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Bridgerton star Simone Ashley: I feel ‘safe and comfortable' filming sex scenes

Bridgerton star Simone Ashley: I feel ‘safe and comfortable' filming sex scenes

Irish Examiner4 days ago
Bridgerton star Simone Ashley has said she feels 'very safe and comfortable' when filming raunchy scenes in the show.
The Sex Education actor, who is about to release her debut album, described hit Netflix show Bridgerton as 'fantasy'.
She told Harper's Bazaar: 'It's about, 'What if?' and how love conquers all.
'Bridgerton represents nudity with a sense of romance, and I felt very safe and comfortable in what I was choosing to show to the world.'
It's going to be somewhat confessional ... and beautiful and messy
The fourth season of the regency era drama series is due to be released next year, with Simone telling the magazine: ''That show just gets bigger and bigger.
'Everyone has gone off to do incredible things, but we come back and it's like time hasn't moved.'
She also spoke of moving to Los Angeles by herself when she was just 18, adding: 'I was really scrappy.
'Since I was little, if I wanted something, I would do anything I could to get it. So, I took some modelling jobs to pay the bills and got into acting through that.'
Ashley, who appears on the digital cover of the magazine, said her album was made following a recent break-up.
She said: 'It's going to be somewhat confessional … and beautiful and messy.
'Good songs don't come from times when my life is regimented and predictable.
'They come when I am feeling vitality, and usually you either feel that way when your heart's broken, or you're euphoric.
'This work has been an amazing channel to put all those feelings into.'
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Clodagh Finn: Carmel Snow, the Irish Anna Wintour who reshaped US fashion
Clodagh Finn: Carmel Snow, the Irish Anna Wintour who reshaped US fashion

Irish Examiner

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  • Irish Examiner

Clodagh Finn: Carmel Snow, the Irish Anna Wintour who reshaped US fashion

Carmel Snow, the influential Irish woman who transformed US fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, was born Carmel White in Dalkey in 1887. Had she been a fan of the double-barrel name, she would have become Carmel Snow-White. I love that quirky if little-quoted fact, not least because it shows our insistence on shoehorning trailblazing women, such as Carmel and the in-the-news phenomenon that is Anna Wintour, into fairytale stereotypes. Women with power, influence and fearsome reputations are no Snow Whites, of course; they are cast as cartoonish wicked women. Or devil women. For proof, look no further than the box-office sensation, The Devil Wears Prada, the film supposedly based on Wintour. Mind you, as steely editor of Runway magazine, the wondrous Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly), offered us a poised and immensely entertaining version of female wickedness, one which we will happily see again soon. 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As she put it herself, Carmel Snow was creating a magazine for 'well-dressed women with well-dressed minds'. She discovered Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy. She gave Cartier-Bresson his first magazine assignment, and counted Coco Chanel, Colette, Salvador Dali, Liam O'Flaherty and Noel Coward as friends. Her vision was an immediate success. She took over Harper's Bazaar in 1935, tripling the circulation in jig time. It happened by accident, in a sense. Or rather due to the tragic death of her businessman father Peter White who died suddenly in Chicago in 1893 while setting up the Irish village, a showcase of Irish history, culture and industry, at the World Fair. Carmel's mother, Anne White, took over from him and did an exceptional job. A commemorative stamp of Carmel Snow. Picture: An Post The 'very capable and charming Mrs Peter White', as one newspaper described her, decided to stay in the US and open a craft shop. She later took over a dressmaking firm with a workroom of over 250 fitters and seamstresses who produced Parisian haute couture for the US market. Carmel later recalled her mother's 'momentous decision' to stay on and take over with admiration. 'Her determination had taken her a long way in that period when women, particularly Irish women, seldom ventured,' she wrote. Her mother's career brought Carmel to America and introduced her to the fashion world. She accompanied her mother on buying trips to Paris where she met Coco Chanel and witnessed the 'birth of the revolution in fashion'. She moved to the city — after a failed love affair, apparently — and worked for the Red Cross during WWI. Her big break into the fashion world came in the early 1920s when she filled in for a New York Times fashion correspondent who couldn't make one of the Paris fashion shows. Her copy was so good it led to a column in that paper and later a job as assistant fashion editor in Vogue. 'For the first day, I got myself up to kill. I wore a smart, but dead black crepe-de-chine dress and jacket from Vionnet, the exciting new Paris designer whose bias cut was so subtle I was proud of myself for recognising that here was an artist in fashion,' she wrote. Her subsequent career at Harper's has been well-covered; here was an early high-flier who did not let the birth of her children slow her down: 'I was never without a baby under the desk.' Much attention has been paid to her drinking in later life, too, and the dignity-stripping reality of that, but let us hope that serves as a reminder that people, even talented and successful ones, have feet of clay. I did not discover until this week, however, that she wrote a six-part series published by the Evening Echo in 1953. Here's a flavour of it: 'To wear the new Dior line, you cannot have a spare tire [sic]. What you need is a spare rib. You must have a concave stomach and pretty well nothing to sit on. You must be slender as a willow and as few of us are this, we must be prepared to be stern with ourselves.' Plus ça change. Although I do, naively perhaps, hold out hope for change. The collective noun for those at a publication's helm is, I read somewhere, 'a revision of editors'. How nicely put. Maybe we can now revise the caricatures we sketch for the women who sit in that hot seat.

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