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Jacket from The Birds

The Birds is the fifth collection by Alexander McQueen for his fashion house. It was inspired by ornithology and the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds. The collection centred around sharply tailored garments and emphasised female sexuality. The runway show was staged on 9 October 1994 and the venue was a warehouse in the London district of King's Cross. The Birds was styled with imagery of violence and death; some models were covered in tyre tracks and others wore white contact lenses. Reception was generally positive, although the styling drew accusations of misogyny. The show's success allowed McQueen to secure the financial backing to stage his next show, Highland Rape. Garments from The Birds appeared in both stagings of the retrospective exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. Seán McGirr heavily referenced The Birds for Autumn/Winter 2024, his debut collection as creative director for the Alexander McQueen brand. (Full article...)

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Farnese Artemis in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples

... that while the objects on the Farnese Artemis (pictured) had initially been identified as female breasts, the museum housing the statue now describes them as bull scrotums?
... that in the history of fisheries in the Philippines, the once-dominant local municipal fisheries were supplanted first by commercial fisheries, and then by aquaculture?
... that Eliza Legzdina has attributed opinions of her work to the "horrification of the female body"?
... that the center squeeze has been blamed for costing Gary Johnson the 2016 US presidential election?
... that voice actress Atsuko Tanaka often named pandas?
... that seven people died when their helicopter struck supporting wires of a Texas TV station's tower and crashed?
... that Michael P. Walsh oversaw the construction of 15 buildings as the president of Boston College?
... that Jer Lau, who appeared in the film Over My Dead Body, also performed its theme song because the director felt his role was too minor?
... that the search for mammals on Booby Island was a bust?

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John Hopfield (left) and Geoffrey Hinton

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (both pictured) receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research in machine learning with artificial neural networks.
A gang attack on the Haitian town of Pont-Sondé leaves seventy people dead and fifty others injured.
More than twenty people die in flooding and landslides in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A school bus crash and fire in Pathum Thani, Thailand, kills twenty-two school children and three teachers.

On this day

October 9: Leif Erikson Day in the United States, parts of Canada, and communities in the Nordic countries

Empress Marie Louise

1813 – Late in the Napoleonic Wars, Empress Marie Louise (pictured) issued decrees conscripting tens of thousands of French teenagers, who became known as Marie-Louises.
1874 – The Universal Postal Union, then known as the General Postal Union, was established with the signing of the Treaty of Bern to unify disparate postal services and regulations so that international mail could be exchanged easily.
1914 – World War I: The civilian authorities of Antwerp surrendered and allowed the German army to capture the city.
2019 – Syrian civil war: Turkish forces began an offensive into north-eastern Syria following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region.

Reginald Dyer (b. 1864)
William E. Woods (b. 1949)
Rockin' Robin (b. 1964)
Oskar Schindler (d. 1974)

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Today's featured picture

Li Fu Lee (1904–1985) was a Chinese engineer and teacher who in 1925 became the first Chinese woman to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She majored in electrical engineering, a course which some undergraduates at the time described as the most difficult major. She was one of the 25 women who graduated from MIT in 1929 and one of the first women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering at MIT. After graduating, Lee returned to China, where she became an engineer and taught at university. She fled with her family to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War and later returned to the United States, residing in Chicago. This 1925 photograph shows Lee at MIT's radio experiment station.

Photograph credit: Underwood & Underwood; restored by Adam Cuerden

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