Capsule #63 ft. Hannah Louise

Hello hello,

Hope everyone is feeling good and that those of us in the UK are excited for a three-day weekend 🫶.

This week’s newsletter is about some unexpected Eras Tour FOMO — if you too experienced this phenomenon this week I’d love to hear from you in the poll! Equally if you didn’t, and generally avoid this sort of thing, I’d love to hear about that too. While we’re on Eras Tour, we’re looking at Hayley Williams’s outfits from the Paramore opening sets, and sharing an argument for getting yourself a birthday present.

Also super excited to have Hannah Louise share her Hots and Nots with us this week — Hannah is someone I’ve followed for a long time, and when I started Capsule, she was on a list of people I’d love to have in here one day. It’s cool that that day is today.

Enjoy!

Holly x

P.s. if this newsletter gets clipped in Gmail, click ‘read online" 👆 up there x

A note on the Eras Tour

The Eras Tour being in London this week did something to me. Each night I found myself on the various fan accounts (@TheSwiftSociety, @tswifterastour) avidly refreshing to see which surprise songs were played, how Taylor spoke of her one-off opening acts like Suki Waterhouse and RAYE, which celebrity friends were in the box, and whether or not the musicians among them would leave the VIP section to head to the stage. There were updates every five minutes, with photos and videos, and on some accounts, you could even watch full livestreams of the show. Following along made me feel excited - my heart rate genuinely raised at one point - but also made me question myself. If I felt like this, why hadn’t I got a ticket?

The answer to that is pretty simple: big stadium concert culture is hard to get on board with unless you’re a diehard fan. There are queues just to get a fan code that gives you the chance to buy a ticket, which are rarely under £150, and the more affordable seats are so far away that it feels impersonal being there. You have to care a lot, and with Taylor Swift, I’d decided my appetite fell slightly short of that.

Fast forward to Tuesday evening, I’m refreshing the accounts, laughing at memes you’d only get if you were so far into the fan culture, and partaking in all the theories about announcements. The feeling reminded me of what it’s like to be at Glastonbury, spending the day debating with your friends about which special guests the headliners might bring out. In these circumstances, you’re nearly always left disappointed. Rarely do people fly in Fleetwood Mac or Rihanna for a song, and similarly with the last Taylor Swift show in London, a Florence Welch appearance was fun, but not something so far from your grasp if you are a Florence fan and hope to see her in your life. The real moments when rumours or surprises came to fruition are when I felt most disconnected from the Swifties online - they seemed beyond satisfied, so lucky, so full with joy and electricity. I thought, this is fun, and Florence has bare feet again. The hype is the fun bit.

And that’s the bit that Taylor is so good at. My boyfriend was surprised at how invested I was in this tour given that this is a celebrity I don’t talk much about, don’t save photos of to a Pinterest board and rarely comment on their style or behaviour with admiration. I’ve never read Taylor’s full Wikipedia page, which I think is a pretty good indicator of investment.

I’ve listened to Taylor Swift’s music since I was in high school - early memories include a classmate introducing me to ‘Forever & Always’ (2008), and the Grammys performance of ‘Fifteen’ with Miley Cyrus (2009). Since then, I’ve listened to each album and kept a few favourite songs with me from each: ‘Holy Ground,’ ‘Getaway Car,’ ‘You’re On Your Own Kid.’ But when I think back to my interaction with the Taylor brand over the past decade, I remember the album rollout as much as, if not more than, the listening experience. I remember her Instagram feed counting down each day to Red. I remember the Polaroids for 1989, and the snake imagery and Kim/Kanye feud around reputation. This is a really solid body of marketing, so powerful it can still be recalled ten years later. I think one of the core strokes of genius from the years Taylor was getting super famous was her consistent use of handwriting - sharing pages of diaries and writing captions on printed photographs. As her fame increased, we were pulled towards a songwriter we could imagine sitting at a desk or on a flight, gazing out the window, writing stuff we felt too, but better.

That mammoth marketing effort for the Eras Tour is also responsible for the intense FOMO. We have never heard so much about a tour before: about records broken, through trailers for multiple versions of the concert film, and enough daily news stories to run an entire newspaper. The Guardian even started a newsletter dedicated to Taylor, which has just finished after six months. There has never been a bigger musician, and certainly never one who has so publicly wanted this life. In old interviews, Taylor is open about wanting to be famous, and is gleeful at the news of her record breaking. She also talks about being raised by “two very logical, practical parents,” which helps us see that this isn’t the archetypal bohemian artist making work when they feel compelled then seeing what happens. This is an intricately designed career, each juncture crafted to lead us to the next, to build a body of work and a fanbase that can carry on into forever. All things considered, I think it’s normal to feel like you missed out if you didn’t see the tour. That’s exactly how this was designed.

While we’re on the Eras Tour…

As noted, the disconnect between Taylor’s style and my preferences is a blocker to a deeper fan experience. The opposite is true of Hayley Williams, and during Paramore’s stint as openers for the Eras Tour, she wore so many outfits worth sharing. All credits to her stylist, Lindsey Hartman. Here are some of the best.

Also wanted to share…

My favourite Instagram post from this week, which came from Fearne Cotton. She shared a photo of herself in a new dress, bought for herself for her birthday. The dress is divine…

And so is the caption, which reads:

Should we start a new birthday ritual of buying oneself a joyful gift and writing a journal entry? Stuff like this feels like a balm compared to everything else we see about women and ageing online.

And finally…

Pop culture and fashion news you may have missed this week:

• Charli xcx defined brat autumn…

• …and is also the latest Skims girl…

• …a campaign only rivalled by Greta Lee for Calvin Klein

• Lana Del Rey released the cover for her next album Lasso

• Jenna Ortega is dressing well on the press tour for Beetlejuice

• The British Fashion Council announced the nominees for the 2024 Fashion Awards

• Chappell Roan wants fans to chill out a bit

• TV news: Michaela Coel is making another TV show, this time with Jesse Armstrong of Succession, Bella Mackie’s novel How To Kill Your Family is being made into a Netflix show with Anya Taylor-Joy as the lead, and Victoria Beckham is getting her own Netflix documentary

• Tems is on the cover of Essence and the photos are divine

• And Amelia Dimz wore British-Nigerian designer Tolu Coker for her Chicken Shop Date with Sabrina Carpenter

This week, Hannah Louise (aka @hannahlouisef) popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Hannah is a London-based fashion and lifestyle creator. She also has a vintage and secondhand homeware and trinkets brand called In Reverie.

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📺 Watching: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on streaming, and Blink Twice, Zoe Kravitz’s new film with Channing Tatum in the cinema.

📖 Reading: Bowen Yang interviewing Chappell Roan for Interview mag, plus some of the articles on friendship in The Cut this week, on why friendship breakups are so brutal and what happens when a platonic life partnership falls apart, which is a follow-up from a 2022 story about people who choose a non-romantic life partner.

🎧 Listening to: The Eras Tour episode of Continental Garbage (a great rec from a friend also missing the tour), and two big album releases: Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, and Fontaines D.C.’s Romance.

Encouraged by the white around her eyes, Piper wants you to know there’s still time before we’re in full fall mode to bleach your brows, and you wouldn’t be alone in doing so. “Y2k eyebrows” was a recent breakout search on Google, and “bleached brows” tripled in search last week. The more of us who try it, the more we normalise it…shall we go?

If you’d like to adopt Piper 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, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋