Luxury fashion house Chanel is staging its 2022/23 cruise collection in the Principality, a location that has special meaning for the iconic brand.
The relationship between Chanel and the Côte d’Azur goes back almost a hundred years to 1929, when Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel built her villa, La Pausa, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, just minutes from Monaco. The relationship continued with Karl Lagerfeld, who made Villa La Vigie his go-to summer residence from 1988.
This long-standing bond is being celebrated by the iconic fashion brand through a live fashion show to be held in the Principality to reveal its 2022/23 cruise collection. The show is scheduled for 5th May 2022. The location is yet to be disclosed.
“By choosing to present the Cruise 2022/23 fashion show in Monaco, Virginie Viard is sealing and extending Chanel’s ties with the Principality. This relationship is embodied in particular by Charlotte Casiraghi, ambassador and spokesperson for the House since 2021, President and Founder of the Monaco Philosophical Meetings and godmother of the Jumping International de Monte-Carlo,” Chanel stated in a press release.
The last time Chanel held a show in Monaco was back in 2006 when it debuted its Métiers d’Art Collection at the Monte-Carlo Opera House.
Cruise collections are the norm for many fashion houses today, but the idea stemmed from Coco Chanel, who in 1919 began to offer her North American and northern European clients embarking on winter holidays light and wearable designs made for sunny destinations.
Today’s modern collections are a complete travel-inspired wardrobe using aspirational pieces for women who dream of wintering in places such as Monaco and made for those who do.
Photo of Charlotte Casiraghi, source Chanel
Alessandria secures highest place finish for any Monegasque skier
Arnaud Alessandria finished his Winter Olympics in style on Wednesday, securing the best finish by any Olympic Monegasque skier with a 13th place in the Men’s Combined race.
Feeding off of his strong performances in the Men’s Downhill (29th) and the Super-G (31st), Alessandria tackled the third and final race of his Olympic Games in-front of Prince Albert II, who has had a front-row seat of the flag-bearer’s games.
An event of two halves, Alessandria first tackled the Downhill. A time of 1:45.79, which saw him finish 1.92 seconds off the quickest run, was enough to secure a 15th place finish. “I had a good run, and I was happy with myself,” Alessandria said after the race.
Attention immediately then turned to his less preferred slalom race, which would see him tackle the slopes of Beijing for the last time in these games. The focus for Alessandria was on damage limitation. “It (slalom) isn’t my cup of tea at all. The objective was to arrive at the bottom inflicting as little damage as possible,” he said.
A finishing time of 2:44.20 was enough for Alessandria to write his own bit of Monegasque sporting history, as he secured the highest place finish of any Monegasque skier in a Winter Olympics.
He finished 12.77 seconds off Austrian winner Johannes Strolz, who narrowly beat Norwegian Aleksandr Aamodt Kilde to the gold, whilst Canadian James Crawford rounded off the podium.
Alessandria registered a DNF in the same event during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, making his record-breaking performance on the slopes of Yanqing an even more impressive fear. “I didn’t expect it,” he admitted afterwards.
His trainer Jacques Pastor praised his performance and character following the result, saying, “He has been valiant. Beyond his sporting bravery is his human bravery, to want to engage himself for the past years, and for wanting to take risks. We are in the court of the greats, we’re not here to make up the number, and today that paid off.”
Trainer Jacques Pastor, Prince Albert, and Arnaud Alessandria
Prince Albert, who has been an ever-present at Alessandria’s races, was complimentary of his performances. “These opening results are really very encouraging,” said the Prince. “His 13th place finish in the Combined was a magnificent result. I am very happy for him.”
Although the Prince’s attendance at the Games is coming to an end, Monegasque involvement is far from complete. The bobsleigh duo of Rudy Rinaldi and Boris Vain are yet to take to the track, and Prince Albert II, a former Olympian in the sport himself, is optimistic about their chances. “Our bobsleigh team has done a very good official training. Rinaldi and Vain are feeling well, they have no physical problems and the morale is good. That is therefore a good omen for some very good results, we all hope that.”
AS Monaco Basketball’s inability to kill-off games once again proved costly on Thursday, as bottom side Zalgiris snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, having trailed for almost the entire match.
Zalgiris only led for a total of 17 seconds during the fixture. Their timing was impeccable however, as they crucially hit the front for the first-time at the end of the fourth-quarter. Mike James had a chance to win the game in the dying seconds, but under-pressure he couldn’t convert his three-point attempt.
It was a match of two-halves at the Salle Gaston Medecin. Monaco largely dominated the first two-quarters (46-36), but let their grasp slip in a crucial third-quarter in which the Lithuanian side closed the gap.
Donta Hall’s on–the-buzzer field-goal gave the home side some breathing room going into the fourth, but that failed to reverse the trend. Monaco still maintained a slender advantage, but that was surrendered with minutes to spare. Five unreplied points from Zalgiris’ Niels Giffey brought the difference down to a single point. The decisive points were scored by Lukas Lekavicius, his two two-pointers in the final minute sealing Monaco’s fate 82-83.
Post-match, Sasa Obradovic bemoaned the lack of cohesion of his side’s performance, saying, “They (Zalgiris) played like a team. We did not play as a team. When you just use your talent and play basketball as a team, you give a chance to someone else who is doing this.”
The defeat is a huge disappointment for a team that has put in so much effort to reach the top eight in the Euroleague in recent weeks. Roca Team player Yakuba Ouattara said, “This defeat hurts us after all of the work that we have done.”
Defeat sees Monaco slump to 11th in the standings, leaving them with work to do in order to catch up to their play-off rivals, many of whom have games in hand. Before that, attention will once again shift back to the domestic competition as they face a trip to Lyon-Villeurbanne on Sunday.
Photo source: AS Monaco Basketball
Can coral help solve the mystery of childhood cancer?
In the laboratories of the Scientific Centre of Monaco on Quai Albert 1er, a group of researchers are studying paediatric cancer. In another section, scientists study cnidarians, otherwise known as corals, medusae and anemones. Extraordinarily, the two have managed to come together to combine their research and potentially unlock the mystery of how and why brain cancers emerge in children.
Dr Vincent Picco is the head of the paediatric cancer research team at the Scientific Centre of Monaco (CSM). In a sun-filled lab with large windows that capture the post-card images of Port Hercule and Monte-Carlo, white-coat researchers work methodically with test tubes. Dr Picco tells me the purpose behind his team’s work.
“The causes of cancer in children are extremely different from adults, because kids have not been smoking and drinking most of their lives, for example,” says Dr Picco. “Our main hypothesis is that during embryogenesis, certain cells that should become neurons or cells that make up the brain remain abnormally locked in an embryonic state.”
The survival rate for paediatric cancers has doubled over the past 30 years, says Dr Picco encouragingly, but not because the treatment has been particularly innovative.
“The chemotherapies used have been around for ever,” he explains. “It is the way they are being used that has improved to increase the survival rate of the patients. But while survival has improved, it has come with very debilitating consequences. One of our main goals is to develop therapies that are more specific towards paediatric cancers, to reduce these secondary effects of treatment and give a better quality of life to the patients, during and after treatment.
“If we understand how and why a cancer emerges, we might be able to design a therapy that is best suited to that cancer.”
Head of the paediatric cancer research team Dr Vincent Picco
In another section of the Scientific Centre, I am introduced to Dr François Seneca, a senior scientist working with cnidarians. He shows me inside a tiny room with a very small fish tank filled with little anemone.
“Here in the lab, we study the innate immune response of aiptasia sea anemone,” he explains. “We are using this species because its genome has been sequenced and it gives us extra information that we can use to study in detail what genes are expressed or regulated during certain conditions, so how the animal defends itself when it’s attacked by a pathogen. The pathogen in this case is vibrio parahaemolyticus, a bacteria that is found in the ocean and, when ingested by humans, causes gastrointestinal illness, more commonly known as seafood poisoning.”
Amidst the complicated scientific terms, I ask how these little ocean-dwelling creatures could possibly help unlock the story behind childhood cancer.
“The really interesting question that we want to address here at the CSM is, ‘What are the mechanisms in corals and anemones that prevent the animal from catching disease’,” he says. “We don’t see tumours developing out of the blue on coral tissues so we think there must be some mechanisms that prevent that from happening. If we can get our head around that, then we can potentially help the biomedical field.”
An aiptasia sea anemone
Cnidarians are indeed fascinating little creatures. Some have a lifespan of around 4,000 years, longer than any other animal that lives in the ocean. When a cnidarian gets damaged, it can regenerate a body part, making them practically immortal. Dr Seneca says he can cut a single sea anemone into a number of pieces, and each will continue to grow and thrive.
“These animals have been through a huge amount of stress due to different environmental changes throughout their lives – excessive energy from sunlight, pollutants, etc., and yet they are still able to survive,” says Dr Seneca.
“We think of coral as being fragile because of what’s happening with climate change and what you see in the news about the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But at the same time, there’s an inherent resilience in corals. They have been on earth and evolving for over 500 million years. They have the tools, the solutions, to propagate and survive if you give them the chance.”
Dr François Seneca, photo by Monaco Life
Dr François Seneca, a Monegasque native, began his research career in Australia with a PHD at James Cook University. It was the first lab in the world to apply new sequencing technology to corals.
“What happened when we started sequencing more and more species of coral is that we discovered how rich they were with gene families and how similar they were from classical models like mice, rats and dogs, all the way to humans,” says Dr Seneca. “Then we discovered that there were genes in corals and anemones that we couldn’t find in classical models. It was incredible, because it had the potential to fill the gaps and present new information to the big picture.”
What also makes cnidarians an exciting research species, says cancer specialist Dr Vincent Picco, is their simple nervous system that is composed of a network of neurons as opposed to a vertebrae nervous system, as in humans. Scientists actually believe that it was probably within this cnidarian group or closely-related ancestory that the nervous system first evolved.
“The simplicity of the animal is very important,” says Dr Picco. “Our aim is to try to simulate paediatric brain cancer in a very simple animal to be able to understand why and how it happens in humans.”
A researcher works in the paediatric cancer laboratory of the CSM, by Monaco Life
Thanks to innovative sequencing technology, a growing number of laboratories around the world are now starting to use cnidarians to better understand vertebrae, or human biology.
“What we know today is that humans are incredibly complex, and this complexity is what makes us who we are, but it is also tricky to completely understand,” adds Dr Seneca. “So, by looking at an animal that is simpler and has genes that are similar to humans, it can help us decipher that complexity that we see in humans, knowing which genes were there at the time of our ancestors, and diversified and built that complexity that we see today.”
Botanists and chemists have long prospected in tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems for unusual substances to meet human needs. But the world’s oceans, which may contain as many as two million as yet undiscovered species, have remained largely untapped.
Using the innate immunity of cnidarians to understand the emergence and treatment of cancer is a growing field. Some cnidarian toxins have already been used for the design of immunotoxins to treat the disease.
“I think that all answers are in nature,” says Dr Seneca. “In the field of biomimicry, if we really want to make huge discoveries and apply them quickly, we have to go back to the solutions that nature itself has created.”
CSM coral and fish tanks, by Monaco Life
The problem, however, is imitating these solutions on a large scale.
“The potentional in terms of bioactive molecules in the ocean is extremely high because of the diversity of the animals and lifeforms,” says Dr Picco. “The problem is that it is extremely difficult to isolate the compounds from these kinds of animals. Even if the compound is active against cancer, it is extremely difficult to synthesise that compound.”
Dr Picco points to a company called Coral Biome in Marseille that isolated a compound called palytoxin in a particular soft coral, an extremely poisonous substance that is 1,000,000 times more toxic to cancer cells than to healthy cells. Research shows that it is highly effective at targeting in vitro liquid cancers like leukaemia, or solid cancers including brain, lung, prostate and breast cancers.
“But it was not possible to synthesise this compound,” explains Dr Picco. “In order to drive that compound to the clinics they would have to cultivate corals at a large scale and extract it from the animals, and these steps made the project impossible in the end. So, despite a very promising effect of the compound against cancer, they could not reach an industrial and clinical level.”
The paediatric cancer team at the CSM are not at that stage in their research. First, they want to answer the fundamental question of how and why brain cancers develop in children. “We hope to follow that with more pre-clinical, advanced studies based on the basic research and models that we are developing here in the lab, building on the extremely original way we are inducing cancers to model.”
The CSM teams shared their exciting research project at the 15th Monegasque Biennial of Oncology (Biennale Monegasque de Cancerlogie), co-organised by the Scientific Centre of Monaco (CSM) and the Princess Grace Hospital Centre in late January. It was an opportunity for 1,200 professors, doctors, researchers and students to share knowledge and create collaborations with the aim of fighting the leading cause of death for men, and the second cause of death for women.
In the seaside laboratories of the CSM, in the tiny Principality of Monaco, researchers have forged their own alliance, combining two very different fields – anemone gene sequencing and paediatric brain tumours – that will hopefully one day change the lives of these young patients, and help prove that the answers to the modern medical world can indeed be found within the sea.
RAMOGE, the committee charged with preserving the shared coast of Italy, Monaco and France, has met to take stock of their achievements from the past year and to announce new plans for 2022, including the sustainable management of super yachting
Despite the world focus being firmly set in the direction of the health crisis, many organisations whose duties are to continue with pre-pandemic agendas have carried on successfully. They have had to manage, overcoming difficulties wrought by the situation, with uncertainties all around.
One such association is RAMOGE, the committee in charge of the international cooperation agreement for the preservation of the coast and the marine environment between France, Monaco and Italy for the area between Marseille and La Spezia.
On 4th February, a hybrid meeting took place, chaired by Isabelle Rosabrunetto, Monaco’s Director General of the Department of External Relations and Cooperation. Delegates looked back at 2021’s activities and progress citing several concrete actions taken by the group.
Amongst their notable achievements were the monitoring of several Mediterranean species, with an awareness-raising two-day diving club trip. They also took stock of the entity’s exploration campaigns, which allowed them to make recommendations to the states, strengthening the protection of zones of ecological interest. This included the finalisation of a major study on the sustainable management of cruising and super yachting, which made it possible to summarize all the environmental impacts of these activities and to propose technical, regulatory and awareness-raising solutions to limit any nuisances brought about by these vessels as much as possible.
Additionally, they created a website and guide in the name of litter prevention for local authorities and the organisation of a pollution-control exercise off Cap Corse using drones, aircraft and nautical resources. Finally, they carried on with their OSCAR-MED monitoring operation, which fights against illegal discharges from ships into the Med.
Looking ahead, RAMOGE, through their agreement, will pursue large-scale actions that include the preparation of a new deep-sea exploration campaign from a vessel of the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA), the sharing of best practices for the sustainable management of cruising and super yachting, and the distribution of its marine litter prevention guide to local communities.
Furthermore, during the next Monaco Ocean Week, the Accord will launch the new edition of its international photography competition ‘RAMOGE – Man and the Sea’.
The RAMOGE Agreement was first signed in 1976 between Monaco, France and Italy to look after their shared coasts and resources. The original agreement went from Saint Raphael to Monaco and through to Genoa, hence the acronym RaMoGe, representing the first syllables of the three areas. This was subsequently expanded and now reaches from Marseille to La Spezia.
Photo by Salmen Bejaoui on Unsplash
New map designed to reduce waste of consumer products
Monaco has made it easier for people to give a second life to things like appliances and clothing with a new digital map listing all the relevant repair and secondhand stores in the Principality.
The map, created by the Mission for Energy Transition (MTE), lists the merchants and craftsmen who have expertise in the repair and/or reconditioning of electrical appliances, electronics, clothing, bicycles, furniture, etc.
It joins, among other things, information on collection points for clothes and toys, links to water fountains and alcoholic gel distributors, and a real-time map showing the availability of Monaco ON charging stations for electric vehicles.
The government says the latest list will be updated regularly, according to new stores and merchants that come onboard.
Waste reduction is at the heart of the Energy Transition’s mission. Waste represents almost 30% of greenhouse gases in the Principality and its reduction, in particular that of plastic waste, is a strategic axis for reducing Monaco’s carbon emissions.
Photo source: Unsplash
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