Header image: No. 1 Family Estate’s Adèle Le Brun, Daniel Le Brun, Rémy Le Brun, and Annie Le Brun. Above: From Eli Thompson’s Until Death Do Us Part diploma collection at Whitecliffe’s School of Fashion and Sustainability.
What a pleasure to learn that Adèle and Daniel Le Brun, along with their industry peers, received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Marlborough Wine Show last month. The Le Bruns have been pioneers of méthode traditionelle in New Zealand for over 40 years and their No. 1 Family Estate wines have been our favourites from our home country since they launched.
In related news, I’ve been concerned how there is less advantage to using Aotearoa New Zealand in our messaging. Twenty years ago, it suited us. Today, well, you can see my thoughts over on my blog, and in Scoop, which first published my op–ed.
I wish this wasn’t the case, since fashion and beauty ed. Sopheak Seng and I attended Whitecliffe’s graduates’ show for their School of Fashion and Sustainability, and there was undeniable talent there.
And those grads will be wanting to start labels in the future, or work for existing firms that might rely on the image of their country of origin.
Sopheak and I were almost of like minds over our favourites from Whitecliffe. I had on my list Eli Thompson, Shariah Diskin, Aquila Gibbs, Phoebe McCrossin, William Newton, Emma Jack, and Molly McGregor as names to watch. How wonderful, too, to meet one of their teachers, Pip Stevenson, herself profiled in Lucire 21 years ago under her maiden name of Bradley, whose 1920s-themed mini-collection as a graduate merited our attention.
We wish the grads the best, and remind them that a lot of successful businesses were founded in tough times.
Above: Wifredo Lam: The Jungle, 1942–3. Oil on paper on canvas, 239·4 by 229·9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Inter-American Fund. Copyright ©2024 Artists Rights’ Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Wilfredo Lam (林飛龍, 1902–82), the Cuban artist, will have a retrospective at MoMA, from November 10, 2025 through March 28, 2026. Over 150 rarely seen artworks from the 1920s to the 1970s will go on show, with key loans from Lam’s Paris estate.
As a Lam on my mother’s side, who knows if we have a common ancestor? Regardless, Lam brought a unique perspective to his work, with his mixed-race heritage: Chinese on his father’s side, and Congolese and Cuban mulatto on his mother’s. His time in Europe brought him into contact with Pablo Picasso, with whom he exhibited; on returning to Havana, his awareness of Afro–Cuban traditions heightened, and a human–animal–vegetal hybrid began appearing in his work. His work blended African and European ideas, and he later began experimenting with ceramics and sculptures.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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