Pop Culture Pulse: From Marilyn Monroe’s Barbie Legacy to the How to Lose a Guy Sequel

A century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe receives the Barbie treatment — and the timing lands precisely where Hollywood's nostalgia economy is currently transacting. Grazia India's latest weekly round-up surveys the pop culture and fashion intersections worth tracking, and the through-line between the Monroe centennial, a certain early-aughts rom-com sequel, and a brace of celebrity-branded side hustles reads less like coincidence than coordinated choreography across hemispheres.

Andie and Ben, At Twenty

Among the round-up's most consequential items: Paramount is developing a sequel to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, more than two decades after Kate Hudson's Andie Anderson and Matthew McConaughey's Benjamin Barry became one of rom-com history's most memorable couples. Hudson is attached to produce; plot and casting details remain unconfirmed. The sequel arrives as studios continue excavating millennial-coded intellectual property, and the central question is whether the project will interrogate the original's particular pre-streaming rom-com architecture or simply replicate it for a generation that consumes the genre differently now. The Andie haircut alone has done more cultural work than most contemporary protagonists — a silhouette that defined a moment and may, if the sequel is handled without irony, define its reprise.

Federline's Heir, Behind the M·A·C Counter

Britney Spears's 19-year-old son Jayden James Federline has secured his first beauty campaign, fronting M·A·C Cosmetics's Fix+ setting spray as the cover star of M·A·Czine, the brand's digital publication. The contract follows his Paris Men's Fashion Week debut walking for Vetements alongside his brother Sean Preston. A musician himself, Jayden is, per the round-up, beginning to assemble a creative résumé that does not lean on his mother's orbit. That independence reads less as fashion-week novelty than as the quiet construction of a career that, if managed carefully, may outlast the headlines that produced it. The booking also marks a more interesting commercial proposition than the usual nepo-narrative: a teenager with actual runway credits and an audio project, marketed on the strength of Fix+ rather than surname. For an industry perpetually in search of the next Gen-Z face, the Federline provenance offers precisely the kind of pre-loaded narrative that converts to editorial coverage — and M·A·C, veteran of countless such campaigns, knows precisely what it is buying.

SKYLRK's Analog Apostasy

Elsewhere, Justin Bieber's SKYLRK is expanding beyond apparel into audio. The brand has teased headphones and accessories that carry its Y2K visual language, with an MP3 player reportedly part of the lineup — a deliberately retro offering for an era allergic to physical media. Pricing and release dates remain undisclosed, but the brand's positioning as a lifestyle label rather than a celebrity vanity project appears, for now, to be holding its line. The bet is clear: nostalgia, properly priced, sells irrespective of utility, and the silhouette of the early-2000s MP3 player has done more aesthetic work in the last decade than most contemporary consumer electronics.

The same nostalgic appetite that resurrected the Andie-and-Ben discourse and the Monroe centennial is reshaping which celebrity brands get to graduate from side-project to durable category. The broader cultural-news cycle is tracking the commercial infrastructure underneath these soft-power plays, and the merchandising — limited-edition Fix+ bottles, anniversary dolls, the inevitable capsule reissue — will follow the calendar.