The Conversation

By Katharine Short and Carolyn Hardaker As a student in the 1960s, Zandra Rhodes would often visit the costume court of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to study ...

By Vassiliki Sinopoulou Picture a cosy Danish living room. Candles flicker, soft music plays and friends and family gather around a table laden with pastries – flaky, buttery and gloriously calorific. ...

By Emanuela Prandelli In a luxury market often blamed for flattening creativity, Maison Schiaparelli has long stood out for its defiant unconventionality. Where Coco Chanel’s creations exalted the functional ...

By Sharon Crozier-De Rosa Known almost as much for her trademark mid-parted hair and large aviator sunglasses as for her acute intelligence, courage and wit, feminist activist Gloria Steinem who ...

By Jane Wood and Tom Bird-Jones Walk around any major fashion exhibition and you might get the impression that biofabricated materials are about to transform fashion. Grown using living organisms, ...

By Jane Wood, Charlotte Barras and Elena Probert When trying to make more sustainable clothing choices, many consumers follow a simple rule: choose natural fibres over synthetic ones. Cotton instead ...

Competitors in the Tour de France Femmes raised eyebrows recently after it was alleged that some riders were stuffing their bras to go faster during the time trials. Race organisers ...

By Katherine Calvert Over the past few years, tradwife content has moved from niche corners of social media into mainstream cultural debate. Tradwives present themselves as embracing a traditional wife ...

By Hannah Marriott Fashion has always sold aspiration. Long before artificial intelligence (AI), it relied on carefully constructed images of beauty through styling, lighting, makeup and, more recently, digital retouching. ...

By Naomi Braithwaite Modern fashion trends including suffocating shapewear, flimsy ballet flats and oversized tote bags have caused misery for many wearers. But these trends are tame in comparison to ...

By Naomi Braithwaite Constantly namedropped in Absolutely Fabulous – one of the sharpest and funniest sitcoms of the 1990s – London’s most iconic fashion department store is up for sale following ...

By Anna M Kotarba-Morley and Michael Westaway In the opening scene of the 2001 blockbuster film The Mummy Returns, two women of Egypt’s royal court engage in spectacular hand-to-hand combat. ...

By Elly Anastasiades Think about the last time you looked in the mirror and sighed at the sight of your hair. Maybe it was frizzing, flattening, greying, thinning or simply ...

By Maria Izquierdo-Pulido, Isabella Parilli Moser and Maria Fernanda Zeron Rugerio Magnesium has become one of the most popular supplements on the market. People take it for a whole host ...

The Commonwealth Games has always been a competition shaped by its history as well as its sport. Previously known as the ‘British Empire Games’, the competition is perhaps viewed by ...

By Anna-Sophie Jürgens For centuries, clowns occupied an ambiguous cultural position. They were comic figures, but also disruptive ones: tricksters who mocked authority and social conventions, picaresque mischief-makers who ...

By Emanuela Prandelli In a luxury market often blamed for flattening creativity, Maison Schiaparelli has long stood out for its defiant unconventionality. Where Coco Chanel’s creations exalted the functional ...

By Beatriz Carpallo Porcar, Andrés Ráfales Perucha, Daniel Sanjuán Sánchez, José Lesmes Poveda López and Paula Cordova Alegre It is tempting to understand muscle’s ...

By Angela Rodrigues For many of us, the instinctive response to good weather is to get to the beach. But the start of the season is also a reminder that ...

By Rebekah Pickering Wood Textiles shape British life in ways we often overlook – the clothes worn, the items inherited, and the patterns that quietly signal where people come from. Yet ...

By Kate Cantrell “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” writes Susan Sontag in the opening of ...

By Paul Hough While some people can spring out of bed at six in the morning and go straight into their day, others prefer to wake up later as they’...

By Catrin Cousins and Jo Wiltshire Indie sleaze is back, but not as you remember it. The 00s scene’s revival taps into a growing backlash against hyper-polished influencer culture, ...

By Rebecca Scott Fashion has always done more than keep us warm. It’s also a social language, quietly organising ideas of status, taste and belonging. What made the first ...