Viva La Diva: A Letter From Our Editor | Harper’s Bazaar Arabia September 2024
Bazaar Arabia’s Olivia Phillips met one of her heroes: the iconic Dame Joan Collins, who was dressed entirely in custom Middle Eastern couture for our September 2024 cover story
Meeting your heroes is a complicated business. To paraphrase the old adage, you should actually go out of your way to avoid them if at all possible – such is the risk of them falling in your estimations once tainted by the unvarnished mundanity that is *shudder* the real world.
It becomes even more complex when your hero is arguably not of this mortal plane anyway, but a beacon of glamour so blinding that she may have invented the very concept itself. Case in point: our September cover star, the incomparable Dame Joan Collins.
“Low expectations, high serenity,” Penelope Cruz once told me (although that’s a name-drop tale for another day), so that’s the philosophy I’ve tried to employ whenever I’ve been lucky enough to meet someone iconic. It’s worked like a charm so far. Well, apart from Quentin Tarantino which – full disclosure – did not go well.
With Dame Joan, however, going in with low expectations was tough. How could the last living legend of Hollywood’s golden age; the original diva herself, be anything other than magnificent? To think so would be like expecting Marilyn Monroe (who Joan was friends with, by the way), to not be beautiful.
The bar, then, was set impossibly high. But one does not remain an icon for over seven decades by being a bit average in the flesh, darling. No – Joan is exactly who you want her to be, and that means she is exactly who she wants to be; unapologetic, patrician, the first word in glamour and (has) the last word in… well, everything. And thank God for that. We wouldn’t want our divas any other way.
Read the full cover story from Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s September 2024 issue.
Editor’s Picks
Editor-in-Chief: Olivia Phillips. Photographer: Ellen von Unwerth. Art Director: Paul Solomons. Stylist: Sascha Lilic. Hair & Make-Up: Alyn Waterman. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Local Producer: Filipine Guyonnaud. Dresser: Chrissy Maddison. 1st Assistant: Frederic Trohler. 2nd Assistant: Octave Monteiro De Oliveira. Digital Technician: Ovidiu Oltean. Styling Assistant: Celeste Pettorelli. Male Model: Pascal L. Seamstress: Myriam Savarese. Photographer’s Agent: 2B Management. Personal Stylist to Dame Joan Collins: Rene’ Horsch. Special thanks to Alex Silver and Le Beauvallon, Bay of Saint-Tropez
Lead image credits: Dress, POA, Custom Reem Kachmar Couture. Sunglasses, Dhs1,395, Hood London. Custom Shoes, Dhs4,175, Gina Couture. Earrings; Ring, both Joan’s own. Male model: Suit, Dhs2,340; Shirt, Dhs475; Shoes, Dhs1,860, all Boss
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s September 2024 issue.
