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British Vogue|March 2025EDITOR’S LETTERNothing ever stands still in fashion for long. Each season new ideas proliferate on the runway, only to be submerged by the next round of shows in a matter of months. Still, I can’t recall a time in recent fashion history that has seen as much seismic change as this current moment. In the last year alone, there has been a staggering number of new creative director appointments at major fashion brands – some seasoned vets, others young designers stepping into the spotlight for the first time. As a relative newbie to this role (16 months and counting!), it has made my job more exhilarating than I could have ever imagined. The upcoming fashion calendar is jam-packed with debuts: SARAH BURTON’s much-anticipated return at Givenchy, HAIDER ACKERMANN’s reimagined Tom Ford,…3 minBritish Vogue|March 2025LIGHTNESS OF BEINGI hope you can feel how truly comfortable I felt in these clothes – and my skin – by looking at these photographs. I had the luck of stepping onto a Vogue set, which also happened to be a sundrenched beach on Spain’s Costa Blanca, and as someone who runs cold (all the women in my family do, I always grew up with the fire on or a hot-water bottle nearby), it’s so freeing to work in warm weather and inhabit myself. Something a lot of people don’t see, or know about me, is that I’ve always struggled with anxiety; my base median is “very anxious”. I’m now 24, and last year I set out to overhaul my life, which, in turn, has changed the way that I choose to…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025A REFINED PALETTEThis season, we’re here for flaunting your bon vivant sensibilities and opting for rich, gourmand hues. “I sometimes feel like I’m talking about a cooking recipe with clients these days when I describe the colours I’m drawn to: clotted cream, butter, bitter chocolate, plum, cotta,” says Sophie Ashby, founder of Studio Ashby. “Atelier Ellis has an incredible range drawn from the worlds of art, food and our universal experience of life.” The key, of course, is ensuring that the palette you opt for aptly reflects your tastes – not to mention your intentions for the space. For example, if paintings and wall works make up your home’s main course, it’s probably best to “start with the art”, Ashby advises, “or at the very least, don’t let it be an afterthought”,…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025MEMOIRS of an INVISIBLE WOMANHow do you determine your value? Your worth as a person? If we’re talking strictly what your body’s made of – things such as carbon, magnesium and stuff – your total value is around £3.60. Roughly the same as a cup of coffee in London. If you were to part yourself out like a junk car – selling off your heart, your kidneys, a lung or two – you might clear a few hundred thousand. But then you’re dead. Or you could try modelling, the career I stumbled into as a teen, and have total strangers tell you your worth every single day. My value could be plotted on a chart, like a stock on the Dow Jones. Demand caused it to rise, but a pimple could send it spiralling.…9 minBritish Vogue|March 2025THROUGH the CRACKSStay awake in the dark, sleep in the day: this is the first thing I learnt when I was a 15-year-old girl sleeping rough. That being invisible in the shadows of a city keeps you alive. For 18 months, between 1997 and 1998, I lived everywhere and nowhere: in parks and the alleyways of Soho; later in brothels and hostels, with my baby daughter in a makeshift cot. I existed between two parallels: desperate to be seen, for someone to acknowledge me, to help me, and terrified of being noticed. On the streets, people watching became my superpower, both to protect myself from male predators and to take me away from reality. From a dirty London doorstep, I would look up at the floating, passing crowds and watch other teenage…9 minBritish Vogue|March 2025VENI, VIDI, VICIIf you’ve ever visited Splendido, A Belmond Hotel (below) high above Portofino’s La Piazzetta, you might recall, on your stroll down to the blue-green Ligurian Sea, passing a string of candy-coloured, coveside palazzos mere feet from the water. The most enviable address among them? Villa Beatrice, an art nouveau mansion whose sea garden and wraparound terrace are made for sipping Aperol as the sun goes down over the Italian Riviera. Come July, the turreted residence will open its doors as a private holiday villa under the Belmond umbrella. “It really captures the spirit of the region,” Martin Brudnizki, who oversaw the restoration of the property, tells Vogue. Enchanted by Tuscan architect Gino Coppedè’s original 1913 frescoes, the Annabel’s designer echoed their floral, marine and ribbon motifs across ceilings, walls and…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025LAND OFPLENTYUzbekistan, the doubly landlocked Central Asian country bordered by five other nations, has for centuries held an almost mythical allure. Ever since it played a central role in the Silk Road – the ancient network of trade routes that connected China with Europe and the Middle East – the country has been the jewel in the crown of empire builders from Genghis Khan to Alexander the Great. That rich heritage, however, was long closed off to many travellers, first during the six decades it spent as part of the Soviet Union and then under a dictator, Islam Karimov, who died in 2016. Since then, there has been a gradual thaw under its current president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and visitors are once again flocking to its capital, Tashkent, and major cities such…5 minBritish Vogue|March 2025TYLAVIRAL lyrics, infectious DANCE routines, showstopping fashion… In the BLINK of an EYE, South African SUPERSTAR TYLA has skyrocketed to take the CROWN of music’s most intoxicating new MONONYM – to say nothing of all the attendant CONTROVERSIES that come with it. As she adjusts to LIFE as the QUEEN of popiano, FUNMI FETTO travels from London to her home town of JOHANNESBURG, where she discovers a 23-year-old on the cusp of global DOMINATION On the street outside an invite-only showcase at Katy’s Palace Bar – a multi-level, industrial-chic venue with incredible views over Kramerville, Johannesburg – a well-heeled, ready-to-party crowd is gathering. As they wait to get in, they dance to the amapiano tunes they can hear being spun by the glamorous blue-haired DJ Tshegu from inside the capacious…18 minBritish Vogue|March 2025BRANCHING OUTResting on a table in the corner of Sarah Burton’s Avenue George V office in Paris are the beginnings of her Givenchy. To wit: a series of lookbooks from house founder Hubert de Givenchy’s first collection in 1952, which contain black and white, frontside-back images of each outfit – rigorously architectural, yet also with a controlled curvaceousness, the rare whimsy coming from a leopard handbag worn very correctly in the crook of the arm – shot with the near-forensic directness you associate with Collier Schorr. Beside these books lies a pile of calico patterns from de Givenchy’s first and second collections–artefacts which had been, inexplicably, bricked up in a wall at his old atelier and discovered years later during its renovation. The symbolism is almost too delicious for words, as…4 minBritish Vogue|March 2025VOGUE INFORMATIONA Adidas.co.uk Alaïa Maison-alaia.com Alighieri.com B Balenciaga.com Bally.com Balmain.com Bergdorfgoodman.com Bettter.us Bottegaveneta.com Byfar.com C Calzedonia.com Carminashoemaker.com Carolinaherrera.com Cartier.com Carven.com Cdlp.com Chanel.com Chloe.com Chopard.com Christopherjohnrogers.com Church-footwear.com Courreges.com D Dheygere.com Dilarafindikoglu.com Dior.com Dolcegabbana.com Driesvannoten.com Duranlantink.com E Edwardsexton.co.uk Emmawillis.com Emporio Armani Armani.com Erdem.com F Falke.com Farrow-ball.com Fendi.com Thefrankieshop.com G Gabrielahearst.com Gianvitorossi.com Gimaguas.com Giuseppezanotti.com Grenson.com Gucci.com H Hanes.com Harveynichols.com Hawesandcurtis.co.uk Hermes.com Hodakova.com Hugokreit.com Husbands-paris.com I Isabelmarant.com Isaboulder.com Isseymiyake.com J Jilsander.com Jimmychoo.com Jrmalpere.com K Karmagloves.com Karolinevitto.com L Leocostelloe.com Lesilla.com Levi.com Loewe.com Louisvuitton.com M Maisonmargiela.com Makeo.top Manoloblahnik.com Marni.com Maxmara.com McQueen Alexander mcqueen.com Michaelkors.co.uk Miumiu.com MM6 Maison Margiela Maisonmargiela.com N Nanushka.com Newyorkvintage.com P Palomawool.com Panconesi Marcopanconesi.com Paristexasbrand.com Paularowan.com Paulsmith.com Phoebephilo.com Polo Ralph Lauren Ralphlauren.co.uk Prada.com R Rachelchudley.com Therow.com S Saint Laurent byAnthony Vaccarello Ysl.com Schiaparelli.com Selfridges.com Sibylcolefax.com Simonerocha.com Skims.com Sportmax.com Ssdaley.com Stellamccartney.com Steve-o-smith.com Studionicholson.com T Thunderslove.com Tiffany.co.uk…2 min
British Vogue|March 2025SUPERSIZE MEIt takes a certain calibre of confidante to be a Holiday Friend. They must – in the teachings of Hemingway – be a person you are, one way or another, in love with. My beloved Holiday Friend and I have perfected our vacation routine. (In the morning, we never chat before coffee, hers, or an ice-cold Coke Zero, mine. Large prescription sunglasses on, me again.) The thing to know, however, is that my Holiday Friend has a talent for inadvertently attracting trouble. Which I tend to forget, until it’s the Christmas break and we’ve just landed at Owen Roberts International Airport in Grand Cayman, bound for Palm Heights – the Caribbean hotel where the likes of Emily Ratajkowski, Paloma Elsesser and Charli XCX unwind. My Holiday Friend’s carry-on contains her…4 minBritish Vogue|March 2025PARTY ONIt’s midnight on a Saturday in east London and I’m sipping on a spicy picante at Silk Stockings, a cocktail bar bathed in pink light and awash with first dates. Soon I’ll be heading to Dalston Superstore for house night Bottom Heavy, a sweaty concoction of dance-floor bangers, booty riders and little string vests. After that, I’ll Uber to The Cause – an all-night industrial warehouse venue on the edge of Docklands – for Egø Deåth, which will probably involve a lot of stomping to techno in near darkness till dawn. I say probably… I didn’t make it in the end; the dry-ice-packed basement at Superstore kept me busy until 4am. But that’s besides the point. Nightlife in the UK isn’t dead, despite reports to the contrary, it’s just evolving…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025OUT OF THIS WORLDVarada Sethu has a confession. “I wasn’t really a Whovian,” she admits, somewhat reluctantly, of her life before now. I’m not surprised at her hesitation – after all, the 32-year-old is about to enter the Doctor Who universe as Ncuti Gatwa’s (the 15th Doctor’s) brand-new companion, Belinda Chandra, thus diving headfirst into a television institution fiercely protected by its legendarily die-hard fans. “Belinda really feels like an equal to the Doctor,” says the Kerala-born, Newcastle-raised actor of what makes her character different to those who came before (almost every British actor worth their salt has had a turn as the Doctor’s companion, from Sheridan Smith to Billie Piper and Nicola Coughlan). “She’s got her own sense of self that isn’t necessarily attached to the Doctor.” That sense of self exists…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025Curb APPEALTo ELEVATE a pared-back palette, try a touch of METALLIC hardware for an INDUSTRIAL edge…1 minBritish Vogue|March 2025SOFT TOUCHLast September, I watched in horror as a cacophony of lilac lids and pearlescent pouts poured down the spring/summer ’25 runways. As a perennial goth, I’d relished the culture’s recent eldritch revival. But now a new mood was being ushered in – one which, on the surface at least, was very cutesy, very demure. When it comes to style and beauty, I’ve always subscribed to the Morticia Addams school of thought: “Black is such a happy colour.” A frosted blueberry eye? Candy-floss lips? It’s a “no” from me… or so I thought. All it took was one photoshoot with the legendary make-up artist Pat McGrath, in which she removed all traces of my eyebrows and added subtle accents of arsenic green and muted mauve, and suddenly I was a pastel…3 minBritish Vogue|March 2025NO PLACE LIKE HOMEI’d just turned six when my family moved back to my parents’ native Kosovo from London. For the next eight years, I called the youngest country in Europe home, dancing at the NationalTheatre of Kosovo and running wild in the Rugova mountains. Even though I moved back to England at 14, my formative years living in the capital of Kosovo, Pristina, are woven into who I am, like threads in a tapestry. My older sister, Dua, my younger brother, Gjin, and I still call it home. These days I squeeze in as many trips back as I can. I’m never more excited than when I land on the tarmac at the airport. There’s a real optimism in Kosovo right now too: 2024 marked 25 years since the war ended and…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025KEEPING GUARDWhen Charlie Gladstone inherited Hawarden Castle in the ’80s, the gothic revival pile had the feel of a crenellated time capsule just across the Welsh border from Chester. “My parents had really only lived in a handful of heated rooms, while the rest of the house stood cold and untouched,” the great-nephew of Cecil Beaton, and great-great-grandson of the house’s 19th-century chatelain, Prime Minister William Gladstone, recalls now. Over the decades that followed, Charlie and his wife, Caroline, tasked themselves with reviving and opening up much of the estate and its 3,500 acres of Flintshire parkland to the public. Today, visitors can clamber up Hawarden’s Norman tower, rent out the West End wing of the castle, whose mullion windows give out onto a bulrush-lined swimming pond, and brush up on…3 minBritish Vogue|March 2025KEEPER of the FLAMEWhen Alessandro Michele was growing up in Rome in the 1970s, one of his favourite pastimes was to rummage through his mother’s closet and to run his hands over the rustling taffeta, glinting sequins and other adornments of time past. Michele’s mother worked as an assistant to an executive at a film production company, a career that called for a glamorous self-presentation, and one gown particularly captured the young Michele’s imagination. Fashioned from crepe de Chine in the style of Valentino, it was full-length and high-necked, falling straight down in a manner that reminded Michele of a candle. The front of the dress was entirely black, which Michele’s mother considered reliably chic. Embroidered on its reverse, however, was an enormous pink and lilac butterfly – an elegant yet subversive gesture,…20 minBritish Vogue|March 2025Chekhov MATESIt’s one degree Celsius in London’s Blackfriars, a biting wind coming off the Thames, and Cate Blanchett has got the jitters. She’s just finished posing for Vogue on a frosty Georgian street, and somewhere between accepting a hot-water bottle and throwing a heavy coat over the spring/summer ’25 Carven separates she’s wearing, it strikes her: when she steps out in front of a 1,154-strong audience on the opening night of director and cowriter Thomas Ostermeier’s revival of The Seagull, it will mark her first time on stage in more than half a decade. “How did that happen?” she asks me, seeming genuinely baffled as she folds herself into a leather armchair at the bottom of a high-rise SE1 hotel a short while later. In person, her intonation is distinctly Australian…12 minBritish Vogue|March 2025ON THE MOVETraditionally, the term ‘commuter belt’ has not been the most positive one, conjuring up visions of dreary suburban locations, popular purely for their proximity to the capital. But if you look beyond those locations, deeper into the Home Counties, you’ll discover that there are some truly exceptional properties to be found, made all the more desirable by the fact that they’re an easy distance from London. Accessibility is first and foremost – proximity to a mainline train station is key, ideally with multiple trains an hour to London during the peak times. Smaller stations are tempting, but having to change trains on a daily basis is rarely worth the stress. It’s also a good idea to consider how easy it is to travel by car – being relatively close…4 min
British Vogue|March 2025ON THE ROAD AGAINNEW YORK “An early morning dip in the swimming pool at Spa Diane Barrière, at the eternally chic Fouquet’s New York (above), is the perfect way to combat gruelling jet lag. Post-show, there’s only one place to be seen: I love to sip a cocktail in the first-floor bar at The Manner in SoHo.” ENIOLA DARE, FASHION EDITOR LONDON “Mercedes-Benz not only shuttle Vogue editors from show to show, they also ferry me to and from my home away from home, The Londoner. (Its club sandwich is the best I’ve ever tasted and is always best eaten in bed.)” LAURA INGHAM, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, GLOBAL FASHION NETWORK PARIS “I had the pleasure of following supermodel-in-the-making – and Vogue’s January cover star – Angelina Kendall around Paris during last September’s Fashion Week.…1 minBritish Vogue|March 2025Tough loveThe dreaded phrase “dress code” generally leaves me cold, but our current political, social and economic landscape has me wondering if we need to adopt a more intentional approach to style. Author Octavia E Butler once said, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” Her words ring true for jewellery. The concept of layering chunky chains is, of course, well established. Hip hop’s old schoolers, including Slick Rick, Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J, Run-DMC and Salt-N-Pepa, got there first. What is different, however, is how we wear it now. When, in 2025, the toughness of gold metal links is layered against the most sumptuous of textures – think: silks, cashmeres and cotton – the result is a super chic embodiment of soft power. A…1 minBritish Vogue|March 2025SMALL ORDERThe old joke goes that martinis are like breasts: one is too few, three is too many. While a few rebuttals – a particular recent dinner party, that scene in Total Recall – spring to mind, I understand the sentiment. I am often torn between honouring Saturday night’s potential and remembering Sunday morning’s non-refundable reformer class; between acknowledging the cost of living crisis and drinking through it; between feeling sober-curious and curious to try everything on the cocktail list. How, then, to satisfy wellness, wallets and wild abandon? Why, the mini cocktail. Ranging in size from a shot to a few sips, diminutive drinks have, it seems, recently morphed from bartender’s handshake to menu staple. Consider the snaquiri (extra-small daiquiri) at Manchester’s Blinker Bar, the mouthful of clementine gimlet everyone’s…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025MOD behaviourOn a late spring afternoon in 1967, the 17-year-old model Twiggy, born Lesley Hornby in Neasden, northwest London, and her manager Justin de Villeneuve, actually Nigel Davies from east London, touched down at New York’s JFK airport. Within minutes they found themselves caught up in a seething mass of photographers, journalists, fans and bystanders. The sheer weight of numbers overshot a safety barrier and headed towards the landing gear. Britain’s hottest property had arrived. Fashion, pop culture and celebrity collided to produce a new kind of woman who looked nothing like a woman usually looked. Her hair had been scissored into a blond, boyish crop; at 5ft 6in she was impossibly angular, but her expression of saucer-eyed bewilderment, emphasised by three rows of false lashes, was real enough: “I felt…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025STREETsmartDo AWAY with pedestrian style courtesy of TAILORED staples and GOLDEN flourishes…1 minBritish Vogue|March 2025THE THICK OF ITDoes your scalp have a serum? If not, then it might be time to reconsider. Vogue has long championed the “skinification” of haircare and yet it wasn’t until my third child that I fully felt the benefits. Though I had turned to supplements to help with hair regrowth following my first two pregnancies, it’s been a case of third time’s a charm thanks to TypeBea Hair Growth Serum, combined with Vida Glow Hairology supplement, which have brought my postpartum mane back to life. Coincidentally, both brands are the brainchild of one woman: Anna Lahey. A mother of four turned hair loss remedy pro, her product development was a deeply personal project. “A third of women will experience some form of hair loss in their lifetime be that due to childbirth,…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025LET’S GET LOSTMany years ago, before we had kids, my husband and I did a road trip across the American southwest. There were some impediments to this journey – chiefly the fact that, despite growing up in California, I’d never learnt how to drive. My husband and I struck a bargain: he would do the driving and I would give him directions. We purchased a pleasingly oversized Rand McNally road atlas from a petrol station and as we set out I settled into the passenger seat, map spread across my lap, flagging imminent turns. I occasionally lost track of our location and I have the distinct memory of pointing out several highway exits just as we sailed past them. Looking back, my navigation attempts seem comically inefficient, but the entire trip is…4 minBritish Vogue|March 2025WISH YOU WERE HEREIf the era of jet-set glamour is over, no one told Vittoria Ceretti. When we speak, the 26-year-old model is fresh from a trip to the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands, before heading straight to Berlin for an all-important girls’ weekend. That said, she lists seeing the great migration in Tanzania and jungle trekking with gorillas in Rwanda as her favourite escapes of the last 12 months, before even mentioning a visit to Vancouver Island to experience the northern lights and her sun-drenched cameos on a superyacht in Sardinia with boyfriend Leonardo DiCaprio. “Whenever I have time off, I always try to reach for nature,” says the Brescia native, who was scouted at the age of 14 in Italy’s Elite Model Look competition and has since become a leading face of…2 minBritish Vogue|March 2025SHARP FOCUSIt started with a call. “I was in a meeting, and my phone was ringing, and I saw it was Tom Ford,” says Haider Ackermann. “My heart was beating, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the meeting to listen to that tremendously attractive voice of his, because that’s what he has. It’s so strange: the minute you see his name, you have so many flashbacks – the design, the sensuality, the movies – [but] I knew what it was about.” Ackermann is relating this while sitting in a black chair in a white office at the Tom Ford headquarters in London. If everything here is monochromatic, the world for Ackermann has quite recently exploded into colour. What it was about was Ford asking the 53-year-old Colombian-born French designer…4 minBritish Vogue|March 2025Life DRAWINGLast year, Michaela Yearwood-Dan stopped working. All projects were on pause as she prepared for a monumental occasion, a labour of love in the true sense: her wedding day. In her east London studio – an immense, airy space that was previously a Burberry factory – vestiges of the happy day last August, when the British artist married her wife, Elle, in a custom-made silk taffeta two-piece, are everywhere. Huge, hand-cut and dyed foxgloves crafted from delicate Italian crepe paper stand in glorious, celebratory bunches in one corner; on the floor next to her desk, a pile of frothy fabric remnants that the 30-year-old is currently repurposing into decorations. “I basically made everything,” she says, smiling. That includes an enormous tinsel chandelier, table runners, ceramic candlesticks, paper corsages given to…9 minBritish Vogue|March 2025NOTEBOOKROOMS WITH A VIEW A major redevelopment is afoot by Regent’s Canal in Bethnal Green, as the area surrounding two oldVictorian gasholders is being transformed into a mixed-use development, creating 555 new homes, and opening up a stretch of the canal which has been inaccessible to the public for over 150 years. Regent’s View is a striking new structure which includes five colourful cylindrical buildings, two of which will sit within the restored gasholder frames. The design recently won an award at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, so future residents will have the opportunity to live in a real-life work of art. Apartments from £585,000. For more information, call 020 4571 2052 or visit berkeleygroup.co.uk MADE IN CHELSEA Combining all the charm of a period home with the convenience…2 min
