PRESS UPDATE : HARPERS ARABIA EDITORS BLOG ... SEPTEMBER 2024 ..

Olivia Phillips with Joan

Editor's Blog

Viva La Diva: A Letter From Our Editor | Harper’s Bazaar Arabia September 2024

By Olivia Phillips

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.

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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!