Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision.

That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.

What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.

As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while? Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”

I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another.

We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.

I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”

I couldn’t help but wish that other missing parts had been included in the adaptation: a scene that uses a billiard table as a metaphor for a particle accelerator; Liu’s deeper exploration of the VR game, which allows the reader to try to untangle its collection of mysteries along with the characters instead of just watching them solve it; more details about the ingenious “human computer” in VR, which looks cool but isn’t really explained on-screen.

The scenario the show ultimately posits bears little resemblance to traditional sci-fi fare; the aliens are coming, but not for another four hundred years, putting humanity on notice for an encounter—and possibly a war—that’s many lifetimes away. This time span is as much a curse as a blessing. Forget the science for a second; what kind of political will—totalitarian or otherwise—is required to keep centuries of preparation on track? How do we get the über-rich to contribute to a new space race in a way that also flatters their egos? And what resources does it take to accelerate scientific discovery to a breakneck pace?

It’s criticised a lot for lacking character depth and not focusing on the characters. I’d agree somewhat but there are a few characters and one in particular which I felt a real connection with as the world unfolds in the later books.What it lacks in character charm though it makes up for in mind bending sci fi. Scale. The possibilities that could lay ahead. It focuses on mass psychology, how civilisations react, different ages etc. It’s about a much much much bigger picture and almost sacrifices character development to focus on that other stuff.I wouldn’t change a thing despite finding book one quite difficult too.My appreciation for it warped beyond recognition as I made my way through books 2 and 3.

Chinese is a utilitarian language, yes. It's also a language that heavily relies on context for impact and meaning. Cixin Liu's writing is no exception and is similar throughout his entire bibliography. It's very recognizable when he was truly inspired, e.g. the hairs on Ye Wenjie's cheeks standing up when she first stepped on Radar Peak, the making of the first sophon, etc. These moments increase in number progressively through the series, and Death's End is mostly one super inspired moment he obviously dreamed about writing for a long time after another, to the point where the final chapters are a mind-boggling rush through new concepts, eons and the coming together of numerous old concepts and plot threads. In short, this was written by a practicing engineer.

And that a core portion of book two was about how wartime footing caused famines and death and hardship, and then there was an explosion of freedom, innovation, and overconfidence. He critiques both the East and the West. I liked that.

I’ve only finished Books 1 and 2, and truth be told, I read them because I wanted to know what would happen. So I’m definitely more into it for the big concepts and ideas than the stories. But I did find some of the stories very interesting, moving, or sad, or surprising, and I really liked the fact that during the first book, he talked about the Cultural Revolution, and censorship, and stifling political pressure, and as a Chinese insider rather than a critical outsider.

The strength of this book is scale and innovation. The 'writing' is not necessarily the best quality. The author is an engineer, not a professional writer, so you can only expect so much. In return, the ideas are much wilder than the typical sci-fi.

For scale, there are two aspects. First is the depth: you start in the cold war era and literally go the end of the universe, with all the major steps in between. Compare this to other sci-fi, like star trek, that happens in an advanced but static universe. There really aren't any game changing tech coming out through the course of star trek, but happens like 10 times in TBP. You can critique the actual science, but the consequences for each technology felt impactful.

At no point where the human and trisolarians even remotely on even grounds. This is in contrast with many other sci-fi works where aliens things had human equivalents (cars, jewelry, etc.) and they interacted face to face.

Chinese literary convention tends toward less emphasis on the individual and a preference for that which is larger scale. In Chinese literature, putting a lot of emphasis on the internal monologues of characters, expounding on their motivations and detailing the minutiae of events are seen as formal and stylistic faults that make a work tedious.

The highly divergent ideas about narrative and sense of aesthetics can make Chinese literature very difficult to read for us in the west, which is why the most popular ‘translations’ of Chinese literature tend to be abridged adaptations that interpret the spirit of the work rather than the actual contents, this is why Arthur Waley's Monkey: A Folktale of China is by far the most widely known and read version of Journey to the West in the English speaking world and the only people reading actual verbatim translations of the full work by Wu Cheng’en are scholars.