Oxford chic meets ethnic peasantry
The other day I was sitting opposite a girl in the lower Rad Cam who kept getting her dangly earrings caught in her pashmina. Every few minutes she put down her pen to disentangle the offending item from the swathe of cashmere swaddled around her neck. What is it about English students and accessories? Or, more precisely, English students and ethnic accessories? Suddenly the lower Rad Cam has become a meeting point of east and west: at every table sits a girl in miss sixty jeans and poncho, reading Shakespeare whilst negotiating the perils of over-accessorizing. Oxford chic meets South American peasantry; Prada jostles with Bolivian alpaca - this is the look of the 'ethno-rah', the girl who can't quite let go of her gap year wardrobe - ethnic accessories flung together with staple highstreet items in a sartorial embracing of cultures. It is a look that has sprung up with the gap year phenomenon, as if we must wear little pieces of the Inca/Aztec/Indian cultures we have visited in order to prove we have been there at all....
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f you've ever wondered where the old TV adage 'never work with animals' comes from, then Alex Griffiths is the person to ask. A former zoology graduate from St Hilda's, she has spent the last three years working for the BBC on the new David Attenborough series The Life of Mammals.
Features: Return of the rainbow warriors
Milou is ecstatic as she watches the colourful sea of people stream by. "We've built a monument to peace and we've placed it in the capital of art." Hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million, have come to Florence, like her, to take part in the demonstration. The biggest that is remembered, in Europe, against war. "This is a historic event," she whispers. ...