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The oyster dress is a high fashion gown created by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his Spring/Summer 2003 collection Irere. McQueen's design is a one-shouldered dress in bias-cut beige silk chiffon with a boned upper body and a full-length skirt consisting of hundreds of individual circles of organza sewn in dense layers to the base fabric, resembling an oyster shell. The dress originated as a reinterpretation of the "shellfish dress" designed by John Galliano in 1987, which McQueen had long admired and sought to emulate. Contemporary critical responses to McQueen's oyster dress were positive and it is considered an iconic piece of McQueen's work. Only two copies are known to exist, one held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and one by media personality Kim Kardashian. McQueen returned to the oyster dress concept several times over his career, most prominently in his Autumn/Winter 2006 collection The Widows of Culloden. (Full article...)

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Yamazakura by Kawahara Keiga

... that bears may be dispersers of the Japanese mountain cherry (painting pictured)?
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... that Inman Jackson played "as though he were born with a basketball in each hand"?
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... that baritone Liviu Holender chose lieder by five composers whose music was banned by the Nazis—Schreker, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Korngold and Schönberg—for a recital at the Oper Frankfurt?
... that some members of the U.S. Army Air Corps were so unimpressed by the Estoppey D-8 that one member stated that he would rather use "nails and a wire"?

In the news

Ebrahim Raisi

A helicopter crash near Varzaqan, Iran, kills eight people, including President Ebrahim Raisi (pictured) and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
In boxing, Oleksandr Usyk defeats Tyson Fury to become the first undisputed heavyweight champion in twenty-four years.
Protests over voting rights changes break out in the French territory of New Caledonia.
Lee Hsien Loong steps down after nearly twenty years as Prime Minister of Singapore, and is succeeded by Lawrence Wong.

On this day

May 22

Prayut Chan-o-cha

1766 – A magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Constantinople and was followed by a tsunami that caused significant damage.
1874 – Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem was first performed in the San Marco church in Milan to commemorate the first anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni's death.
1998 – In Public Prosecutor v Taw Cheng Kong, the Court of Appeal of Singapore overruled a High Court decision in the only time a statute in Singapore had been ruled unconstitutional.
2014 – Prayut Chan-o-cha (pictured), the commander-in-chief of the Royal Thai Army, launched a coup d'état against the caretaker government following six months of political crisis.

Jovan Vladimir (d. 1016)
John Forest (d. 1538)
Charles Aznavour (b. 1924)
Apolo Ohno (b. 1982)

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Today's featured picture

De Viron Castle is a castle in the town of Dilbeek in Flemish Brabant, Belgium. Commissioned by the de Viron family, which settled in Dilbeek in 1775, the castle was built in 1863 by Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar. The Renaissance Revival castle was built on the ruins of a 14th-century fortification that was destroyed in 1862. One of the medieval towers, the Sint-Alenatoren, can still be seen in the park surrounding the current building and is named after Saint Alena, who lived in Dilbeek. The castle has served as the town hall of Dilbeek and housed the offices of the municipality since 1923, and was listed as a Belgian protected monument in 1990. This photograph shows the facade of De Viron Castle with the surrounding park in the foreground.

Photograph credit: Benoit Brummer

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