Latest news with #CarnabyStreet
The Guardian
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Marjorie's, London W1: ‘Original, and truly, madly good' – restaurant review
Some new openings just sound unappetising on paper. Take the cave à manger Marjorie's in Soho, a brand new, Parisian-inspired wine bar serving small plates in London W1. 'Oh God,' I said on learning that its proprietors are Michael Searle and Josh Anderson. 'Never heard of 'em.' Sorry to quibble, especially seeing as this seems to be their first hospitality venture, and I am well aware that eating out for a living is a huge jolly, but eating in wine bars? Well, I am not a fan: too noisy, too boisterous, too give-me-my-bloody-dinner generally – not to mention too many drunken elbows in your toastie de fromage while a sommelier bores on about beaujolais nouveau. Also, Marjorie's is alarmingly close to Carnaby Street, the natural habitat of the disappointed diner. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. So I set off down Foubert's Place, muttering to myself that at least I'm not heading for the nearby Kingly Court food hub that brims with dining options, each of them more impersonal and oversubscribed than the next. Back in the noughties, Carnaby Street still gave a slight nod to its Swinging Sixties roots, with a few remaining independent shops selling goth gear, pantaloons and bongs. Today, however, it is a shiny row of sleek international flagship stores, with the wondrous, olde worlde Liberty at one end, clinging on for dear life, the poor love, before she is inevitably turned into a Lululemon. Anyway, it turns out that it is for all these reasons that we should actually be grateful for Marjorie's, because, yet again and with no fear of this letting up any time soon, it also turns out that I am an absolute idiot. Marjorie's may look like a wine bar, but Searle and Anderson have opened something tiny, brave, bespoke and appealingly odd. Oh, and delicious, too, because the duo have tempted Giacomo Peretti, formerly of Le Gavroche, to cook for them. He has also worked at the crowdpleaser Temper, the wholly underrated Firebird and the dependably brilliant the Culpeper, and if you head down to the basement, where there are more tables, you'll be able to watch him weave his magic. Snaring Peretti to do wine bar snacks and letting his imagination fly is a stroke of genius, because now you have a brilliant chef serving gooey chicken liver 'rocher' – think rich, nutty, nibblable savoury Ferrero Rocher – pretty little yummy crab tartelettes made all the merrier by the addition of kumquat and a delicate and rather bizarre lamb tartare dotted with spring vegetables, goat's cheese and a tiny fresh strawberry. Surprise! This is actually, and quite unexpectedly, a restaurant with serious food; in fact, it might well be the most earnest, accomplished, imaginative food being served in this square mile right now. Yes, you could play safe, grab a space at the long bar upstairs, order from the exclusively French wine list and feast only on a selection of La Fromagerie cheese and rustic pain served with a shedload of salted French butter, perhaps with some saucisson with cornichons on the side. But don't do that: Peretti's larger and admittedly stranger-sounding dishes are well worth the risk. There's a bowl of escargots with seaweed in a silky pinewood cream and a soft, delicate salad of good, mixed green leaves with a sweet, citrussy, orange blossom vinaigrette. Original, perhaps offputting to some, but truly, madly good. Two other standouts were a stinky, slightly warm piece of runny brie de Meaux served with lush fresh apricot – outstanding – and some proper French soul food: poached chicken on white rice made decadent with brown butter. This was a rhapsody of classy, beige carbs, and I scraped at the bowl like a sad labrador released from her kibble diet. Slices of tempura courgette, almost like cigars to look at, came dotted with trout roe and rouille, and were equally weird and wonderful. The dessert list offered a millefeuille with crème diplomate and strawberries, but my eyes had already been greedily drawn to a warm, frothy, olive oil-strewn bowl of fresh chocolate mousse topped with crunchy hazelnuts. Again, this was just heavenly. As a non-drinker, I spend little time in wine bars these days – after all, as the old saying goes: 'If you stay in the barber's long enough, you'll probably end up with a haircut' – but for Marjorie's I'm making an exception. Service is prompt, the menu intriguing and there's a sense that you're in on a secret that no one else knows about. Go for the vin, the gossip, a bowl of nocellara olives and some great baguette; stay for a dinner that's currently one of the best in London. It's really worth going to Carnaby Street for. Courage, mes braves! Marjorie's 26 Foubert's Place, London W1; (no phone). Open all week, noon-11.30pm (Fri & Sat midnight, Sun 10pm. From about £40 a head, plus drinks and service
The Sun
18-06-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Trendy clothing chain shuts ANOTHER store ahead of disappearing from high street forever – full list of closures
A TRENDY clothing chain has abruptly shut another store ahead of disappearing from the high street forever. Monki, which is owned by H&M, has quietly closed down it's flagship store on Carnaby Street in London. It draws a line under a 12-year stint on the popular London shopping street known for housing funky brands. The store has now vanished as H&M continues with its plans to integrate the brand with another one of its fashion lines, Weekday. News of the closure will come a blow to shoppers, who in the past described it as their "favourite store" in the world. While another fan said the clothes were "amazing quality" and "look so good". H&M already pulled the shutters on Monki branches across Manchester Birmingham, Newcastle and Sheffield earlier this year. Remaining stores in Bristol and Glasgow into a new concept store. Monki's online store has also closed down with the brand now only available to shop through the revamped Weekday website. You can check out the full list of stores here: Arndale Shopping Centre, Manchester -closed January 12 Birmingham city centre -closed March 6 Eldon Square Newcastle -closed January 2025 Sheffield - closed June 2025 Carnaby Street, London - closed June 15 2025 Bristol -open Glasgow - open A previous statement from H&M read: "A limited number of Monki stores are intended to be transformed into multi-brand Weekday destinations, while the others are intended to be closed." Beloved department store chain shutting more locations with clearance sales on now until final May 25 deadline "The newly formed Weekday multi-brand destination will cater to customers' high aesthetic standards while embracing their multitude of unique expressions." As part of the process, H&M has also revived its Cheap Monday brand and begun selling it in select Weekday stores and online. The fashion line was a hit during the early noughties, but H&M axed it in 2018, blaming poor sales. The brand has rolled out collaborations with Landon Barker, the step-son of Kourtney Kardashian, as it looks to grab the attention of young shoppers. Weekday currently has five locations in the UK, all of which are in London. Like Monki, it caters towards a younger audience and sells trendy fashion pieces. TROUBLE ON THE HIGH STREET High street retailers have been struggling to compete with the likes of Shein and Temu, which sell fast fashion products at an ultra-low price. The rising cost of living has also meant that customers have less money to part with when they do hit the shops. This cocktail of rising costs and changing consumer habits has battered the high street over the last few years, with a number of popular brands reducing their estates. River Island will shutter a branch in Banbury on June 28, as it is set to undergo a restructuring due to tough trading conditions. The fashion brand, which has been sported by Paris Fury and Cat Deeley, has quietly closed a number of stores in the past few months. A branch in Willows Place, Corby closed in April and a separate site in Vicar Lane Shopping Centre in Chesterfield closed in the same month. Elsewhere, New Look has closed its entire estate in the Republic of Ireland. Earlier this year, Select Fashion closed 35 branches across the UK after it entered into liquidation. Ted Baker was also forced to close over 30 stores last year after it went bust. RETAIL PAIN IN 2025 The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury's hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion. Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April. A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024. Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure. The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year. It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year. Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: "The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025." Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector. "By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer's household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020."
Washington Post
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Sly Stone taught pop stars how to dress wild
In 1968, the Temptations were still performing in matching suits and the Beatles had just shed their pin-neat tailoring for the whimsical trappings of Carnaby Street. That same year, Sly Stone and his newly formed band, multiracial and mixed gender, posed in outfits as wild as those groups' seemed scripted: hippies and dandies and bohemians in peacock prints, optimistically borrowing garments and accessories from the Middle East and South Asia. Even amid this style splendor, Stone stood out: In the middle, he was stoic as a toreador prefight, his chest bare beneath an embroidered vest and a pile of chains. On his legs was a pair of breeches over knee-high socks and gladiator sandals. In one look, he combined ancient Roman battle gear, the snobbery of equestrianism, a then-trendy fervor for Indian styles and a prescient taste for hip-hop's gold chain obsession — a seemingly nonsensical mix that altogether, with Stone's prodigious touch, just worked. Stone dressed the way he made music. He grabbed at influences but understood them intuitively, never superficially, which allowed him to create songs — and outfits — that were so original that they made you feel good before you even understood what was happening to you. Jimi Hendrix shared and almost certainly influenced Stone's flamboyance, wearing large hats and decorating his bare chest with a long scarf and jewels. But if Hendrix was soft and romantic, with his tie-dyes and bell-bottom jeans, Stone was more mercurial, integrating glam, Edwardian melodrama and African diasporic styles into his foundation of funk. He wore his big sunglasses not, as Greta Garbo did, to shield, but to invite your gaze. Stone wanted your ears and your eyes. For a 1969 television performance, he dressed in a satin ocher blouse with a Draculoid collar, tying up the front to expose his chest and fabulous abs, seducing the audience at the piano with 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' A few minutes later, he stood up for 'I Want to Take You Higher,' revealing that the shirt's bishop sleeves were festooned with lengthy black fringe that shimmied as he punched his arms through the air like a preacher sermonizing. We may not have seen that live fusion between clothing and music — not a marriage of music and aesthetic, as David Bowie pioneered, but a synergy between a song's message and a shirt's purpose — again until Beyoncé stepped onstage during her Renaissance tour in 2023, razzing her audience with mirrored alien wear as she wiggled between those robot arms. Before Stone, you could either assuage your audience with clothes — as many of Motown's acts did, as Black artists who sought to appeal to White audiences — or scare them, as Hendrix did with his ripped jeans, or Janis Joplin with her unkempt hair. Stone sketched out a third possibility: Your clothes could open up your music. His band was not focused on looking 'cohesive' visually; rather, its members' disparate and sometimes clashing ensembles emphasized their universe of inspirations. His own ensembles had the same smooth tension. The hippie style that Stone took to an intergalactic other place was about rebellion: that you could reject the values of your parents, of the clean-cut establishment, by wearing your jeans frayed, by not buying new things but patching or mending what was old, by wearing clothes from another time to show you longed for a simpler (if imagined) past. Stone's style was about freedom — the freedom to mix pieces from different centuries and cultures that seem to have little in common and to make them work, even sizzle. He could put on a rastacap and a black fringe suede suit and it just made sense. When he walked onstage in the mid-1970s, wearing a purple sequin jacket with orange flames and a silver sequin baker boy cap and little silver pants — well, that was wilder than anything the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls were wearing at that time. Ripped jeans and safety-pinned T-shirts are nice poetry, but they don't require the courage that Stone's clothes did. A male rock star in women's clothes is often a gimmick. A male rock star in clothes that seem to defy the orders of mens- and womenswear but are undeniably sexy? That's bold. The door Stone karate-kicked open would shape the looks of some of the biggest pop stars of the late 20th century and early 21st. There was Prince and his feminized, feline sex appeal, then Rick James in his total commitment to exuberance. Then Beyoncé, of course, who, like Stone, is less interested in flouting her connections to designers or trends and instead committed to wearing clothes than enhance the experience of seeing her onstage. Perhaps the musicians most influenced by Stone are Andre 3000 and Big Boi, formerly of Outkast, who started off weird — Andre wore a lace-up skirt and T-shirt, and Big Boi a snakeskin short suit, to the Source Awards in 1999 — and then just kept getting freakier even as they became household names. As he moved beyond his musical prime in the 1960s and '70s and struggled with addiction, he remained glamorous. He wore furs and metallic jeans, Dior sunglasses and a big belt spelling out 'SLY' in silver studs. In 2010, he played Coachella, dressed in a police officer's uniform and a blond wig. It was weird, but it was like nothing else. Unlike Hendrix or Gram Parsons, who worked with Michael & Toni and Nudie Cohn, respectively, to create their custom pieces, Stone was never associated with a particular designer or store. Nor did he think about clothes the way Bowie or Madonna did — as tools to help create an era or mood that would mark a new stylistic experimentation. For Stone, dressing was something deeper than a designer or an exercise. He didn't just play with style. He lived it.
