Dymphna's Archive

19/08/2026

There is a claim, repeated often enough that it has become a kind of common wisdom, that silk and satin blouses give the women who wear them a sense of authority. It turns up in style columns, in wardrobe guides, in the kind of listicle that promises to change how you feel about Monday mornings by changing what’s in your wardrobe. The claim is rarely explained. It is simply asserted, as though softness and command were self-evidently compatible, and the reader is left to take it on faith.

The more interesting question isn’t whether this is true. It’s why it might be — and the answer turns out to involve fashion history, the physical properties of the fabric itself, and a strand of psychological research that is more precise, and more limited, than the wellness-adjacent version of the claim usually lets on

There is a claim, repeated often enough that it has become a kind of common wisdom, that silk and satin blouses give the women who wear…

18/08/2026

There’s a moment near the start of the 2014 film Cake, starring Jennifer Aniston in a dramatic lead role, where a support group for chronic pain sufferers is forced to sit with the death of one of its own. The woman has taken her own life, and the group — used to talking about pain they can manage, pain with a shape — doesn’t quite know what to do with a loss that has none. The film spends the rest of its runtime circling a question it never states outright: what happens to the people who are left behind, holding a life that has stopped mid-sentence?

It’s a strange place to start an article about an English electronic band, and the circumstances don’t map onto each other cleanly — Cake’s absence is a su***de, and Broadcast’s was nothing of the sort. Trish Keenan, the band’s singer and songwriter, died of pneumonia in January 2011, a complication of swine flu she’d contracted while completing Broadcast’s first tour of Australia. She was 42. There’s no useful equivalence to draw between the two kinds of loss. But the shape of the question is the same one worth asking about Broadcast: not simply what was lost, but what happened to the work, and the people, left standing afterwards.

There’s a moment near the start of the 2014 film Cake, starring Jennifer Aniston in a dramatic lead role, where a support group for chronic…

16/08/2026

For nearly two decades, one of the most recognisable faces in American film and television was showing paintings, photographs and collages under a name almost nobody connected to her. Long before most people knew Lucy Liu made art at all, galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Munich and Toronto were quietly building a reputation around a different name entirely: Yu Ling, her Chinese name.

It wasn’t a stage persona or a marketing gimmick. It was a deliberate act of separation, sustained for the better part of twenty years, between an actress whose face was on cinema posters and an artist who wanted her work seen without that baggage attached.

For nearly two decades, one of the most recognisable faces in American film and television was showing paintings, photographs and collages…

15/08/2026

Ask someone to name fashion’s great classics and you’ll get a predictable list: the trench coat, the white shirt, the little black dress, maybe raw denim if they’re feeling expansive. The pleated skirt won’t come up. And yet it has been in continuous, visible use for over a century — on tennis courts, in school corridors, on punk stages, in TikTok "get ready with me" videos — more constantly present in ordinary wardrobes than almost anything on that list. A garment doesn’t get that kind of longevity by accident. So why has fashion history never quite let it in the canon?

https://medium.com/.kemp/the-fashion-classic-nobody-calls-a-classic-b0220c68a901

14/08/2026

When you see a pleated skirt today — on a school run, a tennis court, a TikTok feed — you’re looking at one of the oldest pieces of clothing technology still in daily use. Older than coined money. Older than the alphabet most of us write in. The pleat wasn’t invented by a fashion house chasing a trend. It was invented, independently, more than once, by people who needed fabric to move with the body instead of fighting it. Every reinvention below solves roughly the same handful of problems — heat, mobility, drape, status — in a different climate and a different century, which is exactly why the shape keeps coming back.

When you see a pleated skirt today — on a school run, a tennis court, a TikTok feed — you’re looking at one of the oldest pieces of…

13/08/2026

A man walks onto a small stage in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in September 1962, carrying an axe. In front of him is an upright piano. He raises the axe and brings it down, once, then again, splitting the case, snapping strings, until the instrument is a pile of wood and wire on the floor. The audience doesn’t quite know whether to laugh, applaud, or leave. Some do all three.
The piece was called Piano Activities, credited to the composer Philip Corner but performed by several people at once, following a brief written instruction rather than a musical score in any conventional sense. It was one of a run of events staged that autumn under a name almost nobody in the audience had heard before: Fluxus.

Within a decade, that name would attach itself to Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and a loose international network of artists, poets and composers who between them produced very little that looked like art in any familiar sense — instruction cards, mail-order boxes of small objects, performances that lasted seconds. Within five decades, pieces from that same network would sit in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and change hands at auction for serious money. The movement that tried hardest to abolish the art object ended up, eventually, generating rather a lot of them.

https://medium.com/.kemp/who-owns-a-movement-built-to-have-no-owner-2e107dcdde47?postPublishedType=initial

09/08/2026

In 1952, a laurel wreath was stitched onto a sports shirt for the first time, and nobody involved in that decision had the faintest idea what they were setting in motion. The shirt was designed for tennis players. Within fifteen years it belonged to gangs of teenagers in Doc Martens who had never picked up a racket in their lives. Within thirty, it belonged to punks. Within forty, it belonged to men on football terraces comparing the cut of their jackets. And within seventy, the company that made it was forced to pull one of its own colourways from sale in North America because a far-right group had adopted it as a uniform.

This is not really a story about a shirt. It’s a story about what happens when a company designs an object, releases it into the world, and then discovers it has no say in what that object means.

In 1952, a laurel wreath was stitched onto a sports shirt for the first time, and nobody involved in that decision had the faintest idea…

07/08/2026

For fans of John Zorn's Tzadik music label

"In a 2002 interview, John Zorn was asked how many titles his label had put out. "About 250 now," he said, in the tone of someone mentioning how many books were on a shelf he’d built himself. Today that number is well over 900, and roughly a third of it is Zorn’s own work — solo albums, chamber pieces, film scores, his various bands. The rest belongs to dozens of other composers and improvisers Zorn has judged worth a permanent home. That casualness about scale is the whole story of Tzadik in miniature: a record label run for thirty years by a composer who talks about volume the way most label heads talk about strategy, because for him the two things are the same.

Tzadik was founded in New York in 1995 by Zorn, working with engineer Kazunori Sugiyama. Its catalogue spans free improvisation, klezmer, noise, modern composition, extreme metal and film scores, by artists as varied as Derek Bailey, Meredith Monk, Otomo Yoshihide and Fred Frith. It is registered as a not-for-profit, cooperative label. It has almost never bought advertising, rarely issues press releases, and for most of its life released almost exclusively on compact disc, at precisely the moment the rest of the industry was drifting away from the format — vinyl has only ever appeared on the label in small, limited-edition runs. None of this makes obvious business sense. That it has worked anyway — for three decades, at a scale most independent labels would consider reckless — is the actual subject worth examining."

In a 2002 interview, John Zorn was asked how many titles his label had put out. "About 250 now," he said, in the tone of someone mentioning…

04/08/2026

In the 1440s, in the courts of northern Italy, a wealthy family would gather after dinner to play a trick-taking game with an oversized deck of cards. The game was called tarocchi. It involved trumps, tricks, and a fair amount of gambling, and it was, by every surviving account, exactly what it looked like: entertainment for people with the leisure and money to commission beautiful decks for their card table. Nobody at that table was reading the future. Nobody thought the cards held hidden knowledge. For roughly the next three and a half centuries, nobody would.

That gap — three hundred and fifty years of a card game being nothing but a card game — tends to get skipped over in most accounts of tarot’s history, because it’s the least dramatic part of the story. But it’s also the part that explains everything that came after. Tarot didn’t start as a mystery that people gradually decoded. It started as a manufactured product, refined and standardised by ordinary commercial pressure, and only later did anyone decide it meant something more.

In the 1440s, in the courts of northern Italy, a wealthy family would gather after dinner to play a trick-taking game with an oversized…

04/08/2026

“We’ve been together for 35 years and I’ll say just really starting last year or two years ago, we got back into that place again where we’re friends and we love playing with each other again,” Questlove says.

“That’s something I never thought I’d see. I thought it was like marriages. You’re all in love for the honeymoon period and that’s it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I became more hyperaware of human dynamics. That’s the one thing I took away from Earth, Wind & Fire—how to preserve and save myself in terms of a spiritual practice.

“I’m not big on organized religion, but I am big on spirituality. That’s way bigger than man-made organized religion, but I also believe that relationships are everything. As a leader, I wanted to make sure that I’m doing right by my guys as well. So we’re just in a way happier rhythm now than we ever been in the history of this band.”

Though the Roots haven’t released an album since 2014’s …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, they’ve had one in the works for the better part of a decade. The 2014 death of their longtime manager Rich Nichols—who they describe as their Brian Epstein—slowed the process to a snail’s pace, but they are inching closer to its completion and hoping to have it out by the end of the year or early 2027.

“We just don’t want it to become Chinese Democracy, which is the long-awaited, 28 years in the making third Guns N’ Roses album,” he says with a chuckle. “So the joke is don’t take three decades making your record.”

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