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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What is it about the Boat Race that inspires such ardour? The annual contest between Oxford and Cambridge remains a revered date in the British sporting calendar, yet it makes for a strange phenomenon: an amateur rowing competition between two parties representing institutions embalmed in privilege and wealth. It’s an expression of British elitism at its most egregious. And yet the sheer masochistic exertion of it, its associated pain and hardship and, let’s face it, the Olympian bodies required to endure it still give it a rare allure. Add to that the camaraderie, the synchronicity and cut-throat competition, and you can see why some 100 million viewers watch the race each year.
Ellie Pithers went to meet the competing rivals as they prepared for this year’s team events. The 2025 Boat Race arrives with an unusual partner, however: the French luxury house Chanel has, for the first time in its 115-year history, decided to go into partnership with the Oxford and Cambridge blues as the race’s title sponsor and official timekeeper, with the help of its J12 watch. What brought a brand associated with feminine élan and beauty to such a robust and muscular activity as rowing may seem a little hard to fathom. But the partnership is not so unlikely: Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, an Anglophile who based her first designs upon a sportswear-inspired tricot jersey (as worn by sailors), would surely have approved.
I myself was born in Cambridge and so feel duty-bound to support the duck-egg blues. The team trains, as seen in the pictures taken by James Harvey-Kelly, just outside Ely, and the eerie, flat stillness of those fen waters runs deep in my DNA. Then again, Oxford has the more compelling colours, even if past performance puts them a little in the rear. We await the results next weekend with a new excitement, especially now we’ve got a fancy timepiece to keep things up to speed.
I’m sure you’re all aware of Dimorestudio, the Milanese interiors duo who bring a dark bohemian luxury to all that they design. But what do they choose to put in their own living quarters? Emiliano Salci, one half of the business, invites us to answer that very question via his newly renovated apartment in Milan. Maria Shollenbarger enjoys a first appointment, where she finds walls painted in “sombre aubergine”. It’s the antithesis of the modern vogue for vast, open spaces, minimalism and light-flooded atriums. I’m all in favour of the crepuscular atmosphere, Berber rugs and neoclassical antiques.
In her How to Host It column, Laila Gohar shares an unusual homecoming: the first party she has undertaken in her childhood home, Cairo. The opportunity gave her a chance to reflect on bread, one of the culinary totems of Egyptian society, symbolising “abundance, a gesture of devotion” and often found in ancient art, temples and tombs. At a time of such high tension in the Middle East, it seems fitting that her feast is focused on community, sharing and acceptance as represented in this offering.
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