Adele: The singer has moved into the fashion spotlight

Adele - New Music - More Music Videos

Confidence equals style for the Grammy-winner, and her voluptuous figure is now much in demand by the A-list labels.

When Adele takes the stage at the Hollywood Bowl next Sunday alongside Etta James, it will be a dreamgirl moment. More than her stint at the famed BRIT School, the performing-arts breeding ground that also spawned Amy Winehouse, Adele credits her prodigious talent to the high priestess of soul, whose albums she listened to religiously in her bedroom as a teen.

But style, not song, first hooked Adele (born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins). At 13, she spotted an Etta James CD in a bargain bin at the HMV store in her native London. She had never heard of James but was instantly smitten. "Her blond weave and her catty eyes and her curves and her tight gold shimmery dresses, and just that attitude in her face and figure -- I was like, 'Oh my God, to die!' "

Replace the blond weave with a brushed-out beehive and the shimmery dress with a baggy "jumper," as she calls her oversize sweater, and Adele could easily be describing herself: a soul diva for the MySpace generation. Her figure, hair and liquid-lined eyes confer a retro swing that her dressed-down cool simultaneously refutes. When she thrusts out her hand to show off the 16-diamond Tiffany ring she gave herself for her recent 21st birthday, it's clear she's patrolling the border between streetwise girl and glamorous woman.

Lounging in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel in Manhattan, a far cry from her South London roots, Adele sips an espresso and drags on a Marlboro Light, exhibiting a poise that belies her years -- more Beyoncé than Britney. That outsized confidence is matched by outsized features: down-pillow lips, gem-green eyes, flame-red mane, rosebud complexion, heart-shaped dimpled chin. She exaggerates nature with plenty of nurture. "Oh, I love looking like a drag queen," she gushes. "Hair back-combed beyond belief, eyelashes galore, heavy contour. And I love my big, square, ghetto nails."

Her body is also big, if we're talking fashion-world metrics. Adele says she weighs 11 stone (154 pounds) and wears a British size 14 (size 12 in the U.S.) Does she feel pressure to slim down? "I've been the same since I was 15 and went on the contraceptive pill. I've got this far without looking like Britney Spears. I think I can go a bit further," she says with a satirical bite worthy of Jay McInerney.

Despite some to-be-expected snarkiness about it in the blogosphere, Adele's voluptuous figure is working in her favor. If a chance record-store encounter was her fashion awakening, her christening was landing a four-page spread in Vogue for this past May's annual "Shape" issue as the "curvy" icon. Topping that, Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor in chief, dressed her for the Grammys in a custom Barbara Tfank black satin dress belted to show off her waist, with a Stephen Russell 19th-century diamond brooch perched atop her generous décolletage.

Adele walked away from the night with two Grammys, and the event also placed her irretrievably in the fashion spotlight. Which is not entirely where she wants to be. "I'd much rather dress comfortable than become a trendsetter. I'd much rather be like this," she says, gesturing at today's outfit: a striped H&M baggy sweater over black American Apparel leggings, ankles peeking out of Chanel ballerina flats.

"I'm not that fussed about fashion," she says bluntly. But she's hardly ascetic. She raids the racks of Topshop, H&M and American Apparel for basics. She names Donna Karan, Moschino and Vivienne Westwood as beloved designers. Her London apartment is too tiny to accommodate her shoe and bag addiction -- Louis Vuitton, Gucci, tons of Manolo Blahnik and Chanel -- so she keeps stuff in storage at her dad's place. "I get bored of things after two months," she says. Yet she has an adult savvy about investment pieces, like her seven Chanel bags. "They'll be nice to have when I'm older," she says. "My favorite Chanel [a navy quilted-lambskin purse] I could probably still buy in 30 years."

Siren in waiting

Adele has come a long way since her early grunge days. More recently, she has shed kewpie bangs for the side-swept beehive that's now her signature -- "a neat housewifey one, not like Amy Winehouse's," she explains. Her go-to trapeze shapes are yielding to tailored silhouettes.

"When she walked into my studio, she reminded me of Lynn Redgrave in 'Georgy Girl,' " says Tfank, a Los Angeles designer who is creating Adele's outfit for the Hollywood Bowl. Tfank saw a '50s Hollywood siren waiting to be tapped. "She needs to show her body, not hide her body," the designer says. "She is more like Marilyn Monroe, who said, 'This is who I am.' "

For her part, Adele says, "Barbara brought out that thing of me wanting to dress up. People my age in the public eye -- a lot of them are, like, sluts." In the July issue of Nylon, she parades her newfound look: black, waist-defining dress with three-quarter length sleeves and knee-skimming skirt, black tights, vertiginous heels.

With the demands of stardom eating up her calendar -- she has spent more than a year touring her debut album, 19, which has sold more than a million copies worldwide -- Adele has enlisted a stylist, Gaelle Paul.

"The first time I met Adele she was in this incredible Ralph Lauren poncho," Paul says. "She was like, 'Can you believe my friends said this looks like a dishcloth?' I thought, 'She's rad!' "

Paul caters to the singer's classic-bohemian balance: "Very simple dresses from Prada look great. Anything Chanel fits her like a glove. Edgier labels like Isabel Marant speak to her hippie side."

These days, there's no shortage of A-list labels clamoring for a piece of Adele. Isn't that the ultimate fantasy, to be lavished with swag from the fashion gods? Adele enjoys the spoils, but is careful to maintain the rights to her image. "If they give me free stuff, I have to wear it. But I'm not into being an advertising board," she says.

She would consider a fashion campaign but has zero interest in runway posturing, à la Beth Ditto, the lead singer of the Gossip, who sat in the front row at the most elite shows of Paris fashion week this spring. And don't expect her to follow J. Lo's lead with a line of denim or fragrance. "I don't want to do 'Adele by Adele' perfume!" she wisecracks. As for singer-songwriter Duffy's star turn in a Diet Coke advertisement? "I think it's selling out," Adele says, though she's quick to praise Duffy's beauty. "I wonder if they did a Coke advert if they would do a voluptuous girl," she says with tongue in cheek.

Adele may not give a toss about fashion-industry norms, but there's no denying they remain the elephant in the room. When Ditto lands the debut cover of Conde Nast's new biannual Love, it still reads as provocation. Sure, Ditto was naked, but arguably what grabs attention are her resplendent ripples (the accompanying article put her weight at 170 pounds). Adele sloughs the whole thing off: "That cover was phenomenal. But if that's controversial, I think it's . . . lame."

She is similarly proud of her Vogue appearance, and dismisses the rumors first generated by Perez Hilton that the pictures had been Photoshopped: "Who doesn't get airbrushed? No one says anything when some skinny, blond, [busty], white-teeth girl gets airbrushed. Honestly, I've never looked that glamorous in a photograph. I was lying on a bed in a Michael Kors coat with my legs hanging out!"

To Adele, the equation is simple: Confidence equals good style. Asked who inspires her, she cites Beyoncé, because she knows how to dress her body; Sarah Jessica Parker, for pulling off gutsy clashes; Sharon Stone in the movie "Casino," Julia Roberts in "Erin Brockovich," Michelle Pfeiffer in "Scarface" -- all characters with a fearless self-possession. "The most important thing is the way that someone carries themselves. If they feel comfortable, they carry themselves differently," Adele says.

She practices what she preaches. "There is nothing apologetic about the way she looks. It's very celebratory," says Vogue's Hamish Bowles, who escorted Adele to the Grammys. "She might have reservations about showing some parts of her body, but I think she's a very healthy role model because she's sort of, 'Take me as I am.' "

Busy masterminding her second album, Adele is determined to remain honest, in her music style and her fashion style. She refused efforts to be paired with what she calls "dirty pop" producers because it doesn't suit her any more than Winehouse's cut-off jeans or Duffy's pin-up frocks do. "I'll just put my foot down and be like, 'No, I don't like that,' " she says. For her Devil Wears Prada moment, she even challenged Wintour's initial notion to put her in a tight dress. "I was like, 'I've got five bums, one extra belly. I'd rather do one that just flows over the bad parts.' "

Fans respond to that empowering stance. Heavyset girls crowd around her tour bus and praise her for helping them feel comfortable being themselves. "I think it's that I'm not trying to look 'normal,' " Adele says. "I don't feel the need to look good all the time. I want people to see me how I am."

So what will Adele wear to meet her hero at the Hollywood Bowl? She and Tfank are plotting something similar to the Grammys ensemble: a flocked black taffeta dress, this time with an open neckline and a cascading back, and likely diamonds galore.

But for the record: "I still love my leggings and jumpers," Adele says. "I would probably wear that if Barbara wasn't making my dress!"

Story - LA Times

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Vogue Article

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

At 20, the voluptuous, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Adele translates her passion for soulful sixties divas into a captivating style. Hamish Bowles delights in her unvarnished truth.

"I feel so proper," says Adele, laughing, as she eyes herself in the mirror of a Los Angeles hotel room while trying on the shapely black satin dress that Barbara Tfank has made for her to wear to the Grammy Awards. "From ladette to lady!" Adele's hair has been frantically teased and back-combed and looks "a little messed up," says her hairdresser, Kevin Posey, "like she could have done it," and her gray-green eyes are elaborately framed à la Dusty Springfield. "You look gorgeous!" says her manager, Jonathan Dickins. "I'm all proud!" Her product manager, Doneen Lombardi, comes in to see the effect and promptly bursts into tears.

"I feel like my nana!" Adele declares appreciatively. But with her voluptuous figure, peaches-and-cream complexion, and hair that she aptly describes as "ginger biscuit" color, there is something more period than merely old-fashioned about the way this soulful singer (who turns 21 in May) looks. She might be one of Charles II's court favorites, perhaps, or an actress painted by Reynolds or Romney, and her healthy bawdiness would certainly have been celebrated by Wycherley and Fielding.

It is this romantic quality that designer Tfank has played up. ("I'm gonna wear a big balcony bra and get me boobs up!" Adele announced when she first saw the portrait décolleté.) Tfank adapted the dress from a sleeveless model in her collection; Adele adroitly requested the just-above-mid-calf length, and sleeves to the elbow. "I don't like my arms—my upper arms," she explains. "It's the only feature I don't like about myself. I used to wear minidresses with jeans, but I get my legs out now."

Adele spins in her jive skirt. "I've got three bums, and this just sort of glides over them!" she says, laughing. She has few inhibitions about the way she looks. "Fans are encouraged that I'm not a size 0—that you don't have to look a certain way to do well.

"I like being comfy more than anything," she adds. Whether onstage or in her private life, Adele has a preference for trapeze shapes, or enveloping sweaters and cardigans in luxurious fabrics (she also likes "old vintage cardies with beads and pearls sewn into flowers"), worn with leggings and ballet pumps for a look that Posey characterizes as "Goldie Hawn on the Go-Go, or early-nineties hip-hop—but as though Chanel had done it. Really elegant but very urban and a little bit ghetto." Adele gleefully mixes high street—H&M, Miss Selfridge, Topshop—with British designer labels, including Vivienne Westwood and Aquascutum, and regrets that she no longer has time to rummage in street markets. She was delighted, during the American tour for her debut album, 19, to discover the "great vintage places in Portland, Oregon. Twenty on one block, all amazing. Better than Brick Lane."

"I'll go proper glam," Adele told Vogue when she first discussed her Grammy outfit. "Lots of diamonds!" The paste buckles on her vertiginous Manolo heels picked up the motif. She already owns a pair in blue, and another in silver—"They're the Carrie ones," explains the Sex and the City fanatic. "I buy a load of shoes, but I can't wear them!" Moments later she is bellowing, "Burns! Burns! Burns!" Johnny Cash-style as the strain of those heels begins to tell.

The following day, on the Grammy red carpet, Adele's prim look (given an edge with the "ghetto fabulous" black-on-white nails she had put on at a little place on Sunset Boulevard) sets her apart from the coruscating crowd. When she performs, standing shoeless on the darkened stage of the Staples Center, she looks oddly vulnerable and fragile—until her achingly powerful voice swirls and eddies through that vast space, revealing the force that roils within her.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins has come a long way from the hardscrabble district of south London where she was born to an eighteen-year-old single mother. (They remain a tight-knit pair. "We've always been on our own," says Adele. "She's the most supportive mum ever. She's my best friend. Hopefully I'll sell 20 million records and she'll never have to work again.")

Last October, when the Grammys were a dream away, I visited her in London's genteel Notting Hill neighborhood, where she was installed in a rental apartment near XL, her record label (she has since bought herself a little flat nearby, which her mother is decorating for her as a present). She had recently got into a scuffle with paparazzi before realizing to her considerable amusement that their intended quarry was Elle Macpherson, who she hadn't known lived next door. "I love it around here," Adele says. "It's really civilized, really quiet at night. Where I lived in south London, if I had scaffolding in my window like I do here, there's no way it wouldn't be broken into by now." However, she ruefully admits that most of her tight-knit circle of friends, living in the farther reaches of the metropolis, "can't even afford to get here"—a challenge for someone whose "friends are my life, and being in love is my life."

Whatever her surroundings, Adele is, unregenerately, a south London girl, with the attitude, street smarts, and salty vocabulary to match. ("I'm a bit mouthy," she admits.) When she found out a boyfriend had cheated on her, she tracked him down in a local pub and punched the living daylights out of him. ("Chasing Pavements," her hit single, was written about the dissolution of that relationship.)

Adele loathed her music teacher in high school ("She wouldn't let me in the choir!") and ran with what might politely be described as a "fast crowd." "It's so weird because my friends from then all had kids at sixteen," she says. "Can you imagine if I had stayed, and I was still in that crowd and did what my friends did? It would be awful."

Luckily, when Adele was sixteen, her mother enrolled her in the Brit School, a tuition-free performing-arts school whose alums include Amy Winehouse and Leona Lewis. "I never got bored, so I was never getting in trouble. I'd always had a problem taking teachers seriously, whereas there, you wanted to listen to them because they'd all done it, practiced whatever subject they were teaching."

She went through the fashion rites of passage of a working-class London girl. "From twelve to thirteen I was a Grunger," she remembers. "Criminal Damage jeans. Dog collars. Hoodies. We used to go to Camden [the raw, style-centric North London street market] all the time because we were, like, 'so dark.' Then I really got into R&B and became a Rude Girl—in Adidas, with a spit curl! Tiny Nike backpacks. Mine was black, with a logo bigger than the bag."

However übercool her teenage tribal aesthetic, Adele admits that she would hide in her room listening to Celine Dion and is still so in awe of the Spice Girls that she'd rather not meet any of them and break the spell. "It was always pop music," Adele says. "I listened to Jeff Buckley and Joan Armatrading because of me mum, but E17 were my boy band, and I loved Backstreet Boys, Aqua, Destiny's Child, Missy Elliott." (She still loves Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Scissor Sisters, Mika, and Katy Perry.)

But Adele's musical epiphany came at fourteen. "I remember being out at the record store HMV with all my friends. Downstairs is the jazz section. They had a two-for-one deal, two CDs for a fiver, and I bought Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James. I bought them because I loved their immaculate hairdos. And Etta James's eyes—the original Amy Winehouse eyes! I loved the vintage look of it." When she listened to Etta and Ella sing, "it changed my life," she says simply. "It was so heartfelt compared with the music I'd been listening to. Etta had a proper distraught life. She was a big heroin addict; her mum was a prostitute." In tribute, Adele often covers "Fool That I Am," one of James's standards.

Following this discovery, Adele's musical tastes were radically transformed. "I kind of got into the old legends—Roberta Flack, Johnny Cash, Diana Ross and the Supremes." However, she says, "it never really occurred to me that I could write my own songs and get away with it!" Then she saw a Lionel Richie interview with the BBC's Michael Parkinson. "When he met Marvin Gaye, he said, 'How can you write? You don't read music.' 'By humming,' he said. So I'd write vocal parts at home and hum to the guitarist."

In December 2006, her friend Jack Peñate (who had just released his debut single, "Second, Minute or Hour") asked her to open for him when he played at the Troubadour, an atmospheric venue in London's Earls Court, with space for little more than 100 people.

"I went on first and I was on my own, and the whole room was packed," she remembers. "It was hot. It was disgusting." Then she began to sing. "The whole room was silent, and I saw these random girls just, like, crying. That was the time I was like, 'Oh, my God, this is amazing, can't live without it.' There's nothing more freeing than playing live, nothing."

Adele still loves the intimacy of a small venue. "I like to hear people, their glasses tinkling and all that. I'd hate to play to people I can't even see and can't even hear. That'd be horrible." At a recent performance at Manhattan's China Club, her easy rapport with the small, industry-heavy audience was delightfully unprocessed. During the Q & A session she was asked, "What are you looking for in a boyfriend?" "I like a bit of drama!" she said. "Twenty-first-birthday plans?" "I'm going out to drink at every bar!" (Adele actually gave up alcohol after Christmas. "I'm quite enjoying it," she says. "I can remember everything that I do!" She does, however, smoke Marlboro Lights ceaselessly.)

Powerful though her live performances were, Adele's talents reached a much broader audience after a friend created a MySpace site for her. Adele admits she didn't really know what this was—until Lily Allen reinvented the rules of the industry when she launched her career through her own site (to date, Allen's songs from her site have been listened to 36 million times) and "MySpace blew up."

Nick Huggett of XL Recordings contacted Adele through MySpace, assuming that she already had a record deal and a manager. When he found out that she had neither, he set her up with manager Jonathan Dickins, and suddenly she had an album deal. 19 (her age at the time) was the result.

"It didn't even occur to me that a million-plus people would hear my record," she says (the album has sold 500,000), "and that people were gonna love it and criticize it. And it kind of frightens me sometimes 'cause I think my record's really honest—there's things in it that I'd never admitted to myself, that I would never just say in conversation. But then the other side of it is that I always get people coming up to me after shows and telling me that it helped them through their relationship at the time, which is an amazing feeling."

In a stroke of serendipity last fall, Adele was booked for Saturday Night Live on the same night as Sarah Palin. Seventeen million viewers tuned in. "It had been kind of underground till then!" says Adele, laughing. "I've had a really smooth ride. KT Tunstall played empty pubs for ten years."

Back in London in early December, Adele was in bed—"Googling to see if Leona Lewis had been nominated for the Grammys"—when Perez Hilton E-mailed to break the news of her first nomination. When Adele realized that she had been nominated for four Grammy Awards, "I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for an hour!" she remembers. "Then my agent—who was crying, too—came over," she says, adding, with characteristically deadpan drollery, "He was really stingy and brought round a bottle of champagne that I'd bought him for his birthday."

In Los Angeles for the Grammy Awards, Adele is as independent as ever. She eschews the industry parties, and instead, she and her new beau (a soft-spoken London lad with the looks of Michael York in Cabaret) have gone to catch up on the movies—Doubt, The Wrestler, Milk.

Her mother is not here to see her, and Adele guiltily confesses that she hid her passport. "It would be great to have her here," she explains, "but I feel really awkward if she's around when I'm working." Instead, she rings her from the red carpet to announce that she has won her first Grammy (for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance). Her mother just screams (it would be difficult to hear anything else above the roar). By the time she performs, Adele has beaten out the Jonas Brothers and her friend Duffy for Best New Artist.

After the ceremony, she skips the Woodstock-themed official Grammy after-party and what promises to be the achingly cool after-after-party that Coldplay have told her about down in Santa Monica. Instead she repairs to an In-N-Out Burger on Venice Boulevard. Her publicist Benny Tarantini takes the order. "Maybe I should get two milkshakes," she says, laughing. "To match me Grammys!"

"Feeling Groovy" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the April 2009 issue of Vogue.

 

 

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) - Jimmy Choo Fan

Sarah Jessica Parker's Big revelation

The trailer for the Sex and the City movie is playing on a loop in the press suite on the 20th floor of the Ritz Carlton, New York, and there's no denying - it's masterly.

Four years after the hit TV series ended, the film is everything that made the show a cult: the four girlfriends in arms are even more glossy (they look younger), the fashion more fabulous, and in a clever leap forwards, the leading women have all moved on and settled with their men, or, in the case of Carrie Bradshaw, are about to marry Big.

Sarah Jessica Parker, 43, has become a worldwide name due to her role as writer Carrie Bradshaw in the seminal TV series Sex And The City. She admits to being nervous about the release of the big screen version out later this month

"I always knew she would," coos Charlotte.

"You thought that after the second break-up?" Samantha enquires dubiously.

"After the 15th?" wisecracks Miranda.

She's so flawless on screen that it's a reality check when Sarah Jessica Parker high-steps into the room like a just-tamed colt.

She's doll-small - tiny, thin as a six-year-old - with none of the screen's stardust glow.

She's weirdly both Carrie and not Carrie - she has her enthusiastic voice and crazily toned legs, barely supported on towering Brian Atwood heels, and long, loosely curled blond-brown hair.

But she's also slighter and paler, with a business-like way of chewing gum, her pinched face matt with foundation, sheer pale lipstick overflowing a rosebud mouth, grey eyeshadow above thick mascaraed black lashes.

In the movie she's a golden girl; today, on a gilt chair in a room overlooking Central Park, SJP looks like a normal 43-year-old mum, if skinnier, faint lines running round her eyes and along her forehead.

The SATC dream team: Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica and Kristen Davis

It's not really surprising. Today she's ill and barely managed to make this interview, having cancelled yesterday's after her son, James, got a stomach bug while her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, was away.

"So I'm wearing a lot of make-up!" she exclaims wryly.

She shakes her head contritely.

"I'm so sorry about that. I would never miss work, ever.

"But I was throwing up every 20 minutes from 11 o'clock last night, round the clock.

"My son had it on Monday evening and he threw up straight through to 8am the next morning.

"By Tuesday I thought, 'Guess I dodged that!' Then at 6.30pm on Wednesday I was, like, 'Urgh!'"

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She meets your eyes as she talks and uses her blue-veined hands in more down-to-earth gestures than her skittish sex columnist alter ego would have.

She's also cleverer, generous with her answers and time, if a touch more passive-aggressive than her sweet-natured alter ego - she occasionally deliberately misunderstands questions, repeating them with a perplexed air and then pulling back with a sweet, "Oh, sorry!"

Original: the actresses in a 1998 promotional image for the series

It's common knowledge that SJP wanted to make the movie right after the series ended in February 2004, but Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha Jones, wouldn't get on board. Sarah Jessica rolls her eyes at the notion that the two fell out.

"How tired is that?" she groans.

So the film didn't go ahead then, "...because Kim didn't want to do it at the time," she finishes briskly for me.

"But the story they never tell with that is that no one ever denied her that choice.

"Were we disappointed? Yes.

"If it's about money, so be it. That's her choice."

And evidently that changed?

"Well, time passed," she says.

"And I really wanted Kim to do this movie. I didn't want to do it without her and it was important to me to get her back and to make her feel comfortable."

She admits to being nervous about it. Out later this month, the film is very much Sarah Jessica's project - she not only plays the lead but produced it as well (it was written and directed by Michael Patrick King).

'I just recognised that it was the right time, we couldn't let two more years pass, and there was an interesting story to tell, four years later,' Sarah Jessica says of the movie

"I just recognised that it was the right time, we couldn't let two more years pass, and there was an interesting story to tell, four years later," she remarks.

"And this couldn't be a movie about a bunch of girls running round New York having sex - I mean, it would just seem gratuitous, it's not where we ended the show.

"Unless you want to go back in time, and how do we do that? And I think Michael illustrates in the first few minutes of the movie how Carrie has been very successful in the past four years," she goes on.

"She's in a very successful relationship with a grown-up (ie, Chris Noth's Mr Big), she has figured things out.

"She really believes she knows this man and herself, and she's had a lot of satisfaction in work - she's had two more books published and she's working on her fourth.

"So she's a different person, just as all of us are after four years."

So the movie is deeper than the series?

Sarah Jessica nods. "Oh yeah. I hope so. It's more about grown women now."

She grins when asked if she herself would have gone for the complicated Big had she been single in real life (in the 1980s she lived with the actor Robert Downey Jr, who has struggled with drug addiction and spent time in jail, and she reportedly dated the late JFK Jr and the actor Nicolas Cage, so she has had her share of tricky men).

Sarah Jessica says of Carrie's relationship with Big (played by Chris Noth): 'I don't know if I would have stuck with a person like that. I don't know if I'd have had that fortitude'

"Umm," she ponders. "Physically? I might have been attracted to that. There's a lot that's seductive.

"I think he's a really interesting person. And the moment anyone keeps things from you it's like a magnet - you're drawn. He's a bright person and successful; if someone throws you enough bones, you go!

"But I don't know if I would have stuck with a person like that. I don't know if I'd have had that fortitude."

She seems to have chosen more wisely with Broderick, who she's been married to for 11 years.

Despite her recent confession on an American TV show that Matthew is "a complicated person" and they've had some "treacherous train rides", Sarah Jessica still thinks they have a good marriage: "It's a real privilege to be part of, but that doesn't mean I have any tips for anybody else about how to conduct theirs!

"I do think we're at an advantage living in New York, because we are in a town with other businesses and other industries, and I think that has allowed us not to be under the same sort of speculation that actors in Hollywood endure."

The couple live in a Greenwich Village townhouse with James, five. Sarah Jessica paints a down-to-earth picture of daily life, with her doing the school run and the chores.

"When I'm working we have the same nanny that James has had since he was four months old, this extraordinary lady named Myleena," she says, "and when I'm working she takes him to school, if Matthew can't. If Matthew can't pick him up she'll pick him up.

"And in the evenings, if I'm night shooting, or I have to go out, we have a lovely young lady named Kady. So he's had the same people his whole life, and they're amazing, and they're not overworked.

"I think we have really figured out how to work the house, and his needs are obviously the most important. He seems pretty content."

'Sure! I'm riddled with them (insecurities)! But as you get older you get better equipped to deal with them,' says Sarah Jessica

Six years ago she said she wanted "as many babies as is healthy" and two and a half years ago confided that she was longing for a daughter.

Now, she says, "It's a subject I don't talk about because no matter what you say, either it's, 'Poor Sarah Jessica, she wants more and hasn't had them,' or, if I say, 'No, we're quite content,' they say, 'What a cold, heartless, selfish...' So I don't talk about it."

As the youngest of eight (she has three siblings and four half-siblings), Sarah Jessica will say she is conscious that her son is growing up in extreme affluence compared to her childhood.

Her parents divorced when she was a baby and her mother Barbra got remarried to a truck driver. Sarah Jessica was raised in Cincinnati in poverty: "The problem with talking about it is that people like to put a Dickensian twist on it as if I were an orphan," she says.

"There were times when we didn't have electricity because we didn't pay the bill on time - we simply didn't have the money that month - and sometimes we relied on the government for free lunches.

"But my parents were very clever and industrious; culturally our lives were very rich, even though, in practical ways, things were kind of a mess."

Sarah Jessica has been married to actor Matthew Broderick for 11 years

She doesn't regret it, though. On the contrary, she is grateful.

Poverty gave her, she says, a work ethic.

"I started working at the age of eight (when she was the lead in a production of The Little Match Girl) and I've never borrowed a penny from anybody.

"I think it's a real privilege to grow up the way I did, and I think my son's strangely at a disadvantage because he's a child of affluence and he doesn't know what that means.

"That is a great concern to me. I almost wish we could create a false universe for him - I know this is going to be misinterpreted across the world, but I think there is something good about not having much."

I tell her Nigella Lawson recently remarked that she would not leave money to her children for the same reason.

"I understand that!" Sarah Jessica exclaims. "I think sometimes people interpret it as saying that a child of privilege has it worse than a child of nothing, and that's not at all what I'm saying.

"But I get concerned when a child's every whim is met and it's hard not to meet those whims when you have the money to do so."

She certainly does. Not long ago Sarah Jessica was named the richest woman in New York, an accolade that she maintains is not true.

She nevertheless has made millions, not from the series (the women were never paid that much), but from her best-selling fragrances, Lovely and Covet; Gap adverts; a deal with the cosmetics firm Garnier; a reputed £3.5 million fee for designing a clothing line, Bitten, for the US chain Steve & Barry's (in which everything costs under £10, in a nod towards her upbringing); her position as the face of Lux, and now the new movie.

Yet what's interesting about meeting her in the flesh is that this uber-celebrity not only looks perfectly normal but lives a normal life.

Sarah Jessica maintains that she doesn't go to Fashion Week, because, "If I had that kind of time I would be with my son, and the fashion shows are so intimidating", and insists that she only shops twice a year.

"It really doesn't happen much, so I borrow a lot and I treat it well."

Today, for instance, she is in a grey Versace jacket, beige Halston dress and Fendi clutch - far less quirky than Carrie - "and none of it mine!" (Later, Kristin Davis wanders in in pointed black stiletto boots and shiny black coat - a conversely racy and un-Charlotte-like outfit.)

My final question to this mega-star is if she has any insecurities.

This makes her stare in amazement.

"Sure! I'm riddled with them!" she exclaims.

"But as you get older you get better equipped to deal with them.

"It doesn't mean you triumph over them all the time. But I think insecurity can be a great motivator - as long as it doesn't rule the way you work in ways that are not helpful."

By now her PR is virtually tearing her hair out and brandishing her watch, so Sarah Jessica climbs gracefully on to her high heels.

"Thank you so much!" she cries and trips out of the room.

 

 

Jimmy Choo to launch H&M collection

It will be stilettos at dawn. And handbags in the afternoon, until they're all sold out.

The luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo is collaborating with high street store H&M.


Choo-in: Jimmy Choo's president Tamara Mellon says it's a 'privilege' to be designing a collection for H&M

The world-famous brand - chosen by the A-list for red carpet appearances and given mass appeal by Sarah Jessica Parker's character Carrie in Sex and The City - will be creating a line of covetable shoes and bags for H&M, as well as a line of women's clothing that will be designed to match the accessories.






The collection - expected to cause a stampede in stores when it arrives on November 14 - will start from as little as £30 for a pair of ballet pumps, with the most expensive shoe will be at £170.

Killer heels: A preview of the collection Jimmy Choo will be designing for the high street store

The collaboration is another coup for H&M, which has in the past produced collections with designers Karl Lagerfeld, Roberto Cavalli and Stella McCartney and stars Madonna and Kylie Minogue.

With Jimmy Choo shoes usually selling in excess of £400 and bags over £1,000, the more affordable H&M collection, on sale from November 14 in 200 stores across the world, is likely to create mass hysteria among shoppers.

Jimmy Choo's president Tamara Mellon said today she felt honoured to be among the fashion greats who have been affiliated with H&M.

Jimmy Choo president Tamara Mellon with a model trying on some of the pieces from the new range. A clothing line will be designed to match shoes and bags

'It's such a privilege to design a collection to appeal to fashion savvy, street smart women.

'Jimmy Choo will bring to H&M a sophisticated, fashion forward, accessible and glamorous collection - the perfect party pieces to wear out at night,' she added.

H&M's creative designer Margareta van den Bosch said: 'We adore Jimmy Choo's shoes and bags.

'I like the way we have worked with clothes to accessorise the shoes and bags rather than the other way around.

'H&M have teamed up with some of the biggest names in fashion over the last few years ... but this is seen by some as the biggest coup of them all.'

The Jimmy Choo brand has become synonymous with glamour. The label was co-founded in 1996 by Malaysian-born Choo and former Vogue accessories editor Tamara Mellon. It has since become a major global upmarket brand with stores on six continents.





But it's not just shoe-a-holic women who will benefit from Jimmy Choo's design prowess.

Long-suffering husbands and boyfriends can now find out what all the fuss is about as Jimmy Choo plan to create a men's collection of bags, shoes and clothing for H&M.

 

So for all the women out there who, like Carrie, spent the money they were saving up to buy a house on shoes instead, this could be the collaboration they've been waiting for.

Now they can afford the shoes and the apartment.

Story - DailyMail.co.uk

 

Olympic gold medalist Victoria Pendleton swaps lycra for green haute couture

Victoria Pendleton, the Olympic gold medalist, is swapping cycling Lycra for recycled haute couture in a bid to encourage people to live more sustainable lives.

The design by Wayne Hemmingway is based on a green Union Flag and made entirely from recycled materials.

Pendleton will wear the creation on the first Green Britain Day, organised by EDF Energy to inspire Britons to cut the UK's carbon footprint in time for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

EDF Energy is asking people around Britain to "do something green for the team" on July 10 and sign-up to Team Green Britain a website full of ways to cut carbon emissions

Pendleton is supporting the initiative along with a number of her Olympic team mates including rowing champion James Cracknell, swimmer Eleanor Simmonds - Britain's youngest Paralympic gold medallist, rower Tom James and gymnast Louis Smith.

The day will culminate in a concert at The Eden Project in Cornwall starring musicians Paul Weller and the band Florence and the Machine.

Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF Energy, which is sponsoring the London games as sustainability partner, said: "Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing us. As an energy company, EDF Energy has a responsibility to be at the heart of the solution to climate change and we have the expertise to help people use their energy more efficiently."

Sebastian Coe, chair of the games' organising committee, commented: "London 2012 is all about using the power of the games to inspire change and it's fantastic to see EDF Energy, the first sustainability partner of London 2012, taking this on in their activation.

"The Green Britain Day campaign is a great way for people to come together and make a difference."

Victoria's secrets

Story From Guardian.co.uk

Sprint cycling is about machismo. So how did petite, feminine Victoria Pendleton become world champion? She tells Emma John

Some years ago, when Victoria Pendleton was introduced to her new French-Canadian coach, his verdict was instantaneous. 'He looked me up and down, and said, "You're too skinny, too puny to be a sprint cyclist."' In a sport that requires explosive moments of acceleration, the men and women have always been physically imposing: short limbs, huge muscles and necks like fire hydrants. Lined up against her opponents, the now 27-year-old Pendleton - lithe, petite and unashamedly feminine - looks entirely out of place. Yet she is the world champion, and - if we dare say it out loud - Britain's surest thing at the Beijing Olympics.

When she entered track cycling's world championships in Mallorca last year, no British woman had ever won a sprint event. Pendleton competed in three of the toughest - the 200metres sprint, the team sprint (with Shanaze Reade), and the keirin (a mass sprint from a rolling start). She won them all. The Great Britain team finished with 11 medals, five ahead of their nearest rivals, Australia; triple-world champion Pendleton went on to be named Sportswoman of the Year at two separate national awards last December.

The general perception of cycling has, perhaps, never been worse; mention the sport to most people and they think of road racing, its doping scandals and tarnished Tour de France winners. But track cycling - which has none of road racing's commercial enticements - has grown into one of the UK's strongest sporting disciplines, and the one most likely to bring home golds at this summer's Games. It also has a considerably cleaner record. Pendleton - a stickler for the rules, who gives her address to the drugs testers every day - has become its charismatic icon.

'When I was a child,' Pendleton says, 'and my dad asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I never ever knew. All I wanted to do was be really, really good at something ... Once you've had a taste of that you want to do it again, to better it. I need it.'

We meet in Manchester, where Pendleton will compete in the 2008 world championships this month and which is her base for 10 months of the year - it's the only city in England with a velodrome where she and the British team can practise. 'The only problem,' she says with a laugh, 'is that all the things Manchester is great for - the clubs, the music scene - is the stuff I can't do.' Which is a shame, because you suspect chatty, sparky Pendleton would be brilliant fun on a night out.

Whatever her coach may have said, she is not puny. Her figure is a taut, compact powder keg. Her arm and leg muscles are elegantly defined; her sculpted abdominals could make a man weep into his protein shake. While endurance cyclists tend to be lean and sinewy, Pendleton relies on pure strength. 'There isn't a perfect body type,' she says, 'but as a track cyclist I just have to make sure I'm as powerful as possible compared to my body weight. You don't want to grow too much in size because that would work against you aerodynamically. My strength-to-weight ratio is very high and that's probably why I've had so much success.' She must be able to run 100m damn fast. 'I don't know,' she giggles. 'I'm not allowed to run. I'd pick up an injury instantly because my body's not used to it.'

The majority of her training, when she is not pounding her bike round a 250m track at speeds of up to 40mph, is lifting weights in the gym. We're not talking the shoulder-press and lat pulls here; no, this is the Olympic-style 'powerclean', lifting barbells over her head like a fairground strongman. She loves it, she says, because 'it's a mini-sport within my own sport'. Another opportunity to feed that gnawing competitive drive.

Sprint cycling lives on machismo. The 200m sprint - the only female discipline in this summer's Olympics - is the toughest event of them all, a one-on-one pursuit race in which two cyclists stalk each other warily around the steeply banked track until one makes a break and they race to the finish at lung-bursting speed. Reflexes must be instantaneous; muscles ready to explode; psyches unassailable. In this cat-and-mouse sport of anticipation and reaction, mental strength is just as important as physical. As Pendleton points out: 'You can be the fastest out there and make a mistake and come last, because you look over your wrong shoulder for a split second.'

Trackside, image is everything. 'How you portray yourself and how you appear, that's a very important part of the game. You make sure you seem as strong and confident as possible, you don't want to show any of your weaknesses.' Competitors act the part from the moment they enter the contest. 'You stick your chest out, keep your head high.'

As a result, the sport has tended to prize masculinity above all other traits, and even the women have buzzcuts (or, in the case of the Ukrainian team, Pendleton tells me, horrendous mullets). Body consciousness has, she believes, kept a lot of women out of the sport. 'If you show a girl a picture of a sprint cyclist, a guy all stacked up with massive muscles, they're not going to want to do that.' Until Shanaze Reade, world champion BMXer, swapped camps and joined her at the track, Pendleton trained for years without a single female colleague.

She has determined to stay different, to retain and celebrate her femininity. It has been suggested to her that her long wave of dark brown hair may be a hindrance, but defiantly it remains. The day before we meet, she had a manicure at the Lowry Hotel's spa, a little luxury that means a great deal because come competition time she won't be allowed to have nails long enough to paint. She's been around 'the guys' - veteran British cyclists such as Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins - long enough to cope with their teasing if she wears a dress, or says something 'ditzy'. After all, when her gears need changing, it's Pendleton who plays the mechanic.

Having to keep up with the boys is nothing new for Pendleton. Her father, Max, first put her on a bike when she was six and she grew up competing fiercely with her twin brother, Alex. She couldn't get enough of sport, whether it was tackling girls in netball or taking on the lads at mixed hockey. 'I did everything - even cross-country running, though I hated it. I always picked games up pretty fast but no one ever told me I could be an athlete. Only my dad, and you don't believe your parents, do you? They have to say that you're good.'

Her dad is mentioned a lot; she clearly holds him in a great deal of esteem and affection. It was he who spotted, and nurtured, both a natural sporting ability and a desire to win. Her elder sister Nicola, whom he also taught to ride, found the pressure too much; Alex, on the other hand, was too laid-back. 'Sometimes it was really hard,' Pendleton says. 'When we went riding when I was young, my dad would go out a long way in front and I'd have to catch him up. He wouldn't even look back. I'd think, "Does he even care if I'm here?"' She worries after telling that story; she doesn't want to make her dad sound like a pushy parent, because she's grateful for all he did. Fair enough, I say - you wouldn't have kept cycling if you didn't love it. But Pendleton shakes her head; she prefers to be honest. 'I didn't love it some of the time. Some of the time I hated it and wanted to give up. But I'm so glad I didn't, because otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunities I have now.'

Pendleton was spotted by a national coach at the age of 16, but wanted to finish her education before concentrating on sport. After graduating from Northumbria University with a sports science degree in 2002, she was ready to take up cycling full-time; having made a very creditable debut in the Commonwealth Games that year, she was sent to the World Cycling Centre at Aigle in south-west Switzerland. For two years, she trained every day. By the time she arrived in Athens for her first Olympics in 2004 she was considered a genuine contender.

It was a disaster. 'I was totally underprepared to be in a competition at that level, psychologically and physically. I'd been basically thrown to the lions.' Even before the contest began, the Olympic village had overwhelmed her. 'Surreal is the only word to describe it. People from all over the world are interested in you. You eat in a giant dining hall. You take drinks out of cupboards and they're all free. It's just bizarre.

'All these different nations are supposedly living in harmony, but you sense the very high levels of stress, you can feel it. A lot of people hide it well, but underneath everybody is anxious about performing.' She found herself in a mental limbo. 'It was almost like I wasn't there. I wasn't fully aware of being there, concentrating and focused like I should have been.' She berated herself for her poor performances without understanding them; in the final reckoning, she finished ninth.

Pendleton admits that, unlike her twin brother, she is the kind of person who gets 'strung out'. And while she still had to improve physically, it was her mind that really needed rebuilding. Steve Peters, the British team's psychologist, worked with her, breaking down assumptions and beliefs that were causing her to tense up at crucial moments, not unlike a wheel locking up under braking. He asked her why she cycled, what drove her to succeed; gradually, he helped her gain invaluable perspective. 'In the weird environment of an athlete, your performance is the most important thing in the world: how fast you are today, whether you're going to be faster tomorrow. You feel judged on what you're going to achieve, because that's what sport's about. If someone says it's the taking part that counts, I say, "Not in my world it isn't."

'It sounds really obvious,' she adds, 'but sometimes you have to take a step back and look at sport for what it is. I have to be realistic about what I do: at the end of the day, what I do is entertainment.'

It must have worked, because only a year later, in 2005, Pendleton won her first world championship gold. A gold and a silver followed at the 2006 Commonwealth Games; then, last year in Mallorca, she achieved her treble - and became the one person that every female track cyclist now wants, and needs, to beat. Her closest rival is Natalia Tsylinskaya of Belarus, who has won eight world titles herself and is unlikely to enjoy being ousted as queen of the track. Pendleton is also keeping her eye on the Chinese: 'There are a few girls coming through who have shown a lot of improvement and are a threat because you don't know what they're capable of yet.'

We eat a Wagamama takeaway while we chat; she has ordered a yaki soba without even looking at the menu, a sure sign, I suggest, of a regular patron. She grins - when she was on a training camp in Perth, Australia, earlier in the year she and Chris Hoy could be found at the franchise most evenings. 'Food is the one indulgence I can afford myself,' she says. Ah, the life of the professional sportswoman - no alcohol, no late nights, and, I imagine, a sex ban from the coach. 'Oh no, we're allowed to do that,' she says. 'Just not with each other.'

With 10 months of her year spent on the international circuit, and the remainder spent feeling knackered, she has to live what she calls 'a very sensible existence'. When new acquaintances ask what she does in her spare time, she tells them: 'I eat and I sleep. I enjoy a nice sit-down with a cup of tea and a piece of cake.' She used to do dress-making - 'I love sewing, but you can't take a sewing machine away with you when you go to training camps' - and she still enjoys baking; her favourite recipe is a 'French cake' she learnt from her mum, a fat-free sponge layered with apricot jam and Grand Marnier and covered in dark chocolate (and if you're not salivating at the thought of that, you need your taste buds checked). She misses her girlfriends from her home in Stotfold, Bedfordshire, and doesn't like to talk about her day job in company ('My life seems quite dull - I ride around in circles').

If she sounds like an old-fashioned girl, a few minutes watching her power around the track will shake the impression. This month, she is defending her world titles at her home circuit. If she is successful, she will be Britain's most talked-of Olympic contender; and for these Games, she will be prepared. 'The experience [of 2004] will mean a lot,' she says. 'I think it will make a significant difference to how I will approach this one.' And her rivals? 'They're probably more worried about me, which is a comforting thought.'