Luxury

Friday

Jane Stannus

Who stands to gain in the pistachio wars?

If you’ve ever lived in Marseille – where the habit of exaggeration is imbibed with mothers’ milk – you’ve heard about the sardine that blocked the port. But that’s nothing compared to the pistachio that took over the world. In late 2023, Dubai chocolate, a new kind of chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini and crunchy, toasted phyllo pastry, went viral. Chocolate brands, bakeries and purveyors of fine foods were quick to jump on the trend. Coffee chains began offering pistachio chocolate drinks (iced Dubai-chocolate matcha, anyone?) and delectable pistachio bomboloni – soft donuts filled with pistachio cream – came back on the menu in Italian restaurants.

pistachio wars

Thursday

Max Jeffery

Would you dare to wear a Rolex?

From our UK edition

‘London has become a jungle, right? Anyone with anything nice risks having it taken.’ Bobby, the manager of one of Hatton Garden’s watch shops, does business in a windowless room as far from the street as possible, watched over by a thickset guard and a couple security cameras. ‘I’m a paranoid person,’ he says, and he’s right to be. While the level of general theft in London is going down, more and more luxury watches are stolen every year – tens of millions of pounds’ worth. There’s no sophistication to stealing a watch. Gangs smash into shops with machetes or rip them from wearers’ wrists. Last week, Oliver White, a watch broker in south-west London, had £3 million worth of watches stolen.

Sunday

Kara Kennedy

The fall of the Birkin bag

If you had a spare $100,000, what would you spend it on? The deposit on a decent home, perhaps. Maybe a boat or a luxury car. For her twenty-fifth birthday, Kylie Jenner was given a bag worth that princely sum. The three-toned Birkin was one of just three made. By her own account, Jenner had “never even seen anything like this before.” Kate Moss famously used one as a diaper bag, Kim Kardashian, a gym bag. The Hermès Birkin bag was birthed in 1984, after Jane Birkin, the British-French actress and singer, sat next to Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on an Air France flight to London. The contents of her bag spilled out onto the floor, prompting Dumas to remark that she needed one with pockets.

birkin