Hello! The theme of this week’s letter is nuance, as several thorny subjects have filled feeds and proved that there’s no shortage of black and white thinking. One of them is Ariana Grande taking a step back from public life, so a heads up that I get into some commentary about weight and include an image that some may want to avoid.
I promise there’s lots of fun stuff too, including the book of the summer that isn’t even out yet, the latest brand trip to spectacularly flop, Gabriette’s wild wedding photos, the hating women debate, the inflated resale market for Hailey Bieber’s viral jeans, the two under 30s keeping Hollywood alive and it really is phones that’s making kids bad at reading. Paid subscribers get the full bhuna, free subscribers get a nibble. Let’s jump in…
Taking August off… The French have done it for years and now Brits are getting in on the month-long summer holiday trend. I have zero quantitive data to back this up but I do have plenty of examples. From my local cobbler to my Botox doctor they’ve all shut up shop in August…
High profile content creators are also jumping on the trend with Elizabeth Day announcing that she was taking “a summer pause,” which is a very chic name for a vacay.
I’m curious if fellow Brits have noticed this trend too? And to my American and beyond readers, has it reached your shores? As someone who worked in corporate America for six years I fear hell will freeze over before the U.S. gets comfortable with such a liberal use of PTO.
Ariana Grande’s body… and she’d much prefer that we weren’t. In fact she’d very much like us to stop the “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” which has led her, according to her publicist, to take “a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances”.
So far, so scolded, but more on that later.
To rewind, commentators have been dissecting Grande’s body for years, and in 2023, the former child star urged people to refrain from talking about her weight in a TikTok video.
“I think we should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies, no matter what,” she said.
Her pleas fell on closed ears and by November last year the noise had reached a fever pitch. Grande was - along with fellow cast members of Wicked: For Good - deemed to be problematically thin, especially for someone who was portraying a Disney princess, and thus a role model for young girls.
The discourse about Grande’s body came roaring back several weeks ago as she teased her new album on social media and embarked on her first tour in seven years. Then last Friday she dropped the music video for the track petal.
With its Tarantino-style ultra-violent ending, the video was meant to send a message about judgement and rejection. Instead Grande’s body was all anyone could talk about.
The singer’s clothes hang from her frame and her bones visibly jut through her skin. One particular moment when she thrusts her arms back is particularly shocking…
For many Grande’s thinness became the elephant in the room. They couldn’t consider the song, or the video’s plot, because of how underweight Grande appeared. And this wasn’t some unflattering pap picture. This was her video. Something she presumably had creative sign-off for.
Comment sections rapidly became overwhelmed with concern, outrage and criticism over Grande’s “health”. Rage was also directed towards her team and those close to her.
One TikTok video attracted over 464,000 comments, and across platforms she’s been compared to two late singers who struggled with eating disorders, Karen Carpenter and Amy Winehouse.
The response quickly reached Grande and her team. By Sunday they announced her step back and revealed that she was pulling out of the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George.
Unpicking all of this is very tricky. The way I see it we are left with two terrible choices. We either ignore our eyes and roll with the idea that we should not comment on bodies, or we express our fears when we see something alarming. The former risks normalising something profoundly problematic and the latter risks esteem-crushing judgement. There is no right answer.
What I will say is that for Grande’s team to put the reason for her soon-to-be hiatus on us, the viewer, is bold. Indeed the carefully worded statement drips in contempt for those who’ve passed comment:
“Ariana will be taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour. She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily, and then taking a much-deserved break from public-facing work and appearances, which has led to endless, ongoing public scrutiny.”
While Grande, and any other person in the public eye, should be able to live their lives without being subjected to abuse or bullying, it’s a reach to suggest she, or anyone else, be exempt from scrutiny. That’s asking us to be silent and accept what’s fed to us. In other words to be supplicant and maybe even complicit.
Grande’s got nearly a month of live shows to complete before her last one on September 1 in London. That’s a lot of time for “public scrutiny”. And then there’s the open question of whether she’ll promote her forthcoming role in Focker-In-Law, a sequel to Meet the Parents, which is out at the end of November. Whatever she chooses to do let’s hope she finds some peace.
What do you think about the debate over Grande’s body? Let me know in the comments.
Switzy… Whoever is doing the pre-release publicity for this new novel by Emma Cline needs a raise because I feel assaulted by it.
I guess if your past works are The Guest and The Girls there’s going to be buzz, but the number of people flaunting their galley copy is gargantuan. Indeed having an advanced copy of the book appears to be a new status symbol.
Most concerning of all is that the book - which focuses on a man’s final journey to an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland - is not out for another month so I fear we haven’t even reached peak Switzy yet.
Whether hating influencers = hating women… Here’s another one that requires your nuance muscles.
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