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Razor clamshell dress from Voss

Voss is the seventeenth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, made for the Spring/Summer 2001 season of his fashion house. Voss drew on imagery of madness and nature to question beauty standards and critique the fashion industry, with showpiece designs made from unusual materials such as razor clam shells (dress pictured), an antique Japanese screen, and microscope slides. The runway show was staged on 26 September 2000 in London, inside a room-sized mirrored glass cube, the audience seated outside. The interior was styled to look like an insane asylum and models were directed to act unwell. In the finale, a glass cube inside shattered to reveal Michelle Olley, fat, nude, and covered in moths. Critical response was positive, especially towards the showpieces and the performance art aspect. The show is regarded as one of McQueen's best, and has attracted a large amount of academic analysis. Several ensembles appeared in the retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. (Full article...)

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In the news

Protests in Albania

In Albania, demonstrations erupt (pictured) against a proposed tourism development project on the environmentally protected island of Sazan.
In Myanmar, an explosion at a Ta'ang National Liberation Army base leaves 43 people dead.
In Twenty20 cricket, the Indian Premier League concludes with Royal Challengers Bengaluru defeating Gujarat Titans in the final.
Following the collapse of Evika Siliņa's coalition, Andris Kulbergs is appointed prime minister of Latvia.

On this day

June 7

Surinam Airways Flight 764

421 – Roman emperor Theodosius II married Aelia Eudocia, who later helped to protect Greek pagans and Jews from persecution.
1832 – The Reform Act, which is widely credited with launching modern democracy in the United Kingdom, received royal assent.
1900 – American temperance activist Carrie Nation entered a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas, and destroyed its stock of alcoholic beverages with rocks.
1929 – The Lateran Treaty was ratified to bring Vatican City into existence, thus ending the "Roman question".
1989 – Surinam Airways Flight 764 (pictured) crashed while approaching Johan Adolf Pengel International Airport, in Zanderij, killing 178 people, including members of the football team known as the Colourful 11.

Joseph von Fraunhofer (d. 1826)
Amelia Edwards (b. 1831)
Emily Ratajkowski (b. 1991)
Uriah Rennie (d. 2025)

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Today's featured picture

The Astronomer is an oil painting on canvas by the Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in 1668. The work depicts an astronomer studying a celestial globe beside a copy of Adriaan Metius's Institutiones Astronomicae Geographicae. Closely related to Vermeer's The Geographer, it is thought to portray the same sitter, possibly Antonie van Leeuwenhoek; a 2017 study showed that both paintings were made from canvas cut from the same bolt. The painting was seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family during the Second World War, returned to them when the war concluded, and acquired by the French state in 1983. It is now in the collection of the Louvre in Paris.

Painting credit: Johannes Vermeer

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