A decade after launching his Tokyo-based brand, Auralee, Kobe-born designer Ryota Iwai is hitting his stride. Auralee has earned a reputation for its masterful use of colour, meticulous tailoring and Japan-made quality. This is elegant, modern luxury – all made to Iwai’s exacting specifications – that is a delight to touch and wear. It’s an alluring mix of Tokyo edge with wearable sophistication, crafted by factories that have been working with Iwai on his journey from the beginning. With stockists around the world and a flagship in the Japanese capital, the label is now attracting global attention. Auralee is also a fixture on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar. Look out for the label’s runway show at the Musée des Archives Nationales at 17.00 London time on 24 June. 

Tell us about the new collection.
There is a variety of leather items (including suede and smooth leather), premium wool, and cashmere, along with garment-dyed and garment-washed pieces. The brand’s signature sophisticated heather tones and mustard yellows are part of a colour palette that shifts from the heavy tones of winter to the light, bright hues of summer.

The collection draws its inspiration from the changing of the seasons. Spring brings a mix of cold and warm days. As it gradually gets warmer, it’s always a challenge in the morning to decide on a look, sometimes resulting in outfits that feel like a slightly odd blend of winter and summer. These unexpected pairings can add charm to an elegant look. It is these fleeting moments that inspire the collection.

Any key pieces that define the collection? 
Cashmere suits and shirts, hand-sewn coats, silk organdy skirts and dresses.

How does it feel to be returning to Paris on the established calendar?
I always feel nervous and a bit anxious. But having worked on the show for six months, I’m excited about how it will come together.

Is Paris still the best place for you to show?
It is the centre of fashion. Paris Fashion Week is the most global and well-attended event of its kind, so I feel that it is the best place for us.

What are your ambitions for this season? Opening new markets? 
Every season, we work with the intention of making the collection better. We also hope that it will reach more people and will be enjoyable to those who see it.

One of the highlights of this bleak period in US history, known so far as 2025, is the generous cleavage of Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s partner. During the presidential inauguration at the start of the year – and the subsequent media scandal surrounding her “obscenity” for daring to show – I was struck by a voluptuous pair of thoughts.

First, I was intrigued by Sánchez’s retro appearance. Her conspicuously augmented chest was so 1995, so defiant of the high-end designer fashion norms of billionaire-babe chic. While others sneered, I admired her resistance to convention and her courage to go with a vintage look. Here was a media-savvy 55-year-old with a pro-social offering of bosom. I think that she understood on some deeply embodied level how to upstage the 47th president of the US. 

Second, I was vexed by the irony that my new book, Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation, has been censored from ads and recommendations on Amazon, Bezos’s main business. It’s an unfortunate fact that the algorithms used to “protect the communities” of social media and online booksellers do not differentiate between pornography and women’s studies. As a result, women’s perspectives on their own bodies are being systematically suppressed. The media sanctions inflicted on Sánchez and me lead to a few historical questions: when did breasts become obscene or, for that matter, erotic? 

Breasts became eroticised in 15th-century France when aristocrats delegated breastfeeding to wet nurses, freeing the maternal body to be visually and sexually claimed. Starting in the 1400s, French kings commissioned paintings to celebrate the pristine, weightless breasts of the mistresses who had borne their children, standing next to the heavy jugs of the wet nurses who fed them. It is no coincidence that, to this day, Paris has the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world and is also the global hub of the lingerie industry.

Breasts are not universally erotic. Anthropological evidence clearly shows that sexual attraction to them is most common in Europe and the Americas. In Indigenous communities where women wear no clothing above the waist and breastfeed openly, the sexual fetishisation of breasts is viewed as a juvenile perversion or bizarre foreign taste. Beauty paradigms in East Asia have long favoured flat chests and upheld traditions of breast binding among Chinese noblewomen and Japanese geishas. In most of Africa, the ideal breast has not been served up for the male gaze. In Dogon wood carvings from Mali, for example, the finest pairs have a long, conical shape that often points to a baby’s mouth.

Evidence of the intensifying vulgarity of breasts can be seen in the changing connotations of the word “tits”. Initially an innocent variant of “teats”, tits is at least a thousand years old and likely derives from the ancient Proto-Indo-European word tata. Tits were not profane until the early 20th century, when “tits and ass” entertainment proliferated in the form of burlesque shows. At that time, “tits” mutated into a salacious term for a monetised body part, one presented for the delectation of men, far removed from its biological purpose. Today “tits” is the number one word for breasts on the internet due to its function in navigating porn sites and sex-worker services.

There are hundreds of slang terms for breasts in the English language, most of which are used by men. White women in the Anglo world tend to talk about “breasts” or “boobs” – the latter being synonymous with idiots, hence booby prizes and booby traps. This gender discrepancy suggests that women have surrendered the definition of their top halves to men – and they aren’t even trying to contest it. 

When I began researching the topic, I found it awkward to utter the word “tits” out loud. Then I spent many nights in “titty bars” talking to strippers. Sex workers deploy the word “tits” to claim ownership of their bodies in the jargon of their trade. Nowadays, it rolls off my tongue. “Tits” thwarts puritanical taboos and embraces sexual freedoms. When women who are happy with their own anatomy say it aloud, it is not demeaning. It’s a symbolic strategy that insists on reclaiming a body part.

This linguistic revelation led me to a love of the American showbiz expression “tits up”, which one woman might holler to another as she goes on stage. An alternative for good luck, “tits up” encourages a sister to stand tall, pull her shoulders back and succeed. In the UK, “tits up” means something has gone “belly up”, like a lifeless fish floating in water. It’s possible that the positive American meaning arose independently – a physical migration from “chin up” – or it could be that theatre people flipped the dead metaphor, making ironic use of the British idiom in the manner of “break a leg.” 

In the first half of the 20th century, legs were the most fetishised part of women’s bodies. After being hidden for centuries beneath floor-length skirts, the sight of legs had the power to arouse. Between 1942 to 1951, for example, Betty Grable was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress and America’s most popular sex symbol. She was so celebrated for her legs that 20th Century Studios insured them for a million dollars. In 1953, a benchmark year in the sexualisation of breasts, Marilyn Monroe emerged as the world’s premier bombshell, starring in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and appearing topless in the inaugural issue of Playboy. 

Until the Second World War, the ideal breast in Europe and the Americas was modestly sized – often described in poetry as an apple. By the mid-century, mass-produced pasteurised formula was widely available. With the rise of bottle-feeding, breasts became “free” to fulfil their new role as titillators. This fundamental shift in the use of women’s top halves, combined with the hyper-visualisation of films and picture magazines, led to the mega-bust.

The arc of the media’s big-boob obsession starts with the instant success of Playboy and runs through to the final episode in 2001 of Baywatch, the television show that featured Pamela Anderson as a buxom blonde lifeguard. This period idealised supersized breasts in the same way that the porn industry valorises large penises. Since 2007, surgical breast augmentations have declined and sales of push-up bras have plummeted. While breasts continue to bounce across our screens, they do so without the same volume in all senses of the word. 

It is with all this in mind that I appreciate the invincible orbs of Lauren Sánchez. I respect her choices. I admire her honest-to-goodness boob job. I’m delighted that she is out and proud. On that cold day in January, I also appreciated her suffragette-white pantsuit, which I assume was a nod to women’s rights and the fight for our bodily autonomy. So, thank you, Lauren. Tits up to you, sister. Wishing you all the best on the big day. A world desperate for distraction can’t wait to see what you’ll be wearing.

Thornton is a sociologist and the author of four books, including the international bestseller ‘Seven Days in the Art World’. A resident of San Francisco, her latest book ‘Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation’ is out now in paperback. 

Parisians have the palatial expanses of the Louvre. New Yorkers have the Met’s wings, partially extending into Central Park. Londoners have the halls of the National Gallery. Yet, in comparison with their French and American counterparts, the buildings that house Britain’s primary collection of European paintings are comparatively diminutive. 

In 2018, New York-based Selldorf Architects was appointed to redesign the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing. The remodel was heavily criticised when it was publicly announced in 2022, particularly regarding the removal of the building’s non-structural columns. Despite the controversy, the project has proven a success: its emollient results are exactly the salve the gallery needed.

The Sainsbury Wing is perhaps best remembered for King Charles III’s infamous “monstrous carbuncle” comment, which single-handedly scuppered its unrealised predecessor. But even the “much-loved friend”, the original building by William Wilkins that the wing extended from, was derided for its dowdy neoclassicism when it was built in 1838. This latest reworking was not only to mark the gallery’s bicentennial but also an overdue fix of what other national museums take for granted: instead of having to climb the stairs from Trafalgar Square, visitors now have a clear, accessible main entrance via the Sainsbury Wing.

The Sainsbury Wing extension was originally designed by American postmodernist architecture duo Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in 1991. It was given Grade I listed status in 2018 – Britain’s highest heritage conservation protections – at the tender age of 27. What’s being protected feels like a compromise: as you enter, an eclectic jumble of self-referential jokes play out the tensions between architects and clients in built form. “It’s like having an argument with the building,” says the project’s heritage architect Alasdair Travers. And not only with the building but also with its defenders. The new redesign by Selldorf Architects was vociferously resisted by critics, eight former presidents of the Royal Institute of British Architects and even Scott Brown herself.

Despite the noise, Selldorf has hit the right tone. The Venturi-Scott Brown’s masterful façade – a mannerist remix of Wilkins’s classical elements – remains as one of the cheekiest exteriors in the city, albeit with almost illegible signage. Within the structure, double-height spaces carve room to breathe out of the previously crypt-like ceilings. The smoked glass, a puce-tinted hangover from the 1980s, has been banished. And yes, the cutesy Egyptian columns remain.

The upper level of galleries, which was described by its director Gabriele Finaldi as “practically perfect”, remain unchanged. Instead, we are treated with a resplendent rehang, where the original enfilades of sandstone archways boast newly-placed works.

But the unsung heroes are the state-of-the-art metal security measures at the entrance. There has been a despicable spate of attacks on irreplaceable artworks, from Potsdam to Rome, Canberra to the National Gallery itself, where vandals masquerade as revolutionaries. Museums have been beefing up bag checks, banning liquids and putting yet more glass barriers and plainclothes officers between the public and what is supposed to be their collection. The new, nearly invisible metal detectors are a welcome return to a museum experience based, on the surface at least, on trust. I can feel free to enjoy the Old Masters without being searched like I’m about to throw a can of soup. 

One of Switzerland’s most charming cities has been bathed in bright sunshine this week as the art world arrived for Art Basel in Basel. Amid a testing time for the art market, the fair has returned with new sectors and initiatives that have revitalised the programme and re-engaged collectors old and new. Here are a few snippets from Monocle’s rundown of the booths and museum shows not to miss if you’re stopping by the Messeplatz or strolling around town. 

Hauser & Wirth 
One of the most expensive pieces at this year’s fair is a surprise addition to the booth of Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth. Mark Rothko’s 1962 painting “No. 6/Sienna, Orange on Wine” is rarely seen and was missing from the gallery’s preview materials, which makes seeing it in person all the more dramatic. The painting is well worth seeking out if you’re feeling up for a blast of the abstract painter’s big blocky colours. And if it puts you in the mood to see more, head up the road to stop in at the Kuntsmuseum’s permanent exhibition to see “No. 16 (Red, White and Brown)”. 
Messeplatz, Gallery sector, C10 

Edel Assanti 
One of the new initiatives at this year’s fair is the Premiere sector, in which galleries present work created in the past five years. London-based gallery Edel Assanti has brought a colourful solo show by US artist Lonnie Holley. His paintings and unusual sculptures made from salvaged materials invite closer inspection. Head to the Unlimited sector for more Holley in the form of his 2019 film, I Snuck Off the Slave Ship. In it, Holley performs an improvised score, accompanied by a blend of real and re-enacted moments from his life. The combination of gorgeous music and moving visuals makes for a captivating, poignant work. 
Messeplatz, Premiere, P3 

‘Steve McQueen, Bass’, Laurenz Fondation Schaulager
The bustle and busyness of Art Basel in Basel makes for an energising but at times exhausting experience. Take a breather by hopping on the tram to Laurenz Fondation Schaulager for Steve McQueen’s Bass exhibition. The UK artist and filmmaker has taken over the cavernous space with an immersive light-and-sound experience. More than 1,000 LED tubes have been installed throughout Schaulager that slowly change colour over time. As they bathe the space in colourful hues, deep bass frequencies reverberate around it from subwoofers and speakers suspended in the air. The elements combine to create a mesmerising, calming experience. 
‘Steve McQueen, Bass’ is open at Laurenz Fondation Schaulager until 16 November 

Jahmek Contemporary Art
Sometimes the first thing that strikes you about a booth is the sign outside telling you where the gallery is based. So it will be for many visitors passing by Jahmek Contemporary Art, which hails from Angola’s capital, Luanda. Inside, heavy topics of conflict are brought to life in a haunting but beautiful exhibition. Zimbabwean artist Felix Shumba’s gentle soundscape and paintings of ethereal beings are not to be missed.   
Messeplatz, Statements sector, M4

Julian Charrière, ‘Midnight Zone’, Museum Tinguely 
At Museum Tinguely, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s new exhibition Midnight Zone ponders the relationship between people and the earth – specifically as a world of water. Here, often in near-total darkness, visitors are invited to take a different perspective, whether that’s through lying down to watch films beamed onto the ceiling or by exploring parts of the ocean we’d never normally see. Many of the images of watery landscapes, both moving and still, are extraordinary and, on closer inspection, so too are the lengths to which Charrière has gone to capture them. Accompanied by a mesmeric soundscape, Midnight Zone is captivating, if at times unsettling. Dive in with an open mind. 
Julian Charrière. ‘Midnight Zone’ is open at Museum Tinguely until 2 November

1.
News & Coffee
London

Launched in Barcelona in 2019, News & Coffee now brings first-rate print media and coffee to 10 locations across Europe. Each kiosk has settled into its neighbourhood and so it is with the company’s second London location, this time in King’s Cross.

News & Coffee can be found in Granary Squre inside a Paperhouse – one of four kiosks designed by the London-based Heatherwick Studio in 2002. Over time these booths had lost their original purpose and the arrival of News & Coffee returned the Paperhouse to its intended function. “The conversation we had was, ‘How do we feel about bringing paper back into the Paperhouse?’” says Gautier Robial, one of News & Coffee’s three founders.

Granary Square provides a moment of calm in the bustling capital. In the warmer months it comes alive with children running in and out of fountains, live music and open-air cinema programmes. For Robial, this lively environment is the secret to the kiosk’s success. “People are rediscovering the joy of stopping by and having a chat while they wait for their coffee,” he says. “The newsstand is at the crossroads of so many layers of society; some that we don’t always notice. I always say that we have the same role as a public bench.”

---

2.
Aedicola Lambrate
Milan

A ritual close to the heart of many Milanese is a trip to the neighbourhood edicola (newsstand) to catch up on events. So when a group of friends living in the city’s Lambrate district saw a “for sale” sign attached to their local news kiosk two years ago, concerns about losing their source of print media quickly turned into a discussion about buying the space. “The location, set on a corner with a large pavement, was a gathering place for the community,” says Michele Lupi, a former editor in chief at the Italian editions of GQ and Rolling Stone, who now works for Italian fashion group Tod’s. “Newsagents had been there in one form or another since the early 1900s. It would have been a pity to lose it.”

Within a year, Lupi and a trio of partners – Paolo Iabichino, Martina Pomponio and Alioscia Bisceglia (frontman of Italian band Casino Royale) – refurbished the stand, complete with bright-yellow signage. It now stocks national and foreign publications as well as books. Talks with writers and live radio events are hosted on-site to engage residents. “We’ve had a great response,” says Lupi. “When we opened, neighbours came by with prosecco and plates of pasta to celebrate.”

---

3.
Quiosque das Amoreiras
Lisbon

Few shops in Lisbon enjoy better foot traffic than the small yellow newsstand just below the popular Amoreiras complex, which is home to residences, offices and a shopping centre. Passers-by are drawn it by the kiosk’s vast selection of national and international print media. “I have magazines that you won’t find anywhere else in Lisbon,” says Xavier Sepúlveda, who has owned the newsstand since 2019.

His inventory includes prominent English-language fashion, design, lifestyle and political magazines, as well as niche titles on music, film and wine. “We also carry quite a few French-language magazines such as Le Monde Hors-Séries and L’objet d’art,” says Sepúlveda, noting the proximity of the stand to the French lycée. Among the top sellers are decor magazines such as House & Garden, as well as the Portuguese Observador Lifestyle. The kiosk caters to the tastes of local patrons but Sepúlveda also stocks publications pertaining to his personal passions, and as the owner of a motorcycle shop it’s little surprise that he has a fine selection of titles about the two-wheeled beasts.

---

4.
Quiosco KGB007
Madrid

“I might be the smallest but I’m the strongest,” says Rafa Martín Piña from behind the counter of his quiosco redondo, one of eight ornately roofed, round-shaped newsstands in central Madrid. The 58-year-old has worked here since he was 14, observing the streetscape transform. “Only the pharmacy and the café opposite remain,” he says. “We’ve outlived the cinemas, the banks, every beard and bigote (moustache) style.” When the legendary literary Café Comercial (which sits opposite) was revived in 2017, the new owners financed an overdue restoration of the kiosk.

“I’m known as a spot for cinephiles and music lovers,” says Piña, pointing to more than 3,000 DVDs and a few hundred vinyl albums stacked alongside printed press. The name of his kiosk, KGB007, which he insists is entirely arbitrary but playfully cinematic, sums up the essence of his offering: information that sparks the imagination. His quiosco also serves as an informal help desk. When Spain suffered a near-nationwide power cut in April, dozens of people, their phones suddenly inoperative, flocked to him for guidance. “When it comes to printed media, we often say that we’re the resistance but this extends to the survival of neighbourhood meeting points too.”

---

5.
Banca Cinza
Rio de Janeiro

Banca Cinza is a recent addition to Rio de Janeiro’s eclectic mix of newsstands. Founded in 2024 by Jonas Aisengart, it sits in front of popular bar Chanchada, which Aisengart also runs. Cinza is in the bohemian Botafogo neighbourhood and has expanded the offerings of kiosks in the city by adding independent zines and art projects to the usual fare of traditional newspapers and magazines. Also on sale is ice-cream from Brazilian brand Sorvetiño as well as a neat selection of vinyl records. “My background is in art – I studied painting,” says Aisengart. He works alongside graphic artist Peu Lima to select the more artistic publications for the kiosk. “This is a way for me to reconnect with the art world within the commercial space of a newsstand,” he says.

The name Cinza (meaning grey) references the colour of Rio’s traditional newsstands but also works as an acronym for Cultura independente, notícias, zines e arte (Independent culture, news, zines and art). Among the bestsellers are illustrated titles by André Dahmer, who creates comic strips for Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo and for Piaui (Brazil’s answer to the NewYorker). And if choosing the right reading material becomes thirsty work, you only have to cross the road to find a cold beer.

---

Unicef recently published a list of the best countries in which to be a child. The Netherlands placed first. Denmark, my adopted homeland, came in second. Copenhagen certainly scores well on the “popsicle test”, which assesses the safety of a place according to whether an eight-year-old can walk to a shop on their own, buy a lolly and return home safely. I know families in Copenhagen whose children have roamed freely around the city centre from the age of six. Danish children enjoy wonderful freedoms and protections, and are indulged by city planners. It’s hard to argue against any of this but I have begun to wonder: can a society shift too far in favour of the youngest generation?

I recently walked around Copenhagen’s new Opera Park with its architect, Maj Wiwe. Since opening in 2023, Opera Park has become my favourite public space in the city but I had never really thought about why until Wiwe drew my attention to the absence of children. There’s no programming for them. There are no playgrounds or areas for ball games; no climbing walls, basketball courts or shallow boating ponds; no signs with cartoon characters on them; no cuddly mascots encouraging you to pick up your litter.

Wiwe said that she had designed the park for adult pursuits, such as gazing at spring blossoms, reading a book in a shady corner or getting mildly drunk on a summer’s evening. Seeing my children grow up in Copenhagen has made me realise that Danish children are cosseted in many ways. The country’s one-size-fits-all state-school system has a laudable emphasis on supporting lower-achieving pupils but it often comes at the cost of the academically ambitious. Competitiveness is generally discouraged and the limelight is meant to be shared. I once sat, bewildered, at a school production of Treasure Island, until it was pointed out to me during the interval that every child in my son’s class was being given the chance to play one of the main characters through scene-by-scene rotation. It’s a strange paradox: Danish children are extraordinarily free, except to succeed or fail.

Visiting the Opera Park with its designer made me realise the extent to which most other public spaces in the Danish capital are sacrificed in order to keep children amused or distracted. Perhaps the adults have gone along with it because we ourselves have become so infantilised. We dress like children in sportswear and trainers. We play computer games, read Harry Potter and wait patiently outside multiplexes for the latest Marvel film. Instagram encourages us to eat under-10s’ birthday-party food. We drive cartoonish cars and play padel instead of tennis. And don’t get me started on grown men on skateboards.

Copenhagen’s Opera Park offers a compelling alternative approach to urban spaces, with fewer swings and rubberised safety surfaces, and more contemplative oases – quiet corners of the city in which to read a book or flirt. Who knows? If we show our children more mature ways in which to live in the city, we might begin to raise more robust grown-ups.

Michael Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent.

Illustrator: Pete Ryan