Happy Chinese and Lunar New Year! Wishing you all a year filled with prosperity, good health, and happiness! 🐍🐍🐍
Have y'all been keeping up with the AI drama this week? I noticed OpenAI wasn't resolving requests when the news dropped about DeepSeek. So I created an account to see what the drama was all about and you what, yea. I can't believe how little funding DeepSeek had to create a model that's on par, if not better than OpenAI's. And it's open source.
NY Times released a small profile on DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, citing even his hiring practices were unorthodox. Mr. Liang’s approach has been as unconventional as his company’s rise. He has emphasized intellectual exploration over sheer grind. His hiring philosophy is equally unorthodox — DeepSeek’s engineering teams have been joined by literature buffs to help refine the company’s A.I. models.
Considering the budget and actual models, it reinforces to us that the US tech market and its oligarchs have long been driven by greed and not innovation.
Down bad for DeepSeek. Sent a sad smiley and we were back in business! 😂
Shoes On. Eyes Open.
-Sarah
weekly highlight—
Lilith NYC x Áwet New York Pop-Up
Thank you to everyone who braved the cold to hang with us last weekend! It was lovely to catch up with old friends and meet so many new faces.
A special thanks to Misguided Spirits for providing the libations—hope y'all loved the Palomas as much as I did! And huge thank you to Áwet New York for hosting us and making everything run so smoothly. We’re so grateful for your support. 💗
Can’t wait to do it again soon—so stay tuned for more pop-ups and events coming soon!
WE'RE swooning—
Spring Summer Couture 2025 Shows
I loved, loved the exaggerated silhouettes in this Schiaparelli collection. Titled Icarus, Daniel Roseberry shared that he happened upon an “antique shop with an inventory of ribbons from the 1920s and 1930s. Before the war, many of these ribbons were created in Lyon, and shipped around the world. But when Germany invaded France, many of these spools of ribbon were hidden away, lost for a period to history.”
The silhouettes a nod to a range of references, "the snaky, curvy forms from the 1920s and 1930s (what I call liquid deco) here finds shape in fragile silk georgette embroidered with Japanese bugle beads, which is then mounted onto French corset toile molded into shockingly sharp hip blades. We took severe-shouldered prewar Schiaparelli jackets and simplified and elongated them, pairing them with 1990s-style simple bias-cut floor-length column skirts in double satins.”
Big AI meets coquette vibes with Viktor & Rolf's collection—all the ruffles, oversized bows, and ruching. The duo shared that this collection is a series of “extremely diverse variations on a single outfit: a beige trench, a white shirt, and blue pair of pants. While paying homage to couture's traditions and history, the collection forms a whimsical, human clin d'œil to the boundless possibilities of Artificial Intelligence.”
I know I have a blind spot for Elie Saab (gimme all the sequins and dreamy pastel palettes) but I love this couture denim exploration in his collection called Portrait of a Dream. Happy to see something beyond the usual, especially this sleek, denim sari drape.
Titled The Pale Blue Dot, Rahul Mishra's collection was inspired by all his thoughts around issues impacting the world including pollution, due largely to man-made climate change. I didn't include a photo here but there's one black dress that reminded me of the visuals in the film, Inception. The collection moves from dystopic to utopia with a change in color, ending the show with a series of gold pieces.
The Tamil Nadu government has offered a $1-million reward for anyone who can decode the cryptic script of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world’s oldest urban cultures. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin made the announcement as a follow-up to a new study suggesting striking similarities between symbols in the Indus script and those in ancient Tamil pottery.
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have officially withdrawn from the West African regional alliance known as ECOWAS, the bloc said on Wednesday, defying pressure from the group to return the countries to civilian democratic rule. They have also ended military cooperation with France and the United States, imposing new mining laws and taxes to maximize revenue from their ailing economies. 🇲🇱 🇧🇫 🇳🇪
In addition to lawsuits by nonprofits, 22 mostly Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia filed their own lawsuit to block the funding freeze late on Tuesday. Opponents in both cases have argued that Trump’s order was illegal, since responsibility for government spending falls largely to Congress, rather than the president. 😵💫
Surprised I haven't shared this one sooner because I've been listening to it on repeat the last two months. I just need the instrumental section at the end to be a little longer like my other favorite kompa tracks!
