How good it was to see Alber Elbaz celebrating his 10th anniversary at the helm of Lanvin.

Soap up and rinse off stress, grime and grit with these brilliant bathroom buys, from spartan sponges to luxe lathers

Shorts have come out of the holiday drawer and into the limelight, appearing everywhere from the red carpet to the Glastonbury stage, says Susannah Frankel

Sounding increasingly like Hardy Amies way back when, Tom Ford declared this spring that a gentleman should never, ever, wear shorts.

United Colors of Benetton will this week announce the hiring of You Nguyen as its new chief merchandising officer and creative director, as part of its new strategy to revamp the brand.

In London last month, Tom Ford caused an outcry when he refused to invite newspaper journalists to his autumn/winter ready-to-wear presentation.

Where are you now and what can you see? I'm on a train on my way from London to Liverpool and there are English fields flying by the window and the sun is coming out. It's a milky view of an England that doesn't change.

John Higgins quickly found his form after returning to the game at the European Players Tour Championship in Hamm, Germany last night, beating Martin Gould 4-3 to reach the last 16.

The mid-season sale at Joules Clothing is now on, with up to 50 per cent off selected lines and three-for-two discounts on accessories available online. For the full range of sale items, including some fantastic deals on men's sweatshirts and polo shirts, head over to http://ind.pn/bcTowf. The sale ends on 5 November.

Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker's eclectically barbered thinker-in-chief, is to turn his hand to a discipline in which he has somewhat fewer than 10,000 hours of experience: television production. The bestselling non-fiction writer (one of whose theories is that a genius requires 10,000 hours of practice to master his or her craft) has teamed up with "Marky" Mark Wahlberg to produce a drama series for HBO set during the Cold War. According to the Deadline Hollywood blog, the unnamed project will be based in Berlin, and "centers on a missionary who becomes involved in the CIA". It's not yet clear how much creative input the pair will have in the show. Wahlberg has past form at HBO, having produced the hipster "dramedies" Entourage and How To Make It In America, as well as the amply funded new Prohibition-era drama, Boardwalk Empire, with Martin Scorsese. Gladwell, on the other hand, has just one IMDb credit to his name so far, as co-writer on a TV movie unpromisingly titled Runaway Virus.

To lose a partner is to lose two lives. The key to recovering from such a grievous blow is knowing that we have more than one life.

Colin Firth stars in Tom Ford’s adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, playing a bereaved professor who’s planning his suicide over the course of a day in early- 1960s California.