The black director's chair became free and my tummy started doing somersaults. My turn had arrived. Standing next to my best friend, mum encouraged me to step forward so I could choose a little pair of diamonte studs. The day had come after months of begging: I was about to get my ears pierced and 10-year-old me couldn't have been prouder to be experiencing this milestone in Claire's Accessories. The US retailer was a beacon of my childhood and that's why it made me sad to hear it will file for administration, putting 281 stores and over 2000 jobs at risk in the UK. While there's no denying the retail landscape has struggled in recent years and the cost of living crisis continues to wreak havoc with our disposable income, it still pains me to think of a high street without Claire's Access...
There are a lot of things I didn’t expect to have on my 2021 bingo card (including, let’s be honest, using the phrase “2021 bingo card”), and one is babushkas coming back in style. My Ukrainian grandmother wore a babushka. Queen Elizabeth II wears a babushka. But I would have never in a million years guessed we’d see babushkas on the high-fashion runways in London, Milan, and Paris — and neatly knotted under the necks of celebrities like Tracee Ellis Ross, A$AP Rocky, and Chloë Sevigny. (And just so we’re clear, I’m referring to headscarves here, not grandmas, which is what the word actually means in Russian.) Growing up Ukrainian-American, there was nothing high fashion about the babushka (which we called a khustka). It had everything to do with t...