Lily Allen

[LolaSvelt]

Lily Allen is smashing while attending the BAFTA William Vintage Dinner held at St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel on Friday (February 8) in London, England.

justjared

 

[LolaSvelt]

Lily Allen attends the Charles Finch and Chanel pre-BAFTA dinner at Annabels on February 9, 2013 in London, England.

zimbio

 

[Alvedansen]

Attending a famous celebrity nightclub in London - February 12, 2013

[FONT=&quot]tlfan.to[/FONT]

 

[Alvedansen]

[FONT=&quot]tlfan.to[/FONT]

 

[LolaSvelt]

Singer Lily Allen performs during the 'Etam Live Lingerie show' 2013 at Bourse du Commerce on February 26, 2013 in Paris, France.

26th February 2013. Singer Lily Allen (Lily Cooper) pictured at Etam fashion show after performing. Lily had her husband Sam Cooper and her newborn to support her. Paris, France.

27th February 2013. Lily Allen and Sam Cooper spotted arriving at St. Pancras station, London. Lily and Sam have been in Paris where she performed at one of the fashion shows.

zimbio

 

[LolaSvelt]

She might have two young children, but Lily Cooper certainly isn't letting motherhood put a dampener on her social life.

The singer has been something of a social butterfly in recent weeks, attending various parties and events.

And Lily continued her party queen reign on Wednesday night with yet another evening out - this time at the Groucho members' club with friends.

Lily Allen leaving the studios of BBC radio 1 after attending the Radio 1 breakfast show comic relief fundraiser in London.

zimbio, dailymail

 

[Larek]

 

[Not Plain Jane]

“Hard Out Here” Proves Lily Allen Is the Pop Star We Need in 2013"
By Tyler Coates on Nov 12, 2013 4:15pm

Back in the mid-aughts, Lily Allen brought a lot of hype and promise across the pond to the US with her first album, Alright, Still. Produced by a then-underappreciated Mark Ronson, Allen was poised to become the anti-female pop star; a direct opposite to the oversexed, Auto-Tuned princesses ushered onto the charts in the late ’90s, her brand of ska- and reggae-inspired pop songs embodied a charm and wit that was sadly absent in the music of her American contemporaries. But despite the critical acclaim and brief commercial success, Allen didn’t achieve the success of, say, Amy Winehouse or Adele, who eclipsed her with their big voices and big sounds.

But another another curious pop-music occurrence took place as Lily Allen’s star was fading in America: the simultaneous rise of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, whose cheeky, self-reflexive winks at the nature of fame (combined with the tried-and-true hypersexual aesthetics) rode in on Allen’s witty, farcical coattails. It was in 2008 when those two released their first singles; the next year, Lily Allen announced she had no plans to record another album, despite the critical and commercial success of her second album, It’s Not Me, It’s You.

This explains why there’s so much excitement for Lily Allen’s return. Today, seemingly out of nowhere, she released a video for her new single, “Hard Out Here.” While not a strict return to her roots — it incorporates the electro-pop sound of It’s Not Me, It’s You — it is a welcome reminder that Allen was a rare breed of pop star: one who had the brains to point out how destructive the industry in which she works is. And she does so in a way that is sincere and honest rather than patronizing.


It’s easy to see how Lily Allen might find frustrations within the music industry. On the one hand, she was lucky. The daughter of Keith Allen, a musician and actor, and Alison Owen, a film producer, her success was not exactly the surprise it was made out to be in the narrative that introduced her on countless music blogs: that she was an unknown who found fame through posting her demos on MySpace. She’s very much a part of the industry machine, but she was definitely set apart from the others in her cohort from the beginning: she wrote her own music, she had a music-nerd sensibility, and she was not rail-thin (although, conveniently, she did happen to be pretty damn gorgeous).

But despite all she had going for her, she didn’t quite ascend to the level of fame enjoyed by the mega-stars who rule the American pop landscape. Along with looking a bit different, she was a bit too outspoken. And while Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse struggles certainly eclipsed hers, she was still a tabloid fixture on account of her partying. But in a world where that becomes at least as important to the music as, you know, the actual music, Allen’s personal life never became a part of her appeal — rather it was the voice, both literal and figurative, with which she commented on the world around her.

It seems necessary for Lily Allen to return, especially with “Hard Out Here.” The title, a play on the Oscar-winning Three 6 Mafia song, has a relevant gender change. In this post-Miley Cyrus / post-trollgaze world, it feels as if pop music is more vapid and trashy than it ever was before. (You could make a jaded argument that nothing has ever changed, except that what we put up with a lot more manufactured outrage these days.) Sure, the video for (and the lyrics in) “Hard Out Here” is heavy-handed — not to mention the fact that the cadre of mostly black backup dancers twerking and getting their ***es slapped in slow motion muddies the satirical message a bit. But the pretty blatant disses at the heavy hitters on the current pop charts are perfect. There’s Cyrus’ twerking, Gaga’s cheeky product placement and transparent media critiques, even a reference to Robin Thicke’s embarrassing bragging about the size of his penis, and acknowledgment of all three performer’s cultural appropriations. All comparisons of raw talent aside, Lily Allen seems to be the only pop performer still standing who has the self-awareness and wit to nail such a timely message in the space of a four-minute pop song.

Flavorwire.com

 

[Not Plain Jane]

Is There a Racist Undertone to Lily Allen’s “Hard Out Here” Video?
By Michelle Dean on Nov 13, 2013 11:30am

I love Lily Allen, and was basically guaranteed to embrace the video, “Hard Out Here,” that she released as a comeback gimmick yesterday. In truth I don’t love the song — the lyrics may be characteristic Lily Allen blunt truth-telling, but they lack the playful cleverness I loved in her earlier work — but then it’s not the song everyone wants to talk about, it’s the video. And the video, while it operates as a mostly-great satire of the boobs-and-champagne aesthetic of much modern pop music, still has some issues.

Specifically, as pop-culture watchers spanning from the Caitlin Moran to Mikki Kendall found themselves discussing on Twitter this morning, the use of black women in the video doesn’t quite come across as the Satire You Hope to See in the World. Sure, the cartoon colors, the tongue-in-cheek slow-motion lingering over black women’s ***es, and the conceit of the song itself — a comment on what you have to do to be a female pop star these days — are leading the viewer to recognize that the imagery is ridiculous. Sure, this is satire, and like I said, mostly pretty good stuff.

But beyond the mocking frame, if you think about the result for the women who are actually dancing in the video, it is still the same as your average Miley Cyrus/Gwen Stefani/Madonna exploitation of women of color. Let’s get abstract for a second: Here’s a white lady, singing about how she resents having to lose weight and generally be treated as a sex object. And she’s dancing with a number of comparatively voiceless and nameless black women. Their feelings about the situation they find themselves in are neither highlighted nor even explored; most of the time they’re smiling and laughing, as though they were enjoying themselves in the act. And let’s face it: most people are going to walk away from this video thinking, “Oh, those dancers were having fun,” and leave it there. For most people, there’s nothing wrong with a nameless, voiceless black women dancing in the background. If anything, it’s what Joe and Jane Dubstep have come to expect.

Making it potentially worse is the video’s director, who, in what I’d gauge as a medium-clueless interview with NME, mostly seems to think that too. First, he’s quite adamant that the video is not an “angry statement,” which mostly makes you wonder (a) why it is that stupid people often produce striking cultural products and (b) if he’s watched his own finished cut:

That culture is something we’re all complicit in – we all sit and watch those videos with twerking and champagne spilling over gyrating naked women and all that on MTV all the time, so to really rally against them would be hypocritical. It’s much more effective and much funnier to kinda have a bit of fun with those things instead of making any kind of angry statement against them in the video. It’s just a bit of fun.
I suppose he gets bonus points for using the word “complicit” in there. There’s sometimes a tendency for people to want to excuse themselves from all the bad implications of the work they do; I like to joke that these people are worried that if every piece of pop culture is not snow-pure they aren’t going to heaven. Obviously, that guy is not suffering from the “I am FILLED with Christ’s love!” kind of problem, so kudos to him.

That said, the most interesting thing pop can do with its complicity with the political superstructures of racism, sexism, and classism is to be self-aware about it. To, at every turn, acknowledge bluntly the ways in which it’s caught up with it. That’s why, in a video like this one, you need the white music executive guy literally in the frame, demonstrating the twerking motion. It’s also why Lily Allen has to literally say she’s not a size 6. And why, by the way, even as you may be satirizing one thing you can totally miss another:

What I hope comes across in the video is how much of a sisterly vibe there was. It wasn’t like the girls she’s surrounded by in the video were people we were taking the piss out of, or anything – they were in on it. In fact, it was their idea to spray the champagne over each other, like in a Nelly video. They totally got that what we were saying with the video: everything here is imagery we’re all familiar with, but why are we familiar with it? I mean, it’s ridiculous and so over the top and not even really sexy in the slightest, so why? We had a lot of fun on set making that point. It’s way more effective to take the piss slightly – to acknowledge that ridiculousness.
Note the total absence, in this paragraph, of any commentary on the racialized aspect of “that ridiculousness.” You can add to that Lily Allen’s reply, on Twitter, that the women in the video were chosen because they were “the best dancers,” not because they were women of color. (“t seemed unfair and hypocritical not to hire someone because of their skin colour,” she added.) Obviously no one involved in making this video was really thinking too hard about the racial politics of it all. And sure, as activists are fond of saying, intent isn’t everything; perhaps there’s a small population of people walking away from that video still reading a wink about the use of black women as backup dancers into it. But for most people, no. Which just means, I think, that next time Lily Allen comes to wow us — and I hope she does it again — she could do a little bit better. A little bit of her trademark sarcasm applied to the way her business uses women of color could do us all more than a little good.

UPDATE: Lily Allen has now responded on Twitter to some of the charges, not particularly effectively to my mind — she’s basically saying her decision to use women of color in this way in the video was post-racial. Welp.

Also Flavorwire.com

 

[Not Plain Jane]

Twitter world responds to the video, including gals like Lena Dunham and Diablo Cody!

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwi...omes-a-symposium-on-lily-allens-hard-out-here

 

[LolaSvelt]

Lily Allen arrives at the BBC Radio Studios in London on November 19, 2013.

Lily Allen arrives at Red Bull Revolutions in Sound on the EDF Energy London Eye, a celebration of UK club culture with 30 of the most legendary club nights in 30 capsules and streamed live on www.revolutionsinsound.com on November 14, 2013 in London, England.

Singer Lily Allen attends the Closing Night Gala European Premiere of 'Saving Mr Banks' during the 57th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square on October 20, 2013 in London, England.

Singer Lily Allen attends the London Fashion Week Giles catwalk show at Stationer's Hall in London.

The Chelsea Flower Show prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary with a celebrity press day.

zimbio

 

[Nani]

@1:15

 

[meidude]

Cover + cover story for Elle UK March 2014

Photographer: David Vasiljevic
Fashion Editor: Anne-Marie Curtis
Hair: Tony Collins at Streeters
Make-up: Andrew Gallimore at CLM
Manicure: Michelle Humphrey at LMC Worldwide
Props: Alexandra Leavey at Soho Management
Article: Alexander Fury

Celebrity: Lily Allen

Source: imcmagazine.com

 

[Not Plain Jane]

Ah, so cute in that Elle spread; thanks for posting! Will have to read the article as well.

 

[Chanelcouture09]

I do love her new song from her new album -

 

[Chanelcouture09]

In Roland Mouret dress and Alaia heels

In Chanel at Chanel Haute Couture Spring 2014

In Louis Vuitton at Louis Vuitton Menswear Fall 2014

*Zimbio.com

 

[MartiniKiss]

dailymail.co.uk

 

[MartiniKiss]

dailymail.co.uk

 

[MartiniKiss]

zimbio.com

 

[MartiniKiss]

dailymail.co.uk