Fashion

I used to hide away in all-black sport-core until I allowed myself to wear space-age silver dresses or a large-collared, lemony faux-fur coat

Maybe adolescence wasn’t the ideal time to receive my mother’s advice to wear an array of colours. What better way to express how you feel on any given day, and convey that mood to the world, she would say. It was important to the eye, to the soul.

It really isn’t the best advice to give any teenager, especially a sulky one who’s hoping to disappear in baggy, all-black sport-core. I’d cringe when she would try to push big, loud colours on me on shopping trips, talking in what I thought was mumbo jumbo about mood-lifting lilacs, energising reds and skin-warming oranges.

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The beautiful game has a fast fashion problem, with clubs bringing out multiple kits every season. But a move towards upcycling old shirts and wearing vintage garments is on the rise

It may have been a quiet January transfer window, but even so, thousands of new shirts will be printed for Lucas Paquetá, returning to his former Brazilian club Flamengo, while his West Ham shirt instantly feels old. Not to mention the thousands of other players moving from one club to another. Uefa estimates that up to 60% of kits worn by players are destroyed at the end of the season, and at any one time there are thought to be more than 1bn football shirts in circulation, many of which are discarded by fans once players leave.

The good news is that lots of designers are bringing their upcycling skills to old kits, taking shirts and shirring them, sewing them or, as in the case of designer and creative director Hattie Crowther, completely transforming them into one-of-a-kind headpieces. “I’m not here to add more products into the mix, I’m here to reframe what’s already in circulation and give it meaning, context, and longevity while staying culturally relevant,” says Crowther, whose creations involving the colours and emblems of Arsenal, Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain, are, she says, “a response to how disposable football product has become”.

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The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness

Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen.

Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit.

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Bardot titillated the world for five decades, but the controversy and voyeurism surrounding her shouldn’t overshadow an intriguing film career

• Brigitte Bardot dies aged 91

• A life in pictures

Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is: bébé, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle (the feeling was reciprocated). As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.

In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.

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This year, the once-vanishing symbol of Las Vegas glamour was reborn in the wardrobes of Gen Z superstars

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After a 31-year stint on the Las Vegas strip, the showgirls from the revue Jubilee! took a final synchronised kick in 2016. The show, known for its elaborate costumes created by the American fashion designer Bob Mackie, came to an end due to falling audience numbers and unimpressed critics who described it as a spectacle “trapped in time”.

Now, almost a decade later, showgirls, or at least the showgirl aesthetic, is back.

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For years it’s been predicted that the market for male ‘support garments’ will take off … but it hasn’t quite happened. Now M&S is trying again

There is a moment – just seconds into getting dressed – when I think I might panic. The hem of my stretchy top has got rolled up round my ribs before my head has popped out of the neck hole, and with my hands still stuck in the sleeves, I cannot reach round to pull it down. I wriggle helplessly for a minute, but the situation doesn’t improve; the band of rolled-up fabric is taut across my chest, immovable. That’s when I feel the first tingle of rising alarm – so familiar from early childhood – that comes of being trapped in your clothes.

I am trying, for the first time, to put on an item of shapewear for men – an ordinary-looking, highly elasticated long-sleeved workout top that will, I hope, give me the instant slim profile of someone who goes to the gym regularly, instead of not since the pandemic started.

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The outrage a J Crew jumper has provoked shows that the US right’s sense of masculinity is far more fragile than it would care to admit

A men’s jumper by the all-American preppy label J Crew has sent thousands of Maga Americans into meltdown. From a fashion point of view, it couldn’t be more innocuous. It’s got a crew neck. It’s made from wool. It has a Fair Isle pattern at the upper yoke. There’s nothing asymmetric about it, no fringing or tassels, no slogan blasted across the front; no “Make America Kind Again”. So what’s the big deal? Reader, the jumper is pink.

The main storm broke underneath a tweet by conservative social media commentator Juanita Broaddrick, in which she asked: “Are you kidding me?? Men, would you wear this $168 sweater?” The consensus among her followers was a resounding no, and not because of its price. “No man in my family would wear it!” wrote “MOMof DataRepublican”. “My husband wouldn’t use a pink bathroom towel,” assured another. Another X user was even more passionate: “HELL NO. I’m a man, not gay and won’t be dressing up as a Golden Girl anytime soon.” Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican congressman, called the sweater “something a sorority girl would wear in the 80s”. I think he meant it witheringly; I read that and think it sounds quite fun.

Ellie Violet Bramley is a freelance writer

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A look at the editor-in-chief’s Vogue covers from her first radical combination in 1988 to her final ‘weird’ shoot

During her 37-year tenure as editor-in-chief of American Vogue, Anna Wintour has presided over more than 400 covers. December 2025’s, on newsstands this week, will prove her last before she steps away to focus on roles as Vogue’s global editorial director and chief content officer at Condé Nast.

The cover is certainly memorable: an image of the actor Timothée Chalamet photographed by Wintour’s long-term collaborator Annie Leibovitz in a Celine white polo neck, long cream coat and embroidered jeans, standing on a “planet” with a backdrop of a star-filled nebula provided by Nasa.

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