Sean and Amanda discuss Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour epicKillers of the Flower Moon and everything that it entails. They explore the adaptation of the David Grann book and how Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth shifted the perspective in the film (10:00), Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Robert De Niro’s repeated collaborations with Scorsese (23:00), the spellbinding performance of Lily Gladstone (48:00), the ways the film reflects on themes Scorsese has explored repeatedly (38:00), how it slots into the late Scorsese oeuvre (1:27:00), its chances at the Oscars (1:30:00), and more.
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
Mal is joined by Ben Lindbergh to discuss The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1. They start by talking about the state of the ‘Walking Dead’ franchise, their history with it, and whether this show could be a good reentry point for people (8:17). Then, they dip into the season by talking about Daryl and the new supporting characters, the show’s new French setting, and the similarities to The Last of Us (34:30). They also look forward to what’s next for the franchise.
Host: Mallory Rubin Guest: Ben Lindbergh Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Miss Minutes is back, and so is Jessica Clemons to break down the latest episode of Loki! Who is Victor Timely (01:00)? What is Sylvie doing (06:15)? Are Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes actually working together (09:40)? Find out all of that and more in Splash Page!
Host: Jessica Clemons Producers: Aleya Zenieris, Jonathan Kermah, and Jack Sanders Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal
There’s a story that crops up on the margins of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon that’s fascinated me for years. It’s the story of the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, who, in the 1920s and ’30s, became one of a hauntingly small number of American Indian authors to receive national attention for their work. Decades before modern culture rediscovered the so-called Osage murders—first through Grann’s mega-bestselling book, then through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, opening this week to radiant reviews—Mathews wrote about them. And not only did he write about them, he lived through the time when they happened; observed their effects; was shaped by them, to a degree. Mathews in turn played a significant role in shaping the future course of Native American literature. It would be fitting if the popularity of Killers of the Flower Moon led more people to rediscover the work of this important, and semi-forgotten, American writer.
Mathews was a strange, brilliant, phenomenally contradictory figure. American literature has a way of lifting up writers whose psyches don’t entirely cohere, as if they’re assembled—like the United States itself—from mismatched parts. Think of Emily Dickinson: the titanic ambition of the work, the mundane anonymity of the life. Or Ernest Hemingway: the bullying strength layered atop weakness, the rejection of sentimentality shapeshifting into a new form of sentimentality in and of itself.
Mathews belongs to this lineage. Whatever you picture when you hear “early 20th-century American Indian writer” almost certainly isn’t him. For one thing, he was only one-eighth Osage, from his father’s grandmother; the rest of his ancestors were white. He was the son of a rich banker, yet he chose to live alone for long stretches of his life in a solitary stone cabin, which he called “The Blackjacks,” in Osage territory in northern Oklahoma. He spent his early life on a series of globetrotting adventures—he flew planes during World War I, studied at Oxford, hunted big game in Africa, got married in Switzerland—yet he settled down while still in his 30s to a withdrawn and quiet writing life. He was a lifelong Anglophile, and his manners were often compared to those of an English gentleman, yet he spent decades collecting and preserving tribal legends and tales. Above all, perhaps, he was alive to the modernist currents roiling the literature of his day, yet he turned his sensibility away from cities and the future and embraced nature, tradition, and the past.
Mathews was born in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation, in 1894. Oklahoma wasn’t a state yet. When Mathews was a toddler in 1897, a gargantuan reserve of oil was discovered beneath Osage land. Members of the tribe held what are called headrights, which entitled them to a share of the lease money oil companies paid to gain access to the land; this resulted in a massive influx of wealth into the territory. As if overnight, everyone got rich. (It’s this massive influx of wealth, and the horrific violence some white people unleashed in order to gain control of the headrights, that forms the central narrative of Killers of the Flower Moon.) As one of the most esteemed banking families in Pawhuska, the Mathewses benefitted directly from the boom, via headrights, and also indirectly via the surge in new business. They hired an Italian architect to build them a splendid house, complete with archways, European furniture, and a fountain. They held elegant parties. They took trips around the world.
The Mathewses lived between two worlds. They were proud of their Osage heritage, and in some ways were seen as leaders in the tribe. Mathews’s father served on the Tribal Council, as Mathews would later do himself. At the same time, many among the Osage didn’t see the Mathewses as Indians at all.
The Mathews family tree is simply an astounding document; you could build an academic course around it. Bloody and beautiful strands of American history run down the page. John Joseph’s great-grandfather, William Sherley Williams, was the child of Welsh immigrants who moved to North Carolina in the 18th century. He became a missionary, went west, and encountered the Osage tribe; this was in the early 1810s, just a few years after Lewis and Clark—before “the West” as we think of it was invented. Williams learned the Osage language and worked on an Osage Bible, but rather than converting the tribe to his religion, he seems to have been converted himself. He adopted their way of life, married an Osage woman called A-Ci’n-Ga, and had two half-Osage daughters, one of whom would become Mathews’s grandmother. A-Ci’n-Ga died sometime around 1820, and Williams drifted away from the tribe. In the 1830s and ’40s he became legendary as a mountain man. People told stories about “Old Bill Williams,” the drunken trapper and inveterate horse thief, a sort of vulgar ghost in the wilderness. He’d sometimes come down from the hills to guide an expedition, including some that killed dozens of Native Americans without provocation. The man who’d loved and lived among Indians now became known for abetting, perhaps even participating in, the murder of Indians. He was killed himself in 1849, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, by a Ute war party in Southern Colorado.
The two daughters of Old Bill and A-Ci’n-Ga, Mary Ann and Sarah, each married the same man, a Kansas businessman and trader named John A. Mathews. Sarah married him after Mary Ann died. John A. Mathews was admired by the Osage for dealing with them fairly, unlike most of the other white traders in their territory. He was also a slaveholder and passionate advocate of the pro-enslavement side during the Bleeding Kansas struggle in the 1850s. He led raids against abolitionists. He burned barns. Burned crops. Looted. Kidnapped. During the Civil War he tried to convince the Osage to join the Confederate side. His son, William—that’s our Mathews’s father, the future banker—once raced on horseback to warn a Jesuit mission that a guerrilla band led by his own father was coming to kill one of their priests. William was about 12 at the time. To reach that mission he had to ford a flooded river. The priest escaped.
John A. Mathews was tracked down by Union cavalry in 1861 and killed by a shotgun blast. The soldier who shot him was named Pleasant Smith. You think you’ve reached the upper limit of strangeness in American history; American history is just getting warmed up.
John Joseph Mathews’s mother came from a family of French Catholics. Mathews grew up, in his own telling, as a sort of “princeling,” spoiled and caressed. Everything came easily to him. In high school he was an athlete. His father loved going to his basketball games in the years before World War I. When I first encountered that detail in Michael Snyder’s invaluable biography of Mathews, John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer, I had to put the book down and walk around the room in a sort of momentary daze. Because there it is—there’s history. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the pages turning. A missionary sets out into the wilderness in the Napoleonic era, and a handful of generations later, barely a blink of the cosmic eye, that same missionary’s grandson is sitting in a high school gym cheering at a basketball game.
Mathews studied at the University of Oklahoma. When the Great War broke out, he left college and enlisted as a pilot. He loved flying: the danger of it, the remoteness, the beauty of the world from the air. He wanted to fly in combat, but he was made an instructor instead. He taught night-bombing. After the war, he went back to college, where a writing mentor urged him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. He didn’t apply for the scholarship—his grades weren’t good enough—instead, he decided to go to Oxford and pay for it himself. His father had died by this point, and the family business was now in decline, but Mathews had plenty of money from the Osage headrights. For a semester he put off leaving for England because he wanted to hunt bighorn sheep. He went to Wyoming, mixed with cowboys, drank in saloons, camped in the snow. Then he went to Oxford and transitioned to a life of punting on the Cherwell and debating philosophy over tea.
He traveled widely. Paris, Lausanne, Algiers. In Algeria, he hunted gazelles and leopards. With a guide named Ahmed, he traveled into the Sahara. One day, en route to view the Timgad Roman ruins, his party was surprised by a group of Kabyle tribesmen galloping toward them on horseback, firing Winchester rifles. The men weren’t hostile—they were goofing around, more or less. The vision of tribal warriors engaged in an ecstatic charge filled Mathews with a sudden longing to be back among the Osage. He recalled the joy he’d felt seeing Osage riders speeding across the prairie when he was a little boy. Decades later, in 1972, he described the moment for an interviewer: “What am I doing over here?” He remembered asking himself. “Why don’t I go back and take some interest in my people? Why not go back to the Osage. They’ve got a culture. So, I came back, then I started talking with the old men.”
He didn’t, though; at least not right away. In Switzerland he met a young socialite named Virginia Hopper, the granddaughter of a former president of the Singer sewing machine company. They got married and moved to California, where Mathews tried unsuccessfully to establish a real estate business. Mathews and Virginia had two children, but the marriage didn’t last. After five years, Mathews walked out. He went back to Oklahoma. With a startling callousness, he seems to have given his family very little thought from then on. He didn’t write to his children. He sent money infrequently, and never very much. His son became a child actor, which supported the family for a while. After that, Virginia had to pay the bills by having affairs with wealthy married men.
Spend enough time with Mathews and you’ll run into this strange coldness in him. He was popular, charismatic, easy to be around. But he was also self-sufficient. He liked to be alone. Why should he worry about other people? It’s another of his contradictions. Back in Osage country, he got elected to the Tribal Council and spent years working for the interests of the tribe. Consider that, along with his dedication to preserving the Osage oral tradition. What does that suggest? That he valued community, right? But look a little closer and you see a different Mathews.
“The Indian,” he wrote, “is a poet. He is very religious, and he appreciates beauty. Being so very close to nature, he is filled with the rhythm and harmony of nature, yet he is cruel, as nature is cruel.” Maybe he really believed he was writing about all Indians here—who knows. He was surely writing about himself.
He backed into writing. Didn’t know what else to do with himself. He’d left California, returned to Oklahoma, moved into a run-down cabin. What was he going to do there? He had a friend who was working on a biography of Sitting Bull. Why not try something similar? Around the same time, he’d been given a priceless gift: the journals of a Quaker Indian agent, Laban Miles, who’d lived among the Osage for 50 years and meticulously recorded their history. Many people had sought those journals, including the hugely popular novelist Edna Ferber, who’d written about the Osage in her blockbuster bestseller, Cimarron. Now Mathews had them. On July 4, 1931, he sat down and started typing. Everything had always come easily for him. A book poured out.
Mathews’s first book, a history of the Osage called Wah’Kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, took Miles’s diaries as the basis for a lyrical history of the tribe, a history less concerned with chronology and analysis than with impressionistic sweep. The book covered 1878 to 1931; Mathews immersed himself so deeply in the writing of it that he all but cut himself off from the outside world. The cabin didn’t have a telephone. The shower was a bucket. “I wrote that book just like a wood thrush would sing,” Mathews said. “He’s not conscious of it, he just sings. I didn’t have any idea that people would read it.”
People did. The book was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection in 1932, and this was a time when the Book of the Month Club had Oprah-level clout. Wah’Kon-tah, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, became an unlikely national bestseller. Mathews grudgingly traveled to New York City on a press tour. The cosmopolitan globetrotter was now so reluctant to leave his cabin that he forgot to bring the publicity posters his publisher had printed for him. In New York, publishers approached him about writing a novel. He agreed, with similar reluctance. The novel, written quickly and without much enthusiasm, appeared in 1934. It’s called Sundown. It’s the story of a mixed-race war veteran who comes home to Osage territory during the upheaval of the oil boom—that is, during the time of Killers of the Flower Moon. More than 80 years before David Grann brought the story to a national audience in 2017, Mathews had tried to do the same thing—or a version of it.
The differences between Killers of the Flower Moon and Sundown act as a concise index of the changes in American publishing between the 1930s and the 2010s. Killers of the Flower Moon is a taut, gripping nonfiction book, written in a mode that’s at least adjacent to true crime. Sundown is an evocative, challenging novel about a young man’s existential alienation. Mathews’s voice appears here and there in Grann’s novel—he’s quoted in the epigraph, and sporadically throughout the book—but Sundown is too weird and personal, too prone to spiraling around its repressed 1930s sexuality, too focused on the struggle of a single human soul to have been a major source for Grann’s work. Mathews himself didn’t like it. He didn’t look at it again for years after he finished it, and when he did finally pick it up, he was surprised to find it “not in the least bad.”
In later decades, however, it was Sundown that became Mathews’s most studied work. It established a template—Snyder describes it as “the homecoming of an alienated Native veteran who struggles with his identity”—that would be followed by numerous Native writers in the decades to come. It helped to bring about the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s. It influenced Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday. It may not quite be a great book, but it brought a new perspective into American fiction. It was a book about Indians that didn’t exoticize them or make them quaint for a white audience. It opened the door a crack and let a little more light in.
After Sundown, Mathews went more than a decade without publishing another book. Perhaps he still didn’t quite think of himself as an author. He was a hunter, a loner, and—way over on the other hand—a tribal advocate with a wide and varied network of friends all over the world. He got married again. Eventually he got back to writing books. Talking to the Moon, from 1945, describes the decade living in his cabin, amid the rhythm and harmony and cruelty of nature. In 1951 he published a biography, Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E.W. Marland, about the 1920s Oklahoma oil baron. Ten years after that, he published The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters, which represents the culmination of his work “talking to the old men” and writing down their old tales before they passed away.
I grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, not far from Mathews’s cabin, not far from where the events of Killers of the Flower Moon took place. Mathews wrote about my hometown. Knew it well. Was still alive, even, when I was born. And if you need a reason to check out his work, I’ll give you this: When I was growing up, I had no idea he’d existed. I had no idea about the murders, either. We weren’t taught about it. I’ll leave you to guess why. It wasn’t until years after I’d left Oklahoma that I discovered Mathews’s work, and that this history was made known to me. These things are so easily forgotten. Old people die, the page turns, the eye blinks, and then: oblivion. It’s the message Mathews spent his whole career trying to persuade his readers to see. Our stories—I mean humanity’s—are fragile. We should remember them while we can.
He speaks with a familiar, unnerving sureness. “Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that there’s a proper way to kill someone,” says the arms dealer known as the Jackal, the central antagonist of Far Cry 2. “It’s absurd. It’s an aesthetic. We need it to endure the bloody horror of murder. You must destroy that idea, show them what a messy, horrible thing it is to kill a man.”
For all the gruesome, wince-inducing ways that virtual bodies have been designed to meet their demise, the idea that violence can create a bigger kind of mess is one strangely lacking in video games. Not so in Far Cry 2, which depicts the repercussions of killing on both micro and macro scales. Down an enemy in this open-world, first-person shooter, and they may not actually go down. Instead, they’ll convincingly writhe in agony before pulling their sidearm on you. Destroy an entire encampment, and another will simply take its place, respawning because so little—least of all conflict—can be solved with a gun. The world that Far Cry 2 presents, an unnamed African country ripped apart by civil war, is one in which violence seems to have its own libidinal energy. The only way out is to turn a weapon on yourself—to engage in an act of self-annihilation.
Released 15 years ago Saturday, Far Cry 2 is not an easy game to love. Its sub-Saharan setting burns with deep orange hues while also sinking into a swampy morass of muted greens and browns—evocative, if not straightforwardly beautiful. Neither is it a straightforwardly “good time,” but a brutal, sparse experience in which you’re suffering from the effects of malaria. In fact, very little is straightforward about Far Cry 2, a game whose simulationist mechanics paired with its hostile open world caused it to feel like a particularly intense fever dream upon arrival in 2008. It can be slow and tedious before then-cutting-edge fire technology, an AI friendship system, and reactive environments cause it to crackle into capricious life. Just as significantly, Far Cry 2 seeks to disempower the player rather than offer a soothing war hero fantasy, a point reinforced by the game’s grim, morally murky story. It’s as if every system in the game, including the story, is in a feedback loop with everything else. You’re caught in this maelstrom, just trying to survive.
Far Cry 2 boldly pointed toward an alternative future for the first-person shooter, a path that diverged from the jingoistic, popcorn spectacle of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that had taken the world by storm a year before. For Austin Walker, former editor-in-chief at Vice Media’s gaming vertical, Waypoint, and now IP director at game studio Possibility Space, it was an “affirming” game—not only for him, he opines via video call, but for a cohort of “young critics and developers.” At the time of its release, Walker was 23 years old, living in New York, and working as a trademark researcher while attempting to make his way into games media. For him, Far Cry 2 was a watershed moment, imparting the “sense that you could do real thematic work in the first-person shooter that wasn’t just, ‘Rah, rah—I’m the guy with the gun.’”
This is 2008: Indie games were only just blowing up, and so any questioning of blockbusters was still mostly coming from the inside. “We [were] really bound into the triple-A space discursively,” stresses Walker. But here was Far Cry 2, whose propensity to provoke its audience aligned it more with the arthouse than the mainstream. No wonder Far Cry 2, the sequel to an interesting if hoky 2004 original, charted only 18th in NPD’s software-sales charts for October 2008, way below the likes of Fable II and Fallout 3. By 2009, the game had shipped 2.9 million copies, hardly a bust but far from the megahit that Ubisoft was perhaps hoping for, and which it had scored a year prior with the original Assassin’s Creed (which sold 8 million copies in a comparable time frame). As Walker says, “[Far Cry 2 didn’t have] many fans, but [it had] lots of interest from those fans. A real ‘everyone-who-heard-this-album-started-a-band’ kind of game.”
Chris Remo, who was the editor-at-large of Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) at the time, and would go on to codesign Firewatch and Half Life: Alyx, recalls how the game’s release coincided with the launch of the Idle Thumbs podcast. Idle Thumbs (which Remo cofounded alongside fellow Firewatch and Alyx developer Jake Rodkin, and which also often featured another Firewatch and Alyx creator, Sean Vanaman) waxed lyrical about the game for years, coining as close to a meme—“grenades rolling down a hill”—as you’re likely to get for the emergent design that Far Cry 2 trailblazed. In the anecdote, Vanaman relates how his AI companion died in a blaze of fire caused by the explosion of his own grenade. It’s emblematic of a game whose systems, says Remo, were “unusually good at generating moments of extraordinary serendipity, tragedy, success, or any sequence of these things, sometimes very rapidly.” What effect did this have on the then 24-year-old? “I felt energized by what it was attempting,” Remo says. “And that significantly outweighed the surface-level challenge of playing it.”
Remo and Walker were far from alone in feeling activated by the game. A new wave of young game critics excitedly interrogated the game’s marriage of politics, hostile design (like its famously jamming weapons), and systems-driven gameplay, subjecting it to the kind of scrutiny reserved for only a hallowed few. One of those select titles was 2007’s BioShock, a creepy sci-fi shooter that doubled as a heady meditation on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. Chief among the critics of that game was Clint Hocking, the creative director of Far Cry 2 himself, who in the years prior had built a reputation as a smart, considered public thinker on video games through his blog, Click Nothing. He referred to BioShock as a “disturbing” example of “ludonarrative dissonance,” arguing that its theme of Randian rational self-interest was at odds with its narrative, which charged you with helping another character.
Far Cry 2, then, was Hocking’s answer to the thorniest of conceptual problems, an attempt at creating a cohesive, unified vision of story and systems. In authoring this synthesis, he was putting his own critiques into creative practice (think video games’ own Paul Schrader), all while giving the most switched-on players an inside look at a medium mutating in real time.
BioShock may have been the title that allowed Hocking to articulate “ludonarrative dissonance,” but as he explains on a video call from Ubisoft Montreal’s office, the subject had long been on his mind. The creative director wanted to avoid any vagueness in a game that depicts “a particular kind of a conflict,” one that’s “pretty bleak and pretty sinister.” This was the mid-aughts: The battle of Mogadishu between the United States and Somali forces had taken place not much more than 10 years prior and the Iraq War was lurching from bad to worse, all while films like Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and Blood Diamond explored, to various degrees, the effects of Western intervention on developing nations. “We kind of stepped into this,” Hocking says. “It was challenging because you don’t want to make disaster tourism, right? You don’t want to make a game exploring people’s misery and suffering for shits, giggles, and headshots.”
In March 2005, Hocking had just wrapped production onUbisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a game on which he’d held three senior positions at once: creative director, lead level designer, and scriptwriter. He was broken by the process but nonetheless satisfied enough with the results to move forward (“I’ll never make a better one than this,” he recalls thinking). Ubisoft had published the first Far Cry and later acquired full rights to the IP, so Hocking switched franchises, assembled a small pre-production team, and started to hash out design ideas. “Very quickly, we decided we wanted to make an open-world, first-person shooter,” he says, stressing the scale of the challenge they were about to embark on: “That had never been done before.”
This genre hybrid—open-world, first-person shooter—became the foundational idea of Far Cry 2. The team looked to both 3-D Grand Theft Auto games and Bethesda’s landmark 2002 first-person RPG, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, for inspiration. But the task and design brief that Hocking and his team were wrestling with was unique, one that sought to go beyond the large, open, but nonetheless discrete levels of the original Far Cry and 2007’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. “Can you have a first-person shooter that isn’t a linear, authored, narrative, level-designed experience but that gives you the freedom of these games?” Put another way, is it possible to make a game that “has the momentum of a first-person shooter but takes place in an open world?”
In pursuing this unprecedented design goal, Hocking and his team at Ubisoft Montreal devised a new, stranger form of momentum. This is what struck Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter and a writer for both games and television (including Gears 5 and the upcoming AndorSeason 2). Typically, Bissell explains, first-person shooters would follow an intensity waveform: skirmish, skirmish, big battle, skirmish, etc. “You play Far Cry 2 and it’s not like that,” he says. “Just because you made it through a battle doesn’t mean that two more jeeps aren’t just going to roll up. … Suddenly, there’s 90 seconds of the most fucking incredibly intense conflict you’ve ever experienced in virtual form.”
What’s striking about Far Cry 2’s development story, as Hocking tells it, is how quickly the fundamentals of the game coalesced. Africa wasn’t chosen as the game’s setting because the team necessarily wanted to make grand proclamations about colonialism and interventionist foreign policy (other options included the Appalachian Mountains and central China). Rather, they were searching for what Hocking calls an “iconic” setting, something as evocative as the original’s box art, which depicted palm trees, a sandy shore, and blue water. As for mechanics, the “first play” (an internal vertical slice) delivered to Ubisoft executives at Christmas 2006 already contained a working “buddy system,” a handful of missions, jamming weapons, a wound animation, and the player suffering from the debilitating effects of malaria.
The narrative, the glue to bind all these potentially discordant elements, came together even quicker. “I wish it wasn’t so—almost—cliché,” Hocking says. “Even before we settled on Africa, it was apparent that the story of the original Far Cry is The Island of Doctor Moreau—it’s just a retelling. And once we decided to go to Africa, we immediately realized that The Island of Doctor Moreau is almost the same story as Heart of Darkness. … It was an obvious leap, and then we were able to relook at Apocalypse Now and reread the book. It was a kind of map for us.”
For all the laudable grit that Far Cry 2 brings to its conceit—namely, its depiction of civil war as a wretched and oppressive phenomenon—treating Africa as a “composite … a mélange of different places” is the aspect that holds up least for former journalist Walker. He says the game parallels Western media’s portrayal of African conflicts, never really explaining what the heart of the conflict is about (“Oh, they’re both just basically warlords,” he quips). Walker, however, commends the game for the areas in which it was miles ahead of its time—for example, the way it lets you choose from a diverse cast of characters, all of whom hail from countries touched by the pernicious hand of colonialism. More importantly, Far Cry 2 brought unambiguous “cynicism” to the idea that the player’s “presence here could ever mean anything good,” Walker says. “That’s not a perspective we’ve often seen elsewhere. Far Cry 6 is about you showing up as an outsider and helping a revolution. At the end of Far Cry 2, you save some people—but your presence is endemic of a disease that anyone like you is here at all.”
For as long as Hocking had made games, he’d been fascinated by the interplay of virtual space and narrative. As a youngster, he experimented with the level editor of the 1983 platformer Lode Runner (“painting with eight different pixels,” he calls it), saving his work using the primitive Famicom Data Recorder. “There was a cassette drive which you’d put a cassette tape in,” he says. “I would take an old Billy Idol tape, put some masking tape over the songs, and write over it.” Soon after, he started programming, making a handful of games for the VIC-20 home computer before getting into Dungeons & Dragons. This introduced a more intricate matrix of elements: complicated rules; a more freeform experience; a stronger sense of narrative; play that could careen in any direction. It’s precisely this dynamic, almost volatile cocktail of elements that continues to hold appeal for Hocking—“a really expressive thing for me,” he says.
But Hocking wasn’t just a child of nerd culture. Born in 1972, he spent the first few years of his life in Southern Ontario before moving to Vancouver. Like a lot of Gen X kids, he was raised by his single mom, who worked during the day and attended school by night, eventually scoring a job as a production accountant in the film industry. Before that, Hocking grew up “pretty poor.” He paid his way through college, starting with an undergraduate course in visual fine arts at Langara College in Vancouver, where he mostly studied drawing. (“Not like comic book drawing, but open, freeform, messy, artistic drawing,” he says.) By his own admission, Hocking was “terrible” at it, but the degree gave him a crash course in taking criticism, invaluable for the BA in creative writing he obtained at the University of British Columbia, which served as a springboard to a master’s degree. Hocking maintained his omnivorous creative ventures while working as a copywriter for web companies during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. He was part of the Unreal modding scene, contributing a level to a mod called Strike Force (credited as “Clint ‘Cmdr_Greedo’ Hocking”). He made independent films. He even played in a punk rock band.
It’s tempting to read an abrasive energy similar to punk rock’s running through Hocking’s often confrontational work. The opening level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory contains a distressing torture scene. In Watch Dogs: Legion, released in 2020 (Hocking’s first game for Ubisoft after returning in 2015 following a five-year absence), you learn that migrants in the game’s dystopian version of London are being sold into slavery and harvested for organs. Hocking might be employed by Ubisoft, wholly embedded within the studio system, but he has a propensity to ask contentious questions through the two elements that have captivated him since he was a child: virtual space and narrative. Yet Far Cry 2 is different from these games: It rouses intense, physiological reactions—prickling hair, a rapidly quickening heartbeat, a thin film of cold sweat—through long-form play rather than discrete moments. More than any other game of Hocking’s, it’s holistic—and the noise it generates is often overwhelming.
When Far Cry 2 was released on October 21, 2008, it received admiring if not unanimous praise. For Eurogamer, Christian Donlan wrote that “Far Cry 2 is unforgettable rather than perfect; brilliant, frustrating, somber and comical.” Chris Dahlen asserted for Variety that “gunfights are brisk and unpredictable, but the mission framework falls short.” In an 8-out-of-10 review for Game Informer, Matt Miller said that “Far Cry 2 is one of the most ambitious game releases in years. … Sadly, it’s also plagued by a combat system that rarely elevates itself past basic gunplay.” Fifteen years later, Remo echoes the critical consensus, albeit more generously: “In a lot of ways, Far Cry 2’s reach exceeds its grasp,” he says. “But I think its reach is so interesting and compelling that even the ways in which its ambitions were not fully realized are themselves interesting. And when those ambitions are realized, it’s almost sublime.”
Bissell, who would go on to work on three Far Cry games for Ubisoft in the early 2010s (all of which were canceled), believes the criticism Far Cry 2 received upon release was tough for the development team to stomach: “I was explicitly told not to bring up Far Cry 2 overmuch when talking to my superiors [because]—and this is my read on it—the studio really loved what they’d made.” Bissell says Far Cry 2 was a “dirty word” within the studio, but not because the game was perceived as a creative failure. Rather, he suggests, the studio was suffering from “collective trauma” knowing it had made a game that was “special” yet wasn’t received by the majority of its audience “with anything that resembled recognition of its greatness.”
Still, Far Cry 2 was received rapturously by a small stratum of people. Another of its early champions was Ben Abraham, a 22-year-old critic who took it upon himself to play the entire game with a single life in response to one of Hocking’s blog posts. It was, Abraham explains, an exercise in getting into the game’s “headspace” more intensely, akin to “speedrunning for narrative.” He recalls how “scary” the playthrough was at first, but that he mediated the experience by utilizing “degenerate strategies”—long-range rifles, explosives. Thus, a sense of “boredom” began to set in, at least until Abraham hit the brutal difficulty spikes of Act 2. How did the intrepid critic record this endeavor in the era before Twitch and the video game live-streamer? Abraham wrote a nearly 400-page novelization called “Permanent Death,” which has been downloaded close to 30,000 times. Hocking described it as a “complete oddity.” For Bissell, the document stands as a “breathtaking exercise in taking love for a single game to an almost maniacal place.”
How, then, to assess the legacy of Far Cry 2 beyond the straight line that exists between the game itself and the criticism it inspired? It’s been argued that the plausible, simulationist mechanics of Far Cry 2 left their mark on the survival genre that exploded in the 2010s with the likes of DayZ. Another possible vector of influence is battle royale games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which seem to embody something of Far Cry 2’stense, fraught, and emergent approach to combat (“the battle royale is a ‘grenades-roll-down-the-hill’ genre,” Walker suggests). There are also a few games that seem to more closely share Far Cry 2’s systemic, open-world DNA: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain; The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; Death Stranding. But this might just be a case of convergent evolution—there are, after all, a lot of ways to arrive at expansive, systems-driven gameplay. Viewed from another angle, the game’s influence can be said to extend to players for whom it crystallized what they wanted out of a game. Walker loves Breath of the Wild partly because Far Cry 2 “pushed” him in that direction.
We can be more specific, however, and point to Far Cry 2’s influence on the work of a few designers. Harvey Smith, creative director of the Dishonored series, enthused about the game for Penny Arcade in 2012 and described the recently releasedopen-world shooter Redfall as “what you’d get if you blended the Arkane creative values with Far Cry 2.”
Remo, meanwhile, is unequivocal about the effect that Far Cry 2’s “uncompromisingly first-person nature” had on his own Firewatch, a first-person drama set in the hills of Wyoming. Take, for example, the map in Firewatch that works just like the one found in Far Cry 2. Your character pulls out and holds in-game objects in such a way that they take up the vast majority of the screen; the game doesn’t pause; the map is diegetic, not viewed inside a menu. Firewatch’s walkie-talkie dialogue system works similarly, with conversational decisions playing out on the fly as you traipse about the wilderness. Remo declines to call the approach an overarching “philosophy.” Instead, he describes it as a “method of design thinking” intended to ensure the game remained “grounded.” The goal was simple yet strict: refrain from breaking the player’s “immersive viewpoint.”
But Firewatch and Redfall are edge cases, rare attempts at internalizing and developing Far Cry 2’s experimental design principles. It’s the opposite of a slight to say that the game remains one of the most daring titles ever made at blockbuster scale. “What I like about Far Cry 2 is that it tried to create a bunch of its own conventions,” Bissell says. “What’s interesting is how few of them, despite being elegant, interesting, and audacious, caught on in the wider design community of games. That is an achievement in and of itself.”
Not even the Far Cry series itself (which boasts in excess of 50 million unit sales since Far Cry 2) has run with many of the design ideas laid out by the second installment, beyond the open-world, first-person-shooter structure. Each of the four subsequent mainline entries, none of which Hocking worked on, has “sanded down” the spiky, subversive magic of Far Cry 2, says Walker, as if Ubisoft asked itself: “How do we make this our Modern Warfare? How do we make this our huge breakout first-person shooter?” It would do so by forgoing the disempowerment part of the power fantasy. To play a recent Far Cry is to engage with a clear upgrade path and enjoy supersoldier-esque powers, like the ability to tag enemies (thus basking in the knowledge of their location at all times). When you open the map, the game pauses, and when you set a waypoint, giant holographic arrows show up in the virtual environment, leaving practically zero chance of getting lost. Crucially, says Walker, the narrative has shifted from one where you play as a “morally questionable, bloodthirsty mercenary” to an “average Joe who’s gotten swept up in something bigger than themselves.”
For better and worse, the series has come a long way, and its current identity is best summed up by Sandra Warren, the new vice president and executive producer of the Far Cry brand (who also worked as lead animator on Far Cry 2). “We want you to go on holiday and basically throw away all the travel books you can think of, get out of the touristic landmarks, and discover the eeriest things a location has to offer,” she writes via email. “It will make you adventurous, uncomfortable, free, afraid at times. And no matter what, if you survive, when you come home, you will have absurd stories to tell your friends.”
In these terms, the Far Cry series has metamorphosed into precisely the “disaster tourism” that Hocking set out to avoid. In Far Cry 5 and 6, real-world issues like the rise of fundamentalism in the U.S. and revolution in Central America are mobilized in service of something that curves closer to conventional video game “fun.” Certainly, we’re a long way from games that show players “what a messy, horrible thing it is to kill a man,” and not just because the death animations in these games lack Far Cry 2’s macabre eye for detail.
Now,the franchise features snappy, feel-good gunplay of the Modern Warfare school, while its tongue-in-cheek storytelling is firmly rooted in the postmodern mode popularized by Grand Theft Auto. One can understand Ubisoft’s swing for a broader tone in its pursuit of the sales that make the economics of these hugely (and increasingly) expensive entertainments feasible. During his short stint at Ubisoft Montreal in the 2010s, Bissell caught a glimpse of the monumental labor, and thus the monumental stakes, of such productions. “It’s the only game studio I’ve ever been in that had a Starbucks in it,” he says. “It was so big, even then, it didn’t seem possible. I looked in the Assassin’s Creed room and there were 500 fucking people.” At that moment, Bissell saw the direction of blockbuster game development—the way it was becoming “potentially unmanageable.” It would only get more unwieldy: “What seemed like big teams at the time just became colossi of largeness.”
This is precisely the environment Hocking works within today. He lists some of the elements that make up a modern open-world blockbuster: collectibles, skill trees, inventory management, a small country’s worth of non-player characters to talk to, main quests, side quests, vehicles. “It’s just fucking enormous, and so to build on top of that, to progress that forward, you have to have templates that you build with,” he says. “It’s challenging for me because I’m a person who would prefer in an ideal world to always cut everything from full cloth. But that’s just not a reality of modern, triple-A game development. You don’t cut anything from whole cloth.”
Far Cry 2 was made just before this blockbuster horse truly bolted. It’s the product of 150 people rather than 1,500; it took three years to make rather than six; it was made on a single continent rather than many (and without any outsourced labor). Hocking is upfront about the kinds of games he enjoys making (those with “big reach and big budgets”), and the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Codename Hexe (reportedly set in Central Europe during the 16th century) may be his highest-profile game to date. He has little choice, then, but to adapt to the new, supersized conditions of production while noting, with a little wistfulness, the passing of an era in which blockbusters could take “chances and risks … when you could really bring a high concept to a triple-A game.” The year or two surrounding Far Cry 2’s debut brought the releases of Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV, BioShock,Dead Space, and Mirror’s Edge, games of both considerable ambition and a system of production that was yet to spiral out of control. At the risk of indulging in regressive nostalgia, there’s perhaps a case for thinking about these years as something of a golden age for innovation in blockbuster video games.
On X, Hocking refers to himself as “usually the most cynical person in the room,” but there is no doubting his sincerity when talking about what he and his team achieved with Far Cry 2. “I sometimes lament privately in my darkest hours that it may be the best game I ever make in my life,” he says. “I’m very proud of it. I think it’s a very good game. I think it’s an important game.”
Perhaps more significant than even the game itself is the nature of the conversations it’s sparked, the back-and-forth between audience and creator that Hocking holds dear and that’s been the invisible lifeblood of the projects he has steered at Ubisoft for the best part of 20 years. “That’s what I need. I guess some people get their reward from having sold 50 million copies of something, and that’s great, but having only sold 50 million copies doesn’t mean anybody liked it. It doesn’t mean that the game changed anybody’s life or their perspective. It doesn’t mean that I’ve communicated.”
“Communication goes two ways,” he adds. “If it’s just broadcast—I make a thing and 50 million people play it—I can just fucking chuck my game into the sea and say, ‘Look, there it is.’ But it’s when it comes back to you, and you understand how people felt, and not just, ‘That game’s fucking wicked: 10 out of 10.’ If they can talk about what was important to them, what moved them, what changed their perspective about the world, this kind of conflict, these kinds of people, or this kind of play experience, that’s what matters. It’s the echo, right—the feeling that you’ve meaningfully contributed to someone’s experience. That’s why we make things.”
Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including The Verge, Wired, and Vulture.
Chris is joined by guests Bryan Ford and John deBary to explore a food from the future: instant potato flakes! Listener Hannah Vickers shared the recipe for her dad’s famous “Butterhorns”—which we, like you, had never heard of until now.
Host: Chris Ying Guests: Bryan Ford and John deBary Producers: Gabi Marler, Ira Chute, Cory McConnell, and Victoria Valencia
Juliet returns with cohost Callie Curry to discuss all the happenings on both The Golden Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise Episode 4. First up, Golden Bachelor—the ladies discuss Gary and Leslie’s adventurous date (5:24), who the ladies are liking and disliking, the drama, and of course their pickle ball MVP (24:54). They also discuss the Never Have I Ever game (27:58) and who they think will be the next Golden Bachelorette (31:28). On the Paradise side, the ladies talk about Rachel’s not-so-great Bachelor experience and her drama with Mr. Double Denim Ken, Sean (35:56), John Henry impressions (42:23), Eliza’s date with John (45:23), Kat’s outburst (47:43), and more.
In a world where we’re constantly seeking ways to bring nature indoors, Eliza Blank, the founder and CEO of The Sill, has managed to turn her passion for plants into a thriving business. The Sill, a direct-to-consumer houseplant company, is on a mission to make everyone a “plant person” and infuse indoor environments with the benefits of lush greenery.
Blank’s love affair with plants was deeply rooted in her upbringing. Inspired by her mother’s green thumb and the lush gardens that filled her childhood home, Blank developed a profound appreciation for the natural world. However, as a young adult living in a tiny New York City apartment, she encountered a common challenge: finding the perfect plants to thrive in limited indoor spaces. This ultimately sparked the initial idea for The Sill while Blank was still in college.
In 2012, Blank decided to take the leap and turn her plant-focused dream into a reality. To start her venture, she launched a Kickstarter campaign, which successfully raised $12,000, providing her with the initial capital needed to embark on her entrepreneurial journey. In the early days of The Sill, Blank took a hands-on approach; she personally sourced, potted, and hand-delivered plants to clients in the bustling metropolis of New York City. It was a labor of love, a testament to her dedication to bringing the beauty and benefits of plants to city dwellers.
Ría Safford is a master of organization. But it’s a skill that came to her with practice, and she wants to teach you to practice too.
As the founder and CEO of RíOrganize, a luxury home-organization, relocation, and curation solution to help families nationwide transform their homes, Safford made it her mission to make homes functional and harmonious spaces. With that simple yet profound company ethos, Safford’s keen eye and organizational skills have helped spaces evolve into homely havens.
Safford decided to take a leap of faith and start RíOrganize in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2019 when a pivotal moment arrived: Celebrity hairstylist and entrepreneur Jen Atkin sent her a DM about organizing her beauty closet. This serendipitous connection marked a turning point in Safford’s career, opening doors to collaborations and opportunities she had never imagined. Today, Safford is not only a trusted advisor for families seeking order in their homes but also a recognized name in the world of celebrities and high-profile clientele such as Paris Hilton and Chrissy Teigen. She has even ventured into co-branded product lines with retail giants Amazon and Target.
Where are you originally from, and how long have you lived in this city?
I was born and raised in Budapest. I lived abroad for a little while when I was a young child and during my university years, but I always knew I wanted to return and live in Budapest close to my family.
What are some of your favorite neighborhoods, and where do you find yourself spending the most time?
I grew up on the Buda side in the Castle District, which is one of my favorite neighborhoods with its magical little streets, hidden nooks, and incredible history. Currently, I live on the other side, Pest, right by the river very close to the Parliament. It’s a great neighborhood, as it has a lot of small cafés and bakeries, and it’s always nice to have a walk along the river surrounded by all the historical buildings with my son, Samu, and our Bedlington terrier, Ginie.
One of the most special characteristics of Budapest is each of the districts has a different feeling to them. I love architecture, so I often take long walks through the 13th district to admire the Bauhaus buildings. The first district has traditional cobblestone streets that lead into beautiful parts with the most magical lookout points to both the Pest and Buda sides.
What does a typical day look like for you?
I have a small child, so my days are very much about routine these days. Samu, my son, is an early riser, so we start our day at 5 a.m. with breakfast and some morning play, sometimes a morning walk. By 10 a.m. usually, I’m in the office and have a full day of meetings and work. The Nanushka HQ is located in the Buda Hills, and we have a beautiful view of the castle. I leave around 5 p.m. so I can spend my evening with my family. Sometimes, Samu comes to the office with me, as we have a little playroom for him next to my office, which is great. I can spend more time with him this way.
If you had to create the perfect afternoon for someone visiting the city with a limited amount of time, which area would you send them to, and what would their afternoon entail?
I would definitely start in the castle and the surrounding area to explore the rich history of the city and have and experience the amazing view from Fisherman’s Bastion. We would take the funicular down and walk through the bridge to the Pest side to Vörösmarty Square, where Café Gerbeaud is located for some great Hungarian dessert as an afternoon treat.
Nanushka stores are always a prime visit spot for fashion people while traveling. What features do you find special about the Budapest flagship store?
The Budapest flagship store houses our biggest café—it’s much more than a store. When we created it with my husband and CEO of Nanushka, Peter Baldaszti, we wanted to create a space that resembles home. It’s inviting, and anyone can step in without the pressure of buying something. It’s a place where people can just sit with a nice cup of coffee or matcha and meet new people. It’s about our community.
I recently shared my adoration for Banana Republic. It’s one of those special retailers that I’ve shopped at for years, and I’m turning to even more right now because the latest collections have been so strong. The brand also recently debuted a full home collection (amazing) and just opened its first stand-alone store dedicated to home on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
Celebs gathered to celebrate the opening of the new BR Home store in stylish Banana Republic ensembles. And yes, Riley Keough happened to be one of the A-listers in question. To celebrate the event, she wore a minimalist yet striking Banana Republic ensemble featuring a polo sweater (under $100) and coordinating trousers. The whole silhouette perfectly encompasses that low-key-luxury vibe.
Keep scrolling to check out the look, and shop items from Banana Republic.
Can you tell me about some of the most significant lessons that you’ve learned? I feel like this has got to have its own level of learning curve.
I think the biggest thing is I grew up in a world where you were touching things. It was a physical experience, primarily.
Even though you could order online, we had many stores. There was an opportunity for the customer to go in and touch—and they wanted to.
I learned business that way. I learned in a totally different era. Now, everything is visually online.
My biggest mistake was the packaging. The very first iteration of the packaging, I have this glossy L on the outside.
When you hold it up in front of a camera, you can’t see it. It was very subtle. I thought it was very chic, and no one knows what the hell it is.
I think the other really big mistake I made is I got the team way too big too fast. I came from a world where everyone’s job was very specific.
We thought we were gonna go quickly—we also then got slammed with the pandemic—and so we had to really downsize the team.
When you start doing that, when people have really specific jobs, all the sudden you’re looking at people and a lot of us didn’t know what we were doing— myself included.
That was really a huge learning curve to understand. People who have come up in a small business have a totally different mental and capacity for flexing and bending and doing other things.
Whereas people who come from a very specific role, it’s harder. Not because of any fault of their own, it’s just they’re just not used to it.
So you’re asking someone to do something they may not necessarily feel comfortable with. I also didn’t necessarily know how to direct.
I could spend an hour talking about all the mistakes I made.
The numbers don’t lie. A new report published today by Brand Finance revealed the most valuable fashion brands in the world based on factors such as financial performance and growth rates. The top five brands include a mix of luxury and sportswear companies (all household names, of course).
At the top of the list is a familiar name: Nike. “From its relentless commitment to innovation, ability to stay ahead of market trends, and extensive partnerships with athletes worldwide, Nike has firmly cemented its place at the top of the apparel industry,” Annie Brown, General Manager of Brand Finance UK, said in a statement. “In 2023, the brand is continuing to leverage its enormous global influence and reputation to empower positive change in the sporting world and beyond.” Scroll down to see and shop the top five most valuable fashion brands in the world.
Welcome to Who What Wear Weddings, the destination for style-minded weddings. Expect insightful tips straight from the newlyweds, shoppable elements, and plenty of must-save imagery as we share the nuptials of our favorite fashion people getting married. For upcoming features, share your submissions here.
“Within the first five minutes, I knew,” shares Isabelle Harvey as she recalls her first date with her now husband, Martyn Harvey. The couple met 11 years ago at a festival thanks to Isabelle’s cousin. “The following day, he made it his mission to take me out. After six months of asking, I eventually caved,” says Isabelle. “After a boozy date, we spent the entire weekend together and every other weekend since!”
Isabelle is a stylist and vintage dealer. She owns her own vintage business, Fauntleroy, and her expertise in both worlds was reflected in every aspect of the wedding. “I felt the only way to approach wedding plans was collaboratively and sustainably, as though it were an extension of my work. The vibe of my brand Fauntleroy, a curated vintage showroom in Barcelona, is present in every aspect of the wedding,” explains Isabelle. “It was important that my philosophy revolving around thrifting, sourcing unique details, and investing in local small businesses to reduce unnecessary waste and be mindful of cost was core to the entire wedding. I chose the expertise of set designers rather than conventional wedding planners [for] our Montseny wedding under the sun.”
The wedding took place at a 13th-century monastery in Montseny, Spain, a location that hits close to home for the couple, as they both reside in Barcelona and later recall that having the event in Catalonia was a “nonnegotiable.” They incorporated their traditional Spanish roots into their ceremony, their love of vintage into their ensembles, and their attention to detail into every part of their special day. Scroll down to read more about the Harvey wedding from the bride’s point of view, including everything from getting ready to the after-party.
“I wanted everything to feel very chill, so me and my four bridesmaids picked an outside area with good light and cracked open our magnum specially made for us by [my] winemaker friend Lucy Chilvers. No robes or extra fluff. My friend Anna used to be a makeup artist, so when she agreed to do my makeup, I was so pleased, as she totally got the vibe. I wanted to look like me but just a little more fabulous.
“It felt like we were getting ready for a night out or something. We even did our own hair. We laughed, cried, and nervously wafted fans. It ended up being so casual that we did the run-through as the guests were arriving. Thankfully, the delicious vermut on arrival kept the guests busy in the monastery. In true Izzy fashion, I’m always late, and as a result, so is Marty!”
“My outfit was inspired by some of my favorite vintage I’ve sourced for Fauntleroy and a couture dress I’d seen online. I knew the look needed to be very different but still something I’d love 10 years from now. Trousers underneath was that unexpected twist and felt very me.
“Every bride’s worst fashion nightmare came true when, six weeks before getting married, the outfit arrived, and it was terrible. I worked with a Spanish crocheter to produce the first design. Turns out, she was amazing at crochet but horrible at following briefs. Let’s just say she took some serious creative license, and it was too late before I realized. With difficult crochet patterns, you can’t really go back and change things very easily. The worst part was I couldn’t confide in Marty, who usually knows exactly what to say.
“After a debrief with my best friend, several glasses of wine, and one internal breakdown, we decided I needed to find someone on Instagram in London. Six weeks to go, I’m a stylist, and I’m dressless—perfect! For three days straight, I was deep-diving into Central Saint Martins fashion-school graduates. I asked fashiony friends and eventually found my guardian angel, Beatrice, who runs Korlekie.
“She’d never even done a wedding dress before, and this was no small ask, but as soon as I met her, I had total faith. We sat in her lounge, and we laughed at my crazy request, but she completely got my vision and elevated it to a place I never even imagined. She even makes crochet crowns. I didn’t consider myself a tiara girl, but if someone shows you a crochet tiara covered in gemstones, I guarantee you’re instantly a tiara girly.”
“Marty and I source vintage suits together under my brand Fauntleroy. One day, I found this white tuxedo jacket with silk lapels. It inspired an idea for him to wear off-white silk trousers. He ended up wearing a women’s pair from Danish brand Malene Birger and getting them altered. He thought it was a little wild at first but always trusts me when it comes to styling. He was keen to wear a shirt for that cool-casual vibe, so I said, ‘Let’s make one.’ We found a vintage beautiful tablecloth at a flea market and asked a local designer to work her magic.
“The funny thing is I didn’t go to any wedding shops and get my ‘say yes to the dress’ moment, but thankfully, Marty did. We went to collect the shirt with two of our best mates after a few white wines at lunch. When he pulled back the curtain, we all gasped. The seamstress said, ‘Well, do you?’ He said, ‘Do I what?’ [She said,] ‘Say yes to dress?’ We all burst out laughing, and he said, ‘Yes!’”
The bridesmaids and groomsmen.
“We saw five venues in total, but we fell in love with the beautiful 13th-century monastery. It was high up the mountain, so it felt like our own little world up there—like floating in the clouds with our nearest friends and family. It also had that outdoor rustic Sicilian vibe we love, but being in Catalunya was a nonnegotiable.”
WWW Weddings tip: “We created our own invites online. A destination wedding requires lots of details, so it didn’t feel like the best place to spend our money.”
“For us, the ceremony was the most important part. We’re both obsessed with music and wanted to make this one of the key elements, creating atmosphere, tension, and release and playing with visuals, sounds, and smells to evoke feelings, memories, and new experiences.”
“Walking in to a Fred again… instrumental from his NPR Tiny Desk, the song was ‘Faisal (envelops me).’ The tension was insane. Literally, everyone was crying. It was just such an emotional feeling. It’s incredible how music can create such an atmosphere like that.
“Consistently untraditional, our best friend Robyn Salt officiated the ceremony, leading the guests through special moments, funny moments, and milestones.”
“We wanted to recognize the influence living in Spain has had on us, borrowing from the Spanish wedding tradition ‘las arras matrimoniales,’ where godparents gift 13 coins signifying commitment and care. Making this concept our own, we asked 12 friends to make a promise by throwing a coin into a bowl to support the relationship, each coin representing a month of the year, producing a unique moment, playfully weaving between sincere or silly—a great representation of us.”
“After working together on a recent shoot for my brand Fauntleroy, I knew I needed film photographer Marcie Dvorak, whose work’s been published in Vogue, Teeth Magazine, and AD Spain. We work really well together. I love her and her work. She knows exactly our vibe, so we felt very relaxed with her behind the camera. She captured the magic perfectly in her signature style.”
WWW Weddings tip:“Be really proud of sharing and presenting a small window into your love, relationship, and your life with everyone involved.”
“I approached the day as though it were a photo shoot, collaborating with set designers Jess and Van Salgado. Being skilled in art direction and architecture, it felt like a natural fit [for them] to bring our concepts to life. Starting with mood boards, they broke down the elements of the wedding—table displays, floral arrangements, and lighting to create ‘sets’ that could capture different moments, creating a truly immersive and sensory experience.
“Our florist, Sabato Studio, was a newly qualified florist who I predict will be the next big thing. She also designs jewelry, and I feel like you can really see that perspective for art and sculpture in her work. She loves to make bold and interesting statements with her work—just like me!”
Guests enjoying the reception.
“Food being a big part of our social life, we approached our favorite local restaurant Mambo. Head chef Martín Bado put together the menu for the day, focusing on seasonal and plant-based dishes. Having catered for events and fresh off a stint cooking in Madagascar, this was also Martín’s first wedding. He built the menu inspired by the aesthetics and floral displays, working in edible flowers and leaves to serve canapés, which really complemented the overall vision.”
“Many elements, right down to the favors, were handmade and crafted by creative and talented people. My bridesmaid and artist Aggie Davies made beautiful shrines in oyster shells for our guests, all with individual mantras to bring luck and good energy to everyone on the day and beyond.”
“Lucy Chilvers, a natural-wine producer and co-owner of Mambo, paired the wine list to the menu and helped us create our very own wine for the occasion called This Is Nice (one of our little sayings). It flows at sunset. Fresh off the back of Lucy’s collaboration with Italian fashion brand Sunnei x Highsnobiety for Sunnei’s Milan flagship store, we also wanted to utilize Lucy’s own vineyard, where she produces indigenous grapes representative of Catalunya’s thriving wine scene.”
“For tired partygoers, we created a fun ‘chill out’ area/smoking lounge decorated with thrifted vintage objects, props, and seating inspired by a glamorous, sexy after-party—with a touch of Gucci thrown in too.”
Everyone enjoying the food.
“Marty’s cousins made the cake as her gift to us. She’s such a talented chef and baker and completely understood the brief being chaotically chic! It was more edible and sculptural than a wedding cake. She collaborated with Sabato for the final floral touches, delivering an unforgettable experience for us and the guests.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Get thrifty. Work smart by leaning on friends and small businesses within your community.”
“The dance-floor area didn’t need much, as we just wanted to elevate the monastery’s beautiful architecture. Placing two huge olive trees brought the outside indoors, and three humongous disco balls… We love a party. Our first dance was ‘Just the Two of Us’ by Grover Washington. It’s always been our song, and the lyrics are so true to us as a couple.
While sourcing one day, I found a vintage hot-pink cape, and as soon as it arrived, I fell in love, but there was one snag—it wasn’t white! After staring at this beautiful piece for a week, I thought, ‘Everything else in the wedding was unconventional, so why the hell can’t I wear a hot-pink cape to my own wedding?’ So I did!”
WWW Weddings tip: “Don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Don’t feel the need to conform to the traditional wedding format.”
Babba C. Rivera is an anomaly. She is an innovator, a style icon, and now at the helm of the haircare industry. As the founder and CEO of Ceremonia, a clean-haircare brand rooted in her Latinx heritage, Rivera is redefining what haircare should look and feel like—ultimately proving the notion that some of the most successful companies are built when there is a personal connection behind the brand concept.
Ceremonia’s inception in 2020 marked the beginning of a transformative venture. It all started with a scalp oil inspired by cherished childhood rituals and her father’s early career as a hairdresser in Chile. Fast-forward to today, Ceremonia boasts an impressive range of 20 products, including a foray into the world of fragrances. One of the pivotal moments in Ceremonia’s journey was the brand becoming the first Latinx-founded haircare brand available at Sephora, a milestone that reflects its immense popularity and Rivera’s unwavering commitment to her mission. With products now stocked in over 500 Sephora locations, Ceremonia has become a force to be reckoned with in the beauty industry.
The world of cute and functional activewear has been rapidly expanding over the last few years. Now, style lovers who also enjoy breaking a sweat can still do so while looking cute. As a plus-size fashion girl, I’m all about the boom in trendy, cute yet technical activities. As far as size extensions go, the fashion industry tends to move at a slower pace, but plus-size-friendly activewear options are one area that isn’t lacking.
I’ve done what I do best, and I’ve highlighted great brands and a few select worth shopping at each. You can expect buttery fabrics, fun colors, and so much more. Keep scrolling to uncover high-quality plus-friendly activewear brands.
Television host, food expert, author, and producer grace Padma Lakshmi’s resume, posing the question: is there anything this culinary luminary can’t do? Known for her 19-season reign as the Emmy-nominated host and executive producer of Bravo’s beloved competition cooking show, “Top Chef,” Lakshmi is no stranger to the culinary entertainment industry. Today, she sits at the helm of the critically acclaimed Hulu docu-series “Taste the Nation,” a show she created, hosts, and executive produces. In “Taste the Nation,” Lakshmi embarks on a captivating journey to explore immigrant communities across the United States and their profound impact on American cuisine. Recognized for her incredible passion for connecting with others through the love of food, her work has earned her accolades, including Critics Choice Real TV Awards, Gotham Award nominations, and a James Beard Foundation Award.
Beyond the food realm, Lakshmi has also lent her creative energy to a myriad of ventures, from launching her own product lines to co-founding the Endometriosis Foundation of America. Another impressive accolade for Lakshmi is New York Times best-selling author with her memoir, “Love, Loss, and What We Ate,” which offers readers a glimpse into the profound intersections of her life and the role food played within them.
Welcome to Who What Wear Weddings, the destination for style-minded weddings. Expect insightful tips straight from the newlyweds, shoppable elements, and plenty of must-save imagery as we share the nuptials of our favorite fashion people getting married. For upcoming features, share your submissions here.
“It was pretty magnetic immediately,” recalls Hanane El Moutii as she reflects on the moment when she met her husband Marc Ange at a business meeting in Los Angeles at Chateau Marmont. El Moutii—the founder and CEO of Éclat Public Relations, a firm specializing in PR for design and lifestyle brands—and Marc Ange, a designer and artist at the helm of Studio Ange, both have careers in the luxury design worlds, so it was only a matter of time before work brought them together. But it instantly became clear that their relationship was destined for more than business. “We didn’t see each other for about six months after that day. Work brought us together again, and that was it! We never really dated—we fell madly in love and moved in together almost instantly,” El Moutii says. They now refer to each other as soulmates.
It was three years later when the couple was traveling that Marc Ange proposed. “We were on a work trip to India—if visiting Aman properties in India can be called work—when Marc Ange surprised me with a detour to the Maldives and proposed on a private island,” El Moutii says. “We both cried of joy, jumped into the sea, and spent the day sunbathing while fantasizing about the wedding. The day after saying yes, we were canceling the rest of our trip and running back to the U.S. due to the pandemic. During the months of isolation, we fell even more in love, decided to elope in the Utah desert, and exchanged our vows over fuming sage at the beautiful Amangiri.”
After eloping in the canyons of the American Southwest and building their home together with their son, Leone, in Los Angeles, El Moutii and Marc Ange began planning their wedding festivities and landed on a destination weekend in Morocco—a place tied to El Moutii’s roots—at a hotel the couple had been visiting for years. “I was born in a small village in Northern Italy, and my roots are in Morocco. I lived my childhood between two worlds, spending the school year in Italy and summer soaking up the Moroccan sun,” El Moutii shares.
The magnificent wedding set at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in Marrakech was breathtaking down to every detail. Scroll on to see how the wedding weekend unfolded, including words from the bride on planning a destination wedding, all of the details for her three wedding-day looks, and the moment she wants to relive again.
“We hosted a welcome party in one of our absolute favorite places in Marrakech: L’Hotel—a boutique hotel. It’s a small hidden gem in the heart of the medina that we discovered a couple of years ago. Marc Ange wore a custom silk tunic and Marrakshi Life pants in olive green with Ferragamo loafers. I changed twice—I couldn’t choose between the two—and started with a custom traditional tlija caftan in green and gold (I asked the tailor to make the same caftan that my mom wore on her wedding day) with Aquazzura heels and Maison Mèrenor jewels, then changed into a caftan of my own creation I made with the help of some incredibly talented artisans from Moroccan Touch. [It was] shorter than a traditional caftan, with orange and gold accents and large sleeves.”
“Our son Leone was with us every step of the way.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Go on a vacation before your wedding, or find some time to completely unwind and disconnect before the big day. You’ll need all the rest you can get.”
Guests arriving to the welcome party.
“[I wore] three dresses, as three is my lucky number. The first dress was a Monique Lhuillier lace gown. I had given up on finding the perfect white dress until I bumped into Rebecca La Sposa in Milan, a bridal boutique with the most curated selection and my size in Monique Lhuillier! [Marc Ange] started the evening with a custom Rives Paris suit he designed featuring white silk pants and an ochre jacket. He wore this with a bespoke Rafinity shirt that celebrated Moroccan craftsmanship and handmade Salvatore Ferragamo loafers from the Tramezza collection.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Take a walk through your wedding venue right before you start getting ready. This will allow you to share any last-minute changes with your planner and make sure everything looks to your liking.”
“I wore the [Monique Lhuillier] dress with Aquazzura satin platforms and Maison Mèrenor vintage jewelry.”
“The talented Karima Maruan, who has a fashion editorial background, did my makeup. I didn’t want a ‘traditional’ makeup look, and I also didn’t want anyone that would fuss about my decision to do my own hair!
“So thankful for my girlfriends and sisters who thought of everything! The silk robe, the champagne, and, of course, the latest hit songs to calm the nerves.”
“[Marc Ange wore] a chocolate-brown custom Rives Paris suit, also his design, complemented with an embroidered silk tie designed in collaboration with Rafinity.”
“Our wedding took place at the Selman Hotel in Marrakech. We’ve been going to this hotel for years, and it always feels like home. The hotel is family run, and no detail is spared. It’s a glamorous palace where effortless elegance is celebrated. The rooms and common areas are complemented by the owner’s private collection of vintage Moroccan art and furniture, which gives it a historical edge. We knew our guests would fall in love just as much as we did.”
Moments after the couple exchanged vows.
“Marc Ange and I wanted the ceremony to feel like a renewal of vows and stay consistent with our elopement, so we used the same text we had used three years prior.”
“[The invitations were] a collaborative effort, and we absolutely loved creating these invites together. I created the logo by combining our names in Arabic calligraphy, and Marc Ange designed the illustration. We printed our invites in Milan because we happened to be there for work.”
“My two nieces, Alissa and Sherine, were our beautiful flower girls, and they wore custom white dresses with a floral crown designed by The Bloom Room Marrakech.“
The bride on her wedding day.
“My team at Éclat planned the wedding alongside us, and I have to say it was a fun process. We went back and forth between L.A. and Morocco because I wanted to personally select all the vendors, flowers, accessories, and décor elements. We wanted something effortless and timeless. We wanted to celebrate Morocco’s poetic beauty while staying true to our taste.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Plan for slippers at the end of the night, but I’m sure you’ve heard this one before.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Consider an exotic destination wedding if you can. The setting alone can enrich your wedding and make it unforgettable.”
“After the ceremony, we were all guided toward the cocktail reception by a beautiful horse dressed in traditional Moroccan gear.”
“Once we both changed into our second looks, we were carried back into the scene on traditional Moroccan mida tables, and that was the moment I would want to relive again and again.”
“I fell instantly in love with a couture red caftan with handmade embroideries by Rafinity. It felt more like a piece of art than a dress. I loved the contrast between wearing white and changing into something this bold and regal.”
“Marc Ange and I have had the chance to travel quite a bit together since we first met seven years ago. For the wedding, we definitely drew inspiration from the places and flavors we encountered in Italy, India, and Morocco.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Change! Change into one or two dresses to fully express yourself. Have fun with it—it’s your time to shine.”
The couple arriving for the reception.
“I finished the night with a minidress by Vivienne Westwood.”
WWW Weddings tip: “Consider eloping prior to your ceremonial wedding. It takes so much pressure off and allows you to enjoy the party.”
“The color palette and design essence of the wedding came naturally. We both wanted something timeless and to stay true to Morocco’s already powerful beauty.”
The couple cutting their wedding cake.
“The evening reached its climax with a dazzling fireman show filled with glitter and spinning fire, followed by the beats by Dana [Boulos].”
As Taylor Swift continues to dominate the global conversation thanks to the Eras Tour (still not as record-shattering as the Renaissance Tour though), the comparison that keeps being brought up is that she is somehow the Madonna and Michael Jackson of our time. As for the latter, it’s difficult to make such a comparison for many reasons, not just because he was a Black man (at the start), but because he never had the squeaky clean image that Swift does (even before the pedophilia was publicized). Nor did (/does) Madonna. In fact, part of the reason both performers were so controversial was because of the sexually-charged manner in which they took the stage. And yes, Madonna grafted the crotch-grabbing maneuver from Jackson—yet another case in point of her tendency to appropriate from (gay-leaning) men of color.
As for Swift, who is being treated by this nation as though she has, to quote Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) in 10 Things I Hate About You, “beer-flavored nipples” or something, she doesn’t ever get political enough to be as “dangerous” or retroactively controversial (let alone controversial in the moment). Madonna, for example, is currently being compared to Lizzo for possessing the same bullying nature toward her dancers from the Blond Ambition Tour. Famously encapsulated by her asking of one dancer, “Does anybody give a shit?” after he expressed an opinion. While those who “have a fuckin’ sense of humor,” as Madonna said during her August 5th Blond Ambition show in Nice, might be better able to understand that it’s all coming from a place of irony (and that everyone needs to stop being so fucking literal), there’s not much room for that “brand” of humor anymore. Instead, such forms of “jocularity” are doomed to be written off as a form of white privilege that’s no longer tenable. And yet, talking of irony, that brings us to Swift, whose own white privilege is rarely ever acknowledged in discussing her road to success.
As is the case with many white women who end up famous (including Billie Eilish), Swift had ample parental support. Hers was not just emotional, however. Having a father like Scott Swift, the founder of The Swift Group (part of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management) certainly helped her with the encouragement to “pursue her dream.” After all, there was no worry that Taylor might end up homeless or anything if the whole “music thing” didn’t pan out. Because, as Pulp noted, “‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah.” And who knows what Mr. Swift might have helped stop (and start) along the way for his eldest child (with Swift’s only other sibling being her younger brother, Austin)?
Madonna, in contrast, had neither emotional nor financial support from her father when she set off to New York. This after already scandalizing Tony Ciccone by dropping out of college (Swift didn’t bother with that form of education at all). Specifically, giving up the dance scholarship she had earned to attend the University of Michigan. Because, in her mind, she was destined to truly make something out of herself. Not to be molded by the proverbial machine. Swift, comically enough, signed with a record label called Big Machine. And while Swift was growing up on an idyllic Christmas tree farm (as immortalized in her 2019 song of the same name), Madonna was mourning the loss of her mother and dressing in hand-me-downs or clothes she despised that were sewn by her stepmother, Joan. In fact, part of the reason she despised them is because Joan would sew the same exact outfit for all of her female siblings, prompting Madonna to rebel/differentiate herself by mismatching her socks. At least it was something.
Sometimes, “divine” intervention would occur to keep Madonna from having to wear one of her stepmother’s “bespoke” ensembles. Like the time Joan slapped her and Madonna’s nose bled onto the dress she might have had to wear to church were it not for the physical lashing. Madonna wasn’t upset, though. Quite the contrary. As she told Carrie Fisher in a 1991 Rolling Stone interview, “I was thrilled about it because my nose bled all over an outfit that she made me wear for Easter. I really hated it, and I didn’t want to wear it to church.”
So yeah, Madonna had it rough compared to Swift’s idyllic, nurturing, largely trauma-free childhood—complete with a mother, summering in Cape May and traveling frequently to New York for her vocal and acting lessons (the latter of which didn’t much pay off in Valentine’s Day). And, talking of a mother schlepping her daughter to the big city, Britney Spears’ mom, Lynne, did the same thing. Only she didn’t actually have the money to do it. She (along with Herr Jamie Spears) was merely banking on Brit’s success in the long-run by betting everything they had on her in the moment. This still included “borrow[ing] money from friends to pay for gas to get her to auditions.”
Despite the reward of Britney landing her role on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club (after getting rejected the first time at age ten), Lynne was certain to tout, “It cost a lot to send Britney to classes and competitions, and by the time she made it to The Mickey Mouse Club, what she made barely paid for the apartment we stayed in.” Even if that were true, continuing to gamble it all on Spears’ talent resulted in an irrefutable major payday later on (enhanced, of course, by that needless conservatorship). All of this is to say that perhaps there is something to the idea of women (and men) who struggle to become famous actually having the ability to be described as someone who “ate” after every performance. Because every performance is like a reliving of that time when they were fighting to prove themselves, to claw their way to the top. And yeah, it probably makes a difference in one’s eventual performance effect when their key formative influence was David Bowie instead of Faith Hill and Shania Twain (as for Britney, her key influence was Madonna).
That said, Swift can put on all the sequined gowns and other assorted styles of sequined clothing she wants for the Eras Tour, but it doesn’t blind one to the fact that she is not giving (said in drag queen voice) the way a Madonna or a Spears can. She is not at that level of fierceness. Maybe it’s her surfboard body, or her inherent commitment to (as opposed to rebellion against) Christian values, or a refusal to address anything other than romance (instead of sex) and its demise in her lyrics. Whatever the reason, Swift is not the performer she’s being made out to be by overly ass-licking media just because she’s breaking records for album and tour sales. It doesn’t alter the reality that, when it comes to transcendent performance and actually pushing boundaries, Swift plays it entirely safe—in general and during the Eras Tour. Starting with the costumes that scream “generic pop star.”
Take, for instance, her opening number ensemble: a Versace sequined leotard and shimmering Louboutin knee-high boots. This decidedly “prototype” look and style has not only been done to death by the average pop star, but it was helmed by Madonna in the 80s, starting with her “Open Your Heart” bustier paired with fishnet tights, worn for the Who’s That Girl Tour. The leotard/bustier aesthetic would come to define Madonna’s tours over the years, right up to a modified version of it for 2019’s Madame X Tour.
If that weren’t enough, Swift cops tour looks from many others, ranging from Tina Turner (with the fringe dress she wears during her “Fearless Era” section) to Florence + the Machine (with the flowy, feminine, witchy frocks she wears for the “Evermore Era” and “Folklore Era” sections). Elsewhere, things on the costume front get especially basic bitch for the “Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Midnights Era” sections. The supposedly “most original”/“cutting edge” ensemble she wears (during the “Reputation Era” section), an asymmetrical bodysuit with snakes (that look more like sperm) crawling up the side that actually has a pant leg, doesn’t say much about her ability to shake up fashion trends. It damn sure ain’t a fuckin’ cone bra.
This isn’t to blast Swift’s talents entirely. No one wants to undercut a woman who’s “killin’ it” in the music industry, but it bears noting that, clearly, the definition of “killin’ it” has grown decidedly soft in the present. And it’s kind of insulting to those who do still have a higher standard of what an envelope-pushing entertainer can achieve to be told that Swift is this era’s answer to someone like Madonna or Michael Jackson. Or even Britney. Granted, it was the increasingly absurd New York Times that sparked this debate by remarking on how Swift has “a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna.”
As one person commented of the comparison, “Michael and Madonna both brought something new and leveled up the game. Taylor is simply not. She may have the same success level but she definitely doesn’t have the stage presence required to compete with those legends.” And it’s true. To put it even more succinctly, “Taylor Swift is literally immune from slaying. Living proof that you can be the number one recording artist of all time and never once serve.” Of course, that assessment was met with plenty of vitriolic pushback on the platform now called “X,” but it’s completely accurate.
