Burberry returns to profit as sales soar, from £85 socks to £9,000 coats

CEO says ‘democratic approach’ has helped brand outperform tough market, with big rises in China and US

Burberry has returned to profit as its back-to-basics strategy drove strong sales of the British brand’s coats, jackets and handbags over the summer.

Joshua Schulman, the chief executive, said the luxury brand had outperformed a “challenging luxury market” to achieve sales growth of 6%, helped by strong online and wholesale sales particularly in China and the US. “Our strategy is working,” he said.

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Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: to nail this year’s British heritage look, just study Rivals

Thanks to Jilly Cooper, tartan and tweed, waxed jackets and wellies are a style vibe right now

British heritage, in fashion terms, is a country where it is permanently October. A conker-brown and pleasant land, if you will. Brand Britain in the style sense comes into its own in autumn: roaring fires, muddy lanes, damp dogs. Waxed jackets and chunky knits, tartan and tweed, jaunty scarves to banish draughts. Clothes for going on a hearty walk, but with a hip flask in your pocket. Fashion has been mining this seam since long before Brideshead Revisited made battered evening dresses and Oxford bags look romantic, and it keeps returning, because trad British style is satisfyingly utilitarian while also being loaded with enough backstory (class, history, eccentricity) to be intriguing and reinventable.

Also: Rivals. It has taken considerable restraint for me not to mention Rivals in the whole of the first paragraph, because it is now a matter of mere weeks until we get our next Jilly Cooper fix and I, for one, cannot wait. Cannot wait for Cameron stalking the corridors in her foxy power suits, for Taggie in her cute jeans and jumpers, for Valerie in head-to-toe tweed and an aggressive amount of blusher. The success of Rivals has done for old-school British dressing what Emily in Paris did for the beret, only with better jokes and more adultery. Jolly hockey sticks style is the new French girl chic. This fantasy is homegrown, which makes it both more embarrassing and harder to resist. Just as Emily and her friends and frenemies are a camp send-up of fashionable Paris, Rivals is a fond, nostalgic semi-parody of the British wardrobe. The show’s costume designer, Ray Holman, has drawn on original 1980s pieces from Dunhill and Mulberry for inspiration. With Liberty fabrics, nods to polo uniforms and sturdy waxed coats, he has brought the Sloane ranger back into the fashion conversation for the first time in years.

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Jess Cartner-Morley on fashion: this season’s big idea? Wear a skirt. It’s that simple

All you need to look on-trend this autumn is a skirt, but instead of going shopping, check what you already have in your wardrobe

I go to a lot of fashion shows, and sometimes they are gorgeous and sometimes they are ugly. Sometimes they are electrifying and sometimes they are deathly dull. Sometimes they are completely baffling. My absolute favourite kind of show is the one that makes me want to run home and change my outfit. A show that makes me think: there it is! That’s exactly what I want to wear. When the look speaks to me, as if it had been on the tip of my tongue. God, I love that.

Which is what happened at Prada this season. The idea was: skirts. That’s it, that’s the whole idea. The show was 63 different skirts – some with a sweater, some with a bra top, some with a jacket, but the point was the skirts. They were knee-length, give or take an inch up or down, and A-line, although sometimes a narrow almost-pencil and other times with a broader flare. There were skirts that wrapped like kilts, held together with strips of industrial-weight Velcro embroidered with tiny gems. There were stiff boxy pleated skirts and tube skirts painted with swirls, and dainty embellished skirts with a layer of gauze on top, like a petticoat worn on the outside.

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John Frieda obituary

Hair stylist to the stars who created the ‘Purdey’ bob and the groundbreaking Frizz Ease product range

All beauty chains now have metres-long shelves of products for curly, coily and wavy hair, and among the proliferating varieties of “curl custard” and “scrunching jelly” there is always the purple livery of John Frieda’s Frizz Ease range, developed from his original 1991 silicon-based serum. It was the first care product to be sold for – and likely the earliest even to acknowledge – the exasperating existence of frizz.

Frieda, who has died aged 75, respected all types of hair, whether in or out of fashion. He added sculpted shape to straight locks, notably for Joanna Lumley’s pudding-basin “Purdey” bob for The New Avengers on television in 1976, which became a nationwide fad. He scissored and scruffed flat hair into cheeky urchin cuts, as he did for Shirley MacLaine and Diana, Princess of Wales (Frieda had arrived to style a secretive portrait session for the photographer Lord Snowdon not knowing Diana was its subject.)

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From the streets of Lagos to the Chanel catwalk: how a creative’s thrift-shop style took her to Paris

Rachel Ojuromi and her stylist friend Debby Fasingha recreated high-end designs in effortlessly cool videos shot around the city. Then the fashion house came calling

Before Paris, there was Lagos, with its busy markets, roadside stalls and maze of disorderly streets. And then there was Rachel Ojuromi, sashaying through it all and turning the everyday into an unlikely catwalk.

For the past six months, Ojuromi has taken social media by storm, transforming the vibrant streets of Lagos into her personal runway, showcasing designs made from secondhand, thrifted clothes and scraps mostly sourced from local open-air hubs such as Yaba market.

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