falling down (intentional) rabbit holes during the listening experience invites texture and presence - the antithesis of an algorithmic playlist that feels like amorphous background noise.

This notion of world-building on your own terms is also present in the latest iteration of all things Phoebe Bridgers. As we’ve documented, Phoebe reemerged after an extended absence with surprise shows in tiny rooms, popping up in small towns that are rarely seen by bigger artists. She banned phones, a move upheld for her upcoming arena tour, and asked fans to keep quiet about the new music they’d heard. She also left social media for a long time, a risky move for cultural relevance, and still only pops up to share the essentials. The actual press surrounding her return has also been so sparse that we have found ourselves constructing our own narratives: from dissecting the photoshoot behind her tour photo (a detail rarely interrogated, even with big acts), to having intimate conversations about phone-free concerts. In the absence of clippable quotes and big stunts, we mine for niche details, an act that affirms this new, intentional world Phoebe is building.

This is not just another artist moving through the machine, but someone carefully selecting which conventions to keep or delete. Similarly to the way Lorde’s friction creates meaning, Phoebe’s media scarcity has a paradoxical effect: by withholding the standard PR pipeline, she forces us to look closer, turning minor details (like the tour poster photoshoot) into community lore.

The result of this shift for fans is both inspiring and frustrating. Some Lily Allen gig-goers will wish for an extended set with old songs and chatty anecdotes. Some Lorde fans will wonder when ‘Silver Moon’, a teased-but-unreleased song, will ever see the light of day without a proper deluxe album. And there are Phoebe Bridgers devotees who will do anything to secure a ticket, yet desperately want to document it on their phones.

But when we interrogate the rationale behind each of these decisions – which very much are decisions, not accidents – the fuller picture offers us a version of artistry that feels even more exhilarating. Watching the musicians we love throw away inherited scripts encourages meaningful action from all of us: it asks us to think a little harder about artistic intent, it asks us to step back and consider why certain norms are expected, and, most of all, it invites us to also wonder what would happen if we, too, pushed to live by our own values. Of course, most of us aren’t Grammy-winning artists with that sort of leverage and influence, but we do have the chance to shape the people and systems around us in small ways. And I find that to be incredibly generative, almost as much as engaging with the art itself.

Leave a comment

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• There will probably be a Swift-Kelce wedding beginning when you read this, and here’s who has already arrived

• Do you think Zara Larsson was on Rihanna’s moodboard?

• Dua Lipa’s honeymoon pics could be a coffee table book

• And the other couples are having a British Summer

• Charli shared why George was better than all the other guys

• Hayley Williams closed out the Ego Death tour in Dublin, and wore symbolic bloody bandages for the final show

• Olivia Wilde is talking about Botox

• The models who got engaged atop the Empire State Building are free

• This week’s best dressed: Solange, Naomi Osaka, Gabbriette, and Alexa Demie

• And this week’s husband of the week goes to…

• Loved this filmmaker analysis of the Lost Boys video

• Really into Millie Bobby Brown rn

• JoJo is educating us on how the music industry works

• And a task for us all: be more Maggie Rogers

This week, RAEGAN popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

RAEGAN is an artist and producer pioneering “musical theatre pop” - a bold blend of Broadway drama and pop spectacle. With 19M+ views online, the self-made creative is taking her immersive universe on the road this fall for her first headline tour.

📺 Watching: Slayyyter on In Your Dreams with Owen Thiele (a great one!), Gracie Abrams on Table Manners (really sweet), and another great long-form Charli interview.

📖 Reading: ‘The Duty of Desirability’, an excellent essay by interrogating the “effort” expected in order to feel attraction, and Chanté Joseph’s latest story, exploring how women are being ghosted by long-term boyfriends. Reading these two pieces side-by-side really emphasised how digital spaces are creating alternate realities for men and women, and it’s frightening. We have to talk more, and with more compassion.

🎧 Listening to: CONFESSIONS II, the new Madonna album, ‘THE CINEMA’, the new Erin LeCount song (produced by Jim-E Stack), and ‘Molly In The Club’, the new Sophia Stel song.

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

Today’s newsletter looks a little different because we sent the main essay on Tuesday. There’s a link to read it in case you missed it, plus all the regular bits.

Happy Phoebe Day! And enjoy the sun!

Holly x

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Big news: Phoebe Bridgers announced her third album, Lost Weekend. Could the title be a John Lennon reference?

• And the first single ‘Lost Boys’ is here, complete with an excellent music video. We break down the song and video here!

• Olivia Rodrigo is putting on her own festival and a) the lineup is great and b) it’s all for a great cause

• The Harry Styles tour responded to the heatwave thank god

• Gabbriette had her bachelorette

• Who remembers owl necklaces?

• Was not expecting Madonna to be our authority on screen time but here we are!

• Long live the Jacob Elordi x Kendall Jenner twinning era

• Meta glasses did well to put Zuck on the bench and sub in Kylie Jenner

• After years in Paris, McQueen will return to London Fashion Week

• Upcoming collabs to get excited for: Clairo x Ryan Beatty, and Beabadoobee x Hayley Williams

• This week’s best dressed: Adwoa Aboah, Myha’la, and Jodie Comer

• Husband of the year again and again…

• And we thought a Taylor Swift MSG wedding was a clever decoy but now it’s looking rather likely…!

Subscribe now

We published this week’s Open Tabs essay a few days early on Tuesday to align with the Hayley Williams tour. It was a lesson in overcoming cringe and how doing embarrassing things can actually get you somewhere. Here’s an excerpt, then a link to read the whole thing.

Read the full story

This week, Au/Ra popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Au/Ra is a German-Antiguan alternative electropop singer and songwriter. Born in Ibiza and raised in the Caribbean, she broke through with her 2018 hit single ‘Panic Room’. Her album heartcore comes out today!

📺 Watching: Charli xcx on Fashion Neurosis, Gracie Abrams on Popcast, and of course the great new Phoebe Bridgers song and video.

📖 Reading: 10 things Raven Smith learned in his first year of fatherhood for Vogue, sharing items of clothing she’s owned for 10+ years (we must do the same!), and on the contradictions of mass cool.

🎧 Listening to: A bunch of new singles today: ‘Violins’ by Blondshell, ‘Wink Wink’ by Charli xcx, ‘Look at My Life’ by Gracie Abrams, and ‘Sun Has Set’ by Beabadoobee. Plus two new albums: Ryan Beatty’s Sweet Fortune and Your Day Will Come by Chanel Beads.

Hope everyone is well 🫶

It is Tuesday and not Friday but I wanted to bring you an emergency dispatch while the topic is still timely. Some of you may have seen I shared on Instagram my quest to find Hayley Williams () tickets this weekend. I wanted to share the full version of events with you, including what it taught me about being cringe, finding joy as an adult, and how we feel about growing up.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Holly x

P.S. we may be back this Friday with a mini newsletter, but if not, the next issue will be next week as normal. <3

Maybe it started in 2007, when my brother bought me Riot! by Paramore on CD. I’d listen to ‘crushcrushcrush’ on repeat, my 10-year-old life very far away from the lyrics to which I was singing along. Or maybe it was in 2017, running miles to After Laughter to process my decaying relationship with my first love. It was definitely in the first few months of 2026, when my difficult winter gym sessions were soundtracked by Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, the surprise Hayley Williams solo album that appeared as a bunch of MP3 files on her website last year. “So hit me, I can’t get soft / Cause I’m too hard / And my ribs are metal cages / To guard my heart,” echoed in my ears as I increased the weight of my dumbbells. The aim was to get strong in more ways than one.

We each have a few artists that we connect with on a deeper level, whose contributions are not background ambience but a fundamental piece of our existence. Sometimes we’re a little coy about these feelings, because so much of the processing happens when we’re alone, wearing headphones. Fandom can also feel childlike, something we develop in adolescence then shy away from as we grow up. Still, live shows are the best mechanism we have to make our relationship to art both more tangible and more communal, which is exactly why I was gutted to miss out on Hayley Williams tickets in November last year. She’d just announced a small tour, her first as a solo artist after her pandemic shows were cancelled.

The tour for EDAABP was a huge underplay, which is the industry term for when artists book much smaller venues than they could. Hayley talked about wanting to feel safe in a smaller crowd, since so much of the music is so vulnerable and without the comfort of the band. I also think she’s too humble to go straight in with big venues. The result was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of my favourite artists in a setting she’d outgrown years ago. That’s the thing about music industry success; so much of the initial intimacy is lost with scale.

When I failed to get tickets the first time around, I vowed to try resale options closer to the time. I spent much of the last two weeks doing this, and went a little bit mad in the process.

Here is a list of all the things I tried, which get progressively more unhinged:

• I set alerts for resale tickets on Ticketmaster, Twickets, and the Roundhouse venue directly.

• I emailed the venue, and some PRs, to try and explore press tickets to cover this event for Capsule

• My partner found an automated bot service called Ticket-alerts.live, which promised to deliver resale ticket notifications faster than Twickets. (This is not a bot to purchase tickets, rather another method of receiving a notification that tickets are being made available). I paid £10 for it. The notifications were not faster than Twickets for me

• Then I saw people on Reddit talking about Pyngo, a ticket alert service and fan community designed to help people get tickets via Discord notifications. I paid £15 and joined

This was the period I really started to feel insane: constantly checking notifications, switching between browsers, and reading mini-guides within the Discord server on the best tactics for how and when to click Ticketmaster links. (If you’re reading this and you’re acquainted with the 10-minute rule, I see you and I feel you.)

There was comfort and humour in seeing a community of other people equally driven to madness by the process, but I also started to realise that maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a healthy way to spend my time. I had created the illusion of progress, but in reality, I was no closer to a ticket, the event was almost a day away, and I was flushing cortisol through my body every hour.

“I think your phone might be making you unhappy,” my partner, Josh, gently said to me one evening. I knew he was right and decided it might be time to give up, although I never stopped clicking the links. I secretly hoped the old adage of “you find something when you stop looking for it” might apply to me.

When I relayed each of the measures I’d taken in a team meeting on Friday, my manager suggested I make a post about it. I was flooded with embarrassment. I can’t publicly out myself as the sort of person who would do this, I thought. But I was the sort of person who would do this; I had been doing it all week.

And so I made the post. A simple rundown of all the things I had done to try and get Hayley Williams tickets, each step progressively more deranged. I clicked publish, and told myself I could archive it if it totally flopped. I spent the rest of the evening in the park, telling my friends about the hunt but also trying to move on. The show was too close now, my chances were over.

By the time I got home on Friday evening, the post had a little bit of engagement, but nothing major. Then two of our friends called Josh, which was a little random but I didn’t think much of it. Josh put the phone to my face. I remember thinking they want to talk to you, not me but said hello anyway. They said it was a real shame about the show. I told them, “I know, I’m gutted, I went insane over it.”

“But you have to go,” they said. “We got you a ticket.”

“What?!

How?!

WHY?!

Is it a really expensive ticket from StubHub?” I was frantic and sort of crying and freaking out.

They explained that they had found a StubHub ticket, and warned that it might not be 100%, but that they wanted to split the cost three ways as an early 30th present to me. I wept at their kindness, and also felt worried deep down that the ticket would not work, or that something would generally go wrong. It did not feel real.

And then I woke up on Saturday to a bunch of comments and DMs on Instagram. The post had found its audience; swathes of Hayley fans also looking for tickets or those who understood the struggle. People advised me to show up to the venue anyway and find someone with a spare ticket like they had done. Others messaged me privately offering to sell me their spare ticket. One person even invited me to join them for free. I worried about being scammed – how would I choose the right person? I scrolled through profiles to try and discern whether they looked like legit fans I was lucky to connect with, or whether I’d set up the perfect conditions for a fraud to make some money.

And then another DM popped up, around 10am. It was from Hayley’s manager, who had seen the post, and offered to put me on the guest list if I could make the Saturday show.

“What the actual hell?” I said to Josh. “What the hell, is this real?” I read the text out again and again, holding my phone in the air like a wand.

I scrolled through her profile and recognised people and moments that proved its legitimacy: Hayley at the Grammys, small press moments you’d only spot if you were really in the know, like the London photo shoot for The Face. It was real. How was this happening?

I shared my details, thanked her profusely, and went for a run. “We are going to have the best day ever,” I said over and over to Josh, who would be joining me for the ride.

The next few hours looked like this. We headed to the venue early for the 3-5pm merch sale. The queue was already all the way down the street. I bought a purple t-shirt. The show was close but it still didn’t feel real; I was excited but so afraid of jinxing it. I told two people in my life what was happening, too worried to let it leak further.

The security guard told us to leave and come back at 7pm when the box office opened, so we went for some local food. I didn’t have much of an appetite, and passed the time by reading an article in the Guardian Saturday magazine aloud to Josh. At 6pm I managed to eat a few chicken wings, then we headed to the venue to find our fate.

The entrance was dense with demands: members’ tickets, accessibility tickets, and other random requests. I entered that state of calmness one has to activate when around security staff who have the power to change the course of your night. I waited, I smiled at others, and said very little. It could still all go wrong.

And then the box office doors opened, and we shuffled in. I walked up to the desk and shared my name, and just as it was leaving my mouth I saw the letters of my surname printed out on the sheet in front of him. Holly Beddingfield x2, GA (general admission). Holy shit. I was passed a paper ticket (how novel), and entered with so much ease that it made the previous week’s worth of unhinged antics feel comedic. I went from paying to receive notifications, studying niche Discord guides and timing the exact second of clicking a link to waltzing into an air-conditioned building without needing to queue. It was wild.

The next few hours were magical. We watched Tiberius b, an artist I discovered either on Hayley’s Instagram Stories or on the ‘Everything is Emo’ podcast she made for the BBC. Next was Water From Your Eyes, a band I’d dabbled with prior but understood more fully after seeing the live performance. Now I was inside I finally started to relax, and the changing feeling in my stomach emphasised how abnormal I’d felt for the past 24 hours.

And then it was time for Hayley’s set. I took two photos and put my phone away for the rest. I felt so lucky to be there that I didn’t want to spend the time on my phone. I danced to every song, racking up tens of thousands of steps, and sang every lyric. The crowd formed a choir for Hayley, our voices creating an additional instrument throughout the show. Everyone inside got it, none of us were here casually. Phone usage was way lower than other gigs in memory. We all knew how lucky we were just to be there.

I felt like a teenager. Beaming, screaming, occasionally crying. It is hard to put into words the catharsis of singing ‘Parachute’ in a crowd who feel the same, but the feeling was comparable to the euphoria of leaving a job you’ve outgrown or when the penny drops after six months of therapy. Throughout the show I had the same thought at least five or six times: I am so happy to be here. It was so simple, so uncomplicated. I felt high on the certainty of my joy: there was no questioning about where I was meant to be. I was just having the best time and was so aware of it.

That sense of feeling like a teenager is something I have been reflecting on since Saturday night. I was embarrassed at the prospect of sharing my ticket hunt on Instagram because it felt childlike: to go to all that effort, and to be so desperate, felt like something that would be acceptable if I was 10 years younger but not now. I thought a few times that this story might be sweet for a teenager but I’m nearly 30, what was I doing? I imagined what people would think of me. Who would cringe while swiping through the carousel? Who did I hope would miss the post? And who would I look to for comfort, because they would get it?

If seeing your favourite artists live (and occasionally jumping through many hoops to do so) is an experience associated with youth, then I can see why people are afraid of growing up. Why would you want to lose that experience? What exactly is not “mature” about caring about something so much that you want to feel it in person and invest even further? This is something I am negotiating with myself in response to my own shame. It also reminds me of conversations my friends have about “when we’ll stop going to Glastonbury,” the undertone being a quiet question: when are we too old to have this sort of fun?

I think I had an idea of the sort of person I would and would not be in my thirties, formed at a time when 30 sounded really old. Concert culture was a huge part of my teenage years (starting at age 11!) and into my twenties, but in recent years I’ve felt the swing from being one of the younger people in the room to the middle ground, or even leaning older for some (I like Bedroom Pop sorry!). I think many of us can relate to the feeling of reaching a stage in your life and expecting to feel different than you actually do. In reality, although we’ve had experiences that have developed our psyche and progressed our tastes and desires, so much of what remains is our essential core, set right at the beginning of our lives. I actually feel that even more so as I grow up and allow certain things to fall away.

And to circle back to Hayley. Part of the reason why her latest album resonated so much with me was because of the growth it charted. She tells us so clearly who she used to be and who she is now; on ‘Whim’ we learn about her tendency to self sabotage, on ‘Negative Self Talk’ she is sick of hearing herself, and by ‘Love Me Different’ she accepts the responsibility of being the sort of love she desires. There is so much progression but also a moment of acceptance for who she is and what she needs.

There is something to learn from here. My experiences over the past few days have made me more and more certain that we should seek out the things that have always brought us joy, whether they feel childlike or not.

Sometimes “inner child work” will be sort of cool, like making yourself a one-off piece of clothing that gets you a bunch of compliments in the pub. And sometimes it will not. Sometimes you will cry at things that feel inconsequential to others or show up to a dance class on your own, looking sort of strange compared to everyone else all dressed the same. But then something magical happens when you accept yourself: all the euphoria is waiting on the other side.

I suggest we tread closer to the things we so often dismiss with an ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ and explore what is waiting for us just beyond the embarrassment or the coyness. I believe they call it cringe mountain, and I hope to climb it again.

Leave a comment

Share

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

Welcome again to our new subscribers from The Know — so happy to have you all here.

On the menu today:

• News: Including how Phoebe Bridgers’ tour photos were made, and a potential Taylor Swift wedding decoy

• Open Tabs: A summer reading list for us all, curated by the wonderful

• Hot + Not: With musician Charlotte MacInnes

• Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Enjoy the sun!!!

Holly x

P.S. if you have a journey or a long run and need a rec, I was on this week! 🎧

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Olivia Rodrigo’s new album is very good. You can almost hear her frontal lobe developing in real time

• The next Red Lips x Bumble dating event (hosted by previous Capsule guest writer ) is next Wednesday! Tickets here 💋

• Maggie Rogers spilled the tea on a New York Times journalist at Rosalía’s show

• The photo for the Phoebe Bridgers tour is a piece of art. Here’s how it was made

• Tom Holland once again being the sweetest man on earth

• Charli xcx talking sense

• Is this Taylor Swift MSG wedding gossip just a really good decoy?

• Five (!) great looks worth seeing: Suki Waterhouse looking like 2000s Keira Knightley, Bella Hadid in 90s Prada, Ayo Edebiri in a Björk t-shirt, Rosalía in an amazing Yasmina Studio tutu, and of course Rama Duwaji in custom Miss Claire Sullivan to the Knicks parade

• And this week we started making videos for Capsule…why are the bloopers the best bit?!

If you have more thoughts, please hit reply <3

By

In his 2009 novel The Long Fall, Walter Mosley shared a sentiment I have long maintained: “A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.”

I can tell you exactly where I was when I first encountered that quote — my first student halls, tucked just behind Farringdon station, on an evening when I should, no doubt, have been writing essays — because it lodged itself somewhere deep inside. When I began building my life in London, the first things I’d consider in people’s homes were their bookshelves. I fell in love with some people whose bookshelves were full of Austen, and I showed myself the door whenever anybody had bookshelves in their home that were gathering dust, devoid of their very purpose.

I have read prolifically since I was a little girl, and throughout my life books have provided comfort, support and escapism in equal measure. I can point to the books I read during my first love, my first heartbreak, my first hot, languorous summer in London.

I make time for reading the way other people make time for scrolling or watching TV: instinctively, less out of obligation than necessity. I bookmark my days with it — the first thirty minutes of every morning are dedicated to reading, I listen to audiobooks while I exercise, and I finish every evening with another thirty. Books allow me to slip in and out of worlds that differ from my own, some far more beautiful, some considerably less so, but as I have always maintained: there is almost nothing a good, intellectually nourishing book cannot fix.

If you’re looking to build a summer reading curriculum, consider these. Some are tried-and-true favourites — good-for-the-soul comfort food, essentially — and others are newer discoveries I’m just as evangelical about. They are stories that will furnish you with knowledge, engender empathy and leave you aching with love.

The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst is a writer I return to time and time again, and The Line of Beauty — which I first encountered during one long, airless London summer — remains the work of his that I return to most often. Set against the gilded excess of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, it follows Nick Guest, a young gay man embedded in a world of wealth, beauty and increasing precariousness. Sensuous, morally complex and written with a lapidary elegance, it is the kind of book that makes you slightly bereft when it ends. A masterpiece I would like to mandate everybody read at least once in their lives.

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

I am, by disposition, resistant to magical realism — but when my best friend, who is coincidentally one of the most widely-read people I know, thrust a copy of The House of the Spirits into my hands, I had my first introduction to Allende’s linguistic magic. Sumptuous, hypnotic and vast in its emotional range, The House of the Spirits traces four generations of the Trueba family across a turbulent, transforming Chile. Allende writes with such warmth and authority that if this novel doesn’t convert you to magical realism, nothing will.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

is something of a high priestess of culture, and when she recently curated a summer reading list sourced from her readers, one title emerged as the overwhelming consensus. McMurtry’s Pulitzer-winning epic follows two aging Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, and has been called the great American novel so frequently the description has essentially calcified into fact. I haven’t read it yet, but a tattered copy I acquired via AbeBooks sits at the very top of my to-be-read pile.

Hot Milk, Deborah Levy

Sun-drenched and hallucinatory in equal measure, Hot Milk is a book you feel as much as read — the chorus of crickets, the relentless beat of the sun, the specific disorientation of being somewhere foreign and unmoored from everything familiar to you. One of my all-time favourite writers, Levy describes female desire and psychological drift with an almost unnerving precision. Hot Milk tells the story of Sofia, who has brought her ailing mother to a Spanish coastal town in search of a cure; what she finds instead is something altogether more destabilising. Best consumed horizontally, somewhere warm, Aperol Spritz in hand, with no particular obligations for the foreseeable.

Girl’s Girl, Sonia Feldman

Sharp, propulsive and forensically attuned to the anxieties of contemporary womanhood, Girl’s Girl is one of my best discoveries of the summer so far. Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends — until an unexpected kiss causes the established dynamics of their trio to unravel entirely. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile; loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of a pivotal summer, as an adult Mina looks back and traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. Feldman writes girlhood — its invisible jealousies, its unspoken negotiations, and its particular brand of excruciating self-consciousness — with an Austenian precision. A truly delicious summer read.

Lázár, Nelio Biedermann

Lázár is one of the best books I’ve read this year; a sweeping, dynastic odyssey told over generations, it is a remarkable story that is loosely based on Biedermann’s own family’s experience. His own noble ancestors were prominent Central European aristocrats whose lineage dates back to the early 1800s, and many moments throughout the novel are inspired by stories told to him by his grandmother — such as her escape from Hungary on foot and her run across a frozen river in 1956 to reach Switzerland. He also included historical accounts, such as his great-uncle being held at gunpoint by a Soviet soldier. Even more impressively, Biedermann started writing it when he was 16 and had it published when he was just 22 (it came out in March 2026.) I cannot recommend it enough.

I Want You To Be Happy, Jem Calder

Boy meets girl. Around each other they orbit — tentatively, hopefully, inevitably — until they simply stop. The merry-go-round will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has navigated the modern dating scene with any degree of self-awareness. Wryly funny, acutely observed and superbly ironic, Calder writes contemporary romantic failure with a precision that is almost forensic. Given that Calder has been championed by Sally Rooney from the beginning of his writing career, it’s unsurprising that I Want You To Be Happy has drawn comparisons to Rooney’s tour de force Normal People. If you haven’t read it, read it immediately, and then pass it on to every friend you have (as I have done.)

Leave a comment

Share

This week, Charlotte MacInnes popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Charlotte is an Australian singer, songwriter and actress. Her debut EP HIGHWATER is out June 26th via Atlantic Records, and shares producers with Dua Lipa, Charli xcx, and Troye Sivan. You can listen to ‘Struck’ and ‘Celestial’ now!

📺 Watching: Tish Weinstock’s guide to vintage London, Maya Hawke on Wild Card, and the Charli xcx Rolling Stone interview, which takes place in a Hollywood cemetery.

📖 Reading: This article from the brilliant at Haloscope on the next big scent fixation: banana. Plus ’s essay arguing that the opposite of nostalgia is agency.

🎧 Listening to: in this body, the debut album from Sparklmami, ‘Just Like You’, the new Jensen McRae song, ‘Drive’ by Foushee, and a shameless plug: I’m on this week’s episode of Hip Replacement with and , a podcast about cultural shifts and media. <3

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

Welcome to our new subscribers from The Know — so happy to have you all here.

This week’s newsletter was a difficult one to write: it’s on Ariana Grande, and why the blanket rule of “don’t comment on women’s bodies” does not always feel like it’s protecting those who need it most. I’d love to hear from any of you in the comments if you have thoughts.

Also in this week’s issue:

• News: Stories from the Capsule universe you may have missed from this week

• Hot + Not: With alt-pop artist Tanis

• Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Have a lovely weekend,

Holly x

In April 2023, Ariana Grande posted a video addressing the public’s concern over her weight loss. She said that the body people were comparing her current state to was actually her at her lowest point. Although the public and the media deemed her healthy back then, she explained that she was on antidepressants, drinking on them, and eating poorly. The conclusion was that we, as outsiders, have no idea what’s really going on with someone, and therefore should not speculate.

In the vast majority of cases, it feels morally correct to respect someone’s wishes for privacy, especially when so much of their life is on display already. To keep prying into personal issues feels grotesque, an aspect of fame that most of us would struggle to deal with. But when photos and videos emerged from Ariana’s new tour this week, her request for silence felt harder and harder to uphold.

The Eternal Sunshine Tour is Ariana’s first in almost seven years, but she’s hardly been relaxing since then. From 2020-2026, she released two new albums, plus a 10-year anniversary reissue of Dangerous Woman. She became Glinda and shot two Wicked movies, then went on intense press tours for both. Ariana was recently confirmed to star in a theatre production of Sunday in the Park With George, and is still building r.e.m. beauty, her cosmetics brand. And that’s just her professional life. Due to the nature of her celebrity, we also know that she got married and divorced in that time, and began and ended another relationship. It’s a lot.

It is also hard to think of a celebrity who has publicly been through more trauma than Ariana Grande: the Manchester Arena bombing at her show in 2017 and the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller in 2018 took an immense toll. This is a woman who has repeatedly had to outwardly deal with things that most people would collapse under, even with privacy. Ariana has spoken about her struggles with PTSD and anxiety, and has been in therapy for more than a decade. All of this context makes you want to abide by her pleas for privacy.

But on seeing the footage of Ariana’s tour this week, her body more skeletal than ever before, the takeaway is hard to ignore: she needs a break. None of us can speak with true authority on what’s happening behind the scenes, but it should not be controversial to say that this is simply not what a person equipped to endure a world tour looks like.

When you scroll on any of the social media platforms, you will find two clear sides emerging. The first is those people expressing concern, caveating their comments with the promise that they come from a place of genuine worry. I feel more aligned with this group, even if the tone sometimes feels off. The second group is hardcore fans, and some variety of self-identifying feminists who argue that this is not our place to weigh in, that Ariana knows herself better than anyone else, and look, she’s smiling.

Most calls to leave a celebrity alone are a fair reminder that this person is also human and that our time is better spent focusing on our own lives. But ignoring what is so clearly an alarming health issue in the name of “live and let live” philosophy feels like a cop-out. This sort of mindset was built to protect women from the cruel, misogynistic tabloid culture of the 2000s, and from fatphobia. But here it is being weaponised by stan culture, the celebrity PR machine, and legacy media, who fail to comment, asking us to enter a state of cognitive dissonance and pretend that the extreme physical changes we see are natural. To question otherwise would be anti-feminist. At this point, we should really ask who the “never comment on women’s bodies” rule actually serves.

I think if a colleague showed up to work in the same condition, managers and HR teams would feel a responsibility to check in on the person. That’s not to say that hasn’t happened with Ariana, but it proves that being asked not to have thoughts on this situation is at best unrealistic, and at worst, harmful.

Part of why we are so hesitant to voice these thoughts, I think, is the way the politics of talking about body image has shifted in recent years. Commentators have argued that body positivity is dead, that woke is dead, and of course we’re now living through an Ozempic-fuelled cultural backdrop. Some people are doing daily Pilates and fibremaxxing and others are speaking up for soft bellies. The fragmented voices on body image make it hard to discern what is a “right” level of interest in other people’s bodies, and often leaves us saying nothing at all.

The widespread use of GLP-1s has also totally skewed our baseline for what normal weight loss looks like. In just a few years, drastic shrinking has become normalised, and without realising it, we’ve become accustomed to watching stars drop an excessive amount of weight. This new landscape means we run the risk of becoming numb to bodies that are shrinking due to other reasons, like trauma, illness, or exhaustion. We must not let the “trend” of weight loss write off our instinct to look out for people.

All of this knotty context makes you want to steer away from commenting on Ariana’s current situation. But back to the fame of it all: the footage from her tour is already being used on TikTok and elsewhere by girls seeking out pro-anorexia content, with much of it labelled as AriANA. This is obviously devastating, and feeding a new generation of eating disorders and the sort of Tumblr content we hoped was left behind in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

While Ariana’s 2023 video asked for privacy, we cannot afford to be silent on topics like this. The boundaries are always incredibly blurred, and sometimes we may make mistakes. But there needs to be space for a more responsible level of commenting, where we focus less on cruel speculation and more on acknowledging that the right thing to do is refusing to pretend everything is fine. Sometimes, the most empathetic thing we can do is refuse to look away.

Leave a comment

Share

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Lorde’s new festival set is insane… some highlights!

• Also obsessed with a pregnant Japanese Breakfast vibing at the Gov Ball

• The Knicks content has been so fun to see

• Brandy Melville is not the only store closing its fitting rooms. Here’s why

• David Harbour weighed in on West End Girl…

• And Lily Allen wore an excellent outfit to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Preview

• Tickets officially went on sale for the Phoebe Bridgers World Tour

• And we spoke to a girl who was at the phone-free MSG show to see what it was like

• Olivia Rodrigo is dressing like the 2010s

• Rihanna x EE72 by Szilveszter Makó… breathtaking of course

• No wedding photos yet, but some gorgeous details from Dua & Callum’s wedding

• And while we’re on romance: Gracie Abrams is in love and it shows 🫶

Subscribe now

This week, Tanis popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Tanis is a fast-rising alt-pop artist with over a million streams under her belt. She returns with ‘The Bad One’, a new single that turns personal chaos into an unapologetic, emotionally direct anthem. The track evolves the intimate, electronic-laced sound of her 2025 EP Just Some Stories, marking a bold and impactful new chapter for her.

📺 Watching: Backrooms in the cinema, Hayley Williams’ tour diary video, and this video essay on the feminist history of micro bangs.

📖 Reading: This piece reflecting on “I’m just a girl” baby-woman culture in The Cut. And sticking with the Hayley Williams theme: this lovely Substack essay written by her friend , describing how they came to love making art again after (ahem) hard times.

🎧 Listening to: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, the new Olivia Rodrigo album, it’s a real Cruel World, the acoustic EP version of Holly Humberstone’s latest album, ‘the feeling’ by Steve Lacy, and ‘Red Bottoms’ by ADÉLA.

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

I am delighted to welcome some new subscribers today — from The Know (the newsletter media company I co-founded before Capsule!) and from SXSW London. So pleased to have you all here.

Here’s what’s on the menu for today:

• Open Tabs: A guest essay from the brilliant on her new approach to adult friendships

• News: Stories from the Capsule universe you may have missed from this week

• Hot + Not: With Rosa Walton of Let’s Eat Grandma

• Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Have a great one!

Holly x

Often, I crave that specific flavour of teenage friendship when all we had was time. Whispering under the same duvet, then wandering through the local neighbourhood on languid summer holidays, looking for something to do. Mooching around each other’s houses and scavenging through old coats in search of enough change to share a bag of chips. We didn’t live together, but we lived together. It was an intimacy forged in the everyday, as witnesses to each other’s dramas and trivialities, our paths woven together like strands of hair.

But adulthood inevitably unravels those strands. You make different choices, get full-time jobs, end up on opposite sides of the country – and although you love them just as much, seeing your friends becomes an occasion rather than a given. For me, it marked a transition into a more active form of socialising; the feeling that we must do something to make all the calendar co-ordination and train travel worthwhile. My message threads became Time Out articles: ‘Shall we book the exhibition everyone’s talking about?’ ‘Who’s in for visiting that restaurant with queues around the block?’ ‘I’ve managed to get tickets to the gig of the summer – transfer me when you can.’

Don’t get me wrong, it is joyful to have these experiences with my friends. But I also find it a bit pressurised. Two hours to tell my beloved pal all the things I’ve been thinking and hear all her thoughts in return, but also try to appreciate the contribution of Tracey Emin to the artistic canon? Difficult. Granted, I have a one-track mind – multitasking has never been my strong suit. But it got hard to ignore how often I left a meet-up feeling like I hadn’t given my all to my friend, nor had I really taken in the artwork/performance/world-renowned small plates we were supposed to be enjoying. It all felt a little unsatisfying. So I decided to experiment with something new.

While I wish we had the luxurious time of our teenage years, I know we will never get that back. So instead of trying to cram more plans into our calendars, I’ve been swapping which activities I do solo and which I do socially. Things I would usually do with a friend – say, going to a gallery or a play – I’ve been doing more of alone. And the things that I once considered too boring a backdrop for friendship have actually become opportunities to hang out in the easy, organic way we used to.

It’s simple but it’s been transformational – for both my own headspace and the way my adult friendships feel. Recently I had a weekend-long sleepover with no Big Plans in sight. We lay around, read books side by side, wandered the sunny streets with no end game and just soaked up each other’s company. Random passing thoughts and shyly muttered questions came up in a way they rarely do over a tightly scheduled lunch. It filled my cup completely.

This shift in mindset has opened up a lot. Now, when we go to the pub, we go for hours. Last month, I did just that with my oldest school friends. A couple of them brought their babies and we commandeered a corner for the best part of the day. I got to hear what was preoccupying them beyond the big life headlines, and saw them in their natural rhythm of mothering.

With another pal last week, we worked side by side in her living room on creative projects we’d been putting off: I was chipping away at a novel that’s lived too long in my Notes app, while she was crocheting a cute gift for an expecting friend. Seeing this hidden talent of hers, her face in deep concentration as we both swayed to a lo-fi playlist, only made me love her more.

It works best when you’re just sharing the stuff of life. Cooking a meal together. Going to the hairdresser and watching each other’s new personas taking shape in the mirror. Swimming in tandem in your local pool or sitting thigh-to-thigh in a sauna. Reading the supplements and scrolling together on a Sunday afternoon, legs cross-hatched on the sofa. These moments make me feel connected to my friends in a way that feels familial; it’s the kind of intimacy I’ve been missing. There’s also something quite special about realising you don’t need any bells and whistles, and neither do they. The company is the point.

A sweet side effect of swapping social and solo activities is that when I’m alone, I spend that time more intentionally, too. When I take myself to Dulwich Picture Gallery or to sample the new kofta sandwich at Logma, it’s a more textured experience. I find myself noticing more, forming new opinions, feeling the bubble of fresh ideas and inspiration. I think we can all do with the reminder that the best things in life are even better when they have your full attention.

The shift has been subtle yet significant: I am socialising more with myself, and spending more meaningful time with my friends. With no extra dates in the diary or money spent, life feels a little bit richer. Be it sleepovers, aimless wanders or joint missions to the farmers’ market to load up on food for the week, I recommend Doing Less with the people you love. You might find it feeds you more.

By Meena Alexander

Leave a comment

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Dua Lipa joined the lineage of chic town hall weddings… love that she used a small florist for the moment!

• And now the gang are arriving for her Sicily wedding

• This week’s husband of the year

• The Charli xcx album cover sparked plenty of conversation. But she told us how she feels back in 2024

• And once again you can remix your own Charli album cover

• Final Charli news: Olivia Rodrigo left her comfort zone in the club with her this week

• We spent some time recapping how Phoebe Bridgers flipped the script on touring

• And her MSG show sounded so good

• Couples who look alike…

• Hope these two are collaborating!

• Myha’la looking awesome for Dazed

• And we are dying to know the name of Molly-Mae’s new baby

Subscribe now

This week, Rosa Walton popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Rosa is a musician best known as one-half of the experimental pop duo, Let’s Eat Grandma. Today she is releasing her debut solo album, Tell Me It’s A Dream, which she co-produced with David Wrench (Frank Ocean, Jamie xx).

📺 Watching: Obsession in the cinema. Plus this great video essay from Nina Montagne on the ways in which life opens up when you take pleasure seriously, and this extremely lovely interview between Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston.

📖 Reading: There Is No Sound of the 2020s. Yet, a new report from Resident Advisor. Plus the Charli xcx interview in shaad magazine, and this LA Times article about millennial parents driving a kids’ clothing resale boom with their love for vintage.

🎧 Listening to: Detour, the new Kim Petras album, She Won’t Let Go, the new Sistra album, and ‘Secret Language’, the new Ryan Beatty single.

Happy weekend to us all 🫶

Here’s what’s on the menu for today:

• Open Tabs: The Capsule Summer Bucket List 🧺

• News: All the bits you may have missed from this week

• Hot + Not: With musician Martin Luke Brown

• Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Have a great one!

Holly x

We had a brief panic this week that May had gone extremely fast, meaning that summer too would come and go before we know it. The days are long, creeping up to summer solstice, and while we love this period, there’s always that underlying worry: how do we make the most of it? How do we make it last? There are a bunch of ways to try and slow down. But we thought it might be nice to choose some lovely things to prioritise this summer.

This is a long list, and we are not suggesting we scramble to do it all. Instead, choose 3-5 that resonate most, and see if you can find time to try them before September.

1. Fall asleep outside. Find a tree or a parasol, lay out a blanket, and relax with the freedom to fall asleep. Focus on letting the outdoor sounds wash over you.

2. Have an elevated picnic. This is a picnic with intention: plan ahead with your friends to each bring your favourite treats, like a fresh loaf from your favourite bakery, really good butter, and a bottle of wine chosen from a local bar.

3. Watch a movie outside. This could be a local open-air cinema pop-up, or hanging a white sheet in your yard and projecting a film yourself. Both are great!

4. Or take it up a notch, and go to an open-air theatre.

5. Mediocre crafting. Choose a craft you love but are not so talented at (like watercolour painting or clay modelling) and spend an afternoon just having a go at it. The goal is creativity and playfulness, not productivity or perfection.

6. Pastry tasting. Go to a couple of local bakeries, or choose your favourite one, and buy three baked goods. Take them to a local park and have a taste test, discussing what you like about each one. Bonus points if you accidentally find the best cinnamon bun.

7. Have a hotel day. Search for hotels in your city that offer day passes and spend the day there. If you’re struggling for a pass, just get a drink and read in the lobby.

8. Mini photography project. Buy a disposable camera, or a second-hand digital or film camera, and fill a roll of film with a specific focus. Maybe you’ll try to capture the people you see for a couple of weeks, or choose one colour to photograph. When you get them developed, you’ll have a mini photography project, and probably a few snaps you love enough to frame for your wall.

9. Spontaneous train ride. Get on a local or commuter train and ride for 45 mins to a small town or green space you’ve never visited before. Grab a coffee or some lunch when you arrive, walk around for a bit, then return home. The change of scenery is worth it!

10. Dawn or dusk dip. Head to a local lido, swimming pond, or other body of water in the early morning or early evening. You’ll avoid the midday crowds and have a more peaceful, cinematic experience.

11. Single-author reading list. Choose one writer and aim to read three pieces of their work, back to back. This can be full books or shorter pieces like essays, and grants you the chance to dive deeper into their headspace. Great examples are Joan Didion, Sheila Heti, James Baldwin, or Deborah Levy.

12. Intentional sunset. Find a high vantage point (a rooftop, a hill) and watch the sun go down from start to finish. Sit with your friends, don’t try to do anything else, and just enjoy chatting as you watch the sky change colours.

13. Jazz night. Once the sun has set and the temperature cools, have a cool shower and then get dressed up for a jazz night. Think: summer silks, jewellery, and freshly moisturised skin, all ready to go and listen to some great music in an indulgent setting.

14. Weekly gratitude ritual. Set a reminder every Friday evening to write down three things you’re grateful for. This is a lovely way to transition into weekend mode, and you may end up forming up a habit you keep for the rest of the year.

15. Visit a botanical garden. And make the effort to learn the names of a few plant species you like the look of!

16. Go to a theme park. One of the best ways to feel a bunch of childlike emotions in a day.

17. Museum lates. Skip the busy weekend crowds and head to a gallery or museum during their evening hours. It feels different after dark! Romantic and atmospheric.

18. Visit a sculpture park. Always worth the effort! And a great place to walk and talk with people you love.

19. Phone-free mornings. Spend a weekend morning completely phone-free, making coffee, chatting, reading, or planning your day with pen and paper before picking up your devices.

20. Get a pedicure with a friend. Ask for chairs next to each other and just chat.

21. Tackle a home project. Choose one small thing to fix, change, or decorate in your home and complete the task. This could be putting up some bookshelves or finding a solution for hallway mess and you’ll appreciate the effort!

22. Find a community garden. Find out if your city has a community garden and spend a day there with a friend or your partner.

23. Buy a summer perfume and wear it to help document your memories of the season. Not sure where to start? Check out Circe’s perfume guide :)

24. Visit a vineyard. This is the sort of thing you make time for on holiday but you can do it closer to home too, which automatically makes you feel like you have escaped.

25. Do something witchy for the solstice. Some relatively low-effort but fun ways to mark the longest day of the year: make flower crowns, spend time by a river or natural pond, host a bonfire, or light candles to burn pieces of paper inscribed with unwanted vibes. And if you have crystals, charge them in the solstice sun. For your calendars: Sunday 21st June!

We’d love to hear which ones appeal to you, and if you have more suggestions, please leave them in the comments <3

Leave a comment

And do share this with friends you’d love to share these experiences with :)

Share

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• The Pinterest Summer Trends report is here. You’ll notice that some feel familiar, but slightly evolved, meaning that the rapid trend cycle is slowing

• This is clever and cool from Dua Lipa

• Turns out the Phoebe Bridgers secret tour has been in the works for a while!

• And meanwhile, here’s a first look at her in the new A24 movie

• Courtside at the basketball this week: Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner doing shot chasers, and Maggie Rogers

• There are some fun theories about the new Charli xcx album

• Olivia Rodrigo addressed the weird reaction to her babydoll dress

• Gracie Abrams has picked excellent support acts

• Zendaya said she’s been dreaming about her wedding dress since she was a kid

• And we’re talking about Susan Boyle again!

Subscribe now

This week, Martin Luke Brown popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Martin is a British singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist known for his soulful, emotive indie-pop sound and honest storytelling. In addition to his solo career and collaborations with artists like Lizzy McAlpine, he is a founding member of the indie supergroup FIZZ alongside dodie, Orla Gartland, and Greta Isaac. His new single ‘dream state’ is out today!

📺 Watching: Rivals season 2 on streaming, Lena Dunham on Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Audrey Hobert covering her brother’s music for Like A Version, and this brilliant Muna x Rolling Stone interview.

📖 Reading: Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker column on the death of the “good” millennial lifestyle brand, and resurfacing Emma Garland’s great piece on Olivia Rodrigo’s babydoll dress.

🎧 Listening to: Florescence, the new Maisie Peters album, Down On Earth, the new Turnover album, and ‘Beg For Me’, the first of the Lily Allen remixes, featuring JADE. And a final treat: Dr Orna from Couples Therapy on Las Culturistas.

Happy weekend to us all 🫶

Here’s what’s on the menu for today:

• Open Tabs: An essay on my weekend in Helsinki and what it taught me about holidays and expectation

• News: All the bits you may have missed from this week

• Hot + Not: With the very fun artist Alfreda

• Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Have a great one!

Holly x

Since starting Capsule, I’ve experienced holidays differently. First, because it’s hard in general to switch off from something you run, and second, because I started to see these breaks as vital space for having ideas. After spending a truly nourishing week in Mallorca a few years ago, I’ve held each trip up to the same standard: this must be the time I switch off, return to my deepest self, and cultivate some new thoughts.

Of course, pressure is not the best incubator for relaxation or creativity, and I’ve never quite replicated what happened in Mallorca that time. Those days were rare, like holding up a seashell to listen to some interior knowledge I didn’t even realise was there. I’ve since imagined this feeling and tried to map out my path to return. But I’d be lying if I said I’d successfully made it back there.

When I landed at Helsinki airport last week, I was greeted by advertising screens plastered with the word “happy.” That’s cute, I thought, not yet registering that Finland is the happiest place in the world.

I spent my first two days alone. This is not something I do often, so I took the task of finding things to do very seriously. I treated it like a project: first, I noted down the things I enjoy the most – modernist architecture, second-hand furniture, buttery white wine – and then began researching each category to target. I watched TikTok videos, read travel blogs with very long titles, and typed words like “Helsinki cafe” into Instagram. I told Google Gemini my interests, plus a long list of brands I like, and asked for specific stores I might enjoy browsing. I texted my brother’s friend from architecture school who lives in Estonia. Close enough. I built a Google Map scattered with pins, leaving me with much more to see and do than I could ever fit into 48 hours.

During this process, I realised a few times that it was neurotic. Surely I could just wander the streets, stumble upon interesting things, and be in the moment. Instead I was adding pressure, trying to design a perfect itinerary to fully capitalise on this rare opportunity. Yet when I toyed with ditching the research, I felt like I was denying myself something that could give me a lot.

This was a lesson. Sometimes the platitudes about just “being present” and “going with the flow” can withhold you from other experiences you will enjoy. If you have a set of interests and an aptitude for planning, accepting this and leaning into it can be a really great thing.

And so my days were full: a guided tour around Alvar Aalto’s house, intimately creeping around with a group of people all in our socks, three of us wearing the same Uniqlo barrel leg trousers. A novel tram ride to Kallio, a district filled with vintage shops, day-to-night cafes, and lots of considered public seating. A glass of wine just off Senate Square, chosen in conversation with a lovely Finnish woman who could immediately tell it was my first time. That was the first of many conversations with strangers. Being alone and away from home prompts you to ask the questions in your mind, whether that’s the origin story of a jewellery concept store or just what the most traditional thing is on the menu.

Having a lot to do took me out of my head and into my body. Instead of wondering whether I was relaxing or having the “right” sort of thoughts, my time was simply occupied, each hour filled with something handpicked to my taste. A gift to myself.

I spent the rest of my weekend with my partner and our friend, both in town to run the Helsinki marathon. The pace accelerated: a breakfast slot, a race start time, a mission to spectate at different moments. We were all simultaneously on the move, seeing the city in one of the most active ways possible. Yet my mood, heart rate, and whatever other ways there are to analyse how you feel inside continually reaffirmed my calmness. I was busy, yes, even racking up miles on foot to hit specific spectating timeslots. But I was both energised and at ease, a state of being quite hard to comprehend when normal life puts these two things at odds with each other. Usually, I’m either busily racing through life, or in an allotted period of rest. It’s quite magical to feel both at once.

The pinnacle of this embodied leisure came on Saturday evening at Löyly, an iconic sauna on the waterfront in Helsinki. Famous for its sculptural wooden facade, it features traditional saunas, a bar, and a plunge pool directly in the Baltic Sea. From a distance, the cold dip/sauna cycle looks peaceful, icy water droplets evaporating from skin with a view of the horizon. But of course the reality is quite different: coaxing oneself into the frigidity, with the promise it will all be worth it when you reach the heat. Mind over matter, I chanted to myself, over and over again.

The benefits appear within minutes. A burst of laughter. The urge to tell someone you HAVE to do this, you’ll love it I swear. The beads of sweat join together and race down your chest. Shall we do it again?

The sauna was also more social than I had expected. At gyms in the UK, I have mainly experienced silence and tiptoing, while we each stare at the timer, words unsaid. In Helsinki, conversations flourished. We talked to groups of Finnish friends and quizzed them about their habits. We pondered the differences between smoke saunas and hot stones, and joked that we couldn’t handle the heat like them. We learned that there is one sauna for every two people in Finland. That fact alone had us continually repeating the phrase that’s why they’re the happiest country in the world.

Towards the end of our session, we naturally asked each other what we were grateful for. Certain environments make you do that. We made some jokes (my friend is on a big Yorkshire pudding phase at the moment), but each had an earnest answer waiting in line. I said I felt grateful to have spent a few days truly in my body, that was the only way I could describe it. I was active, yes, but psychologically I felt this rare occasion of truly being where my feet were.

As the trip drew to a close, I had no Notes App lists of essay ideas or newsletter growth hacks or a person to collaborate with. I did not have a profound new understanding about anything, really. I just had a very good weekend.

Leave a comment

P.S. If you are ever going to Helsinki, message me!

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• The Harry Styles tour kicked off with some teething issues…

• …which are being responded to in real time

• Gucci put on a show in Times Square, which a lot of people are calling “holding up a mirror” to the customer

• Timothée Chalamet’s new hair is great

• John Travolta has a new accessory

• Charli xcx promises she’s not trying to alienate people

• And she’s at her best when she’s existential

• Two amazing outfits that look better together

• Gabbriette takes Cannes

• And here’s a sweet interview with a venue owner from a place on the surprise Phoebe Bridgers tour. He’s been sitting on this since last August!

Subscribe now

This week, Alfreda popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Alfreda is a London-based art-pop artist making theatrical songs that mix spoken word, big pop hooks and a touch of camp humour. She curates Bedroom Tales Cabaret at House of KOKO and has sold out shows at London’s Troubadour, Servant Jazz Quarters, and the Shacklewell Arms. Her upcoming musical project TEASERAMA! will be released throughout the year, and you can listen to ‘Patsy’ here!

📺 Watching: The Christophers in the cinema, ‘SS26’, the new Charli xcx video and song, and Slayyyter performing on the Jimmy Fallon show.

📖 Reading: Hayley Williams’s newsletter reflecting on her solo tour, Jemima Kirke’s latest advice column, which is all about sex, and this essay from , which pulled me in with the title: ‘The most valuable words a therapist ever said to me’.

🎧 Listening to: everyone for ten minutes, the new Bleachers album, The Afterparty, the new Lykke Li album, ‘the cure’, the new Olivia Rodrigo song, and ‘Heart Has To Work So Hard’, the new Blondshell song.

Delighted to bring you an essay from for this week’s Open Tabs section. She shares her journey from workaholic to hobby enthusiast and the lessons learned along the way. I think we can all relate to the often futile pursuit that is deriving all your worth from work!

Elsewhere in the newsletter:

• News you may have missed this week

• Hot + Not with Mae Muller (of Eurovision!)

• Recs to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Hope it’s a great one,

Holly x

I’ve been a work addict forever. Since the age of 12, I’ve never not had at least one job, usually two or three. All throughout university, I had a full-time job flogging trainers to sneakerheads and tourists. What started as a requirement to pay for Pizza Hut and CDs became a way to fund a career in writing. But, alongside this adolescent hustle, I made a vital error at age 18. I dropped every hobby I had.

Anything that wasn’t directly taking me closer to being A Writer – a fun and glamorous pursuit I understood mostly through the medium of ‘00s movies like The Devil Wears Prada and How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days – had to go. In these movies, female ambition was a glossy inevitability in a Prada skirt – all you had to do was work hard. And I always worked hard. At least from the moment I showed myself to be a secret nerd, shocking everyone, when I opened some of the best results in the country for multiple GCSEs. I’d been more or less invisible. Then, suddenly, my family was proud of me, people at school fancied me, ‘everyone’ loved me. I had found my path and purpose!

From the outside (and the inside, too) my adult life has been dominated by work. Both ‘writing’ and ‘work’ fulfil the same functions for a demented person like me: input and output, cause and effect. My brain loves the structure of it – taking an idea from my intuition or an editor, opening the blank page, pounding through it, finishing the task, then doing it all over again the next day. That same disturbed brain has always worked fast and chaotically, playing a song or two, while simultaneously daydreaming about fame and fortune, and aggressively debating answers to an existential question. Work turns the volume down on all that noise. There are no variables, except the fact that sometimes you get positive external validation from readers or your boss, and other times you don’t. Regardless, I understand explicitly what is required of me, and I rise to the occasion. Ever heard of “open loops”? Well, writing and work take every stray lasso of psychic debris and tie them into a neat bow.

When I was made redundant from my dream job in magazines in 2022, alongside a series of losses in my personal life, something quite profound broke in me. I started 2023 with nothing, a real blank page of an existence. The one pillar that had always been there for me – work – was no longer a stable option to build my entire life around. Meaning and structure had left my world.

My sponsor, always an advocate for moderation and balance, asked me what I did for fun. I got what she was getting at – I needed something to balance out all this Catholic self-flagellation. But I couldn’t answer her. As for free time, I essentially gave myself none. Leisure felt like a dangerous lapse in vigilance. It was for hacks. Even when I saw friends and family, I experienced it as a brief, authorised absence from work. “I’m just so busy at the moment” was my obnoxious catchphrase. I was having ridiculous, fun and stupid adventures, though it all eventually fed back into the work. But it’s also true that I probably wouldn’t have done most of it, if I hadn’t believed on some level, that it supported the master task of communicating things to a reader.

I intended to start slowly when introducing hobbies into my life. I wanted to try acting first, because it was an organising principle of my childhood. Next I took up horse-riding again and went with a close friend to stay on a ranch in Montana. Then the activities came thick and fast: new styles of meditation, trance, psychic mediumship, tai chi, qigong, boxing, singing, yoga, hiking, life drawing, collaging, photography, etc, etc, etc. Nothing was outside the realms of possibility. If it was a niche activity on a random night of the week that I could just rock up to, I’d be there. Some I loved enough to pursue, some were just for a fleeting evening. I was a woman obsessed.

Almost overnight, work began to occupy my mind and my life a normal, non-pathological amount. Why had I convinced myself that every hour of my twenties had to be about “making it”? Why was there no space for anything that couldn’t be folded into an essay (beyond partying, I guess, but even then)? Hobbies had seemed embarrassing! A distraction! My artistic aspirations should have been the antidote to the millennial Girlboss attitude, but maybe I was one of them anyway – trading my existence for an identity, validation, and a pat on the back.

Mostly, though, I think I operated this way because nobody tells you that having no hobbies makes you a total 2D loser. School and society tell you to get a job and eat healthily and work out. They don’t encourage you to have a nice well-rounded life by getting strangely into making off-putting aura portraits of your friends in your spare time. That’s not serving our hyper-capitalistic overlords, unless you count the money I spent on colouring pencils from Jeff Bezos’ website.

But hobbies are genuinely so important (a meagre revelation to anyone reading this thinking, “well, duh”). They have made me happier and provided surprising anecdotes to rant about at events. Ironically, they provide more structure than work ever did for me – especially now that AI exists and the market for the written word is drying up. Even if I moved to a different city or country, I could go to a class for one of my interests. I can do them if I’m travelling or on holiday. All of them allow me to enter the “flow state” that I so long to be in all the time, the state I slip into when I write. I have started to believe that I will forever be safe and supported through the repetition and ritual of my ever-growing roster of activities.

Relatedly, I currently have an active ban on new hobbies. One thing about being a hobbyist (!) is that it is expensive. Work is now vital for funding my classes. How else am I expected to pay for a £700 week-long course in Essex? Who among us is fronting the bill for me to sway like a willow tree with pensioners in the town hall? My career might be going nowhere and my life a total shit show, but right now I’ve forgotten about all that because I’m on the back of a horse that is highly attuned to my mood and micro-movements, and now I’m on a stage responding to a stranger attempting to improv a first date gone disastrously wrong. I don’t care about “Work” anymore because I am no longer just a worker, a drone, a lump of generative AI! I am a soul with passions and interests! I am here to play and create like the creator himself! I am not a byproduct of a failing industry or the degrees I pointlessly collected – I am alive! I am alive! I am alive!

Leave a comment

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• This week we became a Phoebe Bridgers news outlet on Instagram. See: details about the secret shows, her next collaborators, and where she might pop up next

• Sad to report that Kitri is closing its doors after nine years. Shop the remainder of their spring collection here

• Hailey Bieber is the face of many brands (rhode, Alaïa, Saint Laurent, DKNY), and now, Mango

• And another brand deal for Charli xcx, this time with Nothing, the headphones brand, where she’s also an investor

• Also here’s a closer look at the great clothes in the ‘Rock Music’ video

• Loved Chanel’s Mother’s Day campaign, featuring drawings by kids

• Why is everything black and white now?

• We should be funmaxxing like Dua

• Speaking of, here’s a peep at her bachelorette, or do we think she calls it a hen?

• Emma Chamberlain’s coffee shop just opened

• And the next Gracie Abrams album is called Daughter From Hell, which is one way of owning the nepo baby allegations

• Jonathan Anderson had his first Cruise collection for Dior. These details are amazing

Subscribe now

This week, Mae Muller popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Mae is a singer-songwriter from London. Since representing the UK at Eurovision 2023, Mae has re-emerged as a frank and relatable voice for her generation by blending Y2K-inspired dance-pop with sharp, self-aware songwriting. Her latest music offers a high-energy outlet for communal catharsis, navigating everything from generational frustration to messy relationships.

📺 Watching: Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM Requiem (if you’re lucky enough to have Apple Music at this time!), plus the new video for ‘Eastside Girls’ by MUNA, JADE’s Tiny Desk, and this BTS video of the making of Charli’s ‘Rock Music’ video is genuinely really good.

📖 Reading: This excellent essay by on the trick mirror of making art about yourself, with references to Justin Bieber, Lena Dunham, and Lady Gaga. And Lena Dunham’s final installation of Dunhamisms, her brief advice column launched to countdown to her 40th. It’s a good one! And a last treat: her list of 40 things she wants to do after 40.

🎧 Listening to: Dancing On The Wall, the great new MUNA album, Sugar Girl, the new Little Simz EP, ‘Hit the Wall’, the new Gracie Abrams song, ‘Promise (When You Go)’, the new After song. If you like the After song, dive into After EP 2.

Here it is: your 2026 Met Gala debrief. I am 99% sure you’ll need to click read online to see all the photos!

P.S. I was on BBC News yesterday talking about this! Huge moment for our little newsletter. I’ll be on again today — check Instagram for the clips later <3

Okay let’s go!

On Friday, we talked about the theme being vague. A reminder:

The exhibition explores the “dressed body” through three lenses: the omnipresent (classical and nude bodies), the overlooked (aging and pregnant bodies), and the universal (the anatomical body). In short: it’s a study of how clothes interact with the physical form in art history.

The dress code, “Fashion is Art”, seemed wide open. You can call anything art, right? But the best looks either offered a deep, contextual approach — the type of thing you need to look at for a long time and hear about the references and process to understand, or, they were inspired by an existing piece of art, and managed to pull off turning it into a garment.

There were fewer “weird body” approaches than I’d hoped for, but that being said, a lot of the “art” stuff was genuinely great in execution. Let’s take a look…

The conceptual takes

Rihanna came dressed as an aging oyster shell, made by Margiela. It received some criticism for not being “totally new” (read: it featured elements of existing Margiela couture), but I loved how she saw something that resonated with her and built on it. She said the piece is inspired by Barbados, her home, and positioning herself as something weathered and organic ties her to her roots and provides reflection on her journey so far. It’s a win for a look to be a bit weird but also feel deep in this way. And the hair and makeup rocks.

I also like how the silver Margiela put this look in conversation with her 2018 Margiela pope look.

Paloma Elsesser’s dress was made from hundreds of vintage dresses from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, sourced on eBay and upcycled by Francesco Risso (Marni). I love it when people use existing materials to make something new, and I think this piece cleverly connects to both the exhibition and the dress code. Using many scraps of material makes this piece feel textured and historic, but also truly made for Paloma’s body. The result is intimate, unique, and ticks the “piece of art” box so easily.

Bad Bunny picked up on the exhibition’s “overlooked” bodies and aged himself up. This is more about the beauty than the clothing — the suit is custom Zara (like his Super Bowl look) and is designed to look ageless to contrast with him. The execution feels a bit Halloween but we needed someone to make this statement and it’s pleasing to see it on a man known for having a great glow up. He knows none of this lasts forever and that’s good!

Kendall Jenner wore custom Zac Posen for Gap, in a look tied both to the exhibition and the dress code. Some photos don’t do it justice, but seeing it photographed properly with the winged cape you get it. It’s inspired by the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a 190 BC Hellenistic Greek sculpture on display at the top of a staircase in the Louvre. Kendall is a quiet Met Gala slay for me, her recent years have been really strong and very her.

Cardi B brought us one of the weirder looks of the night, playing with shapes, anatomy, and the surreal body. It’s by Marc Jacobs, and is inspired by the work of German artist Hans Bellmer, who worked with dismembered dolls. This gets points for “only at the Met” and “beautiful woman willing to look strange”.

Kim Kardashian tapped British pop artist Allen Jones for a fiberglass breastplate, inspired by one previously seen on Kate Moss. The fact that this theme looks so normal on Kim K really cements the impact of her body and aesthetic on our generation.

The “Fashion is Art” takes

I was really frightened of the museum gift shop core angle. And yet so many of the gowns inspired by paintings were actually great. To give credit where it’s due…

Hunter Schafer in Prada was one of the best of the night. Inspired by Klimt’s Mäda Primavesi, it’s fairly subtle yet so fresh. To make white and muted grey florals stand out on a carpet like this is a huge achievement. Love her!!!

Emma Chamberlain’s Mugler hand-painted dress is inspired by the brushstrokes of Munch and Van Gogh, but also her Dad who is a painter. This had the potential to be really bad but it works because a) you can tell she loves it and b) there was as much focus on the garment shaping as there was on the painted aspect.

Gracie Abrams in Chanel was one of those that looks understated until you see the references, and then you think: this is a knockout. This was for the Tumblr girls, for the girls who love vintage jewellery, for the girls who don’t want to move to Kindle.

If you’ve seen the Alexa Chung art account on Instagram, you’ll know how much fun she had with this. For years fans have compared her outfits to paintings, and this time she got to choose one herself, made by Dior. Are we warming up to Jonathan Anderson’s flower earrings?

Love a more gothic Madonna, love that she brought us a bit of carpet spectacle. Although her Saint Laurent piece doesn’t make you think of the body much at all, it does introduce lots of us to a piece of art and creates a scene. It’s uncommon to have this many outfit plus ones on a Met Gala carpet, and even more uncommon to have them dressed as part of the look, and not just helpers in black tuxedos.

Additional details worth seeing

Anok Yai wore Balenciaga, but her make up was the standout. She stayed in character the whole time.

While Rachel Zegler’s main look lacked a bit of texture and depth, her eye mask inspired by The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was elegant and affecting.

Ayo Edebiri’s Chanel look was delicate and beautiful. Not her most memorable Met but the feathered braid, like Rihanna’s glam, created true synergy between her body and her look.

Charli xcx’s Saint Laurent dress featured resin irises, inspired by Van Gogh. Charli noted that Yves Saint Laurent used to give irises to his favourite muses, and the detail of this concept felt in line with where Charli is heading as an artist.

In a carpet interview with Emma Chamberlain, Charli said she’s been feeling inspired by going out and having IRL experiences with people. The physicality of the flower brought this into light — it felt like a push towards the real.

In a different but connected vein, Janelle Monae commented on technology, in a Christian Siriano gown made of mossy nature and discarded cables and bits of hardware. The butterflies and dragonflies moved, and when asked about her look, she simply said “balance must be restored.”

The flops

First up Katy Perry, who wore a Stella McCartney gown and headpiece by Miodrag Guberinic. Her look also commented on technology, but in a heavy-handed “we live in a society” sort of way. Some notes on the mask from the press release:

The problem with KP is a) everything is too literal and b) she’s often doing things a few years later than other very famous people (Kim K, Charli xcx). Her gloves managed to become a big talking point, though, as one hand featured six fingers to mimic the weaknesses in AI image generation. This was a nice nod to the false AI images of Katy Perry at previous Met Galas, but the message didn’t carry enough meaning.

Heidi Klum has been in the Halloween game for a really long time and it shows. Her outfit is made not by a traditional designer but by a makeup artist called Mike Marino. It sounds cool on paper. The feet are mad. But unfortunately this was the Peeta from The Hunger Games moment we all feared.

She obviously looks great but you must hear Nicole Kidman’s inspiration for her look:

“Fashion is art and I wanted something red, because I wanted to embrace the way in which red has been used in art through the years.”

Randomly becoming a death doula. Deciding red needs more recognition. I do want whatever Nicole Kidman is having.

Hailey Bieber looks fine! Still waiting to see her in something freaky. This was too close to Gigi Hadid at Vogue World in 2024.

A series of flops because they did too little:

Carey Mulligan (struggling to connect to the theme at all?), Doja Cat (expected so much more!!!), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (meh), Elizabeth Debicki (even she looks bored), Margot Robbie (there was potential but the end result is giving nothing).

And also this — Bhavita Mandava is a rising star model. Her look is a reference to her Chanel debut, and her “jeans” aren’t actually made of denim but have been interpreted that way. Although there is meaning here it looks like she missed an opportunity to shine!

A series of flops because they did too much:

Sarah Paulson’s Metieres Fecales dress is awesome. It’s from their collection designed to caricature the ultra-wealthy, which would have been enough for the Bezos gala. The dollar is a) too on the nose and b) now facing a bunch of backlash because she’s wealthy too. Odessa A’Zion we usually love but this one was a struggle, Kris Jenner is in costume, and Amanda Seyfried is going to prom, especially when you see the big ponytail.

Final things worth noting:

• Absences: Zendaya, Olivia Rodrigo (did go to the afterparty), Bella Hadid (although she hasn’t been for a few years)

• Aariana Rose Philip made history as the first person to attend the Met Gala carpet in a wheelchair. She rocks so much!! (You might recognise her from the Collina Strada runway shows)

• Blue Ivy beat North West to the carpet

Closing notes

“Fashion is Art” brought us both highs and lows. While it gave us gorgeous, painterly moments from the likes of Hunter Schafer and Emma Chamberlain, it also allowed for some intellectual laziness (Nicole Kidman, Katy Perry).

But the most impactful moments came from the looks that went beyond looking like a painting, treating their own bodies as the canvas. Rihanna’s Margiela oyster or Janelle Monae’s high-tech nature study will stay with us because they acknowledge that the dressed body is not just a mannequin, but something innately imbued with meaning. The body is living, breathing, and constantly changing. That alone makes it worthy of a piece of art!

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!!! We can blame any spelling mistakes on the chaos of the past 12 hours.

Holly x

Leave a comment

Hope everyone is well this week 🫶. I personally am very happy it’s the weekend.

Today’s issue is a bit of a Met Gala primer, filled with predictions. I would love you to share anything you would love or hate to see in the comments!

We’ll be landing in your inboxes again next Tuesday with a special Met Gala debrief.

Speak soon!

Holly x

The Met Gala is a paradox: a billion-dollar event of elite excess that somehow remains one of our strongest cultural barometers. You can date a year just by its silhouettes: Kim Kardashian’s floral couch Givenchy dress of 2013 or Beyoncé’s 2015 naked dress are timestamps we return to again and again.

The conversations around the Met slightly evolve year on year. Here’s what we’ll likely be talking about this time around…

1. The Bezos of it all

For the first time in Met Gala history, the lead sponsor is not a fashion house but billionaires Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos. There is very little good PR about this: people broadly see fashion’s tech-bro influx as both troublesome and a killer of taste.

But as Amy Odell points out, “tech world’s march toward Met Gala domination has been long.” For more than a decade, the gala has received funding from corporations like Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, Instagram, and TikTok. Still, the Bezos name front-and-centre feels different, like the need for cash has officially outweighed the need to gatekeep taste. Critic made a great Instagram post comparing Lauren Sanchez Bezos’s social climbing and media strategy to that of Kim Kardashian: both used Vogue covers as a turning point in their public image.

2. The Ozempic Era

Although GLP-1s came onto the scene a couple of years ago, we’re now firmly in the Ozempic Era. What began as a medical tool for some has morphed into a red-carpet prerequisite, with already-small celebrities using the drug to get even smaller. This year’s Met is likely to be inextricable from conversations about thinness, and since the theme is so tied to the body (as we’ll get onto), we’re likely to interpret thin bodies as both retro (harking back to the 90s and 00s) and eerily futuristic (a direct product of new medical technology).

3. The vague theme

We know that the real Met Gala fun lies in our opportunity to judge a celebrity’s ability to follow a theme. But in order to weigh in, we must first understand the brief. And this year, that’s a bit of an ask.

There are two distinct parts:

Curator Andrew Bolton’s exhibition sounds cool. It explores the “dressed body” through three lenses: the omnipresent (classical and nude bodies), the overlooked (aging and pregnant bodies), and the universal (the anatomical body). In short: it’s a study of how clothes interact with the physical form in art history.

While the exhibition leans into the political and biological, the official dress code, “Fashion is Art”, is incredibly vague (and rather close to something we’d use in our school art projects).

After years of having literary texts to help guide the dress code (like J.G. Ballard’s The Garden of Time in 2024 or Monica L. Miller’s Black Dandyism in 2025), we are now operating entirely on vibes. And that is scary.

“Fashion is Art” also feels detached from the nuance of the exhibition, creating a buffer against controversy (and opening the doors for potential cringe and chaos). In theory, the lack of detail means it should be easier than ever to be “on theme”, but without clear direction, I want us to brace ourselves for some generational flops.

To get us excited for next week, we’re rounding off with some predictive Met Gala Hot + Nots. Let’s hope we get to cross some of these off!

The Met Gala takes place on Monday evening in New York. We’ll see you on Tuesday for a special debrief issue!

Leave a comment

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Ayo Edebiri is consistently the best dressed woman of our times (exhibit A and B this week)

• The next divisive shoe has arrived

• Lorde is probably teasing a deluxe version of Virgin with this dark shower

• Charli xcx is reaching into the fandom again

• A beautiful campaign

• If you have been feeling blue lately, learn from this Maggie Rogers strategy

• Hailey Bieber weighed in on which wellness trends are worth it

• Taylor Swift loves emo

• Kylie Jenner launched a new collection then opted to step out wearing… the designer version of her product

• Emma Chamberlain is pausing her podcast

• And in science news we should all pay attention to: research shows that even mild dehydration affects mood in healthy young women. This speaks for a lot this week. Refill that glass!!!!

Subscribe now

This week, Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Kyle is an American writer and trend analyst. He’s currently based in Barcelona and writes The Trend Report™.

📺 Watching: The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the cinema, of course. Plus this excellent new GENER8ION x Yung Lean video, and this gorgeous Holly Humberstone performance of ‘White Noise’ for Spotify. Song of the summer…

📖 Reading: Jessica DeFino’s latest advice column, on how to respond when a friend criticises themselves. Plus this great breakdown of all the artwork on the walls in the apartment in The Drama, and this list of productivity tips from Ella Emhoff.

🎧 Listening to: Middle of Nowhere, the new Kacey Musgraves album, MAITREYA CORSO, Maya Hawke’s new album (start with ‘Devil You Know’), and Lucy Dacus on the HSM podcast.

Hope we are all well 🫶

This week’s Open Tabs section is an essay on why stars are using laptops to create a sense of intimacy, inspired by recent performances from Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, and Lorde. I think there’s a lot we can learn about what matters in art, and how to keep seeking out the good bits of the internet!

Scroll for your weekly News, a Hot + Not from Miso Extra, and stuff to Add to Queue this weekend.

Enjoy enjoy! And feel free to share with your friends.

Holly x

In her new music video for ‘drop dead’, Olivia Rodrigo slides down the hallways of the palace of Versailles, singing through wired headphones. The setting is explicitly grand – painted Baroque ceilings, gardens with geometric topiaries, sweeping marble staircases – but the video is intimate. We see Olivia sitting cross-legged on a bed, clicking on her computer, as she sings:

Oh, one night I was bored in bed

And stalked you on the internet

It’s feminine intuition

There is obviously a sharp juxtaposition at play here: having the means to hire out an entire palace but spending time in there plugged into your laptop. The wired headphones are no accident, either. Over the past couple of years, they have become the symbol of intentional, analogue listening, and a rejection of new technology.

If this was a 2010s music video, there would be dozens upon dozens of dancers (think ‘G.U.Y’ by Lady Gaga or ‘Firework’ by Katy Perry, which are also shot in palaces or castles), multiple outfit changes, even stunts.

Yet despite being in the upper echelon of pop stardom, with the budget for archival fashion and high-concept Petra Collins collaborations, Olivia is reaching for the mundane. The image of her sitting at her laptop is the ultimate symbol of intimacy and girlhood: it represents the quiet moments we have all spent in our bedrooms, using the internet for its best asset – the gateway through which we discover our taste and build our identity.

And crucially, she’s on a laptop, not her phone. While the phone is a tool for passive, infinite scrolling, the laptop is closer to active creativity. This is made literal in the second music video for ‘drop dead’, a DIY version filmed entirely via Photo Booth while on set.

Olivia is one of a few stars using their laptops to create a sense of intimacy with their big audiences. At Coachella last week, Justin Bieber delivered a stripped-back headline set. Dressed in baggy clothes within a cocoon-like set, he prioritised new music as a way to reset his boundaries and signal the artist he wants to become.

The highlight of the show saw Justin transform the stage into a digital living room. Sitting at his MacBook, he projected a raw feed of his YouTube history, shuffling through old songs, home videos, and memes. This wasn’t for everyone – many thought it was lazy, and even sexist, arguing that Sabrina Carpenter would not be able to get away with doing “so little”. I guess the question to ask here is whether you think the laptop is the window to the soul, or a slacking shortcut?

I found it to be extremely intimate. To watch a star on one of the biggest global stages effectively doing what we all do with our friends at home is not something we see often. Using YouTube for the old music may have been a clever workaround for his sold catalogue, but the outcome was a rare glimpse of a performer on his own terms, inviting us to meet him where he is now, rather than being stuck as a ghost of his teenage self.

By contrast, the Sabrina Carpenter show was technically exceptional, and the months of rehearsals and vast team input are felt in every frame. But even with a surprise Madonna cameo, reports suggested the crowd struggled to fully engage. Spectacle, then, has a ceiling: we are so overstimulated that “more” does not always equate to “better”. Sometimes it just adds to the noise.

If we want to feel more connected to art and to each other, we have to be okay with accepting “less” on the surface – not in artistic quality but in the shocks and the surprises. Sometimes the new thing will feel quieter and that’s okay.

Similarly, Lorde is another member of the laptop club. On her Ultrasound World Tour, for a moment she kneels on the floor, hunched over her laptop, tapping keys as she reimagines the song ‘Oceanic Feeling.’ The entire tour is stripped back, like watching a rehearsal – dancers are unchoreographed (or at least feel that way), she purposely shows the messy wires of her equipment, and wears plain t-shirts and boxer shorts. The MacBook moment is the pinnacle of this unfiltered era: watching Lorde simulate her at-home creative practice in real-time collapses the distance between the superstar on magazine covers and the Kiwi girl in her bedroom.

Why intimacy and why now? There are a few ways to look at it. Each of these stars has been in the public eye for a really long time: Olivia Rodrigo is only 23 but has been in the spotlight since 12, Justin Bieber was famously discovered on YouTube at 13, and Lorde signed to Universal Music Group at the same age. With each successful year of artistry, their audiences have increased, and so too has their level of production. Tours get bigger, album rollouts get longer, everything expands. There is a point when more is not always more, when the shininess of stardom eclipses the work itself.

There is also a specific kind of loneliness that comes with modern life. We are reached by notifications and see more Instagram handles than we do people IRL, but are rarely touched by art. It’s something we really have to seek out. Our phones are the site of this shallow connection, where algorithms feed us soulless campaigns and AI slop.

Many of us have accepted that we can’t really separate from the internet at this point, nor would we entirely want to. But there is a desire to carve out a healthier, and more fulfilling version of being online. Laptop time is different: being hunched over and tethered by a wire carries the nostalgia of our earlier, more intimate internet. Watching Lorde or Justin Bieber do the same thing on stage creates relatability, yes, as we see them discovering themselves in the same ways we used to. But even more than that, the quiet act offers a vote of confidence for stopping the performance and allowing yourself to be seen instead. When a stripped-back show makes you feel more than a 50-person dance troupe or novel outfit change, it proves that we already have everything we need to connect. We just need the signal to finally tune in.

Leave a comment

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Uniqlo’s next designer collab is Cecilie Bahnsen and you will be seeing it all summer

• Are Zoë Kravitz and Harry Styles engaged or is she just promoting Jessica McCormack jewellery?

• Happy to learn that Suki Waterhouse drove upstate to work with Aaron Dessner on her new album

• If you know that SZA cried her eyes out when Rihanna wanted to use her music for ‘Consideration’, then this interview response will land a little differently

• P.S. Obviously Rihanna’s daughter is wearing a Dior couture diaper

• Here’s Dakota Johnson looking gorgeous in a silk dress in Rome with Jessie Buckley, and then wearing a great red coat while out with Role Model

• Sending an enormous YES to this Olivia Dean tour outfit

• And to this from Amelia Dimoldenberg

• And Zara Larsson is in her Emma from The Drama era

Subscribe now

This week, Miso Extra popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Miso is a singer, rapper, and producer based in London, known for her unique blend of hip-hop, hyperpop, and UK Garage. She signed with Transgressive Records and released her debut album, Earcandy, in May 2025. Her latest single ‘Right Here’ is about being present and enjoying life.

📺 Watching: Anne Hathaway on Popcast, this MUNA interview about what it takes to collaborate on creative work, and this excellent PinkPantheress x Derrick Gee interview, where she plays her favourite British music for him.

📖 Reading: Cosmopolitan’s new campaign on male fertility, and obviously this week’s viral article on The Cut, ‘Losing My Friend Over Wegovy’. They always outdo themselves.

🎧 Listening to: Three albums for spring: this from My New Band Believe, the extended version of Rosalía’s LUX (which she has elegantly called Completed Works), and the new Arlo Parks, which is great.