Dilara Findikoglu Fall/Winter 2024 - Femme Vortex

Surgical clothing was originally white, the color of cleanliness. But under bright operating room lights, all that white caused harsh glare and eyestrain. In 1914, American surgeon Dr. Harry Sherman found that the glare made it harder to see what he was working on, so he created a “spinach-green” operating room at St. Luke’s Hospital, with walls and fabrics in the same shade. Over the following decades, especially after World War II, green spread through operating rooms, and the outfits became known as “surgical greens.” The name “scrubs” came later, from the sterile, “scrubbed” environment where they’re worn.

The real trick is in how our eyes work. Green sits opposite red on the color wheel. When a surgeon stares at red blood and tissue for a long time, the eyes’ red-sensing pathway gets tired. Then when they glance at something white, like a drape or a colleague’s outfit, they see a green “ghost” that follows their gaze, like the spots left after a camera flash. Against green or blue, “these disturbing ghosts will blend right in and not become a distraction,” explains Paola Bressan, who studies visual illusions at the University of Padova. Looking at green from time to time also keeps surgeons’ eyes more sensitive to subtle shades of red, which matters when every detail counts.

On June 3, 1987, at the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris, Alain Chevalier of Moët Hennessy and Henry Racamier of Louis Vuitton signed the merger that created LVMH: Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. Under Bernard Arnault, the group turned into a fashion powerhouse. In 1997, Louis Vuitton hired American designer Marc Jacobs to create the trunk maker’s first ready-to-wear line.

Then came the big buys. In March 2011, LVMH sealed a €3.7 billion deal for the Italian jeweler Bulgari, and the Bulgari family became LVMH’s second-largest family shareholder. In April 2017, LVMH bought Christian Dior Couture for €6.5 billion, reuniting Dior’s fashion business with the Dior perfumes it already owned. In January 2021, after more than a year of pandemic-era delays and a renegotiated price, it completed the $15.8 billion takeover of Tiffany & Co. Bernard Arnault called Tiffany “an iconic brand and a quintessential emblem of the global jewellery sector.”

In April 2023, LVMH became the first European company valued at more than $500 billion. In March 2024, as a premium partner of the Paris Olympics, it unveiled Louis Vuitton trunks built to carry the Games’ medals and torches. Each medal trunk holds 468 medals, and the medals themselves were designed by Chaumet, another LVMH house.

Bill Cunningham had 28 bicycles stolen. When the 2010 documentary Bill Cunningham New York was filmed, he was on his 29th, a Schwinn, and most of the others had been taken while he was busy getting the shot. For decades, the New York Times photographer pedaled across Manhattan in his signature blue French workman’s jacket, often to several events in one night. He never owned a car and wouldn’t take taxis.

Born in Boston in 1929, Cunningham dropped out of Harvard in 1948, moved to New York and wrote about fashion for Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune before he picked up a camera. A chance photo of Greta Garbo passing on the street caught the Times’ attention, and in 1978 he began his weekly street-style column there, later called “On the Street.” He turned down repeated offers of a staff job. He was also the first photographer whose pictures of famous people the Times ran without their permission.

“The street speaks to me,” he said. “If you’re not out on the street, you don’t know anything.” He was named a New York City Living Landmark in 2009, and as Anna Wintour put it in the documentary, “We all get dressed for Bill.” He died in 2016 at 87.