Linda & Whoopi & Kim

We love a cultural icon who is self-aware and direct!

Welcome to Quality Sheet, a weekly assortment of outside-the-box news, events, trends and offbeat oddities to indulge your curiosity. Subscribe for a midweek treat each Wednesday that'll make you hummm with intrigue and amusement.

---

If we’re lucky, every once in a while the internet delivers us a line or two from an icon that unites the masses. The latest wisdom comes from Linda Evangelista. Of her view on dating, the supermodel told the Sunday Times recently: “I don’t want to hear somebody breathing.” It’s a solid interview—further hits include “Knowing your worth is for yourself.” Evangelista joins the ranks of legends who love their personal space, including Whoopi “I don’t want somebody in my house” Goldberg, Kim “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself” Cattrall, and Isabel “We’re not living together until we can afford a place with separate wings” Togoh*. Ahhh, it feels good to find one’s tribe.

*this is mostly a joke.

Welcome to Quality Sheet! Today’s post brings together a cabaret countess and everyone’s favourite new flautist.

🍫

Chic, c’est la vie! Money can’t buy you class! Please don’t let it be about Tom! Whatever your view on her, Countess Luann (that’s Mrs de Lesseps to you) has gifted us countless maxims over the years as star of stage and screen. The cabaret singer and OG real housewife of New York dishes to Dazed about experiencing the quantum universe, her personal growth through her years of ups and downs on TV and how to turn lemons into lemonade. She also gives journalist Alim Kheraj her take on Crocs, so it’s essential reading. Related: The Countess is coming to the U.K. next summer to perform at the Mighty Hoopla festival. Tickets here.

🍬

André 3000 surprised us this month when he announced he’d be dropping new music for the first time in years…and again when it turned out to be 1 hour and 27 minutes of instrumentals, with the humble flute as its star. The album is a lesson in how trying new things can respark creativity and inspiration. “You hear intelligence at work; you hear language without words,” Spencer Kornhaber writes in the Atlantic’s review of “New Blue Sun.”

🍪

"Women, too, can be immoral and selfish…we can have conflicted feelings…we can be brutal and power hungry just as much as we can be sensitive and gracious and funny and noble." When I tell you I Amazon PRIMED Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen” on Monday after reading this piece in the Guardian, received it on Tuesday and will start reading it tonight. I don’t think I’ve ever been sold on a book so quickly. Just as exciting is the upcoming film adaptation, starring Anne Hathaway, out December 1 in the U.K.

🍭

The reality of raising children, with its messiness and unpredictability, cannot fit prettily into Instagram’s tiny square boxes, nor should it. The Cut’s Kathryn Jezer-Morton explores how the kind of online personal branding that easily lends itself to hobbies like fashion, food and gaming, isn’t as natural a fit for influencers who want to demonstrate the day-to-day of family life on social media. “Raise good humans,” a saying that’s popular on parenting pages and seems to simplify the world’s hardest task, is “so general it becomes meaningless,” Jezer-Morton writes. “There is no assembly line of kindness or set of best practices for ensuring a child’s goodness. We can only do so much to influence how our children turn out.”

🍩

“Maybe the shame [around talking about loneliness] exists because admitting a lack of emotional and social connection makes you feel like a defective human. The thing that we’re all supposed to do to survive as a species—be social and cooperative—loneliness and isolation chew away at.” I’m thinking and talking about loneliness quite a bit these days because it’s cold and dark outside! ‘Tis the season when we’re prone to feeling it more acutely. Sign up to read more on my other newsletter, Colouring Outside The Lines.

🥠

We’re well and truly into sweater weather, a.k.a. soup season. Which is your favourite? Mine is a ‘resurrection soup’, the recipe for which is a trade secret. From Louisiana’s Gumbo, which has West African roots, to San Francisco’s Cioppino, with its Italian origins, Fifty Grande’s Briana Brady gives us a tour of the United States of Soup and where some of America’s best-loved stews and soups come from.

🍒

As trends are recycled every 20 years or so, how will future generations interpret what we look like today? What will ‘2020s core’ look like in 2047? Things might not look so different in the future, as some argue we don’t look uniquely different to how people dressed 20 years ago. Here are some theories as to why it’s becoming harder to clearly identify each decade by its style, from Dazed’s Kleigh Balugo.

🎁

Thank you for reading. Share to sweeten someone’s day—and have a lovely rest of your week!

Isabel :)

Get in touch/share links/follow me:

I have another newsletter that explores what it means to live freely! It goes out a few times a month, you can subscribe below: