Bella Freud’s Marks & Spencer collection sells out in a day
Marks & Spencer launched its much-anticipated collaboration with Bella Freud on Thursday, with fans quickly buying up items from the 27-piece collection.By lunchtime, coveted items such as the pleated pinstripe skirt had been bought in most sizes from the website, and by Friday morning the majority of the items had sold out in most sizes online.The retailer says the collection will not be restocked.The success of the collection is partially because Freud’s trademark slogan knitwear and retro aesthetic are a good fit with Marks & Spencer.“Freud has such a knack for creating personality-packed pieces that are easy to wear and appealing to all ages,” says Joy Montgomery, the shopping editor at Vogue.
“This, paired with the British public’s universal love of M&S, makes for a pretty potent pairing.”The hype around the sellout has to be put into context, because collaboration ranges are often produced in much smaller quantities than the majority of items on the shop floor.“It would not be the same sort of volume as the core Marks & Spencer lines,” confirms the retail commentator Catherine Shuttleworth.“It could be hundreds, rather than thousands.”Sign up to Fashion StatementStyle, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solvedafter newsletter promotionHowever, the Freud collaboration does remains a success in its category.
It can be compared to John Lewis’s collaboration with the London-based brand A.W.A.K.E.
Mode,Also launched on Thursday, most items remained in stock online by Friday morning,“When you’re choosing a collab as a retailer, you’ve got to remember who you are,” says Shuttleworth,“I shop in John Lewis, I’m thinking, ‘Who are [A,W.
A,K,E,Mode]?’ whereas I knew who Bella Freud was straight away,You get hits and misses for collabs, you’ve got to be really good at understanding the consumer.
”While Freud is an established designer – she began her label in 1990 – she is forever known for dressing the likes of Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller and Kate Moss in her slogan knitwear in the 00s, an era currently in focus for a younger consumer.“Like every other millennial woman, I was obsessed with Alexa Chung’s style,” says Montgomery.“The moment I saw her in the brand’s graphic 1970 jumper, I was sold … the logo knit feels like a gentle way to embrace the Primrose Hill set nostalgia.”Shuttleworth argues the success of this collaboration is Marks & Spencer flexing its retail muscles.“This is not about the jumpers, there’s a halo effect.
What they’re saying is: ‘Look at us.We’re the people that are absolutely on the pulse of fashion in the UK.’”
Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods’
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses.The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office.That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.On the anonymous messaging platform Blind, they wrote: “On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit
UK’s Alan Turing Institute launches redundancy consultation process
The UK’s national institute for artificial intelligence and data science has launched a consultation process that could lead to redundancies among its 440 staff.In a memo sent to staff this month the Alan Turing Institute gave an update on its new strategy, under which it will concentrate on fewer projects.It was addressed to “affected employees” and stated that the government-backed institute “may need to consider making redundancies”. According to informal calculations by staff, the memo could have been sent to as many as 140 people.The internal document said the institute – which carries out research with universities, the private sector and government entities – was working on 111 live projects and needed to “move away from engaging in large numbers of individual projects”
iPhone 16 review: more buttons and speed for Apple’s standard phone
Apple’s latest iPhone bucks the trend of buttons vanishing from phones, gaining not one but two new controls on the outside, plus a big jump in chip performance and two-day battery life on the inside.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.The standard iPhone 16 is Apple’s smallest and lowest-priced handset in the new 16 series, costing from £799 (€959/$799/A$1,399) sitting below the bigger and more expensive 16 Plus and 16 Pro models
‘It’s not me, it’s just my face’: the models who found their likenesses had been used in AI propaganda
The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso.“We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!” he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup.Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time.On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform
Google to buy nuclear power for AI datacentres in ‘world first’ deal
Google has signed a “world first” deal to buy energy from a fleet of mini nuclear reactors to generate the power needed for the rise in use of artificial intelligence.The US tech corporation has ordered six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) from California’s Kairos Power, with the first due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.Google hopes the deal will provide a low-carbon solution to power datacentres, which require huge volumes of electricity. The company, owned by Alphabet, said nuclear provided “a clean, round-the-clock power source that can help us reliably meet electricity demands”.The explosive growth of generative AI, as well as cloud storage, has increased tech companies’ electricity demands
TechScape: Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at the Guardian US. Thank you for joining me.Average daily notifications: 270Apps with the most total notifications: – Messages: 391 – New York Post: 190 – Slack: 121Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump.The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has funded a pro-Trump political action committee with tens of millions of dollars and planned a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania
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