• Capsule
  • Posts
  • Capsule #31 ft. Emma Garland

Capsule #31 ft. Emma Garland

FKA twigs drama, defending bows, and boxer Barry Keoghan

Hello hello!

Every Friday in January is a triumph so welcome and well done! It’s not easy plodding through the week when it’s dark and cold. But now it’s Friday and time for your pleasure reading 🫶

In today’s issue, we’re chiming in on the peak bow discourse, chatting about the banned FKA twigs Calvin Klein ad, and sending love to Selena Gomez. 

I’m also delighted to bring in Emma Garland for this week’s Hot & Not. Perfect timing as her new newsletter is up there with some of the best writing you can read on desire - the perfect backdrop to the conversations around the FKA twigs controversy. If you’ve been tapped out this week, all will become clear as you read! 

Have a great weekend,

Holly x

(Open tabs)

On bow fatigue 

I’ve heard a fair bit of chatter about us reaching peak bow, bows are over, we can’t wait to see the back of them, and so on. I understand that we are in a place where there are bows on everything so there’s not much further we could take it even if we wanted to. But some of the conversations remind me of the worst bits of trend culture: you’re supposed to love something, buy into it, and then turn your back on it a few weeks later (or risk being left behind with those who don’t “get it”). 

My two cents: bows are timeless, and we’ll always use them to soften hard edges (and practically to actually tie stuff). We won’t affix them to everything forever, but there’s no need to avoid something like the plague because someone online told you they weren’t cool anymore. Just look at Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, who almost missed their Glastonbury set in 2022. She emerged just in time, face beaming, wearing a silk Simone Rocha dress with bows on the straps and sides. She went so hard that day, the cascading ribbons of the bows following her as she charged across the stage. I like to recount this as a reminder that there can be more depth to the things you like than some TikTok telling you something is over. That’s what style is.

FKA twigs and Calvin Klein 

This week, a Calvin Klein ad with FKA twigs was banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency for presenting her as “a stereotypical sexual object” and focusing “on the model’s body rather than on the clothing being advertised” (isn’t that the whole point of Calvin Klein marketing?). The tagline was “Calvins or nothing” - no points for subtlety there. How does the policing of this campaign make you feel? Do you think the image is harmful? Does it protect women to take it down? 

Calvin Klein campaigns: FKA twigs (banned) and Jeremy Allen White (not banned)

The banning of this ad has come at a funny time, because less than a week ago everyone was losing their minds at CK’s latest campaign with Jeremy Allen White. A journalist even brought a blown-up print of it to the Golden Globes and used it as fodder for press chats with the cast of The Bear. As Emma Garland points out in her newsletter Gabrielle, which is all about desire, “imagine the jail someone would be thrown in for approaching the red carpet with a cut-out of Ayo Edebiri in a sports bra.” In a post #MeToo world, it simply wouldn’t happen. But does striving for more conservative images of women help us in a broader sense? For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a crime to find someone attractive or enjoy pictures with nudity, and I don’t think most people do either. Apparently 30% of all web traffic goes to porn sites, and discreet forms of erotica (like Kindle books or audio-based pleasure apps like Ferly) are commonplace. If we sanitise imagery, not just in advertising but in other narrative media we consume, we set a strange, repressed standard for our culture. 

Emma goes on to say: 

“The way we talk about sex symbols is more out of pocket, more divorced from the true nature of sex, than ever. We’re delighted to put cartoonishly horny expressions about men out there in the world, and to male actors directly. That’s fun, encouraged – professional, even! The industry can’t be seen being publicly creepy to women anymore, so being creepy to men is its replacement currency. Now we’re in a situation where men have become not only the lesser sexual threat, but the locus of our displaced prurience. Meanwhile female sexuality has become more threatening, if anything. The very suggestion of its existence is something we have to deny or repress, ostensibly for our own safety.”

You should read Emma’s essay in full here, where she deftly moves between representations of desire in media (including Girls, Drive and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) and sex symbols (Jeremy Allen White, Paul Mescal, Harry Styles, Pedro Pascal) and plots their meaning onto how we treat sex today. 

Mesh tops in January

It’s an icy cold January so of course many of us are thinking about mesh tank tops. The meme comparing Zac Efron in The Iron Claw to Lena Dunham in Girls gained a new member this week in Barry Keoghan, our Irish man of the moment (or one of? Irish actors are killing it rn).

I’m still trying to figure out Barry’s style, in part because he’s experimenting a fair bit, which is a joy to see in itself. All I can say with certainty is that you can just tell he’s a boxer. He likes a bit of glam with his drip; there’s often jewellery, shoulders and upper arms are important, and he’s rarely seen without a fresh trim. If any of us wanted to channel Barry this weekend, I’d suggest we incorporate running up some concrete steps into our run, and make the effort with our hair and jewellery even though it’s January and we’re feeling a bit sorry for ourselves. 

Barry Keoghan for GQ, photographed by Jason Nocito

And finally…

Selena Gomez returned to Instagram 18 hours after announcing her social media break (the post was probably published by her management agency but that’s just the fine print). I love this stuff. Normalise doing something for less than a day but still announcing it. Way cooler than agonising over the image you’re curating for yourself. 

This week, Emma Garland popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Emma is a writer and editor from South Wales. Formerly the Culture Editor at VICE and the Digital Editor of Huck, she runs the @gabrielleultras newsletter and freelances for the Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Dazed among other places. Her first book, Tell All Your Friends: A Cultural History of Mainstream Emo 2000 – 2013, is due out via Hachette US in 2025.

🔥🔥🔥Hot🔥🔥🔥

- Phone calls for no reason

- Complimenting your boys

- The 90-minute banger (solid films of a reasonable length)

- Intergenerational friendships

- Asking God to grant you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference

- “E.I.” by Nelly

Hot Not… 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

- Perfect teeth

- Pret subscriptions

- Apps for every coffee shop, restaurant, parking meter etc

- Hardback books (bitch my wrists HURT)

- That hideous looking Amy Winehouse biopic

- Rap lyrics being used as evidence in court

📺 Watching: The Traitors of course! If you haven’t started because you mistakenly thought it was on every night and therefore too much to keep up with, it’s not, and it’s not too late to begin.

📖 Reading: This first-person piece from Rachel Connolly on questioning whether she was the villain in a past relationship – it’s about staying with someone longer than you should because the logistics work for you. Plus this week’s new profile pieces: Jack Antonoff and Barry Keoghan for GQ, and Bar Italia for Crack, Kristen Stewart for Variety.

🎧 Listening to: ‘Right Back to It’, the new Waxahatchee song, and If Books Could Kill, a podcast about popular self-help books (like Atomic Habits, Men Are From Mars, etc) and their unfounded claims.

There were a few things Sophie thought may not return from the 2000s, and the Puma Mostro was one of them. And yet here we are, relaunched with a fat new price tag (currently £135 on END.). On cheap trainer sites, you can still bag a pay for 30-odd quid, and failing that, your dad might still have a pair in the shed. You might shudder at the thought for now but we know how the cycle goes… Awaiting Bella Hadid to style…

If you’d like to adopt Sophie or one of her friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, please forward on 🥺

See you next week 💋