Wednesday 15th October 2025
Blog Page 511

This House Believes Dogs are a Man’s Best Friend

William McCathie and Jasper Evans
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This House Believes Dogs are a Man’s Best Friend

Proposition: A friendship sixty thousand years in the making – Jasper Evans, Lady Margaret Hall

This morning I took my dog Gustavo (Gus, to his friends) for a walk. As we enjoyed our government-mandated thirty minutes of exercise he began to sniff. He slowed, padded gracefully towards a wall and stopped. For ten seconds of leg shaking, hard-squeezing silence we kept eye contact before he stood back up again. He looked at me, and then back at his turd. And as I went to pick up the brown monstrosity, I thought to myself: ‘what is this, if not true friendship?’

For the relationship between dog and man is truly one of the most special in this usually alienating world. While less complex than relationships between humans, it is purer, unadulterated love. It is the love of best friends. Unlike a human, a dog won’t love you for clout, won’t hang around you to meet other people, won’t like you until you’re uncool. As shown by the loyalty of dogs to those even in the direst of circumstances, dogs don’t even stay with you for food. They are the Forest Gump of friends: dumb, kind and loyal until the end.

And unlike other friends, dogs provide great value for friendship. Never have I seen my mate sniff the air and tell me blood sugar was low. Nor have I seen a friend rip a man’s arm off with his teeth for breaking into my house (although, now that I think about it, that would lead me to reconsider my friendship). As shown by dogs that work in the police, they can easily detect drugs in the air, and yet you would never fear your humble hound selling you out to the police. As friends go, dogs are remarkably useful.

So, dogs are clearly good friends, but can they really be rewarded the title of man’s best friend? It is, undoubtedly, a hotly contested throne. Cats would seem the most obvious rival, but their imperious, elitist stare must eliminate them. A cat wouldn’t tell you if your blood sugar was low, even if it knew. It would slowly purr as you struggled to find the medication it had knocked off the table, then escape via the tiny door it insisted you put in. Hamsters and Guinea pigs seem inferior in terms of conversation. Dogs truly seem to (albeit unsuccessfully) attempt to grasp what you say to them, like someone who’s just passed their GCSE in Spanish trying to listen to a real conversation. Rodents only stare at a noise. Fish are too wet, birds are always high, and snakes are, well, snakes. It seems there is no clear competition.

It simply boils down to the fact that dogs have a sixty-thousand-year advantage hard-wired into their blood. Dogs are the only animals that have evolved with us. Together we’ve seen through ice ages and Neanderthals, the saber-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoth. Dogs were there for it all, and it shows. They are not man’s best friend by chance, but by evolution. Millenia of selective breeding to create the cutest, most loving, most friendly beings imaginable. No other friend of yours, no matter how fun, is going to make up for that.

Opposition: Not fun friends, but flimsy family – William McCathie, The Queen’s College

What is it to be a friend? Ask this of Google, and you will be given the following: “a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations”. Based on this, all I would need to do to disprove that dogs are ‘man’s best friend’ would be to declare that to be a person you have to be a human, and that dogs are not humans. However, I doubt either you, dear reader, or my opponent here would be very satisfied with that, as you would likely not want to discount the possibility of friendship with non-humans. It is tempting to say, then, that because you know you love your dog, and your dog clearly seems to love you, that we are all best friends with our dogs. However, I believe that far from being ‘man’s best friend’, our relationship with dogs hardly resembles friendship at all.

We’ve been around dogs a long time – we domesticated them from the world for our own purposes a long time ago and have since settled into a symbiotic relationship: dogs provide us with services, and we provide them with food. This doesn’t mean we are friends, however, any more than we are friends with our gut bacteria. Indeed, the dog’s most common modern employment, as a companion, is a relatively recent invention. Wikipedia notes that most references to dogs written before the 18th century depict them more as vicious or watchful than as a friend. If you are tempted to say dogs are ‘man’s best friend’ on the basis of them having been mankind’s cuddly companions for a very long time, you are likely mistaken.

If dogs are to hold any relation to us, it is not that of friend, but of family. Now appealing to my earlier definition, your family are distinct from your friends. When you adopt/buy a dog, you are taking on a duty, similar to a duty to one’s child. No matter the circumstances, personality, needs or any host of other changing factors, you have a duty to family that holds equally true towards your dog. This is notably absent in mere friendships – friends are self-sufficient and of equal status. Dogs are (to put it bluntly) needy, furry slaves.

Their understanding of language is limited, at best, but we nevertheless try hard to teach them commands, and chastise them for their confused disobedience. Think about this from the dog’s perspective – a well-trained dog will view its owner as master, as an alpha of distinctly higher status. Studies show that they will purposely misdirect you from food if you do not have a history of sharing snacks with them. While showing deference under the eyes of their superiors, outside of observation they get only what they can for themselves.

If you still need a cuddly, cute and soft little animal to leech off your food and be your friend, I direct you no further than the cat – an animal that certainly does not see you as superior. You can train it to poo in one place, it’s properly independent, and as a litany of internet videos can show you, whilst dogs are very boring and do little other than wait whilst the humans are away, cats get up to their own fascinating shenanigans. Like a real friend, cats can live for themselves, and won’t hesitate to abandon you if abused.

#IsolationCreations: How the Ashmolean is encouraging creativity in isolation

Sofia Henderson
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#IsolationCreations: How the Ashmolean is encouraging creativity in isolation

When living in Oxford and struck with a need to get away from the stress of work, one of the loveliest ways to clear your head is to walk around the Ashmolean Museum. However, that is no longer possible – we’ve all been consigned to our homes and uninspiring childhood bedrooms. But the museum has come up with a clever way to keep people engaged, a way to pass the time while we wait for our lives to return to normal.

#IsolationCreations is a project which allows the public to engage creatively with the Ashmolean collection while social distancing. Every day, the Ashmolean share an object from their collection via their Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and invite anyone to reply or tag them with their creative responses, whether they be drawings, paintings, poems, interpretative dance, baked goods, or anything else that may come to mind.

The Ashmolean hopes that “by encouraging small moments of creativity in the day, we can help to bring something calm, positive and distracting to the public”. Not only does the project make the museum’s fascinating objects accessible to all of us via our phones or laptops, it opens up a new way for us to engage with both art and the past: the creative process involves reflection, inspiration, and collaboration. It’s a way to focus our minds away from the quiet chaos of the outside world.

In being forced to spend time at home doing absolutely nothing, many of us have felt an anxious need to be busy or to prove our worth by being productive. Engaging with art and culture in such an open and non-critical way can allow us to break out of this anxiety, and to create just because we want to, rather than for any wider purpose.

Cherwell encourages any students who have participated in #IsolationCreations to share their work. We welcome submissions at [email protected].

The problem with home delivery – and how we solve it

George Phillips
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The problem with home delivery – and how we solve it

While many non-essential workers are now working from home, and therefore enjoy a guaranteed source of income, those employed in the hospitality sector are afforded no such privileges. The restaurant industry has taken a brutal hit over the last weeks; both high-street chains and small family-owned eateries have been left floundering, and support from the government is lacklustre at best.

Data provided by reservation service company Opentable offers an indication of the sheer scale of the problem. Even in countries where lockdown measures are yet to be officially imposed – the USA and Sweden for example – weekly bookings are down by as much as 90%.

The introduction last week of full lockdown measures here in the UK may have come as no surprise, but they nonetheless left restaurants scrambling to adapt their business models. Some have shut their doors entirely in an attempt to protect staff and customers, but the vast majority have turned to delivery-based operations to claw back lost revenue.

And it seems that our government is keen to support this transition. After all, the benefits of home delivery are twofold, acting as a lifeline for small businesses in particular whilst simultaneously making it easier for the elderly and the sick to get hold of meals.

Although many restaurateurs felt left out in the cold following Sunak’s initial attempt to support the hospitality industry, hastily announced changes to planning permission regulations were easier for them to swallow. Under the reformed rules, businesses hoping to register with delivery providers like Deliveroo and UberEats are no longer obliged to submit a change-of-use application, meaning the transition can happen pretty much overnight.

Although exact statistics have not been released, thousands of new restaurants have registered with third party delivery providers over the last fortnight. Historically this move required a sign-on fee typically sitting in the realm of £300 to £500, though Deliveroo and UberEats have sweetened the deal by agreeing for this to be temporarily waived.

But ultimately, third party delivery services have never – and probably will never – offer a reliable source of income, particularly for smaller businesses. Commission charges per order are still very much present and typically average around 30% of total order value. In other words a huge chunk of profit is whisked away from under the restaurant’s nose by a middleman who fills the gap between kitchen and consumer.

Even aside from these problems it’s a trying time for the delivery companies themselves. Speaking to the Financial Times, an unnamed food delivery executive admitted that “Volumes are down quite substantially… Consumers are super scared.” Social distancing and health worries have led to a huge surge in home cooking and the recent closures of delivery stalwarts McDonalds and Wagamama came as a huge blow.

Putting restaurant closures aside for a moment, it is crucial to remember that the efficacy of these food delivery networks depends entirely on the riders and drivers actually out on the streets keeping the cogs turning. Historically, delivery companies have had tenuous relationships with these ‘self-employed’ workers who have once again found themselves with little to no support in a time of crisis.

The so-called ‘hardship fund’ announced last week by Deliveroo was lambasted by riders who exposed the ridiculous fine print behind the seemingly generous measures. Whilst the company claimed to be making financial support available to symptomatic workers who were forced to cancel shifts, it rapidly emerged that they would only provide sick pay when shown evidence of a positive COVID-19 test – an impossible task for the vast majority of the population.

I occasionally ride for food delivery companies during the vac, and a quick glance at the local Whatsapp group gives feel for the current mood. Behind the nonchalance and the banter, many riders are genuinely worried about infection, and almost all are frustrated and angry at the lack of support from employers. It’s a dangerous cocktail of emotions; these services will become increasingly stretched as more and more workers are forced to self-isolate, and in the current climate a rider-led strike would be hugely disruptive not only for the delivery companies themselves, but crucially for the thousands of restaurants which are now completely reliant on the service they provide.

The food and drink companies best placed to weather the current storm are those who are opting to adapt, rather than simply transferring operations to home delivery services. Iffley-based bakery Hamblin has launched a baking scheme which sees fresh bread and buns hand delivered to local residents, all of which is coordinated via their Instagram account. Avoiding third-party delivery providers maximises profit and adheres to their ethos of small supply chains and community engagement.

Other businesses have chosen to promote their takeaway elements whilst staying clear of third party companies; pubs and breweries across the country are now offering a McDonalds style ‘drive-thru’ service for example, though whether or not this can be justified as essential travel remains open for debate. And we are increasingly seeing companies leverage the power of the internet with imaginative digital solutions. For example, Beer behemoth Brewdog have launched a series of online tasting sessions for IPA aficionados, and numerous restaurants are offering exclusive online cookery consultations with award-winning chefs.

Regardless of the measures they take to survive the pandemic, restaurants and food and drink producers are going to take a huge financial hit. But high-street chains will surely emerge stronger than local businesses who operate on a far smaller scale, and we have a responsibility as consumers to ensure that we think about where our money goes over the next few weeks. Now, more than ever, it is time to support small businesses directly. The temptation to reach for the phone and order a Deliveroo takeout is now paramount but, if at all possible, food should be collected in person. Cutting out the middleman is a small gesture but the financial implications are huge; restaurants struggle to turn a profit with home delivery even before accounting for the recent reduction in order volume. So why not sign up for an online beer tasting, or pay for a pasta making lesson over Skype? What could be better than picking up new skills whilst supporting restaurants during a time of hardship?

Culture and pandemic: can art change the world?

Francesca Mencattelli
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Culture and pandemic: can art change the world?

Confronted with an indefinite period of self-isolation, many of us are broaching the question of how to occupy ourselves over the coming weeks. This peacetime challenge to ‘normality’ is unprecedented; we have been forced – many of us for the first time – to operate outside the sphere of daily routine. With educational institutions suspended, the leisure industry closed, and work cancelled for many, the only choice is to remain in our homes.

Such an environment may appear antithetical to the growth of art and survival of culture. Art Basel, one of the biggest international art fairs, was due to take place in Hong Kong on the 17th March; it has now been cancelled and adapted, as far as possible, to an online format. Many of the largest and most profitable events keeping the global arts market afloat have followed suit, including the Cannes Film Festival and the Met Gala. In the UK, the implementation of more rigid containment policies has led to the closing of the Royal Opera House, the Tate Galleries, and the cancellation of Glastonbury Festival, amongst numerous other casualties. Across the globe, many theatres, opera-houses, and other arts-based institutions have been seriously threatened by a decrease in commerce in the weeks preceding their official closure by government regulation. How, then, can culture survive a pandemic?

In these circumstances, many have found their daily lives become increasingly dependent upon and centred around various art forms: books, music, film, and television are the most common examples. In this respect, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly reshaped notions of ‘culture’ as a previously inaccessible and elitist domain. Popular opinion previously conceptualised art as requiring a certain level of cultural capital; for many, ‘art’ or ‘culture’ was synonymous with pretentious art exhibitions and incomprehensible operas, which have little tangible bearing on day-to-day life. The current crisis has begun to shift this definition of art to something more accessible, helping bridge the gap between ‘high’ and ‘low’ perceptions of culture. More and more people are recognising books, films and music as art forms to turn to in crisis, both for guidance and genuine enjoyment. Alongside this, there has been a substantial increase in the participation in and publication of online art forms, including a surge in online library engagement and the popularisation of virtual galleries. The technological solutions of the art market to the crisis posed by COVID-19 have functioned to make many of these cultural spaces more accessible to a wider section of the population. Such ubiquitous trends suggest that art and pandemic in fact come hand in hand.

An acknowledgement of this statement leads to another, more fundamental question. Crisis revives culture: why does this matter? When this pandemic passes and society returns to ‘normality’, many people will place their books back on the shelves, and films will once again become a pastime for a hungover evening. However, if this is to be the case, such an outcome does not negate the significant role art has played in these times. This period will nonetheless have existed; it will be entrenched in the global consciousness as a time when the world turned to art for solace. Art functions primarily as a means of communication, providing us with insights into other cultures and modes of thought; it can thus act as a unifying force in a time when society is experiencing unparalleled fragmentation. This pandemic has highlighted the role of culture in the modern world and its ability to co-exist with the demands of daily life. The proliferation of popular art forms has highlighted an alternative system of approaching everyday life – one in which periods of reflection and engagement with our creative faculties counter and compliment the haste of daily routine.

Oscar Wilde famously propagated the anti-mimesis aesthetic: “life imitates art.” The sceptical will disagree. But art can certainly inform and shape our approach to life and aid the construction of creative solutions in response to crisis. Our return to art and culture in times of pandemic demonstrates the twofold function of art: both as providing immediate, temporary pleasure; and as a system of values, an immersion which can contribute to longer-term shifts in the way society approaches and responds to the pressures of daily life.

Sonnet: Written by the Sambre-Oise Canal, On a Pilgrimage to Wilfred Owen’s Deathplace

Joe Williams
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Sonnet: Written by the Sambre-Oise Canal, On a Pilgrimage to Wilfred Owen’s Deathplace

Rolling dumb – what offence such vital blood
Ran cold in your black and impudent mass.
You yawned and gobbed that gift with tin and sod
To baser phlegms, ‘till, sea-swirled, it was dross.
And, kissed by that truth-blistered hand, you brayed
A coarse cough, not moved to keep Pity’s node,
Or hold the final flush of sacrifice,
Leaving just a stone for innocent eyes.

Yet, it’s right the flow smites, like tide of shells,
Doubling love for those lines that ‘scaped the mire
And rang right up to a week from the bells.
Right, too, so short a flare here doused its fire,
Where, with span quarter-spent for future fame,
The poet perished as writ was his name.

Image Credit: Francesca Nava

Mauritian Prawn Rougaille

Rebeka Shipkolye
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Mauritian Prawn Rougaille

Rougaille is at the heart of authentic Mauritian Creole cuisine. It is not only the easiest Mauritian dish to make, but its combination of tomatoes – known as pomme d’amour in Mauritius – chillies, garlic, ginger and onion leave little to be desired. Prawn Rougaille utilises the rich seafood of Mauritius, but this spicy tomato sauce can be made with fish, meat, or paneer (for vegetarians).

Prawn Rougaille

Serves two

Ingredients:

4 king prawns/(200g of paneer/260g of beef/120g of chicken according to choice)
1 finely chopped onion
1 finely chopped fresh chili (add more if you like spice)
1 finely chopped onion
2 tbsp ginger paste
2 tbsp garlic paste
4/5 dried curry leaves
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tbsp ground chili
400g chopped tomato
Sunflower oil
A few stems of finely chopped coriander (for the end)
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

  1. In a bowl, place the king prawns with a tablespoon of ginger paste, garlic paste and ground coriander. Season with salt and pepper and leave to marinate for half an hour.
  1. Once marinated, heat the sunflower oil in a saucepan. Add the chopped onion, dried curry leaves and a tablespoon of ginger and garlic paste. Add the prawns and cook for 4 minutes. Remove the prawns and set them aside.
  1. In the same pan, add the cumin, ground chilli and fresh chilli, followed by the chopped tomatoes. Immediately after, add about a cupful of boiled water- this will create the sauce.
  1. Season with salt and pepper and leave this to simmer on low heat.
  1. After about 5 minutes, add the prawns back in and cook for a further four minutes.
  1. Sprinkle some fresh coriander over the prawn rougaille.

In Mauritius, this dish is normally served with rice and lentils. Enjoy! 

Moving beyond meat: University proposes to halve meat consumption by 2025

Freya Rose Hanley
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Moving beyond meat: University proposes to halve meat consumption by 2025

Encouraged by the advent of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, The Economist dubbed 2019 ‘The Year of the Vegan’. It was the year that, despite Piers Morgan’s tantrums, plant-based foods finally turned mainstream. With an increasing variety of options on supermarket shelves and menus, plant-based food has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Students, in particular, have come around to the joys of the Linda McCartney sausage and the oat milk latte. We are leading a generation demanding more sustainable – and less bloody – food options. With Cambridge recently banning red meat and Goldsmiths banning beef, vegetarianism is coming to Oxford University – or trying to.

For years, researchers from the Oxford Martin School have been telling us that reducing meat consumption helps us to stay healthy[1] and that it is also a crucial step to take for the planet. Livestock arming produces a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, contributes towards deforestation[2] and is also a water-intensive process. Now the University is taking tentative steps to follow the advice of their experts: this year saw the opening of the University’s first vegetarian/vegan cafe on the Old Road Campus (for staff only). Currently, the University is formulating a new, more ambitious, sustainability strategy which students can contribute to until the 14th of April and can be found here[3]. It includes the proposal to reduce meat consumption across the University, aiming for a minimum 50% reduction by 2025 and an 80% reduction by 2030.

This sustainability strategy comes from the University’s central management, so it does not directly apply to colleges. This means that students will not feel the direct results in college canteens. However, these schemes could encourage colleges to follow suit, especially if there is encouragement from the student body. Various departments around the University are already testing measures to see how meat consumption reduction could be achieved. Taking small steps to nudge people towards choosing vegetarian options have already been put in place, such as the Maths Institute’s traffic light system in their canteen. The carbon footprint of each serving is estimated with a traffic light colour which indicates whether it has a high or low carbon footprint. Fully informed, students can either choose the high-carbon (and often meaty) options or instead opt for a lower-carbon one.

The vegetarian Norrington Table offers an insight into veggie food offered by each college and its results suggest that many colleges have improved since 2016[4]. However, many of the respondents to the vegetarian Norrington survey despaired at the lack of options and the quality of the food offered. One comment reads “There’s a tendency for college kitchens to think that ‘vegetarian’ = ‘cheese + masses of puff pastry’, rather than getting inventive with vegetables, nuts and seeds, and a range of flavours” (which I can confirm is sadly true).

The same criticism is often levelled at Meat-free Mondays: a meal that could be an exciting range of plant-based food is often just a floppy vegetable patty. Instead of converting students, it irritates them. Rightly, many point out that they are being charged the same amount for a meal which is cheaper to produce. The disappointment often stems from the fact that college chefs do not have the requisite training for cooking plant-based food. However, this is beginning to change, as an inter-collegiate initiative for college chefs will focus on increasing the diversity of college cooking. This will involve kitchen training for catering for a diverse range of faiths, and also an increased focus on vegetarian/vegan food. With this training, Meat-free Mondays could easily be transformed from a chore into a showcase of a new way of eating which is cheaper, kinder and, crucially, doesn’t contribute to the destruction of our planet.

The University’s target is a very important step, but I do not think it is enough. Reducing meat consumption should definitely be a focus, but it needs to be accompanied by an improvement in the current plant-based options. Otherwise, students and staff will simply choose to eat elsewhere. Chefs need to be trained, so they can experiment and create meals which don’t feel like ‘alternatives’ but which make the choice easy. Plant-based food has finally begun to flourish, meaning that you no longer have to compromise on taste for your moral ideals.

[1] https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201603-plant-based-diets/

[2] https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/long-read/food-in-the-anthropocene/

[3] https://oxford.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/environmental-sustainability-strategy-consultation

[4] http://www.veggienorringtontable.com/

quarantine hands

Helena Aeberli
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quarantine hands

quarantine hands

knuckles crack
a bleeding crucifix
between my metacarpal joints.
a confusion of life-lines
upturn the path through the desert
of my flaking flesh.
i have picked sandcastles here
and dried-out dusty rivers
carve their path
sometimes running rusty blood
or a geyser’s worth of soap.
fingers like pharaoh’s
doomed to crumble
my arrow-bones
point a road
that we lost long ago;
their promise peters away.
this year indelible skin
quarantine hands
an unmapped land.

Image Credit: Phoebe White

Paris Fashion Week: Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens and Paco Rabanne in focus

Sarah Townsend
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Paris Fashion Week: Louis Vuitton, Rick Owens and Paco Rabanne in focus

Having started the new decade with a pandemic, Australian wildfires, and a locust swarm in Somalia, the first three months of 2020 have been likened to Judgement Day. After a fashion week plagued by the concerns of its audience, Louis Vuitton’s closing show might have been expected to provide us with a sense of closure, a single look to define the present day, or to point us towards the future. Nicolas Ghesquière, however, did no such thing. 

His show, hosted by the Louvre, saw a backdrop of tiered seating reminiscent of a traditional theatre behind a glass screen, occupied by singers wearing Elizabethan style clothing. As the show began, they sang a Baroque symphony comprised of Nicolas de Grigny’s original seventeenth century composition and composer Bryce Dessner’s modern verses. This playfulness with time and composition was not confined to the backdrop but defined the show itself, with models walking the runway in outfits characterized by their anachronisms.  They wore romantic brocade jackets paired with sportswear and modern style colour blocked pants. Eighteenth century petticoats were layered over biker jackets, pinstripe blazers, and cowboy boots, creating a contrasting collage of history and style. 

With the ghostly backdrop of costumed singers and the quirky combination of time periods, Ghesquière created a spectacle that transcends time. He told British Vogue’s fashion critic, Anders Christian Madsen, that he “wanted different eras to be confronted with another one, our own. All of these ‘pasts’, embodied by a gallery of personality in period dress, converge in our present.” The brand described the show as a “tune-up in which personality takes precedence”, there is no “total look” but an “anachrony of genres” where “everyone can pen their own history”. 

For Louis Vuitton, this is no new ground. Looking back to the Menswear AW20 show in February, Virgil Abloh presented a similar mediation between past and present. Mimicking the nostalgia of childhood, he designed a show space with childlike versions of a tailor’s toolkit, a giant ruler and sewing kit. With different variations on the silhouette of a suit, his collection felt like a child dressing as a grown-up. Although the rise of COVID-19 has seen the Met Gala postponed, it is worth mentioning that the 2020 theme was to be ‘About Time and Fashion’, sponsored by Louis Vuitton. Perhaps Ghesquière’s show is a brand-wide statement of the power of personal style to transcend history. The modern woman, according to Ghesquière, can escape the troubles of the present day by using fashion to declare her identity and “pen” her “own history”. 

Without eighteenth century glamour and Elizabethan costume, Rick Owens romanticizes the past in his own way. His show was accompanied by a soundtrack comprised of David Bowie and Gary Numan, influencing the collection itself. “Seeing someone like [Numan] as a doomy adolescent in Porterville, his glamour gave me my direction, the way David Bowie did”, Owens declared before the show. It’s easy to see Owens’ inspiration in the reflective sunglasses and triangular blocked colours, reminiscent of Bowie’s iconic Ziggy Stardust make-up. The outfits were complete with knitted horned shoulder pads and sky-high platform boots with plastic heels, some of the models reaching a powerful height and appearing to come from a futuristic alien planet. 

Seeing Gwendoline Christie wear similar shoulder pads in the Rick Owens audience, you might be reminded of her Game of Thrones character Brienne of Tarth – a six-foot-three-inch female knight. While Owens used the power of the 70s to (literally) uplift his female models, Paco Rabanne reached back to the middle ages for female empowerment. Dossena used Conciergerie, a medieval Parisian palace as the backdrop, its gothic vaults echoing with the operatic music that accompanied the show. The models sported translucent slip dresses covered with chainmail accessories and large medallion necklaces, resembling both the armour of a medieval knight and the silhouette of a waif-like fairy. High, stiff turtlenecks and the recurring 1970s style platform heels completed most of the looks, metallic headdresses partially covering the models’ faces. Dossena tapped into the most elegant and artistic aspects of each era, using tassels and embroidered shawls to give the impression of medieval tapestry. He described the monastic setting and chainmail outfits as a way of expressing “femininity” as “an attitude that’s also violent”. “When you’re talking about religion, it’s always men in charge, so I wanted to give the charge to women”, he explained. With the tall platforms and elegant silhouette, Dossena transforms priest into priestess, medieval soldier into female warrior. 

At this point, you can’t help but think of the 2018 Met Gala: ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’. Now, it seems more relevant than ever. With Louis Vuitton’s ghostly singers, the otherworldly atmosphere of Rick Owens’ show and Paco Rabanne’s high priestesses, Paris Fashion Week seemed to be charged by the spiritual, acting as a place of refuge for its audience. Only one group could surprise us with this exact mentality – Kanye West’s Sunday Service. Just two hours before the Balenciaga show, over a hundred choir singers gathered in the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in matching beige outfits and Yeezy trainers. While 2020 has given us Book of Revelation style plague and pestilence, the choir director gave a brief speech to the audience while they performed a soulful celebration of the gospel – no mention of the coronavirus in sight. Are we being told that fashion is a way to escape present day trouble? Personal style, a way of regaining control? The collections are both ethereal and alien, whisking us away from present day earth and providing us with an uplifting sense of style. 

Pick up a Book! Rekindling a Love Affair

Eve Bennett
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Pick up a Book! Rekindling a Love Affair

I’ll throw my hands up and admit it – since leaving school almost two years ago, I’ve read less than five books for pleasure. And yet, perplexingly, reading takes up a sizable chunk of my time every single day at university. Every week I churn through two or three set texts, skim through seven or eight books of literary criticism, digest multitudes of academic articles for my various seminars, as well as reading hundreds of news articles and opinion pieces to keep myself in the loop. It should come as no surprise, then, that the last thing I feel like doing in my few hours of free time is picking up the latest bestseller in Waterstones. 

For me, each term at university is a blur of abstracts, conclusions and reading lists, with thousands of words swimming past my eyes on a daily basis. Granted, I love my degree, and I enjoy (most of) the reading I do for it, but I cannot help but feel that my desire to read purely for enjoyment and personal fulfilment no longer burns as strongly as it used to. Little by little, chapter by chapter, my brain has started to associate reading with academia, with deadlines, with assignments and exams. Each word I read is a step closer toward finishing an essay, each book I tick off my reading list a step closer to a glowing report at the end of term. In my mind, the amount I read directly correlates with my academic performance and not with my personal development, meaning that reading has slowly become a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

I often wonder what 13-year-old me would think if she could see me now. She spent hours and hours with her head in a book, devouring entire series in a matter of days and becoming so engrossed in each new fictional world she entered that she would often forget to eat – or even sleep for that matter. Now, even during vacations, I try to pick up a book and find myself unable to read a page without getting distracted. I attribute this in part to the fact that social media has destroyed my attention span, but I think the root of the problem lies in how little I see reading as something that can simply be for fun.

My free time is spent playing the piano, watching YouTube, going out for coffee with friends – anything that doesn’t involve looking at words on a page. After two months at university, that part of my brain is so worn out that the thought of reading any book makes me feel as tired as I feel at the end of 8th week, not to mention the fact that I have to spend most of my vac reading novels in foreign languages to prepare for the upcoming term. With so many other ways to fill my time that require only a fraction of this brainpower and concentration, even getting through a chapter of a novel feels like a monumental achievement. 

Suddenly, however, the outbreak of a global pandemic means that many of my usual outlets for entertainment have become unavailable: with cinemas, cafes and pubs being forced to close their doors and thousands of students like myself being confronted with the prospect of an indefinitely extended vacation, now feels like a perfect time to reassess my approach to reading. I find myself staring at a potentially unending expanse of free time for the first time in years – suddenly the pressures of vac reading are off the table (at least for now) and all of my plans are cancelled. I hope that this will give me the mental space to rediscover the pleasure of getting lost in a book. I’ve redownloaded Goodreads, made a questionably large order of books on Amazon, stocked up on snacks and tea, and I’m suddenly feeling as excited as 13-year-old me was on the day that the final Hunger Games book was released.

The pressures of university life and an ever-increasing offer of online entertainment (I’m looking at you, The Sims) are enough to make even the keenest bookworm fall out of love with reading. I hope that in the coming days and months, these unprecedented circumstances may lead to a dwindling flame being reignited. After all, as the world we are living in becomes increasingly similar to the worlds we read about in dystopian novels, there may be some escape to be found in reliving the Roaring Twenties, immortalised in the pages of Fitzgerald, or in immersing yourself in the romantic intrigues of the landed gentry in Austen’s works. Yes, it’s going to require locking my phone away and applying some serious discipline at first, but I cannot wait to begin tearing through novels with the same enthusiasm I tear through Netflix series. 

I’m beginning with a novel I’ve been meaning to read since I was sixteen, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I hope that amidst the walls of Helen Huntingdon’s Elizabethan mansion I will rekindle the love affair with reading that I left behind when I came to Oxford.  

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