How I learned to stop hating and love GOOP.

[I've been pretty busy recently, but we should be back to regular HelloTailor updates in a couple of weeks! :) In the meantime, have this article I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow's beauteously delusional millionaire lifestyle website, GOOP.]

If the experts at People magazine are to be trusted, then Gwyneth Paltrow is currently the most beautiful woman in the world. Happily, this means that beauty now comes with a comprehensive instruction manual. Thanks to her lifestyle newsletter, GOOP, it’s possible for us mere mortals to follow Gwyneth’s own advice on how to be exactly like her—that is, perfect.

 According to its website, GOOP (cheerily named after Paltrow’s initials) is “a digital media and e-commerce company.” Its free weekly newsletter includes style tips, recipes, vacation recommendations, and miscellaneous words of wisdom from Paltrow’s rich and famous friends. The writing style is particularly intriguing—primarily first-person Paltrow, with occasional additions from a mysterious editorial “we” whenever Gwyneth wants to interview herself.

GOOP may not sound like it has much of a market aside from people who really, really like to read about quinoa and $350 yoga pants, but it’s mesmerizingly readable—mostly because of its Marie Antoinette–esque detachment from reality. It's a glimpse into a magical alternate universe where money is limitless and the most important things in life are selecting the most authentic Corsican spa for a weekend getaway and teaching one’s children to enjoy buckwheat grains. [READ MORE]

Hannibal: "Apéritif”

(Note: No major spoilers.)

Hannibal is a rare breed in that the first episode is genuinely good, mostly because there's no need for clumsy exposition. Anyone with half a brain already knows what's going on: Hannibal is a cannibal, but it will probably take at least one season  for anyone on TV to work that out. It only takes a couple of minutes to illustrate who Hugh Dancy is: a guy who frowns a lot because of Confused Emotions, and whose brain is a holodeck for blood-spattered crime scenes. Hugh Dancy means we can watch people get murdered in dramatised flashback form, instead of having some generic CSI person explain it to us with Science. 
Mads Mikkelsen is, obviously, fantastic. But for me, the harder sell was always going to be Hugh Dancy's character, criminal profiler Will Graham. Not because I'm familiar with his character (I'm not) but because the crime/mystery genre is already overflowing with cute-ish men in their 30s and 40s. Luckily Graham sidesteps the two main cliches of "asshole genius" and "dorky everyman", and is interesting enough to be a worthwhile foil to Hannibal. Still, like most stories about serial killers, Hannibal mostly features women as side characters or in the role of naked, brutalised corpses. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is less of an issue because Clarice Starling is just as important as Hannibal Lecter, but there's no real need to make a TV series about Clarice. We already know her story too well.

Mike Lunsford's "fully-dressed redesigns" of superheroine costumes @ The Daily Dot.

Supergirl may be a woman of steel, but is a red, blue, and gold cheerleader uniform really the most practical outfit for fighting crime? While many superhero costumes can be a little beyond the pale (Ben Affleck’s red pleather catsuit in Daredevil comes to mind), their female counterparts are almost always worse.

Image by Mike Lunsford/ze-tarts.

Superheroine costumes can be a major point of contention for comics fans. Wonder Woman’s red bustier and star-spangled short-shorts are iconic, but do all female superheroes need to wear a swimsuit and heels when battling the forces of darkness? NBC’s failed Wonder Woman pilot tried to redesign her suit with pants rather than a skirt or shorts, but the end result was something that looked more like a Halloween costume. [READ MORE]