Married At First Sight's hottest bride ever Evelyn Ellis ensures all eyes are on her as she stuns in a dramatic couture gown on the Cannes red carpet
The Married At First Sight star, 28, ensured she was the centre of attention as she graced the red carpet at the Opening Ceremony and premiere of Partir Un Jour (Leave One Day) in France.
The Aussie reality star joined a bevy of A-list luminaries including Eva Longoria, Heidi Klum and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Evelyn looked every inch the Hollywood siren in a dramatic, two-toned gown by Cappellazzo Couture.
The sculpted bodice featured an elegant corset silhouette in a gradient nude tone, with soft black detailing that traced her décolletage, adding a hint of gothic glamour.
A billowing tulle skirt cascaded into a voluminous train, flowing beautifully as she walked the red carpet.
Cinched at the waist with an abstract black satin detail, the dress perfectly highlighted Evelyn's hourglass figure.
Adding a touch of sparkle, the brunette beauty accessorised with a dazzling necklace from Affinity Diamonds, keeping the rest of her jewellery minimal to let her gown take centre stage.
Her makeup was flawless, with glowing skin, a nude lip and sultry, smoky eyes.
Evelyn wore her brunette tresses in a side-parted updo with soft, face-framing strands to complete her glamorous look.
This isn't the first time the glamorous TV bride has graced the red carpet as a special guest of L'Oréal.
While she was all smiles as she strutted through the event this year, Evelyn posted to Instagram on Sunday, saying she would miss boyfriend Duncan, 40, while in Cannes.
Posting photos of herself outside the airport, she wrote: 'This little lady is off on a big adventure, but can now declare she will be a little unhinged without Duncan.'
The happy couple, who announced they were dating in May 2023 despite having been matched with different partners on MAFS, just celebrated their second anniversary.
Evelyn and Duncan stepped out for a romantic evening last month and shared a heartfelt tribute to social media.
Taking to Instagram, Duncan posted a sweet message alongside a series of glam snaps with Evelyn.
'2 years of loving you. Which is 730 days, and approximately 1,051,200 minutes of putting up with each other. Thank you, for being you x,' he wrote.
Evelyn cheekily responded in the comments with, 'We still got it,' proving the spark is very much alive between the fan-favourite couple.
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Daily Mail
9 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
The Lionesses are on the brink of glory at the Euros... and so is their market value! Brand expert reveals how women's team are entering their 'influencer' era - and the one thing the men's team MUST learn from them
Should the Lionesses beat Spain in the Euros final on Sunday, they won't just be bringing football home, they'll be opening the door to a commercial future once thought to be intangible for the women's game. Their 2022 Euros triumph broke many preconceptions of what is achievable in the sport, and the top tier of women's football is fast becoming a goldmine for brands seeking authenticity, relatability and reach. The Lioness stars have become more than just athletes. They are style icons, social trailblazers and marketable personalities with growing influence that's not gone unnoticed by big player brands. 'They're doing more outside the sport than the men's team ever have,' says Hayley Knight, Co-Founder and Director of Comms for BE YELLOW, a leading PR and Media Relations Agency. 'They're more human. They're more accessible. They're pushing for equal access in sport for schools and they're influencing policy. 'And the one wonderful thing about the Lionesses in particular and this particular team is that there's no scandal, they're very open and honest. There's LGBT representation. It's very diverse. 'So there are a lot more brands that can invest and there's a lot more brand trust that they can hook onto. And the contracts will be longer because of that. 'Plus they have access to social media and influencer marketing in a way that previous teams and the men's team have never had access to.' Lucy Bronze's on-field heroics and social media visibility have landed her lucrative endorsements with the likes of VISA, Spotify, and recently, Rexona, that have seen her rake in the big bucks, amassing a whopping £3.5m net worth. Fashion house Gucci swooped up the ascendant Leah Williamson as a brand ambassador – and along with other deals with big players like Nike and Pepsi – the England captain has a staggering £4m net worth. And they're not the only millionaires in the squad - Chloe Kelly, Lauren James, and Alessia Russo can all boast at least six-figure values from their deals with industry giants like Calvin Klein, Google Pixel and Adidas, to add to their wages. Growing viewerships have seen the Lioness stars begin to bridge the chasm to the men's when it comes to earning away from the pitch, but that's not the only magnet for advertisers. 'They have different audiences, and more diverse audiences, than the men's teams,' Knight explains. 'They also have access to the women and girls market, which is a very underserved demographic, especially in sports. And that can be incredibly valuable to brands in order to help target them. Williamson, pictured stripping down to her underwear while modelling for Calvin Klein, has a staggering £4m net worth - thanks to sponsorship deals with big players like Nike and Pepsi 'A lot of brands' main focus is on Gen Z and the younger audience, and the Lionesses will allow them to access that.' With further Euro glory on the horizon, the already burgeoning market for England's female football stars could find a second, third, even fourth, wind in the coming years. 'I think over the next 12 to 24 months, merchandising growth could lead to about a £10 to 20m increase,' predicts Knight. 'I'd say we'll see about a 20 to 30% increase across endorsement deals. If the players go above and beyond the sport, they're probably looking to make about £20,000 to £60,000 per sponsored post. 'I think they could even exceed a 50% increase over the next few years.' Those endorsement premiums will almost certainly bleed into the salaries seen in the Women's Super League. At present, Chelsea forward Sam Kerr is reportedly the highest earner in the league, taking home a considerable £400k a year. That dwarfs the average annual salary of women footballers globally per FIFA's annual report, a measly £8k per year, which increases just under £18k when only the 41 clubs designated as Tier 1 are taken into account. Spain superstar Ainata Bonmati broke records last year by coming the first women's footballer to earn a salary of €1m a year (around £835k) - a record broken in the men's game in 1979 Still, even a superstar like Kerr would have to work roughly 385 years to make what Cristiano Ronaldo does in one – the Portuguese legend snaps up an unconscionable £153.5m a year in his new Al Nassr contract. 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But these women that already have that platform and work as influencers, become a lot more accessible to smaller brands.' The nation will be behind the Lionesses on Sunday, as they look to add to their growing trophy cabinet, but even if they don't succeed, Knight reckons their commercial value won't diminish.
The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
The change in royal protocol Sophie is 'relieved' about since becoming a Duchess
Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, is known for her down-to-earth nature and was reportedly viewed by the Queen as The Firm's safest pair of hands. Patron of more than 70 charities and organisations, including Childline and the London College of Fashion, she undertakes over 200 engagements each year, including visits to schools, hospitals and military bases. For this reason, it was an incredibly poignant moment when the former Countess of Wessex became a Duchess in 2023 to mark Prince Edward 's 59th birthday. This was in keeping with his parents' wishes and in recognition of Edward's commitment to the Duke of Edinburgh's Award youth scheme. Sophie said in a recent interview that the change in title 'felt like quite a big moment' because of its connection to the late queen. But according to friends of Sophie, she was also 'relieved' that her move up the royal ranks means she no longer needs to curtsey to Meghan Markle. The relationship between the two women has been tenuous since the beginning. A friend of the couple said: 'Sophie is relieved. She no longer has to curtsey to someone in the family who has not only left Royal duties but has spent the past three years criticising the institution that Sophie works so hard to support.' When Meghan entered the Royal Family fresh from her role in Suits, the late Queen enlisted Sophie to teach her the ropes. When Meghan entered the Royal Family fresh from her role in Suits, the late Queen enlisted Sophie to teach her the ropes But according to royal author Gyles Brandreth, Meghan 'wasn't interested' in receiving advice from her new mentor. This led Sophie to make a cutting remark when asked about ' stepping in' for Meghan and Harry after they stepped down as senior royals. According to royal expert Katie Nicholl, Sophie said: 'What did people think we were doing beforehand?' This wasn't the only time Sophie addressed Harry and Meghan's exit from the family. Following the Sussexes' explosive tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, Sophie and Edward made a cheeky remark. When asked about the much-discussed interview by The Telegraph, the Prince simply said, 'Oprah, who?' while Sophie added with a laugh, 'What interview?' Speaking about Harry and Meghan's exit from the Firm, Sophie added: 'I just hope they will be happy.' More pointedly, she then stated that the royals do all they can to try to assist new members to adjust, adding: 'We all try to help any new members of the family'. Speaking about Harry and Meghan's exit from the Firm, Sophie added: 'I just hope they will be happy'. Sophie and Meghan are pictured at Ascot in 2018 Sophie and Meghan travelled together in a car down The Mall ahead of the Queen's State Funeral in September 2022. After travelling together, Sophie was described as a 'savvy peacemaker' who may be tasked with 'soothing tensions between the Sussexes and the rest of the Firm.' According to royal expert Camilla Tominey, writing in the Telegraph, the job of making sure the 'Sussexes are made to feel part of the sombre proceedings' appeared to have fallen to Sophie. The royal expert cited reports of previous times the former Countess is believed to have 'stepped in to soothe tensions,' including after the funeral of Philip, when she is said to have sought out Harry and spoken with him for some 30 minutes. And a former aide of Sophie told the Telegraph that she 'is made for the role of mediator.' They said: 'That's why she's the Queen's favourite daughter-in-law - she's down to earth and just gets on with it.' Speaking during her visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina last week, Sophie said in an interview with The Mirror: 'First of all it was quite large shoes to fill because not as many of the population alive today will remember but the Queen was Duchess of Edinburgh for the first few years when she and my father-in-law first married. 'For me, it was quite an emotional thing to sort of step into her shoes [as being Duchess of Edinburgh], it felt like quite a big moment.' The Duchess of Edinburgh visits Sarajevo's Old Town during her visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina She explained, however, that in practical terms her and her husband's role is to support the King as it was to support the Queen. In her interview, Sophie also opened up on what it is like being seen as the Royal Family's 'secret weapon'. She explained that she doesn't see herself as being in a 'front and centre' role, which allows her more time to pursue her own interests. Sophie said: 'I like to fly under the radar. It's all very well being a secret weapon but if no one knows, maybe it's too secret.' 'I suppose I should take it as a backhanded compliment,' she added. Royal expert Russell Myers previously claimed that Sophie 'undoubtedly benefited' from Harry and Meghan stepping back from royal life because it has 'raised her profile'. Speaking on True Royalty TV's The Royal Beat, he explained: 'Are the Instagram generation going to be as obsessed with Sophie and Edward Wessex as they are with the Sussexes? Obviously not. 'However, when you're dealing with them… Sophie's really across her subject matter. It's not just for show and she has really grown into that. With the Sussexes not here, the Wessexes will undoubtedly benefit.' Meanwhile he also pointed to how similar Meghan and Sophie's interests are, saying: 'The similarities between Sophie and Meghan are there to be seen. 'Sophie's working with girls' education, she's done a lot of stuff about violence against females in Africa.' Most recently royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams told MailOnline that Sophie's hard-hitting advocacy work could have allowed Meghan to flourish in the Royal Family. In recent years the King's sister-in-law, who is married to his brother, Prince Edward, has travelled to current and former war zones including Chad, the Congo, Kosovo, South Chad, Lebanon and Sierra Leone. She has devoted much of her latter working life as a royal to supporting the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and is passionate about championing gender equality. Fitzwilliams said: 'Meghan is struggling to be an influencer, Sophie has influence in ways that really matter, which Meghan could have been. 'Meghan has always boasted about how she promotes feminism. 'Yet contrast the occasional speech she makes in comfortable surroundings with the remarkable work of Sophie who actually visits areas of the world such as Sudan and Chad which have been devastated by war and attempts to comfort the women who are victims of rape and exploitation.' He added that Meghan's departure from frontline royal duties is a case of 'wasted potential', while Sophie has ' proved she's the Royal Family's champion of women's rights'. In the most recent YouGov opinion poll, 51 per cent of Brits said they felt positively about Sophie, compared to just 20 per cent for Meghan. Just 12 per cent of people had a negative view of Sophie compared to 65 for Meghan. Sophie is currently ranked as the sixth most popular royal, compared to Meghan who falters in 19th place. In 2019 Meghan was the sixth most popular royal and Sophie was in 11th place. stepped down as senior working royals.
