Eighties Blitz, the self and a VHS Club

Eighties Blitz

The Blitz exhibition at the London Design Museum, which opens on the 20th of September, revisits the iconic Blitz where New Romanticism was born. The club was the centre of London’s 1980s creative explosion, and launched the careers of Boy George, Spandau Ballet, milliner Stephen Jones and others.

The exhibit shows how the Blitz club shaped 1980s fashion, music and art, and reflects its impact on music, fashion, film and graphic design today. You can watch the Blitzed documentary on Netflix and read more here

IP & Copyright

Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors who allege their books were pirated to train the company’s AI chatbot. It is the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies. The case showed the central role of books as high-quality data sources for large language models, while raising questions about how creative work is valued and protected in a digital economy.

It is an important precedent because it may reshape the relationship between AI companies and creative industries, setting standards for consent, compensation, and fair use in the age of machine learning. Read more here

Tilda Swinton - Ongoing

Opening in September at Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Tilda Swinton – Ongoing reflects on the actor’s four-decade career that ranges from experimental cinema to Hollywood hits. Curated and conceived by Swinton, the exhibition frames her as a performer and an active co-creator. It emphasizes the collaborative relationships that have shaped her four decades of work.

The exhibition will not be a retrospective, but a living, evolving portrait of her ethos, the actor as a central auteur. There is an interesting program of talks and interviews with Tilda and collaborators as part of the exhibition. See more here

Escaping the Self

In the book Against Identity, Alexander Douglas writes that our so-called individuality is built on imitation, rivalry, and the gaze of others rather than any authentic inner core. Identity is a harmful illusion, he writes, that breeds rigidity and intolerance.

Douglas suggests that liberation comes not from affirming identity but from loosening our grip on it altogether. The book is a statement against today’s culture of self-obsession, challenging the romantic lie of being yourself with the radical idea of letting identity dissolve. You can read more here or listen to a podcast here

Haus Nowhere

HAUS NOWHERE is the Future Retail experiment by Gentle Monster that opened last weekend in Seoul. It is a 14-story immersive concept store that blends performance, sensory experiences, and brand worlds.

The project reveals a growing emphasis on retail as a cultural experience, where imagination and setting frame how we engage with brands, not just products. See more here

VHS Club

Club VHS is a new video rental initiative in Amsterdam, dedicated to films that are not available via streaming services. It offers a physical collection of DVDs alongside rental players, reviving the experience of browsing and selecting titles by hand.

At a time when streaming platforms dominate viewing habits and limit choice through algorithms, the project highlights the value of curation and cultural preservation. The analogue, community-driven approach reflects a search for slower, more tangible ways of engaging with media and discovery by hand, eye, and gut. See more here