In July 2015, when I encountered the installation by the New York–based artist Saya Woolfalk in the Disguise: Masks and Global African Art exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, I felt like I’d entered an ecstatic, sci-fi world inhabited by cyborgs and unfathomable technology. In a darkened room, mandalas painted on the walls flickered while rainbow-patterned mannequins wore elaborate, fantastical costumes with glittery, butterfly-like embellishments, skirts with triangular pieces of fabric layered like reptilian scales, and headdresses topped with small chimeras...

Jane Birkin, who has died in July 2023 aged 76, was a singer, actress and “style icon”; granted celebrity status in France as the muse of the singer Serge Gainsbourg, she was best known in Britain for giving her name to a prohibitively expensive Hermès handbag. She met Gainsbourg in Paris when she was 21 and already the wife of the composer John Barry and the mother of their daughter. She and Gainsbourg embarked on an affair that would last 12 years, and in 1969 they released their record Je t’aime moi non plus...