A Letter From The Editor On The Road Less Travelled | Harper’s Bazaar Arabia Issue July / August 2025

A celebration of wanderlust and life’s unexpected trajectories, in our July / August 2025 issue Olivia Phillips reflects on personal pathways

Urban legend – or at least pop psychology – has it that your life fundamentally shifts every seven years. True or not, it’s a handy theory. Ultimately, if blaming pre-ordained seasonality helps us move through change with a lighter gait, I’m all for it. Ironically, there can be real empowerment in just letting go.

It’s something that our July-August cover star, the very super original Super Helena Christensen, has always sworn by. “I wasn’t really someone who planned far ahead or made these big decisions. I just kind of floated along, but I was always really connected to how I felt deep down in my stomach. If something doesn’t feel right, your body knows. I think my whole career is based on that. My whole life, too,” she tells Anita Bhagwandas on page 56. After all, there’s a reason they call your gut the third brain.

Helena’s has evidently steered her well; into a life lived creatively, purposefully and joyfully. Between her photography work, refugee advocacy as a UNHCR Ambassador and creative directorships including the newly announced one at BoConcept, she has, as Anita writes, “quietly redefined what a traditional career path can look like – particularly for women – over the course of their lives.” In the face of pressures, demands and, perhaps most challenging of all, society’s expectations, that’s certainly something super to aspire to.

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From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia July/ August 2025 Issue