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Tag: Jess

  • Smart casual is halfway between dressed up and dressed down: here’s how to do it | Jess Cartner-Morley

    Smart casual is halfway between dressed up and dressed down: here’s how to do it | Jess Cartner-Morley

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    Smart casual is not just a dress code – it is modern life in outfit form. Smart casual dressing tells the world that you are someone who gets it. It shows that you know how the world works now, what the spoken and unspoken rules are.

    If a pinstripe suit and a pocket square make you look creaky and antiquated and ripped jeans and a scruffy T-shirt make you look a bit of a loose cannon, smart casual – say, for the sake of argument, a stripe shirt with pleat-front trousers, chunky-soled loafers and a couple of necklaces – identifies you as someone who can be relied upon to steer a path through the middle ground.

    Let me put it like this. Say you go for dinner to a nice restaurant. If you turn up in ripped jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, your friends might get the idea that you’d rather be home with a takeaway on the sofa, and that can make them feel uncomfortable.

    Rock up in the pinstripes and pocket square, on the other hand, and they start to worry that you are expecting silver service and are going to kick off about the modishly uncomfortable bench seating. In the era of small-plates dining, when modern manners are not about how to hold a fish fork but about how to divide a quail between three people without splattering anyone with miso butter, the well-dressed diner needs to show they can walk a delicate line.

    There are some things to bear in mind though. Smart and casual are not two fillings that you smoosh together like peanut butter and jelly in a sandwich. Not a fancy top with low-fi bottoms, or vice versa. That way chaos lies.

    The way to make smart casual look intentional rather than a bit all over the place is to think of it as a smart outfit that you are simply making a little bit more casual. You could also approach it the other way, starting with a casual outfit and making it a little bit smart. But in practical terms I find it is easier to ease up a formal look than to smarten up an informal one.

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    It helps if you think of smart casual as about looking modern rather than a halfway house between dressed up and dressed down. So we start with a straightforward template for looking smart – a cotton shirt and tailored trousers, say. What you are aiming for is to make this look a bit cooler and less stuffy. It’s not just about leaving the suit jacket off or rolling up the sleeves of your slim-fit cotton shirt. That was smart casual two decades ago – and just Rishi Sunak today.

    One easy trick to make the proportions look breezier is to choose an oversized shirt so it blousons out over the waistband of your trousers.

    Another is to make the shoes chunky. Instead of classic slim-profile loafers, bring some bounce with a chunky lug-soled supersized version. Which you might want to accentuate with a colourful or glittery pair of socks. The older I get, the more I appreciate the power of a great pair of socks.

    Or maybe you want to start with a dress. The best way to make a smart dress casual is to do something unexpected with it. You could layer a red cotton polo neck or a Breton T-shirt underneath a dress with a deep V neckline. Or you could dial down the tea-party cuteness of a floral dress by layering a neutral knit sweater vest over the top.

    Don’t overcomplicate it, because if you are doing it right you need to make it look effortless. Just like modern life.

    Model: Ana at Body London. Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Davines and Dermalogica. Shell print shirt: H&M. Trousers: Mango. Shoes: Ivylee

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    #Smart #casual #halfway #dressed #dressed #heres #Jess #CartnerMorley
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Ali died days before he could challenge BP’s CEO on the dangers of gas flaring. Don’t let his death be in vain | Jess Kelly

    Ali died days before he could challenge BP’s CEO on the dangers of gas flaring. Don’t let his death be in vain | Jess Kelly

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    Ali Hussein Jaloud, a 21-year-old Iraqi who lives next to one of BP’s biggest oilfields, was meant to ask a question at the company’s annual shareholder meeting today. He was going to challenge the CEO on why his company continues to poison his neighbourhood with cancer-causing pollution. But, just a few days ago, Ali died of a form of leukaemia that has been linked to chemicals released by the burning of fossil fuels. His grieving father will ask why BP did not use its vast profits to help save his life.

    Over the past two years, my fellow investigator Owen Pinnell and I got to know Ali while making a documentary for BBC News Arabic, Under Poisoned Skies, which revealed the deadly impact of gas flaring in southern Iraq, including at BP’s Rumaila oilfield where Ali lives, surrounded by oil company-patrolled checkpoints. We also found out that Rumaila has more gas flaring than any other oilfield in the world.

    Routine gas flaring is a wasteful and avoidable practice used by oil companies to burn off the natural gas expelled during drilling. The process releases both greenhouse gases and dangerous air pollution. The gas could be captured instead and used to power people’s homes, saving them from dangerous emissions. But for more than a decade, BP and its partners have failed to build the necessary infrastructure. Since the Iraq war, BP has extracted oil worth £15.4bn from the country. BP said it was “extremely concerned” by the issues raised by our film (and in February said it was working to reduce flaring and emissions at Rumaila) but announced record profits from the oilfield in the year we launched the film.

    A keen footballer, Ali was diagnosed with leukaemia at 15. He had to drop out of school and his football team, and embark on two painful years of treatment. His family had to sell their furniture and take donations from their community to pay for it. “Sometimes I wished I would die so that I could stop torturing my parents,” he told us. But, miraculously, Ali survived. He was too old to return to school, so he set up a small mobile phone shop.

    Ali had been told by doctors that pollution had probably caused his cancer, and he quietly started advocating for a greener Iraq, one where children could breathe clean air. In his last Instagram post, just days before his death, Ali called for the oil companies to stop routine gas flaring and “save the youth of the country from kidney failure and cancer”.

    Excess gas is burned off near workers at the Rumaila oil field, south of Basra
    ‘In Iraq, the law states that gas flaring shouldn’t be closer than 10km (6 miles) from people’s homes.’ Excess gas is burned off near workers at the Rumaila oil field, south of Basra. Photograph: Atef Hassan/REUTERS

    Rumaila, the town where Ali was living, is heavily guarded and journalists are denied access, so we asked Ali to record video diaries documenting his daily life. In the first scene of our film, he opens his front gate to reveal a towering black cloud of smoke, just a few hundred metres away, beneath which children play hopscotch. In Iraq, the law states that gas flaring shouldn’t be closer than 10km (6 miles) from people’s homes.

    “These children are happily playing, they’re not aware of the poison that is coursing through their veins,” he says over the video. In the next shot, he loads his cute five-year-old nephew, Abyas, on to the front of his motorbike and they scoot off, passing the primary school, which is also engulfed in thick black smoke, before arriving at a spot by the canal where gas flares punctuate the skyline in every direction.

    When we showed that footage to David Boyd, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, he called it “a textbook example of a modern sacrifice zone, where profit is put above human life and the environment”.

    Ali helped us uncover high levels of the cancer-causing chemical, benzene, produced by gas flaring, in the air and bodies of children living in his community. Benzene is known to cause acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) – the cancer from which Ali and many other children we met were suffering. After our documentary appeared, the Iraqi government acknowledged, for the first time, the link between the oil industry’s pollution and the local population’s health problems.

    In December 2022, we found out Ali’s leukaemia had returned. His doctor in Iraq said that his only option was palliative care. But his father, who described Ali as his best friend, refused to accept this. He found a doctor at Columbia University who said that Ali could be eligible for experimental T-cell therapy. A supporter of the film, Callum Grieve, began a fundraising campaign to try to raise the £70,000 needed to send him to India. The donations were steady, but relied on the generosity of ordinary people with only small sums to give.

    I began to notice in our calls with Ali that his face looked bloated, and his cheekbones hidden because of the effects of steroids. But I had no idea we would lose him so soon. On Friday 21 April, the first night of Eid, we received the terrible news that Ali had died. We had already lost to cancer three of the children we got to know while making this film.

    A Guardian investigation found that nine million people a year die as a result of air pollution. Getting to know Ali helped to make that feel like much more than a statistic.

    Despite the barren and apocalyptic landscape Ali grew up in, he was a keen gardener. He used to send us videos of him watering the tiny, sparse patch in his front yard where he grew a handful of small palms and some unusual species like the “bambara” or white mulberry tree. When we showed him pictures of the countryside in England, he marvelled at the greenery and the clear skies. It contrasted so starkly with the constantly orange and acrid sky he was used to.

    Companies like BP are still breaking Iraq’s law by gas flaring illegally close to people’s homes. If you are looking down on us now, Ali, please know that your death will not be in vain. Britain’s biggest pension fund, Nest, and other investors are launching a shareholder rebellion against BP for rolling back on its climate targets. They told us their actions were partly inspired by our film. And this story could help secure justice for the thousands of lives put at risk by pollution from fossil fuel companies.

    • Jess Kelly is a documentary film-maker and journalist. Owen Pinnell also contributed to this piece.

    • Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.



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    #Ali #died #days #challenge #BPs #CEO #dangers #gas #flaring #Dont #death #vain #Jess #Kelly
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Jess Cartner-Morley’s forever fashion: ‘I’ve had this dress 21 years. When I say “this old thing”, I mean it’

    Jess Cartner-Morley’s forever fashion: ‘I’ve had this dress 21 years. When I say “this old thing”, I mean it’

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    This is how long I’ve been wearing this dress: I thought about reproducing the older photo you see here when having my picture taken for this, but I couldn’t make it work because Alfie, the baby son I’m holding, is at university in a different city. Alfie is now 20; the dress is almost a year older.

    The funny thing is that, when I bought it, I wasn’t at all sure I’d get much wear out of it. The year was 2002, Net-a-Porter had recently launched and “internet shopping” was an exciting new world. Diane von Furstenberg and her wrap dresses were enjoying a renaissance. Her New York fashion show that season was a headily glamorous scene, Ellen Barkin clinking champagne glasses with Paris Hilton. Also, I go weak in the face of leopard-print anything, always have done. I saw this dress, dropped a few heavy hints to my husband, Tom, about my upcoming 29th birthday and before I knew it I was lifting it out of layers of black tissue paper and putting it on for the first time for a birthday dinner at our local Italian.

    But then – plot twist! – about a week later, it turned out that I was pregnant with Alfie. A wrap dress doesn’t really work without a waist, so within a couple of months this dress was relegated to the back of my wardrobe.

    By the time Alfie was six months old, the dress was back in my life – as was the champagne, as you can see. (Yes, I was still breastfeeding – but it was the 00s, we did things differently.) And I’ve been wearing it ever since. I’ve worn it to two weddings and a christening. I’ve worn it to Ascot – with a dodgy asymmetric fedora hat, not its finest hour, with the benefit of hindsight – and to interview Von Furstenberg herself. (Never underestimate the power of sucking up to an interviewee.)

    Jess Cartner-Morley with her son Alfie
    20 years ago … Jess Cartner-Morley with Alfie. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

    I used to dry-clean it, but I’ve found that washing it on cold in the machine and letting it air-dry works just as well. It is pretty much as good as new. And it isn’t, actually, the oldest thing that I still wear – there is a Gap flippy black above-the-knee skirt, still a staple of my summer wardrobe, that I have had since I was a student. When I say “this old thing”, I mean exactly that.

    This is quite categorically not intended to portray me as a saintly pioneer of sustainability. I am nothing of the sort. For many years I bought way, way too many clothes. In the glory years of the big Topshop at Oxford Circus, I sailed up those escalators laden with shopping bags on a Saturday afternoon in blissful ignorance, like a passenger on the Titanic knocking back the Moët even as the ship tilts. I overshopped, and I wish I hadn’t. I have a lifetime of buyer’s remorse, and more clothes than anyone could ever need. The least I can do now is keep wearing the clothes I already own, instead of buying more. A leopard doesn’t change his spots, after all. And I have no plans to change out of these ones.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Women suffer guilt, abuse and disapproval. No wonder Jacinda Ardern is knackered | Jess Phillips

    Women suffer guilt, abuse and disapproval. No wonder Jacinda Ardern is knackered | Jess Phillips

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    Jacinda Ardern has no gas left in the tank to continue as the prime minister of New Zealand. Her resignation speech was the sort of rare and dignified moment that we have come to expect from her, as a woman who presented the world with the kind of leadership that uniquely lent on her emotional intelligence. I’ll miss her tone and grace. She leaves a legacy she can be proud of.

    I have been thinking about what burned the fuel that she relied on to govern.

    Firstly I have no doubt that she felt the constant guilt that pretty much every woman in the world feels the moment they evacuate their womb of a child. Even the Mary Poppins-style perfect, Instagram-polished mothers of the world fret that something they do will harm their child in some way. I asked my husband, who has always been our son’s primary carer, if he ever felt guilty for missing a school play or staying late at work. He looked at me baffled; the concept was lost on him. He just thinks, “I had to go to work,” and that’s the beginning and end of that moral maze for him. For me, there is a constant torture and self-loathing about how my choices might affect them. No matter how I try to push away the societal grooming, it is always there. For Ardern there will have been column inches aplenty to keep the torture prickling her skin.

    This is not to say that most working women don’t just push through this: they do so every single day in every single workforce in the country. It just burns up fuel, fuel that others don’t need to spend. It is tiring and saps our bandwidth.

    The pressure pushed on to working women is tiring enough without it being amped up by being a public woman – and the worst of all offences, to some, a political woman. The thing that burns my fuel to the point of a flashing emergency light and a blaring alarm is the abuse and threat of violence that has become par for the course for political women. Jacinda Ardern will have suffered this mercilessly. Today, colleagues and admirers discussed the extent to which that constant threat of abuse contributed to her burnout.

    Those threats came from many sources, too: people who hate progressive women and believe they are damning masculinity; anti-vaxxers outraged by her tough Covid stance; those with a general loathing of all politicians.

    Combine the two fuel burners and what you end up with is the terrible guilt, fear and shame that decisions you have made in your career, or your political stances (no matter how much you believe in them), put your children, loved ones and employees in danger.

    Moments before I started writing this, I spoke to a woman who works for me who told me she wouldn’t be in work on a particular day because she had to give evidence in court after an incident in my office. She was not the target: it was me. When my children at school have to answer questions from their classmates about stances I have taken, or are told hateful and untrue things that have been published about me, or when they act hyper-vigilantly in public crowds, aware of the threat to us, my heart breaks and more fuel burns up.

    No doubt this is something all men and women in political life experience. However, studies show that the level of violence – often sexualised violence – and the threat that female politicians face is incomparable. I am used to it. I wish I wasn’t; but I also wish I was a size 10. but I will also never get used to the effect it has on other people; it is so very tiring. It’s just something else I have to consider on top of worrying about policy and details, and fallout, and loyalties. It burns fuel.

    What can we do about it? Like Jacinda, I believe the answer is being honest about the fact that politics is an emotional not a bureaucratic game. And constantly pushing for a more empathetic political environment, which will be brought about by having more female leaders and politicians, not fewer.

    I am not so idealistic as to think politics is going to change its stripes in my time. But we must build the structures into our politics and our media that damn and criminalise the perpetrators of this abuse, and those who make massive profits from spreading it. We must create support structures female politicians and activists can lean on without being seen negatively or as weak.

    Alas, even as I pen my suggestions for change, I know that it is women who will have to do the labour to achieve it, just like we always do. This work takes more fuel – fuel others don’t have to use up in the pursuit of a political life. No wonder Jacinda’s knackered.

    Jess Phillips is Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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    #Women #suffer #guilt #abuse #disapproval #Jacinda #Ardern #knackered #Jess #Phillips
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )