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First Post
16-07-2025
- Politics
- First Post
Why Hamas, Hezbollah must face the same moral scrutiny as Israel
Days after Hamas's October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, I reread Japanese author Haruki Murakami's 2009 acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In it he said, 'Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg […] [y]es, no matter how right that wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg.' While this was widely interpreted to be a pro-Palestinian message, I believed that Murakami was making a subtler point about 'the wall' in his metaphor, which he also calls 'The System'. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'The System,' Murakami tells us, 'is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically.' This description, I believed, tacitly extended the blame to forces like Hezbollah and Hamas. So I read it as a call to re-examine blind, angry loyalty to one's own side. Subsequent reporting suggested Murakami had been more stridently critical of Israel elsewhere and that Murakami inadvertently held anti-Israel notions due to 'the cultural milieu in which he dwells'. This question in itself doesn't interest me, but another re-reading has convinced me that the speech's inclusiveness was less intended than superimposed by a wishful reader. This realisation was disappointing at several levels. The primary one being that Murakami's greatest appeal was his alienation, an estrangement from society that seemed to place him beyond familiar political divides. His distaste for Japanese nationalist writers like Yukio Mishima is well-known, and his novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were deeply political, but they seemed to emerge from the depths of the individual 'psyche' where mundane political ideas gave way to universal emotions and images. So this binary, uninsightful nature of his political stances felt like a betrayal of promise. It is my impression—an unverified one—that his 'anti-nationalist' pronouncements grew shriller after the annual Nobel Prize speculation began. Murakami, the master storyteller, surely needn't be warned of the perils of creating paper-thin antagonists. The playwright Aaron Sorkin insists, 'You can't think of your villain as a villain'. Instead, he suggests writing them like 'they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven'. To be fair, Murakami didn't make Israel out to be an outright villain, and he did defy calls from Palestinian groups to decline the prize. Still, his metaphor of a state having convinced its people to 'kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically' comes dangerously close. And it's telling that such calls to conscience fall only upon Israel: is Murakami unaware that forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, with the sponsorship of the likes of Iran and Qatar, strive to 'coldly, efficiently, systematically' kill Israelis? Is he also unaware that terrorist acts are designed to invite state clampdowns and cause alienation? STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD His framing of the issue is of interest because it is indicative of a wider moral incoherence that surrounds this and other conflicts and only accentuates their tragedy. Observe how Murakami's wall-and-an-egg symbolism perpetuates the symbolism of an armed state at war with unarmed people. Gaza's tragedy (and that of Palestinians as a whole) would have been better approximated with the image of an egg being crushed between two steel blocks: one gripping the egg in place and the other closing in and smashing it against the first. The second steel block consists of Palestinian extremist groups and their sponsor states. And it is precisely because serious moral pressure isn't mounted upon this second block that Israeli suffering is perpetuated and Palestinian tragedy compounded. To illustrate, let's take Israel's accusation of Hamas 'unlawfully' embedding military assets in densely populated areas and using them as human shields. New York Times paraphrases Oxford Professor Janina Dill countering the charge with '[e]ven if Hamas uses civilians as human shields, those civilians are entitled to full protection under international law unless they directly participate in the fighting'. Israel can neither be expected to ask its soldiers to get shot rather than fire at terrorists attacking from behind civilians nor will it give up its military objectives. Then why not call for an international ban on Hamas and for the sanctioning of its supporters? Such pressure may well force Hamas to return the hostages and thereby compel Israel to cease fire. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Such calls don't arise because global realpolitik and ideological pressures suppress them. Also, the fact that these pressures weigh disproportionately upon individual states suggests that keeping states off balance is desirable to multiple players. But let us stay with the moral discourse here. Counterintuitive though it might seem, international law allows 'certain , including uses directed toward 'self-determination''. Using this outdated anti-colonial provision, ideologues project terrorism as a struggle for self-determination (therefore a ) to justify violent means. [Incidentally, it isn't clear that Hamas's military wing is legitimate in international law.] But even with 'just cause', , and so a more roundabout intellectual exercise begins. For example, Neve Gordon points to Israel's celebration of the roles of Zionist paramilitaries—some murderous—in Israel's creation, seemingly to equate future Hamas's legitimacy with Israel's today. He bemoans the tendency of states to describe civilians they've killed as human shields while describing civilians killed by 'non-state actors'—Gordon won't call them terrorists—as 'civilians.' He also suggests that states locating military offices in densely populated areas should invite similar condemnation. Citing anti-colonial struggles, Gordon then justifies 'the ability to blend into the civilian population' as being 'necessary for military survival' of paramilitaries, given the 'asymmetry of power.' He further holds state militaries' 'new surveillance technologies and enhanced weapon systems' responsible for forcing paramilitary groups to hide in 'densely populated urban settings' and concludes, 'Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier.' This is a 'hardboiled egghead' version of Murakami's egg-and-wall stuff. A question worth posing here is why Gordon doesn't worry that making a military case for human shields is self-defeating, as it would lead us to the concept of STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Legal scholar Louis René Beres writes, 'When Israel's enemies declare an IDF attack on a Gaza high-rise building to be 'disproportionate,' they wittingly ignore ipso facto that the rule of proportionality does not demand any tangibly equivalent infliction of military harms, but only an amount of force that is militarily necessary.' He also introduces a legal concept Gordon assiduously avoids: 'perfidy'. 'To the extent that Hamas and its insurgent allies routinely practice a form of 'human shields', the Palestinian side is guilty of 'perfidy' .Any such practice is illegal prima facie and qualifies as a conspicuously 'grave breach' of the relevant Geneva Convention. The most critical legal effect of perfidy committed by Palestinian insurgent leaders is to immunise Israel from any responsibility for inadvertent counterterrorist harms done to Arab civilians.' Ideologues don't worry about military cases because their arguments aren't really about principle but about perception: about weaponising Israel's status as a state and a democracy against it. And despite weak disclaimers to the contrary—like Gordon's—Hamas's violence is sought to be semi-legitimised in the name of the Palestinian people. Once again, using wall-and-egg oversimplifications. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Consider the harm caused in one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the war: humanitarian aid. Israel claims Hamas diverts aid supplies for its use and to fund its war. Accusations of Israeli blockades weaponising hunger have even yielded International Court of Justice warrants against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defence Minister Gallant. Israel and pro-Israel voices deny there is starvation and accuse critics of lying. But where's Hamas, the governing party in Gaza prior to the war, in all this? A top Hamas official stated that 75 per cent of Gazans were refugees, so it was 'the UN's responsibility to protect them' and that Israel was obliged to provide for Gaza's citizens under the Geneva Convention. The hostage-taking, civilian-massacring Hamas demanding that Israel take care of its civilians is a stunning double standard, but one that aid agencies and the UN appear to go along with. Meanwhile, most aid agencies object to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private entity backed by the US and Israel, on relief supply citing principle. As aid agencies themselves warn of a humanitarian crisis, why not engage with it for the sake of Palestinian civilians, even if under protest? And why shouldn't governments diplomatically extract concessions from Hamas to facilitate transparent aid delivery? Surely some brakes on the second steel block are also warranted. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD I sincerely believe Israel must be held to very high standards to demonstrate that it is not targeting civilians militarily or through aid. But I also believe Hamas must be compelled to cooperate to stop the suffering of Palestinians, release hostages, and be held accountable for October 7. It's a foregone conclusion that most intellectuals will emphatically agree with the former and weasel out of the latter. Sacrificing the egg for the second steel block: that is moral incoherence. The world's intellectuals, media, and institutions must do better. Can Israel seriously be expected to validate people like UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur Francesca Albanese—the news of whose sanctioning by the US is just breaking—who reportedly justified Palestinian violence? Or journalist Mariam Barghout, who writes in Al-Jazeera of the 'exhilaration' she felt on October 7: '[T]he Palestinians have struck Israel where it has struck Palestinians for more than 75 years: lives and land.' Or Professor John Mearsheimer, who was questioned about his moralistic tone against Israel when he displayed none against alleged Russian 'atrocities' in Ukraine: 'I don't have to provide a consistency of approach. I'm focusing on what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. I'm not comparing what happened in Gaza with what happened on October 7 and what's happened in Ukraine. Those are different issues. You could write a piece like that, but I'm sorry, there's nothing wrong with me analysing what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, period.' Are there no errors or sins of omission? STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Conclusion The universal images and emotions of Murakami's fiction can actually help us understand the soul-crushing situation of the Palestinians and Israelis' existential fears. Instead we're served up tendentious agenda-driven narratives, which in truth drive the steel blocks that smash the egg. If aggressive Zionism crushes the Palestinian people, so do ideologies that undermine legitimate states, provide cover to terrorists, and give terror-sponsor countries a free pass. I don't have a personal axe to grind in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I believe India's official position on the Gaza War—condemning terrorism, justifying responsibly striking back, but seeking peaceful resolution of the issue—is the moral one. But, for decades now, I have listened to smug voices shield Pakistan and its terrorist proxy-soldiers and undermine India in exactly the same way. That's enough time to develop an aversion for vacuous moralising and intellectual contortionism. It is better to call terrorism 'terrorism', to know that justifying it in any context is perilous, and that creating ideological space for it is reprehensible. And to those very people who might loosely hurl about terms like 'Islamophobia' or 'genocide justification', I would say Hamas ruled Gaza brutally, with a fundamentalist ideology, killed Israelis including children, took hostages, raped women, and now negotiates to return dead bodies—so just take a look at what it is you are justifying. This isn't 'resistance', it's depravity. And I would question whether such critics genuinely weep for Palestinian suffering and death or find in it a vent for their anger and a useful weapon against an enemy. Incidentally, Murakami's own relations with the political Left suffered a blow when he was semi-cancelled for misogyny in his writings. I won't go into its merits here, but I can't help but sympathise with an author who shared what was within his 'fragile shell' only to find himself up against a 'high, solid wall' made up of 'bricks in the wall' he thought were his allies. The writer is the published author of two novels (Penguin, India and Westland, India) based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.
Associated Press
02-07-2025
- Sport
- Associated Press
Stadium where Babe Ruth played in Tokyo is at the center of a disputed park redevelopment plan
TOKYO (AP) — Plans to demolish a historic baseball stadium where Babe Ruth played and an adjacent rugby venue are at the heart of a disputed park redevelopment in Tokyo that critics say trades history and greenery for commercial space. The plan to remake the Jingu Gaien park area was approved 2 1/2 years ago by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Work clearing land has begun but opponents are still trying to stop the project, which could take a decade to complete. A coalition on Wednesday presented an open letter to Toshiko Abe, the minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, asking the project be reassessed. It's signed by 368 experts — urban planners, architects and environmental scientists — and 1,167 others. Ode to an emperor The park area was established a century ago through public donations to honor the Meiji Emperor. At the heart of the issue is citizens' control of public space, and a potential conflict of interest with private developers and politicians deciding how valuable parcels are used. The stadium oozes history and critics say building skyscrapers in the park space would never be allowed in Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London. Ruth and Lou Gehrig played at the stadium on a 1934 barnstorming tour. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami was inspired to write his first novel while drinking beer and watching a game there in 1978. The stadium is still home to the Yakult Swallows baseball team and hosted a concert this week. Lofty plans in place Plans call for developers to build a pair of 200-meter (650-feet) towers and a smaller tower. The stadiums are to be rebuilt in the reconfigured space with the baseball stadium going where the rugby stadium now stands. The open letter is critical of so-called private finance schemes that give private developers access to park space. Hibiya Park is Tokyo's oldest public park, another example of this approach. Opposition to the Jingu redevelopment has included novelist Murakami, a conservancy group, and botanists and environmentalists who argue the sprawling project threatens 100-year-old gingko trees that grace the area's main avenue. A global conservancy body ICOMOS, which works with the United Nations body UNESCO, has said the development will lead to 'irreversible destruction of cultural heritage' with trees and green space being lost. Strong lobby for the development Opposition groups are pitted against powerful real-estate developer Mitsui Fudosan, the Shinto religious body, and Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike. 'The problem is that many Japanese citizens are not so much interested in democratically regulating their own city and are used to demolishing buildings,' Kohei Saito, a Japanese political economist at Tokyo University, wrote to The Associated Press. He said 'companies with political power try to maximize their short-term profits without consideration of Tokyo's attractiveness (history, culture), inhabitants' well-being and future generations.' Zoning changes to allow high-rise buildings in the area were made around 2013 by the Tokyo government when the city won the bid for the 2020 Olympics. Many of those changes permitted building the neighboring National Stadium but also applied to the park area. 'The process of rezoning the area lacked transparency and democratic procedure and constitutes an illegal abuse of the governor's discretion in urban planning decisions,' the open letter said. The Jingu district was considered 'common property' until after World War II when the government sold it to Shinto under a promise it would remain a common space. The national government comes into play because the rugby venue is the property of the Japan Sport Council, a national government affiliated body. The rugby venue represents about 30% of the Jingu Gaien area. Forthcoming election might help Opponents hope the timing later this month of a national election might aid their cause with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba heading a minority government. Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has ties to the rugby venue. In addition to serving two decades ago as prime minister, he is the former president of the Japan Rugby Football Union and also served as the president of the 2020 Olympic organizing committee until he was forced to resign after making sexist comments about women. Opened in 1926, developers argue the baseball stadium is too old to save. However, Fenway Park in Boston dates from 1912 and Wrigley Field in Chicago from 1914. Both have been refurbished and are among the most venerated in the United States. Meiji Kinenkan, a historic reception hall in Jingu Gaien, dates from 1881 and is still widely used with no calls for its demolition. Mitsui Fudosan's headquarters building in Tokyo dates from 1929. Koshien Stadium, located near Osaka, was built in 1924 and has been in use since a refurbishment. The new rugby stadium would be an indoor venue with plastic grass, which players view as the least desirable surface for the sport. ___ AP sports:
The Independent
02-07-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
Stadium where Babe Ruth played in Tokyo is at the center of a disputed park redevelopment plan
Plans to demolish a historic baseball stadium where Babe Ruth played and an adjacent rugby venue are at the heart of a disputed park redevelopment in Tokyo that critics say trades history and greenery for commercial space. The plan to remake the Jingu Gaien park area was approved 2 1/2 years ago by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Work clearing land has begun but opponents are still trying to stop the project, which could take a decade to complete. A coalition on Wednesday presented an open letter to Toshiko Abe, the minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, asking the project be reassessed. It's signed by 368 experts — urban planners, architects and environmental scientists — and 1,167 others. Ode to an emperor The park area was established a century ago through public donations to honor the Meiji Emperor. At the heart of the issue is citizens' control of public space, and a potential conflict of interest with private developers and politicians deciding how valuable parcels are used. The stadium oozes history and critics say building skyscrapers in the park space would never be allowed in Central Park in New York or Hyde Park in London. Ruth and Lou Gehrig played at the stadium on a 1934 barnstorming tour. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami was inspired to write his first novel while drinking beer and watching a game there in 1978. The stadium is still home to the Yakult Swallows baseball team and hosted a concert this week. Lofty plans in place Plans call for developers to build a pair of 200-meter (650-feet) towers and a smaller tower. The stadiums are to be rebuilt in the reconfigured space with the baseball stadium going where the rugby stadium now stands. The open letter is critical of so-called private finance schemes that give private developers access to park space. Hibiya Park is Tokyo's oldest public park, another example of this approach. Opposition to the Jingu redevelopment has included novelist Murakami, a conservancy group, and botanists and environmentalists who argue the sprawling project threatens 100-year-old gingko trees that grace the area's main avenue. A global conservancy body ICOMOS, which works with the United Nations body UNESCO, has said the development will lead to 'irreversible destruction of cultural heritage' with trees and green space being lost. Strong lobby for the development Opposition groups are pitted against powerful real-estate developer Mitsui Fudosan, the Shinto religious body, and Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike. 'The problem is that many Japanese citizens are not so much interested in democratically regulating their own city and are used to demolishing buildings,' Kohei Saito, a Japanese political economist at Tokyo University, wrote to The Associated Press. He said 'companies with political power try to maximize their short-term profits without consideration of Tokyo's attractiveness (history, culture), inhabitants' well-being and future generations.' Zoning changes to allow high-rise buildings in the area were made around 2013 by the Tokyo government when the city won the bid for the 2020 Olympics. Many of those changes permitted building the neighboring National Stadium but also applied to the park area. 'The process of rezoning the area lacked transparency and democratic procedure and constitutes an illegal abuse of the governor's discretion in urban planning decisions,' the open letter said. The Jingu district was considered 'common property' until after World War II when the government sold it to Shinto under a promise it would remain a common space. The national government comes into play because the rugby venue is the property of the Japan Sport Council, a national government affiliated body. The rugby venue represents about 30% of the Jingu Gaien area. Forthcoming election might help Opponents hope the timing later this month of a national election might aid their cause with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba heading a minority government. Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has ties to the rugby venue. In addition to serving two decades ago as prime minister, he is the former president of the Japan Rugby Football Union and also served as the president of the 2020 Olympic organizing committee until he was forced to resign after making sexist comments about women. Opened in 1926, developers argue the baseball stadium is too old to save. However, Fenway Park in Boston dates from 1912 and Wrigley Field in Chicago from 1914. Both have been refurbished and are among the most venerated in the United States. Meiji Kinenkan, a historic reception hall in Jingu Gaien, dates from 1881 and is still widely used with no calls for its demolition. Mitsui Fudosan's headquarters building in Tokyo dates from 1929. Koshien Stadium, located near Osaka, was built in 1924 and has been in use since a refurbishment. The new rugby stadium would be an indoor venue with plastic grass, which players view as the least desirable surface for the sport. ___
Indian Express
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: On Emergency and nationalism, a debate that blinds us to the future
Haruki Murakami once wrote, 'Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.' This might seem like a meditation on growing older — when the weight of the past grows heavier and the space of possibility contracts. But it also seems to capture the emotional register of the way in which nations speak about their histories. This paper has witnessed scintillating debates about the nature of nationalism and the roots of the Emergency. These are a credit to the intellectual seriousness of those participating. Who can deny that we must return to the past: For insight, for inspiration, for forgotten histories, and above all, to understand the present? But even among the most well-intentioned, one cannot shake the feeling that we are litigating the past partly because we are at a dead end when it comes to imagining the future. Take the debate over Indian nationalism. What work is it doing in our present context? Its primary function now seems to be boundary-setting: To distinguish the 'good' from the 'bad' nationalism. But the assumption that we must all operate within the horizon of nationalism remains unchallenged. The frame persists: Are you the right kind or the wrong kind? This framework, however, only reinforces the grip of nationalism on our political imagination. There are three dangers in this enterprise — two historical and one ethical. First, as political diagnosis, this project is fraught. There is no easy mapping of morally good ideas onto virtuous political outcomes. 'Good' nationalisms have often carried their own blind spots — and left their own corpses. 'Bad' ones have tapped into suppressed histories. It is wishful thinking to believe that fixing nationalism will resolve our political crises. Second, the search in the past often fails to properly historicise the past. To put it bluntly: We cannot build a future by relying perpetually on the crutches of whichever figure we admire — Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, B R Ambedkar, Ram Manohar Lohia. They did their own thinking, made their own judgements, acknowledged their own limitations. We can draw from them, even think with them. But they cannot substitute for thinking now, in and for our moment. In any case, we must ask: Are the debates we are having the ones the next generation ought to inherit? Much of our nostalgia is for 'roads not taken'. But those roads are closed not merely due to ideological error. Their closure demands deeper diagnoses of present transformations. But the ethical worry is this. Take the dozens of important issues which divide us, everything from free speech to the nature of our development to our geopolitical environment. The problem with the idea that we somehow need to get the nature of our nationalism right before we tackle these issues is that it morally obscures what it is at stake. Rather than fixing good and bad nationalism, let us talk directly about the issues and values at stake. How will the 'right' nationalism give an answer to the question: What are the boundaries of free speech? How do we combat practices of discrimination that still exist? How do we defend a free society? Should personal laws be allowed? How do we create a sustainable, inclusive, vigorous growth model? The more nationalism, good or bad, colonises our imagination, the more obscure our answers to these questions become. Fixing the right kind of nationalism is not just irrelevant, it has become a dangerous form of diversion, producing a performative politics on all sides. As far as I can see, there is only one question to which the nationalism debate might be relevant. This is the communal question, the place of minorities in India, an imagining of India where all communities with their histories have a place. But even there, it is morally obfuscating to mediate the debate through the category of nationalism. There are two simple ethical principles at stake: No member of any community should be targeted simply for being who they are, anywhere. We should not care what 'nationalism' this principle fits into. If this principle does not move you, the right kind of nationalism is beside the point. And second, we need a conversation about the values on which our social contract will be founded. Do we imagine India as a zone of freedom, where each citizen is protected, from both state and community power to the maximum extent possible? And do we create the material conditions for citizens to effectively exercise this freedom? If we embrace these moral principles and objectives, the issue of communalism goes away. The more we tie ourselves in knots over finding the right kind of nationalism, the more values will get obscured by historical debates. The Emergency was a dark episode in Indian history. It raises profound issues of accountability. But has not most of our public discussion on the Emergency been, not an act of historical reckoning, but a diversion from the present? The BJP's use of it is politically understandable. It simply uses it to exonerate itself from creating a regime of poisonous and insidious control that will, in the long term, prove even more damaging. But even for non-BJP folks, the recourse to the Emergency now functions as a kind of psychological exoneration to passivity. All sides are guilty. Saying that authoritarianism is one of those cyclical things has become a way of escaping the gravity of the present. All societies have relied on a usable past, something that both secures continuity in time and can be a source of pride, as a way of being in the world. But only if you have a future horizon can you construct a usable past. What is disquieting about this moment is the sense of a loss of the future. Yes, we hear of Viksit Bharat 2047 — a technocratic dream built of roads and metrics — but this is a future shorn of moral imagination, obsessed still with the past. But the ideological response to that has also been to play on the terrain of the past. It is telling that the one patriotic song that now seems completely out of time, as it were, with no resonance at all, is 'Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat purani, naye daur me likhenge milkar nayi kahani.' This is truly ironic for a country whose population is so young. It is doubly galling that in an era of economic, technological and moral change on such a planetary scale, we still want to remain stuck in the Seventies. The past, indeed, increases, as the future recedes. The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
Vogue
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
For Restless Sleepers Resort 2026 Collection
Francesca Ruffini appears to draw from an inexhaustible well of imagination, where flora and fauna reign as her perennial muses. Her designs blossom as miniature Edens rendered in silk or chiffon; inspirations culled from her travels add layers of exotic details. But it's not only the natural world or distant horizons that spark Ruffini's creativity; she is also a devoted bibliophile with a taste for the uncanny. After revisiting the surreal world of Haruki Murakami, she set out to translate his off-kilter universe into her seasonal figurative extravaganzas. One of the outcomes was the rather absurdist scene of a curious little monkey perched on a tree, gazing pensively at a horizon scribbled with a quote by none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosophical primate made its appearance across a blush-pink silk pajama, edged with chocolate-brown piping, and again, more boldly, on cyan-blue palazzo pants with a matching shirt. Ramages of corals, flamboyant botanicals, and flamingos seemingly poised for takeoff flutter across long summer caftans and billowy blouses, casually tucked into fluid, drawstring trousers. For Ruffini, comfort isn't an afterthought, but rather a guiding principle, right alongside ease and versatility. Her impactful designs may turn heads, but they never tie hands: you move freely, as if dressed in a breeze. The prints themselves have grown more open and lighter. One featured half-sketched flowers tangled with geometric shapes, like a drawing caught mid-thought. 'A little chaos is liberating,' she quipped. Judging by the elegant unruliness of her patterns, she means it.
