Who Put Waitrose Beans on the Fashion Week Menu?
At London Fashion Week, it is apparently no longer enough to ask someone who they are wearing. We need to know what they are eating, too. Across the endless stream of street-style interviews and Fashion Week Reels, the same question keeps appearing: what is your favourite British food? The answers are remarkably consistent. A fry-up. Beans on toast. A Sunday roast. Fish and chips. Pie, occasionally, if someone wants to demonstrate a little more regional knowledge.
The question itself is harmless enough. So are the answers. There is nothing particularly radical about somebody liking a full English breakfast, and there is no reason that someone who works in fashion should not enjoy beans on toast. The oddity is in what these foods have come to represent. Asked outside a fashion show, surrounded by clothes that most people will never be able to afford, a fry-up becomes more than breakfast. It becomes a way of communicating Britishness, normality and relatability. The £2,000 coat might be inaccessible, but look, they like beans on toast.
A Travel Guide to Firenze Schiacciata
A recent trip to Florence offered all the beauty of art and architecture that we were hoping for, but I’m sure it has been spoken about at length by far too many people to warrant another person waxing lyrical on Botticelli’s Venus or Michaelangelo’s David. Instead, I have decided to wax lyrical on Tuscany’s famous sandwich, the schiacciata, a focaccia bread that has been squashed, and then sliced for sandwich bread. I thought that since it was such a large part of our trip, being the most reliable and easily accessible lunch food, that surely it deserves just as much attention, if not more, as the art. After all, although art does feed the soul, sandwiches feed the heart and the body, which is perhaps a more useful purpose.