Dior’s haute couture runway show in Paris saw the French fashion house tap into the most exclusive trend of the moment: quiet luxury. Brought to the fore by HBO television show Succession – which put the spotlight on the ultra-wealthy – quiet luxury is all about sleek, understated clothes that ooze elegance and wealth. Dior’s latest show took place at the Musée Rodin in Paris, a grand 18th-century mansion that displays Auguste Rodin’s work, most notably the famous sculpture The Thinker. In keeping with creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s continued dedication to feminism, the collection was themed around female narratives and representation in ancient mythology. The show opened with a model wearing a classic white gown with caped sleeves trailing to the ground. This set the aesthetic tone – models wore lots of long, flowing gowns in muted colours – mainly whites, earthy tones, navy or grey hues. There was lots of layering, sheer panels and flowing skirts – but everything was so precisely tailored that silhouettes were kept crisp and sharp. After all, this was a couture collection – seen as the pinnacle of craftsmanship, garments are one-of-a-kind and require a lot more skill, time and money to produce. While clothes were mainly left plain – as is the trend within quiet luxury – there was the odd subtle accent. Think intricate knotwork, heavy beading and floral appliques, adding to the overall feeling of wealth and glamour. The styling was kept simple – models wore their hair in low ponytails with a centre parting – and Dior made the case for a new trend: wearing one statement drop earring, instead of a pair. The show closed with a model wearing a heavily embellished caped gown – like a more formal, red carpet-ready version of the opening look. Celebrity guests on the front row also wore silhouettes and simple designs that felt like quiet luxury. Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki – who plays Diana, Princess of Wales in The Crown – kept things chic and French-inspired with her outfit, wearing a black beret with netting over the top, a simple white tank top and a black leather skirt. House ambassador Natalie Portman wore a white strapless gown with watercolour-style pastel accents. A familiar face on the Dior front row, actor Rosamund Pike had her hair slicked back, and donned a black dress with an off-the-shoulder neckline. At the end of the show, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri took a brief bow, her own outfit another prime example of understated luxury: a simple yet impeccably tailored navy suit. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live The history of royal fashion at Wimbledon Cardi B and Tracee Ellis Ross sit front row at Schiaparelli show in Paris Affected by someone else’s drinking? 3 key pieces of advice for loved ones of alcoholics

The NetherRealm Studios-developed Mortal Kombat 1 is the latest entry in the decades-spanning fantasy fighting

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 29, 2023--

The U.S. Postal Service is rolling out its latest special edition postage stamps, paying homage to a Hispanic tradition that has evolved over centuries to become a universal symbol of celebration

Netflix's Bird Box is back for some reason, and it's in Spanish this time. The

Pickleball is currently America’s fastest-growing sport, bringing in everyone from tennis aficionados to first-time racket game enthusiasts and becoming a go-to weekend activity for many. No matter your age or athletic ability, the tennis-meets-badminton-meets-ping pong game is pretty easy to get the hang of and is super enjoyable. So even if you haven’t personally jumped on the pickleball bandwagon yet, you likely know someone who has (and maybe that’s reason enough to get into the trendy sport yourself).

This is one of those brilliant I-can’t-believe-it-was-so-quick dishes that comes together in under an hour,” says chef and Great British Menu host Andi Oliver. “The fragrant broth is packed with succulent prawns.” Aromatic shrimp curry Serves: 4 Ingredients: 450g king prawns, peeled and deveined For the green seasoning marinade: 2 jalapeños, or other chillies of your choice, finely chopped 2 tbsp chopped chives 1 tbsp green seasoning (see below) Pinch each of salt and freshly ground black pepper For the curry sauce: 1 tbsp rapeseed oil 2 onions, very thinly sliced 2 garlic cloves, grated 1 red chilli, chopped 2 tsp ground cumin 2 tsp ground coriander 2 tsp ground turmeric 2 tbsp Caribbean curry powder 1 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tbsp tamarind chutney (see below) 1 tomato, finely chopped 1 x 400ml can of coconut milk Chopped coriander and/or fresh chilli, to serve For the green seasoning: 2 sprigs of thyme 10g fresh bay leaves 1 small bunch of flat-leaf parsley 1 small bunch of coriander 4 spring onions 10 garlic cloves, peeled 1 green chilli or 1 Scotch bonnet, depending on how much heat you like 6 little Caribbean seasoning peppers (about 20g), or a mix of red, yellow, and/or green mini sweet peppers ½ white onion 400ml cold pressed rapeseed oil or any neutral oil Salt and freshly ground black pepper For the tamarind chutney: 4 tbsp tamarind paste 2 tbsp sugar (demerara or dark soft brown sugar work best) 2 tsp coriander seeds 2 tsp ground allspice 2 tbsp green seasoning Airtight jar or container Method: 1. To make the green seasoning, add all the ingredients to a food processor and season to taste with salt and pepper. Whizz to the consistency of a salsa verde and keep in an airtight jar in the fridge for up to two to three weeks. 2. To make the tamarind chutney, put all the ingredients into a small saucepan with 80 millilitres of water. Set over a medium–low heat and warm through, stirring now and again, until everything is melted and combined. Leave to cool, then transfer to a sealed jar or container and store in the fridge to use as needed. The chutney should keep well for three to four weeks. 2. Put the prawns in a medium bowl and add all the marinade ingredients. Mix well and rub the marinade into the prawns with your hands so that all the prawns are well coated. Refrigerate and leave to marinate for about 20 minutes. 3. Meanwhile, to make the curry sauce, get a medium, high sided frying pan over a low–medium heat and pour in the oil. When the oil is hot, add the onions and cook down for 10–15 minutes until soft and fragrant. Add the garlic and chilli and cook for a further three minutes. 4. Add the cumin, coriander, turmeric, curry powder, and cinnamon to the pan and cook, stirring, for one minute. Add the tamarind chutney, chopped tomato, coconut milk and 350 millilitres of water. Bring to a steady simmer for five minutes. 5. Heat a griddle pan or a heavy-based frying pan until red hot, then chuck on the marinated prawns, cooking on each side for around two minutes until nicely charred all over. Transfer the prawns to the curry sauce and simmer for around four minutes to bring it all together. Finish the curry with a sprinkling of some freshly chopped coriander and/or chillies. Serve with roti or plain or coconut rice. Recipe from ‘The Pepperpot Diaries: Stories From My Caribbean Table’ by Andi Oliver (published by DK, £27; photography by Robert Billington). Read More What is coronation chicken? The story of the royal recipe and how to make it Easy coronation chicken pie recipe chosen by Mary Berry Andi Oliver on turning 60 and channeling her anger into power Andi Oliver: Earl Grey tea bags are a gamechanger for barbecue chicken Caribbean-inspired coconut and lime cheesecake Three one-pot recipes for washing up hater

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t usually read ingredient lists on my skincare. I’ll check the callouts on the front label to get the big picture so I know when and how to use it, but I don’t dig much deeper unless something bothers my skin — or makes it look amazing, which is what happened after I started using Béla Nektar Cerate of Immortelle Ancestral Recuperative Balm.

Lewis Hamilton insists Red Bull’s pace advantage has reduced after the Mercedes star claimed a surprise pole position at the Hungarian Grand Prix. The 38-year-old, whose previous F1 pole was back in December 2021 in Saudi Arabia, beat Max Verstappen to top spot in Budapest by 0.003 seconds in a thrilling end to qualifying. It was Hamilton’s 104th pole position – 18 months after his 103rd – and his ninth at the Hungaroring, breaking the record for the most pole positions at one circuit. While sceptical of his chances tomorrow, the seven-time world champion believes Red Bull’s significant pace has dropped off in the last few race weekends. “Honestly I think they’ve [Red Bull] slowed down from the beginning of the year,” he said. “Where’s the DRS advantage gone? But in the race they’re still the quickest, it’ll be very hard to beat them tomorrow. “But it’s definitely interesting to see some of the deficits and see how it’s changed race-to-race.” Hamilton was elated after the pole position though, and he will line-up alongside Verstappen on the front row for the first time since the infamous end to the 2021 season in Abu Dhabi. “It feels like my first pole, believe it or not,’ Hamilton said. “Feels strange to say that with 104. I don’t remember the last time it feels so long ago! “We weren’t expecting that going into the weekend, car felt terrible yesterday. “I just sent it! Nothing to lose. Threw it into the high-speed corners, it was a great, great lap!” Lando Norris qualified third for McLaren, with his team-mate Oscar Piastri in fourth. Read More F1 grid: Starting positions for Hungarian Grand Prix Lewis Hamilton claims long-awaited pole with brilliant lap at Hungarian Grand Prix F1 Hungarian Grand Prix LIVE: Qualifying updates and results Sergio Perez crash in Hungary practice a sign of the times F1 grid: Starting positions for Hungarian Grand Prix

Wings! Fake tans! Low body mass indexes! For millennial women, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was an annual reminder of the myriad ways in which we were failing to adhere to exacting and exhausting beauty standards. When it was cancelled in 2019, few mourned it. But fashion loves a comeback story, and today the company unveiled Victoria’s Secret: The Tour ’23 on Amazon Prime Video, its first televised catwalk event in five years. According to the company, the feature-length film is the “ultimate expression” of their ongoing efforts to rehabilitate a brand that has been mired in scandal. Alongside long-standing criticisms over promoting an unrealistic body image, the company’s former marketing executive Ed Razek was also accused of behaving inappropriately with models in a New York Times report (he described the allegations as “categorically untrue, misconstrued or taken out of context”) and a recent Hulu documentary Angels and Demons explored troubling links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Visually, strategically, everything about it is the incarnation of where the brand is going,” Victoria’s Secret president Greg Unis has said. Instead of the usual structure, which was centred around a straightforward runway show, The Tour ’23 is roughly divided into quarters, each focusing on one of four locations: Lagos, Nigeria; Bogota, Colombia; Tokyo, Japan; London, the UK. In each city, a local designer has dreamed up their own fashion collection to be modelled by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Emily Ratajkowski, Adut Akech, and Gigi Hadid, who does double duty as the show’s narrator. In London, the chosen designer is Michaela Stark, whose corsets aim to celebrate a diverse range of body shapes, rather than constrict them. She agreed to take part in the VS show 2.0, she suggests, so that she could counteract the damaging messages put out by the original runways. “It was a big thing” when she was a teenager, she recalls, “but it was also that culture around it, of not wanting to eat after you saw it”. Her comments inadvertently raise a question that looms over the whole production: can you ever truly detoxify a brand practically built on the insecurities of a generation of women? Founded by Roy Raymond in the late Seventies, who felt awkward buying lingerie for his wife in his local department store, Victoria’s Secret began life as a women’s underwear shop aimed specifically at men. In 1982, Raymond sold the business to Limited Stores founder Les Wexner for $1m; Wexner went on to transform the brand, envisaging it as a more affordable version of the fancy European label La Perla. In 1995, when the company was facing competition from Wonderbra, the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It proved successful enough to become an annual event. In 1999, the show was streamed on the internet for the first time, prompting the website to crash as 1.5 million users tried to tune in. Two years later, the VS show celebrated its inaugural TV broadcast, during which the National Organisation for Women (NOW) protested outside a New York branch of the shop. “Some people are terribly blase about this, that this is not a big deal, that we ought to be used to this kind of daily sexuality,” Sonia Ossorio, NOW’s vice president for public information, said at the time. “But I think we need to keep questioning the ever-extending sexualisation of women in mass media.” The following year, NOW branded the event a “softcore porn infomercial”. By then, the blueprint for future VS shows had been set. A lineup of models would don bras encrusted with millions of pounds worth of jewels and embarrassingly themed lingerie (never forget Cara Delevingne’s god-awful outfit circa 2013: a sort of miniature shell suit likely pitched in the boardroom as “sexy football fan”). Somewhere between the models, a famous singer would pop in for a brief performance; if they were a woman, they’d be decked out in a VS creation of their own (Taylor Swift got a particularly raw deal in 2013, too, when she had to wear a Union Jack-inspired number, complete with a tiny red, white and blue top hat). This glittering, over-the-top spectacle, much closer to a beauty pageant than a Fashion Week presentation, spotlighted the world’s most beautiful women – who were not just genetically blessed but worked hard, too, we were told ad nauseam. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules. These wing-wearing “Angels” were selling a dream, one that we lesser mortals could supposedly buy into by picking up some synthetic underwear at our nearest Victoria’s Secret branch. But it was their painstaking fitness regimens, not the pants they were wearing, that were the real focus of fascination. In endless interviews, the models were asked to detail exactly how they whittled themselves down to “Victoria’s Secret ready” size – so that we could try and copy them. To combat the criticisms of objectification, the brand relied on its models to pay lip service to just how “empowering” the whole circus was, offering up their take on choice feminism. “There’s something really powerful about a woman who owns her sexuality and is in charge” – model Karlie Kloss was peddling this line to the media as late as 2018. “A show like this celebrates that and allows all of us to be the best versions of ourselves. Whether it’s wearing heels, make-up or a beautiful piece of lingerie – if you are in control and empowered by yourself, it’s sexy.” Naturally, it was very convenient that this “best version of ourselves” aligned with the oppressively narrow conventional standard of sexiness Victoria’s Secret was selling. By the late 2010s, though, as the fashion industry began to (slowly) address its diversity problem, Victoria’s Secret started to seem more and more like an anachronism. As other brands took small steps to spotlight plus-size models on their catwalks and in their advertising campaigns, the VS show remained the preserve of the extremely thin. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules Placing white models in culturally insensitive outfits (see: Kloss walking down the runway wearing a Native American-inspired headdress) only added to the glaring PR problem, which was later exacerbated when the brand’s marketing boss Ed Razek made controversial comments about transgender people and plus-size models to Vogue in 2018. “It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in your show?” he said, apparently recalling questions from critics. “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy.” Elsewhere, he claimed “no one had any interest” in seeing bigger bodies on the VS catwalk. Razek later apologised, admitting that his “remark regarding the inclusion of transgender models in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show came across as insensitive”. His comments about plus-size bodies went unaddressed. In 2019, against a backdrop of plummeting TV ratings and declining sales, the brand confirmed that the VS show had been cancelled; instead, they said, the company would focus on “evolving” their marketing. The news came just a few months after the revelation that Jeffrey Epstein had provided financial advice to Victoria’s Secret founder Wexner – and had exploited his personal connection to the brand as a means to lure in young women. “Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved, is something that I’m embarrassed I was even close to,” Wexner said to investors. “But that is in the past.” He left the company the following year. Since then, Victoria’s Secret has made some high-profile attempts to rectify past missteps. The company brought in a majority female board of directors; they ditched the “Angels” concept in favour of the new “VS Collective” whose ranks include actor Priyanka Chopra, US football star Megan Rapinoe, and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser. Last year, an ad campaign featuring a more diverse array of women was accompanied by the slogan “we’ve changed” – supposedly into something “ever-evolving” and “real”. How much has Victoria’s Secret “changed”, really? The latest show features a handful of plus-size models, Elsesser included, but many of the old VS cohort are present and correct, including Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, and Adriana Lima. The nods to body diversity can’t help but feel a bit cursory when the overriding vision is still one of impossibly thin women parading up and down a runway – albeit a runway that now snakes around a Brutalist building in Barcelona as opposed to a swanky New York City hotel. The outfits too, are more arty, less skimpy this time around and mercifully there hasn’t been the usual media battery of stories on extreme exercise and diet in the run-up – but that doesn’t mean those practices have ended altogether. “We haven’t forgotten our past, but we’re also speaking to the present,” the brand’s chief creative director Raul Martinez said before the film’s launch. In an era when more inclusive, dynamic lingerie labels, like Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty, reign supreme, the VS show can’t help but seem like a relic. And as long as its legacy of impossible body standards lives on for many of us, any attempts to dress the spectacle up as empowering feel very hollow indeed. Read More Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Victoria's Secret overhauls its racy fashion catwalk in its latest moves to be more inclusive Chioma Nnadi at Vogue: All hail the era of the Black female fashion editor Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Kim Kardashian debuts buzz cut and thin eyebrows for new photo shoot Travis Kelce wears ‘1989’ inspired outfit after leaving NFL game with Taylor Swift

As of October 9, here are all the best deals on outdoors essentials at Amazon

In Miami, Spanish rules. One hears it everywhere, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants speaking it even as they...