Tag Archives: Profiles

Waris Ahluwalia’s Iconic Life

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Waris Ahluwalia

Waris Ahluwalia has followed the rhythms of his own peripatetic life, and landed on the shores of some enchanted land, where you can do anything you fancy, and all of it seemingly well.  All of Ahluwalia’s wandering and exploration have turned him into a sort of “renaissance adventurer,” one who, on the one hand, makes glorious, luxurious, bohemian jewels and, on the other, stars in movies both big and small (from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited to The Inside Man). He collaborates thither and yon with this one and that one (like the panty line he did for Yoox.com or diamond collaboration he did with Forevermark), gets profiled in the grooviest online places (mrporter.com, theselby.com, thesartorialist.com and the list goes on), and shows up at so many creative happenings that you can get a creative royalty contact high just from perusing the photos of his gallivanting about. 

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Jessica Chastain’s Dream Come True

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One night in November, Jessica Chastain sat at Charlie Rose’s table, along with David Straitham and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, with whom she’s appearing in The Heiress in a limited run on Broadway, and talked about the play, her life, and the last two glorious years, which have brought her a fame that she wears like her own skin, like it was always meant to be there, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Chastain, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award this past winter for her work in The Help (and who will almost certainly be nominated again this winter — this time for Best Actress — for her work in this year’s Oscar buzz-worthy Zero Dark Thirty — told the story of her grandmother taking her to see Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when she was a child. There was a little girl on stage and her grandmother told her “This is their job. This is what they do. It’s professional theatre,” and Chastain says, “As soon as I saw it, it wasn’t ‘that’s what I want to be when I grow up,’ it was ‘that’s what I am.”

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Tata Harper On The Farm

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Tata Harper lives on a 1200 acre farm near Middlebury, Vermont, with her husband Henry, their three kids and a menagerie of rescue dogs, cats, sheep and goats. They grow most of their own food and they also grow some of the ingredients for Tata’s eponymous, natural, Tata Harper skincare line, which is also manufactured on the farm.

Growing up, Tata was passionate about math and science. She loved experimenting and figuring out how things work. Little surprise, then, that she became an Industrial Engineer. Tata’s career path changed in 2004, when her stepfather was diagnosed with cancer and advised to avoid conventional products because of the toxic chemicals they contain. Tata, whose grandmother introduced her to homemade skincare as a child, did what she does. She started experimenting. For five years, she worked with a team of chemists, biologists, agriculturalists and aromatherapists from around the worlds. The result? A line of luscious, texturally rich, wonderfully (and naturally) scented products that deliver results.

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Liya Kibede’s More Than Model Life

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Liya Kibede, the international super model — and Ethiopia’s native daughter — isn’t resting on her laurels. This girl works. She works the runway. She works a magazine layout and she can definitely work an ad campaign. She works LemLem, the fashion label she founded in 2007 with the goal of putting traditional Ethiopian weavers back to work. She works The Liya Kibede Foundation, her namesake foundation dedicated to saving the lives of birthing mothers and children by ensuring that every woman, no matter where she lives, has access to life-saving care. She even works the silver screen, having appeared in nine films, including the Matt Damon starrer The Good Shepherd and Desert Flower, based on model and anti-female genital mutilation activist Waris Dirie’s novel by the same name.

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Billy Reid’s Shindig

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Billy Reid: Southern Hospitality on Nowness.com.

The life of Florence, Alabama-based womenswear and menswear designer Billy Reid is so insanely beautiful, authentic and inspired it’ll have you wanting to decamp to some sleepy town in the Deep South…if only to prove that it isn’t so sleepy after all. Florence Alabama alone, which the New York Times dubbed the fashion capital of the deep South (never mind that moniker only shows up in the Google search, and never in the article itself). Florence alone is home to Billy Reid and filmmaker turned designer Natalie Chanin’s Project Alabama, (since re-dubbed Alabama Chanin), the fashion house that found its place in the fashion firmament by combining high fashion with a community revitalization project that employs local women ages 20 to 70, former factory workers, retired teachers, widows, stay-at-home moms, and secretaries who help sew Alabama Chanin’s one-of-a-kind, handmade garments. Alabama Music Hall of Fame is just down the highway, and if you stop on in, you’ll learn a thing or two about Alabama native son Hank Williams and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which influenced the sounds of Aretha Franklin and so many more. You’ll even find a Frank Lloyd Wright house right there in Florence, the only one of its kind open to the public in the deep South.

But I digress. There’s a whole world of riches in the Deep South — and just about any place if you look with an open mind. But this is about Billy Reid. Billy’s life is a living example of what a fully realized life can look like — and a reminder that sometimes our best life can only be accessed by riding the stormy waves that life sometimes brings until it carries us to some new shore. Billy rode his wave to Florence, Alabama, where he hosts his annual Shindig each year. One of these days, Billy Reid is going to invite me to his Shindig. Until then, I’ve got this video from Nowness.com, one of the most inspired destinations on the Web.

3 REASONS TO LOVE BILLY REID:

One. Because, when his business failed on the heels of an economy turned south, Reid and family packed up and moved his family to that deeper, sweeter South.

Two. Because Reid created a new reality — and invited us all along.

Three. Because, in rebuilding his business, Reid rose like a Phoenix from the ash.

VIDEO BY Nowness.com

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