Post-war

• Dior’s haute couture collection remains a historical moment for post-war fashion, and lends its name to Apple’s new ten-part series.
• The drama explores the state of Parisian couture in the final year of the second world war and the years that followed through the lives of important designers.
• This includes Dior and his contemporaries Coco Chanel, Pierre Balmain, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lucien Lelong, Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Cardin.

French fashion during wartime

• Once Nazi forces invaded, Paris and its international fashion markets were effectively cut off from the rest of the world.
• As fashion designers were forced to limit the amount of material they used, unnecessary decorative additions such as ruffles and pockets became expendable.
• Instead, wartime couturiers turned to embroidery and beading for decoration – trends that continue to characterise haute couture today.

The rival ‘American look’

• Its biggest rival was the American ready-to-wear apparel industry, an aspect of the story this new series dramatises to great effect.
• Though the American industry also faced fabric rationing during the second world war, it was not occupied, and the restrictions weren’t as debilitating.

Dior’s beacon of hope

• Dior’s 1947 Carolle collection, was renamed the “new look” at first viewing by American fashion editor Carmel Snow.
• Snow claimed it represented the creation of a new femininity – which Dior would later call “the golden age of couture”.
• Rather, it celebrated the end of the grim years of wartime trauma, misery and lack.

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Elizabeth Kealy-Morris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The death of Klaus Teuber, creator of popular board game Catan, marked the passing of a board game giant.
• The German-born dental technician-turned-game designer invented the game, originally called Settlers of Catan, in 1995 while managing a dental lab.
• That same year Catan won one of board gaming’s most prestigious awards, the German Spiel des Jahres.

Settler colonialism

In interviews, Teuber said he started creating games in the 1980s to help deal with the stress of his dental career. “I developed games to escape,” he said. “This was my own world I created.” The Settlers of Catan — renamed Catan in 2015 — wasn’t really Teuber’s own world, it was a playable version of the American dream.

• As historian Lorenzo Veracini says, “the Settlers of Catan is really about settler colonialism.” The success of Catan also codified a certain kind of game play that has similarly proliferated worldwide, one that’s invested in the specific historical, economic and political factors of settler colonialism.
• The Settlers of Catan was not the first time a board game touched on colonial or imperialist discourses.
• However, because players in Catan explicitly take on the roles of settlers, this particular board game’s engagement in the rhetoric of settler colonialism set new precedents.

Decolonizing gameplay

• In these games, Indigenous identity, history, culture and sovereignty emerge as essential elements of world-building and game mechanics.
• Board game designer and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Greg Loring-Albright has shown with First Nations of Catan that it is possible to modify and decolonize gameplay by drawing attention to issues of Indigenous sovereignty.
• Another excellent example of this is Sínulkhay and Ladders by Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee, a Squamish decolonizing facilitator, creative director and Indigenous changemaker.

Biz Nijdam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• It turned out Hunka had fought against the Allies as a voluntary member of the Nazi German Waffen-SS Galizien division.
• As I discuss in my new book, Fascists in Exile, Canada isn’t the only country where former Nazis fled after the second world war.

• Last year, however, his secret history was revealed: he was found to be a member of Nazi intelligence in occupied Lithuania during the second world war.
• He was almost certainly involved in the persecution and murders of Jews.

Denial, then investigations

• This group included soldiers who had fought in German military units, as well as civilian collaborators.
• But their resettlement in any country that would take them was a matter of political expediency in the fraught post-war and early Cold War period.

• The then immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, dismissed their claims as a “farrago of nonsense”.
• The migrants were used as labourers under a two-year indentured labour scheme and transformed into what the government called “New Australians”.
• Australia received at least eight extradition requests between 1950 and the mid-1960s for individuals suspected of WWII-era crimes from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
• As a result, there would be no further official discussions about any alleged perpetrators residing in Australia.

Family histories unearthed

• Many alleged perpetrators of crimes never appeared on any official, or unofficial, list, either before or after the Australian investigation.
• My own research, for example, has resulted in the compiling of hundreds of such names by painstakingly piecing together various archival fragments.
• For example, a colleague and I were alerted to some suspicious phrasing when the family of Hungarian migrant Ferenc Molnar, now deceased, placed a commemorative biography on the website Immigration Place Australia.
• The SBS television show Every Family Has a Secret has been approached by at least four people who have suspected a deceased family member was a Holocaust perpetrator or collaborator.

Dr Jayne Persian receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

• StorageMart enhances Brighton's urban landscape by transforming a forgotten historic site into a state-of-the-art storage facility.
• BRIGHTON, United Kingdom, Dec. 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- StorageMart announced today that it will enhance Brighton's urban landscape by transforming a forgotten historic site into a state-of-the-art storage facility, set to open in the spring of 2024.
• StorageMart will take the historic building through a comprehensive transformation.
• Strategically located on Wellington Road, this expansion marks a significant addition to the StorageMart portfolio in the greater Brighton-Hove area.