How the king of the high street Philip Green lost his crown
Philip Green once dismissed Asos as a digital upstart - but it went on to buy his Topshop empire for a knock-down price last month
5 March 2021 • 6:00am
How a generation of retail heavyweights have lost their empires this year
Credit: Rex
Boob tubes, cowboy boots, the lemon one-shoulder dress from the first Topshop/Kate Moss collection in 2007… these are not the first items you would look to for an unfolding Greek tragedy. But what is hubris writ large, if it is not Sir Philip Green impatiently batting away my question about what he thought of Asos with one of his habitual ‘tsks’? This would have been in 2009, when Topshop still ruled the high street, loved by everyone from 15-year-olds to fashion editors. The Oxford Circus flagship alone was valued at £400-500 million, and there were a further 70 or so branches nationwide. fashion websites like Asos, which launched in 2000, were still perceived as parvenus. Ju
How to build a garden office for as little as £5k
Working from the kitchen table may have started as a novelty, but now we need WFH solutions for the long haul. Here, we show you how
29 March 2021 • 2:09pm
Owner Faye Hamilton
works in her garden
studio, designed
by AO Architecture
(aoarchitecture.co.uk)
Credit: French+Tye/AO Architecture
After Covid-19 restrictions have forced many to embrace working from home full-time – the way we think about our home work spaces has changed. The kitchen table or tiny desk crammed in next to the spare bed were fine when working in pyjamas was a novelty, but now we need solutions for the long haul, in terms of boosting both productivity and the way we feel about our homes.
Returning to the scene of Japan’s worst disaster a decade on
Credit: Rob Gilhooly
Ten years ago Shinichiro Hiratsuka watched as, under a gunmetal-grey sky, the first, small, tarpaulin-wrapped bodies were brought up the embankment from Okawa Elementary School and laid gently on the road. Singly, or in small knots, the waiting parents stepped forward, pulling back the makeshift shrouds to reveal the faces of the dead children. Even in utter grief, they were restrained. On more than one occasion, the only indication that a mother had found her child was her buckling at the knees and being held up by her husband. There were tears, but the crying was inaudible over the wind and the sound of the digging that continued in the mud and the wreckage of the school and a couple of hundred homes that had made up this village.
Bryan Cranston: ‘One of the things I’m most grateful about is that I was poor’
As he makes his TV return in Sky thriller Your Honor, the Breaking Bad star talks about his fractured family and midlife fame
27 February 2021 • 6:00am
‘One of the things I’m most grateful about is that I was poor
Credit: Norman Jean Roy
With nowhere to go, little to do, and varying grasps on the real world, Hollywood’s great and good have found their own ways to pass the time over lockdown. Some took to political activism; a benign group recorded a legendarily embarrassing John Lennon cover; others went slowly insane. But Bryan Cranston, ever the Everyman, simply did what we all did: he got really into baking.