The Saint Omer director has gathered work by artists, writers, composers and poets for Geste de Consolation, set in the 60m-long central hall of the Palais d’Iena in Paris

Alice Diop has just returned to France from California when we speak. It’s a Zoom meeting with a bad connection, and Diop leans close to the camera, always in frame, barely moving. It’s like watching the characters in her documentaries and films, where her camera lingers on its subject with a slow, cool intensity.

Diop had been attending a two-week celebration of her work organised by the French department at University of California, Berkeley, in which academics pored over her documentaries (Nous (We), Vers La Tendresse (Towards Tenderness)) and her first feature film, Saint Omer, which received the Silver Lion in Venice in 2022. The courtroom drama was inspired by a real trial that Diop attended, of a Senegalese woman who had allowed her baby to drown in the sea. Over two hours, it explored the complexities of race, culture and motherhood in contemporary France. The film was the first by a black female director to be entered by France as its official entry in the 2023 Academy Awards.

Brand’s signature desire to subvert the ordinary brings blazers with track pants and crop tops under blazers to Paris fashion week

Speaking backstage at Miu Miu’s show on Sunday at Paris fashion week, Miuccia Prada said she had been thinking about “real clothes”. The clothes people wear on the street for running errands rather than posing on social media. Her findings? Succinct. “The reality of clothing today is this mix – sportswear, casual, normal,” she said. Her challenge? To make them “more interesting, more rich”. To achieve this, she outlined how she had decided to focus on mixing “elements of sports with sophistication”.

The collection opened with a series of five neatly pleated checked skirts. The first was worn with an equally neat checked blazer but rather than a smart shoe, such as a pump or loafers, there were brightly coloured trainers. The second featured a crop top under the blazer, the trainers swapped for spiky high heels. The other looks ditched the blazer and clipped the tops so they sat just under the bust line.

Celebrities are hosting literary clubs and designers are launching products emblazoned with the classics – but does reading’s trendy turn have a darker side?

From celebrity book clubs to the revival of the edgy literary party, being a book lover is in. Dior has launched new versions of their Book Tote emblazoned with the covers of classics such as Ulysses and Dracula. Earlier this year, Coach collaborated with Penguin to produce miniature literary bag charms – fully readable micro-versions of books, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Sense and Sensibility. Miu Miu hosts a Literary Club; Chanel its Rendez-vous littéraire.

Being bookish is now sexy, we’re told. i-D magazine recently ran a piece on the Whitney Review – a literary journal based in New York – proclaiming its team part of the “hot literati reshaping criticism”. The founder describes the Review as “sexy, surprising, stubborn”, and its contributors “curious and beautiful” (corroborated by an accompanying shoot in which the Whitney team look more like a bunch of models than anything else). But the piece raised eyebrows in the comments section of i-D’s Instagram page: “the definition of vacuous and vapid”, writes one user; “No room for ugly literati, only HOT”, says another. Should we be sceptical about reading’s voguish turn?