Jean Luc Godard's muse Anna Karina on why she refused to star in 'Breatless'

We are at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London, in a greenroom replete with mid-century Lucite orb lamps and potted palms. It is strange to be surrounded by renderings of a period in cinema immortalised by the woman sat in front me  – actress, singer and poster girl of the French New Wave, Anna Karina, now 75 years old. Continue Reading...

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Rihanna and Kanye West kick off autumn/winter 2016 shows, but who cares about the clothes?

New York kicks off the global womenswear calendar for autumn/winter 2016, and its fashion week started on 10 February, but with what? A glut of shows proposing disparate messages, an overwhelming mêlée that, hopefully, will settle down once we lurch back across the Atlantic and begin to unpick everything. But perhaps it won’t. Continue Reading...

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Super Bowl food: A guide to making scientifically perfect nachos for the big game

Even if you have zero interest in sportsball, Super Bowl Day is a great day. Everyone loves snacks, and the best snacks are the ones that are the worst for you, and there's no day so dedicated to the consumption of abundant unhealthy appetizers as this coming Sunday. Who needs a full meal of gluttony? Bah! Spend all day grazing and eat like five times as much. Continue Reading...

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Gucci to hold fashion show at Westminster Abbey

For more than a millennium some of the greatest figures in British history have walked its aisles and transepts, many to be married, or later to shuffle into the next place via its raised tombs: Newton, Darwin, Chaucer, Wilberforce. Continue Reading...

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How to make a pancake, according to the experts

Everyone loves pancakes and wants to know the secret of cooking them. And that partly depends on whether you’re after the thin, crêpe-like European style or the thicker ones more popular in North America as each requires a different approach. Continue Reading...

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They’re back! Top designers rescue flares from dustbin of fashion history

 

In the latest round of menswear shows for autumn/winter 2015, which took place in Milan and Paris last week, a new trouser shape was in evidence – or at least one we haven’t seen for a long while. Flares – the 1970s classic which had apparently been consigned to the dustbin of fashion history – are back. Continue Reading...

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Burberry's ditching of seasonal catwalks signals fashion shakeup

 Burberry has announced it is to abandon the traditional seasonal approach to its catwalk collections in a move thatcould herald a major shakeup for the entire fashion industry.
From September, all of the clothes featured in Burberry’s runway shows will be available to buy immediately, instore and online, a significant departure from the conventional model in which clothes appear on catwalks four months before they go on sale.Continue Reading...

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A ragu alla bolognese recipe to provoke passionate conversation

I once sat and listened to the most heated debate about ragù alla bolognese. My Italian was still basic, and a lot of wine had been drunk, so I wasn’t able to keep up with the detail being bounced back and forth across the table between the two main debaters, both from different sides of Bologna, which apparently makes a difference. It was possibly chicken livers, or when to add the cheese. At a certain point, the thing I had been quietly dreading happened and the conversation turned to spaghetti bolognese, and faces turned to me, one of two English people.Continue Reading...

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They’re back! Top designers rescue flares from dustbin of fashion history

Break-ups are tough. In terms of personal style and grooming, there are two distinct phases. The first is a slow unravelling. Visually, you go full-on Mad Max 2 via Tom Hanks in Castaway: break-up beard and greasy hair, all topped off with comfy, mud-coloured clothes that you don’t have to change very often. Your style icon? Swampy. Continue Reading...

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Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue: four fashion questions

1. Is honesty the new Photoshop?

Two months ago, Leibovitz gave the Pirelli calendar a reality check, swapping its usual taut, dewy-skinned aesthetic for an earthier vision of womanhood with wrinkles and soft rolls of fat on show. Now, the photographer brings realness to the Hollywood issue. The cover argues that age is no barrier to sequin-clad glamour, while the portfolio inside is “raw, intimate, and honest”, according to Vanity Fair, and “dismissive of the shackles of airbrushing and Picasso’d Photoshop manipulations”. In practice, this means artfully messed-up hair, visible crow’s feet and irregularities in skintone against a backdrop of frayed-edged, sludge-coloured fabric that looks like an American-civil-war-era carte de visite. Importantly, though, everyone still looks hot. Continue Reading...

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Michella Obama's State of the Union dress – stylewatch

The meaning of Michelle Obama’s upper arms is a topic to which we will clearly need to return at length before this presidency is out, but for now let’s talk about the dress. The colour was the prime talking point of the State of the Union address, before designer Narciso Rodriguez confirmed that it is officially “marigold”. (The exact same colour was mustard when J Lo wore it to the Golden Globes two days earlier, but go figure) The sunniness of the tone was a deliberately upbeat note, chosen as the Obamas begin the final, legacy-minded stretch of their White House tenure. Compare and contrast with last year’s serious, dark-toned skirt suit, which chimed with her husband’s 2015 speech focussing on income inequality. Continue Reading.....

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Food Made Good Awards 2016: Star Bistro's disabled training scheme and a great menu make it People's Favourite

The National Star College, Ullenwood, Gloucestershire. The National Star College Abby Guilding is hardly the type to knock restaurant awards– not after Star Bistro, the Cheltenham-based outfit run by her charity Wiggly Worm, scooped one of the top accolades at last year’s homage to the UK’s most sustainable restaurants.
And yet, she admits the shine of a win can get tarnished by the multitude of different celebrations out there. Not so the Food Made Good Awards, which is the new name for the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s annual roll call of dining establishments across the UK that serve the country’s most environmentally and socially ethical meals. Or, as Abby puts it, recognition for “going beyond just good food”.Continue Reading

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SAG Awards 2016 red carpet: Best and worst dressed

SAG Awards 2016 red carpet: Best and worst dressed ABC Life Style, Feb-03, 2016

The SAG Awards took place on Saturday, the final major film awards ceremony before the Oscars later this month, as such it's seen as something of a dress rehearsal for the main event.
By now this season's biggest stars and nominees will have pinned down their glam teams from stylists, facialists, makeup artists, hair stylists. But not everyone has got their look quite right it seems.Continue Reading

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How to create a butterfly garden

 How to create a butterfly garden

ABC Life Style, Feb-02, 2016

 
Pollinator friendly: a painted lady on a dahlia Credit: Jonathan Buckley

• Sarah Raven

Walking through the hay meadows in Transylvania this summer felt like a visit to a perfect place, not just for the wildflowers – the salvias, aquilegias and orchids – but for the butterflies you kick up with every step. It’s not, I have to admit, quite as miraculous as the story a friend of mine told me about driving along the road in Bhutan. There, the butterflies were so thick he had to use the windscreen wipers to see where he was going, but in the Transylvanian mountain meadows there is a frothy, dancing upper-storey to the long grass, extending it into a third dimension, flecks of colour moving continually a few feet in the air.
The grass is also alive with caterpillars. I sat in one place and counted how many I could reach in the circle around me. There were 13; brown and black-spotted hairy ones, some shiny green and some grey with yellow flecks.
It was a whole new world I’d hardly thought of before that day, but it gave me a new resolution, not just to learn all our native butterflies, but what their caterpillars look like and feed on. The safest time to sow wildflowers and plant shrubs is in the next couple of months. The shrubs will have time to get their roots well established without the need for watering and many wildflowers need cold to encourage germination. Sow now and you’ll have the best results.Continue Reading

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Is 70s food making a comeback?

Is 70s food making a comeback?

ABC Life Style,Feb-02, 2016

 
The vol au vent, as seen on The Great British Bake Off, is a typical 70s party food.  Credit: Alamy

• Debora Robertson

It’s been a good news/bad news week for devotees of 70s cuisine. On the one hand, The Great Sport Relief Bake Off reminded us of how amazing vol au vents are, as SamCam stole the show with her flawlesss crab curry versions. On the other, Young’s Seafood announced that they’re ceasing production of Findus crispy pancakes.
It’s easy to think of the 70s as the land that gastronomy forgot. Sure, to our modern eyes, there’s much contrived styling, piping of mash, suspending in aspic and garnishing with day-glo maraschino cherries.

 
Samantha Cameron impressed with her curried crab vol-au-vents Continue Reading

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Top 10 winter lipstick shades

Top 10 winter lipstick shades

ABC Life Style, Feb-02, 2016

• Sonia Haria, Beauty Editor

1 February 2016 • 6:06pm

It's still pretty cold outside and we're not ready to whip out the coral lipstick yet. Hand us a rich, dark lipstick and let us be all moody and wintery about it, okay? Here's our round-up of our ten favourite winter lipstick shades. Pair with a slick of mascara and let your lips do the talking.

Tom Ford

Lipstick in Moroccan Rouge by Tom Ford, £38 Continue Reading

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Meet Foxes – the reluctant pop star trying to change the music game

Meet Foxes – the reluctant pop star trying to change the music game 

ABC Life Style, Feb-02, 2016

Foxes AKA Louisa Rose Allen

• Radhika Sanghani

To her friends, Louisa Rose Allen is the 26-year-old girl with 'funny tattoos' who likes to sing. But to her thousands of fans, she's Foxes – the Grammy-winning pop star whose second album they're desperately waiting to download. 

But ‘pop star’ is not necessarily the label Foxes would give herself.
“With the whole pop star thing that’s something that’s been an avenue that I don’t think I really belong in,” she tells me, sitting in a hoodie and trainers at a Shoreditch hotel. “I’m not trying to say I don’t like pop music because I do, but trying to be seen as an artist not a pop star can be seen as quite difficult when you write pop music.”
She’s well aware that her music does fall into the pop category and that with her colourful videos and doll-like face, people do see her that way: “In the first album I had a lot of label meetings where I’d be involved in writing music videos, but they maybe looked quite clean and pop and bright” – but she’s keen to “break out of that.” Continue Reading

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Why you need a proper morning fitness routine

Why you need a proper morning fitness routine

ABC Life Style, Feb-02,2016

 
'The truly great morning regime starts the night before...' Credit: Getty Images

Scott Laidler  

Working in the fitness industry has taught me that an individual’s habits over time will more often than not be the determining factor in their success. Not only that, habits leave clues.
Perhaps this is most profound in my world, where merely glancing at a person gives you a feel for what their exercise and eating regimes look like, but our habits and routines say a lot about us all.
After reading Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals I realised that many of the world’s most successful people had very deliberate morning routines that set them up perfectly for the challenges of the day ahead. Show me your morning routine and I’ll show you your future! Continue Reading

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