Patrick Grant says rise of low-cost retailers means new clothes ‘haven’t got cheaper, they’ve just got worse’
While filming The Great British Sewing Bee, the presenter and clothing entrepreneur Patrick Grant found himself in need of a pair of black socks.
The production team bought a pair from the Marks & Spencer shop close to where the popular BBC show was being filmed. Grant said: “They went to everybody’s favourite high street store, that used to sell on the basis of quality and value, and they bought me their Autograph socks, which are supposed to be their best socks.
The fashion designer and Biba founder, 87, on the best business advice she’s been given, why she wears black and the reason she never cries
As a child living in Jerusalem, we used to visit churches and convents. I always wanted to redesign the nuns’ outfits – they just weren’t dressed correctly. Jesus wasn’t a very good designer.
I have no temper. I like people too much. I really love them. I think it’s from living in a big family.
I had a mum who was so beautiful it was embarrassing. I used to stand outside the front door and give away all her clothes from Paris to anyone who needed them, which was not very popular.
There’s nothing I’m scared of. When you’re younger you’re scared of dying. As you get older, it seems rather fun. I can’t wait – there must be a big party going on on the other side.
Finding the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with is so instant, it’s so obvious, it’s absolutely amazing. It doesn’t often come. You’re very lucky if you get one such person in your lifetime and I had one. It was so wonderful.
“Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey!” Our first accountant at Biba gave me that advice and it’s the best advice I’ve ever been given. We should have put that on a T-shirt.
When I was very, very small I used to follow my father around like a little dog. He was the biggest person in my life and I get very angry that I didn’t have longer with him.
The thing to do with grief is to bottle it and it just keeps. You don’t want to be a bore to people. They’ve got their own problems.
The wellness project claims to help users make ‘smarter food choices’ based on ‘world-leading science’. But many scientists claim its fee-based services are no better than generic advice
“Your body is unique, so is the food you need.” This is the central credo of personalised nutrition (PN), as professed by its leading UK advocate, the health science company Zoe. Since its launch in April 2022, 130,000 people have subscribed to the service – at one point it had a waiting list of 250,000 – which uses a pin prick blood test, stool sample and a wearable continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to suggest “smarter food choices for your body”.
Like other companies working in this space, Zoe has all the hallmarks of serious science. Its US equivalent Levels counts among its advisers many respected scientists, including Robert Lustig, famous for raising the alarm about the harms of refined carbohydrates such as sugar. Zoe is fronted by King’s College London scientist Tim Spector and claims to be “created with world-leading science”.
The actor and his son on fun memories, toxic masculinity and Saltburn spoilers
Born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in 1974, Shaun Dooley’s acting career began on soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders. Now a leading actor on film and TV, Shaun has mastered the art of complex characters and had roles in Broadchurch, Doctor Who, It’s a Sin, Black Mirror and as Michael Rudkin in Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He is married with three daughters and a son, Jack, 19, who is a camera trainee and a student at Manchester University. Shaun performs in Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California at the Harold Pinter theatre until 15 June.
The photographer and her husband came across an abandoned boat while out walking and took the opportunity to float a surreal idea
Every September, Carla Vermeend and her husband go on holiday to Terschelling island, in the Netherlands.
“It has lots of nature, right in the middle of the Wadden Sea, which is listed by Unesco as a world heritage site,” says Vermeend, a Dutch photographer. During their visit in 2014, the couple were walking by the sea together.
The singer on eating junk food in bed, a $100k holiday he didn’t even go on, and the perks of fame
Born Montero Lamar Hill in Georgia, Lil Nas X, 25, rose to fame in 2019 with his single Old Town Road, which won many awards, including two Grammys. In 2021, he released his debut album Montero, which featured the hits Montero (Call Me By Your Name), Industry Baby and Thats What I Want. The following year, he completed his first worldwide tour. The documentary Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero – directed by Carlos López Estrada and Zac Manuel and released on digital platforms on 20 May – sees him navigating issues of identity, family and acceptance as he embarks on the tour. He lives in Los Angeles.
When were you happiest? Maybe on tour when I was in Argentina. Yeah, or Brazil: oh my God, those people out there.
Concerns raised as influencers promote pigment-injection procedure as latest cosmetic trend
From butter boards to viral dances, social media has spawned a host of fads, but experts have warned against the latest trend: eye-tattooing.
The procedure, known as keratopigmentation, is a recent development and can be used for therapeutic purposes to improve the appearance of eyes. This can include for people who have been left with scars on the transparent front part of the eye, known as the cornea, as a result of infection, disease or injury, or who have aniridia, a condition where the iris has not formed properly.
For her debut book, the Irish photographer Eimear Lynch travelled around Ireland to photograph groups of girls immersed in the, often lengthy, ritual of dressing up and applying their makeup together
From a burrowing clam to toilet cleaner, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 The OED’s first citation for “video game” mentions which Atari product? 2 Which river has Damietta and Rosetta branches? 3 Who were bribed in the 1950s payola scandal? 4 Which poet was nicknamed the White Myth of Amherst? 5 What athletics world record has stood at 7291 since 1988? 6 Which PM was described by Caitlin Moran as a “C-3PO made of ham”? 7 Which philosopher had a brother who was a celebrated one-handed pianist? 8 What brand name was used by M&S from 1928 until 2000? What links: 9 Bummalo; out first ball; Pacific burrowing clam; toilet cleaner? 10 John Deydras; Lambert Simnel; Perkin Warbeck; Mary Baynton? 11 Calderdale, West Yorkshire and Nova Scotia, Canada? 12 The Night Manager; Conversations with Friends; Notes on a Conditional Form? 13 Leda; Nut; Rebecca; Rhea Silvia? 14 Beaded; flush; keyed; recessed; tuck; V-grooved; weathered? 15 Relating to a city (8); devout (12); not guilty (13); merciful (14)?
Marina Hyde: ‘So Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames, and all his sins were washed away. Cheaper than a lawyer, I suppose’; plus Jenny Kleeman meets Raffaella Spone, the woman accused of creating and circulating a damaging ‘deepfake’ video of teenage cheerleaders. The problem? Nothing was fake after all.
Cannes film festival Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons
Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.
An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Jane Fonda in an animal print coat, Lily Gladstone in Gucci and Chris Hemsworth in an old Hollywood jacket – there was a lot to enjoy on the Croisette this week
I met my ex in our last year of high school. After a year of university we married when we were only 18. The first 10 years were rocky, with many family crises that put stress on our relationship, and at one point I left my husband. We reunited within a few months and changed our attitudes and goals. From then on I vowed to accept and find the good. We were married for 25 years, through his many infidelities and my anxieties. We didn’t have any childrenbecause he didn’t want to be a father. Finally, there was a mistress he wouldn’t set aside, and after three years I gave him an ultimatum, as gently as I could. He chose her, and divorced me. Some of the most painful words I have ever heard were:“You are a wonderful wife, beautiful and brilliant, but I don’t want you. And you deserve better than this.”
I remarried 13 years later and for 23 years have been wife to a fine man. But he is emotionally distant, while I am emotionally overflowing. I relive my first husband’s betrayal in my dreams nearly every night. In my nightmares, I am frightened when he appears and feel under his control. I wake up full of fear.
Beneath the famous hats was a prime mover in a British golden age, as a biopic is about to show
The legendary fashion editor Isabella Blow is remembered by her hats. A jewel-encrusted lobster which snaked back from her brow like a crustacean mohican. A miniature Chinese garden, complete with tiny eaved pagodas and lilliputian cherry trees with quivering blossoms. Her trademark was so distinctive that Princess Margaret once greeted her at a party with the words: “Good evening, Hat.” At her funeral in 2007, an 18th-century black galleon headpiece with delicate lace sails cascading from its lofty prow, created for her by her favourite milliner Philip Treacy, crowned her coffin on a bed of white roses.
But The Queen of Fashion, a newly announced biopic directed by Alex Marx with the Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough cast in the title role, is set to highlight Blow’s more serious role as a central figure in a golden age of British fashion, a kingmaker who launched the career of Alexander McQueen, and a powerhouse who helped put 1990s London at the centre of the creative world.
Little change at top between 2021 and 2022 but European names such as Nova beginning to gain favour
New entries to the list of top 100 baby names in England and Wales for 2022 suggest European names are gradually gaining favour, data from the Office for National Statistics shows.
While girls’ names remained largely unchanged from 2021, with Olivia top (most popular with mothers aged 25 and older), followed by Amelia (most popular with mothers aged under 25), Isla and Ava, more unusual names are creeping in.
Mindfulness is said to help everything from anxiety to overeating. But how does it work? Experts separate fact from fiction
FALSE “Mindfulness is the opposite of ‘emptying the mind’; it is fully immersing the mind in precisely what you are doing,” says neuroscientist TJ Power. “If you were eating a banana mindfully, 100% of your awareness would be focused on the taste and experience.”
Mixing growing speeds and heights is a great way of maximising your available garden space
Now that we are racing through May, I hope you’re surrounded by seedlings emerging and young plants putting down strong roots. It’s a good idea to sow about 20% more seeds than you have room to grow. I probably sow even more than that out of an abundance of caution and a sprinkling of self-doubt. Principally I do this because it’s rare that all my seeds germinate, but also so I have some extra seedlings to replace those I’ve planted out but haven’t made it through those dicey early weeks of life outside (especially as it’s so sluggy out there this season).
If all goes to plan and there’s plenty of germination, I use these bonus plants for interplanting. This is the practice of growing plants with different growth habits side by side to make the most of your space. It’s a creative and engaged way of growing crops, takes advantage of underused space, and foregoes regimented planting plans to harness the benefits of growing a diversity of plants.
It was like I was trapped in a movie – with a hideous plot twist
I met Eric on a dating app in early 2018when I was living in New York. He was handsome, talkative and interesting. I was falling for him – but there was something he needed to know. In 2015, I’d been in love with a guy called Mike. On my 30th birthday, my parents threw me a party at their house. Everyone was having a great time until I heard my brother scream Mike’s name. As I ran towards the noise, I saw Mike on the ground by my parents’ pool.He’d slipped into the water and wasn’t breathing. I frantically tried to do CPR on him, but he remained unconscious.
At the hospital, I was told that Mike wouldn’t ever wake up. No one knows how he got hurt. He broke some bones in his back, and had a brain injury, but we don’t know how that happened.
Anita Roddick’s visionary brand paved the way for ethical beauty. It would be wrong to lose it now
The first Body Shop opened in my home town of Brighton in 1976. It recently closed, along with hundreds of others. They may yet reopen, but thebodyshop.com is still trading, and I believe passionately that it should be shopped at and saved. Here are just a handful of the many reasons why.
If ethical and sustainable initiatives in retail are now mainstream, it’s because the Body Shop made them so. “You have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else,”wrote founder Anita Roddick in 1992. And that’s precisely what she did. The Body Shop’s radicalism didn’t just change the beauty industry, it changed every consumer industry. It was among the first companies of any type to receive B Corp certification (there are now more than 8,000) – an official acknowledgment that it treated people, profit and planet with equal importance.
Confucius and other ancient Chinese philosophers believed the feeling isn’t all bad – and can lead you toward your best self
What was the last thing that you felt shame about? Perhaps you couldn’t afford a new outfit for your friend’s wedding, and felt chagrined around those in more chic attire. Maybe you hid your homemade lunch while your co-workers ate takeout, or you didn’t call your mom on her birthday and felt bad to have missed it.
Shame can emerge in everyday situations like these, or can be a more pervasive emotion that darkens your view of who you are. The British clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy called shame the “feeling that destroys the self”. It’s unsurprising, then, that when a person is more shame-prone, they can be at higher risk for anxiety or depression. “One thing that shame often does is prompt people to want to hide, to escape, to essentially want to sink into the floor and disappear,” said shame researcher June Price Tangney, in an interview with the American Psychological Association.
In this week’s newsletter: Those ‘posh dad’ shoes associated with Cape Cod and the Kings Road are cropping up everywhere. We dive deeper into what’s behind their new wave
It is finally happening: those shoes that your posh friend’s dad wore to slope to the shops are being spotted on trains, buses and pavements everywhere. Their return has been rumoured in industry circles for some time – Vogue even dubbed 2024 the year of the boat shoe in February – but no one was quite sure if it would materialise in the real world, outside Nantucket. But lo and behold, there they are, on the feet of people who don’t know their port from their starboard, miles from any boats.
The resurgence of the design can be traced back to the catwalk. Miu Miu, the label designed by Miuccia Prada, featured multiple boat shoes in its spring/summer show. Its versions are for sale for £660 but the label is so influential that resale app Depop credit it for a rise in the popularity of boat shoes. Searches were up 39% last month, with Timberland and Sebago popular brands, available from £12 to £90.
You can’t cordon off every weird dynamic on the big day, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But you can be clear you won’t accept trespasses without consequence
I am getting married next year. For various reasons, including his treatment of me and my siblings, I do not want my father at my wedding. If he is there he will ruin the day by shouting at me for some perceived transgression. He holds grudges like no one else I’ve ever met and he doesn’t accept who I am. He refuses to acknowledge I am disabled and thinks I’m making it all up for attention. He has not met my fiance and I have no intention of introducing them.
The difficulty is that my mother and brother live with him. I’m very close to my brother and I desperately want both of them to attend. I worry my father will either invite himself or create such a row that neither feels able to come. They both know I’m getting married but my father does not. I have no idea what I can do to make sure my wedding isn’t ruined.
They’re both natural Labour supporters, but one is so unhappy with the leadership he isn’t planning to vote for the party. Will either of them see red?
When Philippa moved to Sheffield from London in 2018, one of the first things she did was join her local Labour party. “I was studying for a PhD in housing and planning and was already involved in a tenants’ union,” she says. “I was very active socially, but I lived alone, so it was a bit lonely for me.”
A year after moving up north, she began supporting the 2019 general election campaign. “We’d send groups from different areas to go leafleting and door knocking,” she says. “Olivia Blake, who we’d been supporting, won her seat, so she put on a little victory party just before Christmas.”
Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?
Fifteen questions await you on topical news, current affairs and various other things that popped into the quizmaster’s mind for some reason. There are no prizes, but you can tell us how you got on in the comments, where you can score bonus points by being funny and spotting references to the children’s teatime favourite Doctor Who, and lose points for unnecessary quibbling over questions or answers. Enjoy!
Spell unlikely words, cram them into sentences: there must be a better way for kids to get the measure of a language
The mice’s nest was under the floorboards. The geese’s pond was smelly. There, I’ve done it. I’ve put two words, possessives I have never used and will never use again, into sentences. These were two of 10 awkward possessives that my friend’s daughter had been tasked with putting into sentences. Men’s and ladies’ were on the list too. My friend asked how she might go about explaining the rules behind these apostrophe positions to her nine-year-old. I’m afraid I couldn’t be of much assistance. Rather her than me.
The exercise was almost triggering for me. I hated doing these things with my daughters when they were at primary school. This was about the only homework they were ever set – learn how to spell these words and put them into sentences. The purpose is obvious. I get that teaching English spelling is a nightmare and putting a word into a sentence shows that you know what it means, and hopefully helps you remember how to spell it. But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
From pests to pampered pets … how Victorian artist Louis Wain ushered in the age of the cat
‘Catland”, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other “Catland”, the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth.
For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.
Neoprene is made from toxic chemicals, hard to recycle and, with 400,000 tonnes made a year, a growing problem. So can surfers and swimmers find green wetsuits?
I have been hesitating for months. The wetsuit I swim in every week to keep me toasty warm in the winter and safe from jellyfish stings in the summer is riddled with holes. Yet I can’t bring myself to buy a new one because I’ve learned that comfortable, flexible and insulating neoprene is manufactured using some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.
Neoprene, a synthetic foamed rubber, is made from the petrochemical compound chloroprene. Exposure to chloroprene emissions, produced during the manufacturing process, may increase the risk of cancer, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Last week the founder of the dating app Bumble forecasted a near future dating landscape where AI ‘dating concierges’ filter out prospective partners for us. But does AI, or even science, really understand what makes two people compatible? Madeleine Finlay speaks to Amie Gordon, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, to find out what we know about why two people go the distance, and why she and her colleague associate professor of sociology Elizabeth Bruch, are designing their own dating app to learn more.
Speaking at Cannes, the actor said that before more women got greenlight jobs in Hollywood, executives had struggled to see themselves in female roles
The cruel and unwelcoming fashion magazine editor at the icy heart of 2006 comedy hit The Devil Wears Prada may not strike many viewers as Meryl Streep’s most relatable role.
But in a stage interview at the Cannes film festival the veteran film actor revealed that her turn as Miranda Priestly, the boss from hell, was the first role she played that caused men to come up to her afterwards and say they knew exactly how she felt.
I discovered a new side of myself last week. And I didn’t much enjoy it
I was given an award last week. It was a grand prix, if you don’t mind, at the Croatian national tourist board’s Golden Pen awards in Dubrovnik. The garland was hung around my neck for a thing I did about the island of Murter on Shaun Keaveny’s BBC Radio 4 series Your Place or Mine. I’ll spare you the humble stuff along the lines of: “Aw, shucks. Me? Really?” This award was richly deserved – less for my contribution to Shaun’s splendid show than for a lifetime spent using my privileged position in the British media to bang on about my mum’s home country.
At the ceremony I was asked to appear live on Croatian television. I’d not been so nervous about anything in years. As we waited to go live, the interviewer, alarmed that I was deadly quiet, sweating profusely and all wibbly-wobbly about the legs, asked me if I was all right. Was it that I was more used to radio than television? I explained that I was terrified of making a fool of myself speaking publicly in such poor Croatian. But then the light went on and I babbled and burbled my way through it, and everyone seemed happy.
Weddings are once-in-a-lifetime statements of wealth, taste and social capital. Maybe it’s human nature to want to dissect them
A non-exhaustive list of things I have arbitrarily strong feelings about when it comes to weddings: headbands, the number of bridesmaids (more than five is too many), espresso martinis (should be banned), Mr Brightside (argh!), “hats optional” (an edict both stuffy and stressful), any kind of day-after event.
I’m hardly alone in my convictions. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things other people tell me they find tasteless: naked dresses, lab-grown diamonds, wedding hashtags, too many speeches, not enough speeches, asking for a Peloton.
After escaping the deadly attack at the Manchester Arena with my son, I suffered with survivors’ guilt. So I decided to do something positive to help
The first time the Manchester Survivors Choir sang together – eight months on from the arena bombing in 2017 - it was very emotional. I remember thinkinghow beautiful we sounded. About 18 of us had come together at a church in the city to sing together – all of us had been impacted by the bombing. It felt very special, as though we were all connected. We were a varied group – there were people like me who had been there on the night and had tried (and failed) to get back on with normal life. Others had been injured or lost loved ones. Singing together felt a bit like mindfulness, something to focus on. It gave us all an opportunity to meet other people and feel as if we were doing something positive.
On 22 May 2017, I had taken my then 10-year-old son Jake to see Ariana Grande. It was his first concert, and it was fantastic. I didn’t hear the bomb go off – the suicide bomber detonated it in the main foyer area, and we were leaving by a different exit. I realised something was wrong when people started screaming and running. Even then, my mind didn’t go to a terrorist attack; people were saying maybe a speaker had exploded.
Sarah Thornton had dismissed them as ‘dumb boobs’ until a double mastectomy changed everything. Her new book, Tits Up, explores what our beliefs about breasts mean – from feeding babies to bra design and Baywatch
Throughout her life, Sarah Thornton hadn’t given much thought to her breasts. They were there, of course, and they’d fed two children. But they had also attracted unwanted attention, and latterly they’d become a source of concern – with a history of breast cancer in her family, and after years of vigilance and tests, in 2018 Thornton was about to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Preparing for the operation, she realised she still hadn’t given them much consideration, nor what it would be like to have “new” breasts in the form of implants. When they turned out to be bigger than expected, she was shocked, “but in the end,” she says, “it wasn’t the aesthetic form as much as the feeling. It was like losing sentience. And it put me on a quest to understand these things that I’d never thought too much about. These things I’d kind of dismissed as dumb boobs.”
Thornton’s new book, Tits Up: What Our Beliefs About Breasts Reveal About Life, Love, Sex and Society, is a deep dive into the bosom of our fixation with boobs.Writing the book, she says, has transformed how she views her own breasts. “I really did go from dismissing them as a kind of shallow accessory, to thinking of them as a really important body part – one we wouldn’t have a human species without,” she says. “Our top halves have beeninvaded by male supremacy and I did not realise how deeply patriarchal even my own view of breasts was. I was dismissing them as dumb boobs, partly because they’re positioned primarily in culture as erotic playthings and I didn’t want to just be an erotic plaything.”
We would like to hear from home owners who purchased their property with one or more friends in the UK
While house prices have steadied in the first part of 2024, home ownership remains out of reach for many as the average cost of renting continues to increase. This has prompted some to find different ways to get onto the housing ladder.
We would like to hear from home owners who bought their house with one or more friends. Why did you choose to pool your resources? What are the pros and cons of sharing your property with someone who is not a significant other? Tell us all about it below.
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, direct to your inbox every Thursday
Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday
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