Author: My World of Interiors
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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The City People Keep Missing
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Athens in September, and the case for treating it as a destination rather than a gateway The standard relationship between the serious traveller and Athens is one of transit. You fly in,…
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The Reel Argument: Agnès Varda
By Bergotte Agnès Varda spent sixty years making films about the people and things that the world had decided did not matter, and she did it with a curiosity so genuine and a formal intelligence so complete that the combination amounts to something close to a philosophy of cinema — a sustained argument, made in…
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Monstrous Bitch
Who Gets to Be a Monster? Book: Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying WomenAuthor: Eleanor JohnsonPublisher: Princeton University PressPublication: 6 October 2026Pages: 344ISBN: 9780691291666Genre: Cultural history / Feminist criticism / Mythology There are monsters, and then there are women who have been made monstrous. The distinction lies at the heart of Eleanor Johnson’s wonderfully provocative…
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
How Proust Can Change Your Life In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask what…
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The Human Condition According to Mark Twain
By Bergotte Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy —…
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Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor
How a boy from Northern Ireland transformed Loewe, dismantled the boundaries between fashion and culture, and arrived at Dior with more creative power than any designer since Christian Dior himself By Bergotte Fashion periodically decides that one designer matters more than everybody else. The reasons are never entirely aesthetic. A designer becomes important because he…
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Alessi
Makers & Rooms — Essay VI The Dream Factory on the Lake For a century, the Alessi family has been making things for the kitchen and the table. Alberto Alessi turned that inheritance into something stranger and more ambitious: a theory of what objects are for, a laboratory for the most original design minds of…
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What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She responded…
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The Post-Compliance Generation
I think about this a lot… by Bergotte What Gen Z Gets Right There is an ungenerous and emotionally immature kind of pleasure available to every ageing generation: the discovery that the young are doing everything incorrectly. Their clothes are wrong, their language is absurd, their music is noise, their manners have deteriorated and their…
