Need to Know
10 : 09 : 18

Saudi Arabia – Prada’s subsidiary Miu Miu launched the latest film in its Women's Tales initiative, which has been giving female directors a platform to explore their stories since 2011.

The short film, entitled The Wedding Singer’s Daughter, is set in the capital city of Riyadh in the 80s and follows a group of women as they enter a wedding venue, where the reception is separated by genders. It explores the multiplicity of the female experience in Saudi Arabia, showcasing the women wearing glamorous Miu Miu clothing beneath their abayas.

Directed by Saudi Arabia's first female filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour, the piece highlights the country's conservative past and hints at its future through its protagonist, a young girl who looks to save her mother, the wedding singer, from humiliation.

For more on the brands that are working to rewrite narratives around gender, visit our Female Futures vertical.

The London museum’s Autumn blockbuster – Design/Play/Disrupt – explores the flourishing of the video game as a medium of critical and cultural enquiry since the mid-2000s. While many of today’s most lauded games developers are represented, it is the grassroots case studies – and the ultimate blurring of the designer-user binary – that is most compelling. Design/Play/Disrupt demonstrates how gaming now acts as a platform for community creation across a broad range of geographies and demographics and, within that, has become one of the tools of choice for marginalised groups to reclaim their voice.

‘There’s been an aversion in some sense to thinking about video gaming as something that is political, but of course any kind of medium has its own politics, even if it’s not explicit, so we really want people to critically engage with those issues,’ research curator Kristian Volsing tells LS:N Global.

Gaming is also becoming a vital forum for young men to discuss mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Read more in our Relationship Games microtrend.

The new label, Collusion, is aimed at consumers who are coming of age and will be built around the twin pillars of gender fluidity and affordability. ASOS created the brand by bringing together a group of six young people from various walks of life – students, activists and YouTubers among them – with a team of fashion designers.

Collusion will be launched alongside a national marketing campaign that captures the lives of 100 young people living in the UK who will turn 18 in 2018. Each was asked the question ‘what do you wish for, in the year you come of age?’ in order to ‘create an image of a group portrait and visual census of Britain’s youth at a unique moment in time’, according to a statement from ASOS.

As we’ve recently explored in our New Masculinity series, male consumers are increasingly as comfortable as their female counterparts with exploring the mailability of gender identity, and want brands to help facilitate that journey.

According to research by PwC, while 84% of executives claim to have some sort of blockchain initiative in progress, few have implemented the technology. Respondents cited a lack of trust among users as a major obstacle to adoption, alongside regulatory uncertainty and the technical challenge of bringing separate networks together.

For more on how blockchain might (eventually) reshape the global economy, read our Viewpoint with Joao Reginatto, European director of product and operations at cryptofinance company Circle.