Tyler West gets emotional on live TV after Molly Rainford engagement
The couple were both contestants on the 2022 series of Strictly Come Dancing.
Rainford reached the final of the competition, whilst West was eliminated in the seventh week.
West became emotional discussing their engagement on This Morning, describing Rainford as his best friend and the best thing that has ever happened to him.
Watch the video in full above.
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The Guardian
6 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The thong bikini boom: why the skimpiest swimwear is back
There are plenty of places where no one would bat an eyelid at the sight of a thong bikini; on a beach in Brazil or around the Love Island fire pit, visible butt cheeks are practically de rigueur. But my first sighting this year was not while surfing in Australia or sunbathing in the Caribbean, but at an open-water swimming spot, on a rainy day in Scotland. I should not have been surprised. Tiny swimwear is huge news this summer. It is no longer confined to sunny climes, but cropping up everywhere from lidos to leisure centres – and lochs, apparently. The trickle down from catwalks and influencers to holidaymakers and shoppers is notable. A search for 'thong bikini' on Asos yields 187 results, ranging from high-leg styles, to side-tie, to tanga (somewhere between a thong and a standard brief), while high-street outlets including H&M, Calzedonia and Zara all have thong bikini bottoms in their collections. And, as with any trend, there are plenty of celebrity forerunners, including gymnast Simone Biles, model Heidi Klum, actor Sofía Vergara and singer Nicole Scherzinger. Rapper Lizzo is a longtime fan. 'I won't lie, it was nerve-racking initially,' says Victoria, 29, who wore a thong bikini for the first time on a recent solo trip to Naples. As for many new converts, part of the appeal lay in the fact that she would be able to avoid the significant tan lines created by fuller coverage swimwear. 'I saw thong bikinis everywhere and wished I could wear one. But then I thought about it and was like, it's just a bum. Men wear those teeny-tiny trunks where you see everything, so why can't I wear this? Plus, it was really comfy.' The itsy-bitsy bikini revolution may have come to the fore this summer, but it has been rumbling for some time. In 2023, the New York Times declared that 'more women are adopting the 'less is more' philosophy' when it comes to beachwear; the same year, fashion site Who What Wear called thong bikinis the 'controversial swimwear trend you'll see on every beach this summer'. In 2024, New Zealand site The Spinoff asked: 'Why is every bikini bottom a thong now?' 'I think we've moved into another age of body consciousness – a much more expressive moment,' says Shaun Cole, associate professor in fashion at the University of Southampton. 'People are saying: 'It's my body and I can show it off in ways that I choose to, and if that involves wearing clothing that is sometimes deemed socially unacceptable then I'm going to do that.'' Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be 'flattering' – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely. 'Women of all shapes and sizes are leaning into bolder cuts with real confidence as part of a wider cultural shift towards body positivity and self-expression, which is great to see,' says Aliya Wilkinson, founder of luxury swimwear label Ôsalé. Her brand doesn't yet offer thong styles, but she plans to introduce them in the future. 'In the west, fashion has long found ways to augment the butt, to make it look bigger and put emphasis on this part of the female body,' says Roberta Sassatelli, professor of sociology at the University of Bologna and co-author of Body and Gender. 'This is perhaps because the butt is deemed to be very sensual but is not related to reproduction. Because it is totally related to pleasure, it feels more liberated.' The trend is reflected in the popularity of potentially dangerous cosmetic procedures, such as Brazilian butt lifts. Sculpting the perfect behind has also become something of a fitness obsession. In 2018, sports writer Anna Kessel noted that 'the emphasis on a firm, or 'juicy', bottom has now overtaken the flat stomach as the fitness holy grail in mainstream women's health magazines', with an increasing number of gym classes dedicated exclusively to the posterior. Seven years later, could it be that gym-goers are keen to display the results? 'I think the popularity of thong bikinis exists at the convergence of a focus on building glutes in the gym, a kind of exhibitionist creep in which the butt is one of the last frontiers that had remained mostly covered in public, and a greater cultural acceptance of a range of different body types,' says historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation. 'The low-slung jeans of the early 2000s were certainly correlated with the age when flat abs workouts were all the rage.' Cole suggests there may be another reason why more people are choosing to wear less. 'It could be linked to what's been called the 'pornification' of culture and style,' he says, citing an idea put forward by fashion historian Pamela Church Gibson. '[It is] modelled on a style that has come out of pornography – at the points where pornography stars are dressed – which involves garments such as tiny bikinis or thong-style underwear. There's an acceptance of that style without people really realising where it originated. The popularity of shows such as Love Island, where people are there to show off their bodies as a way of attracting a partner, again ties to that pornification of style.' After years of falling audience figures, Love Island is also experiencing a boom this summer: increased numbers tuned in to watch the UK and US versions, with the New York Times attributing the popularity of the latter to its ability to offer reprieve during 'times of societal and economic hardship'. As dress and design historian Amber Butchart put it when curating Splash!, a recent exhibition on swimming and style at the Design Museum in London: 'Swimwear's close relationship with the body means it reflects changing attitudes to modesty, morality and public display. From the 18th century, bathing machines were used to protect sea dippers from prying eyes. But throughout the 20th century, a number of boundary-pushing designs challenged previous ideas of decency while also courting controversy. For the last century, what we wear while swimming has been used as an excuse to police bodies.' While it is predominantly women who are opting for poolside thongs today, this wasn't always the case. The earliest iteration of the style is thought to be the ancient loincloth, worn by men. Modern thongs are said to have been adopted in 1939, when the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, ordered that showgirls must cover themselves rather than perform nude at the city's World's Fair. When it comes to swimwear specifically, Austrian-American Rudi Gernreich – the fashion designer behind the monokini, or 'topless bikini' – is most often credited with creating the thong bikini, in response to Los Angeles city council banning public nudity, including naked sunbathing, in 1974. The thong bikini has prompted similar bans more recently. In January, a council in Greater Sydney, Australia, banned thong and (even skimpier) G-string bikinis at its public pools. A number of women have also been arrested for wearing thong bikinis in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the style is banned. In the UK, Greenwich Leisure Ltd, which operates 240 leisure centres under the brand Better, requires swimmers to wear 'full-coverage bikinis', which a spokesperson previously indicated did imply 'that thongs wouldn't be acceptable'. But even when thong styles are not prohibited, many bikini-wearers remain nervous. 'I do own one, but it's only been worn once, when my partner and I had a private villa in Portugal,' says Rebecca, 33. Even then, she says, she felt a little too exposed. 'I don't understand why someone would wear one on a family holiday, for example. Thong bikinis feel quite sexualised, so to me it seems inappropriate. Give me high-waisted bikini bottoms that cover your cheeks any day.' For Sassatelli, the reason thong bikinis are in vogue is not so surprising. 'The thong has never gone away completely,' she says. 'But for people who are in their teens and 20s, they haven't really been 'in fashion'. Once [the fashion industry] has forgotten something, then it can be recuperated – and it makes for a little sense of novelty.'
North Wales Chronicle
37 minutes ago
- North Wales Chronicle
Lenny Henry says TV industry ‘still struggling' to do black hair and make up
The comedian, 66, picked up the outstanding achievement award at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday and reflected on his career and experience starting out in the industry in the 1970s. 'It was hard, you know? I mean, they didn't have a light for me', he told the festival. 'I called it the negro light. I said, 'Break out the negro light' and they'd bring out this big-ass spotlight and point it at me.' Sir Lenny, who made his TV debut on British talent show New Faces in 1975, said someone who worked at the BBC 'started to realise that I needed different lighting to those guys'. 'Also there's the thing on (TV series) Three Of A Kind where all the wigs were for white people,' he said. 'So we had Michael Howard and Dave Allen's wigs, and they never had any wigs for me. 'I had to get some dreadlocks for a character. So they sent me to the London wig company, and they made some dreadlocks for me. 'And then a year later, they had more stuff for me to do, and they got nearer, closer to what they should be like. 'And so I sort of began a whole thing where they had to know how to make black hair, and they had to know how to do black make up.' He added: 'They're still struggling with it. People like (make up artists) Jan Sewell and Sally Sutton really knew how to do it, because they did it on my show. 'But before then, they never had to do it. 'I went to a black make up lady on The Fosters in 1976 and I thought, 'Oh, it's going to be like this. There's going to be people that do make up for us'. 'Once The Fosters was over I never saw her again.' Sir Lenny was born in Dudley, near Birmingham, in 1958, and shot to fame in 1975 when his stand-up comic routine won TV talent show New Faces. After his TV debut, Sir Lenny appeared on landmark black working-class comedy The Fosters, and comedy sketch show Three Of A Kind, before landing his own self-titled show in the mid-1980s. In 1985 he co-founded Comic Relief, and in 2015 he was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity. A year later he was presented with a special Bafta award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to television and in 2020 he helped to launch an independent body that examines representation in journalism, acting, film, television and radio in the UK called the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity. In February he received the Freedom of the City of London and in May he and filmmaker Richard Curtis accepted a philanthropy award recognising Comic Relief's efforts to address inequality and poverty.
Scotsman
2 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Richard Flanagan
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... How does a kiss in Edwardian London spark a chain reaction which leads to the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima? This is one of the questions posed by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan in his genre-bending memoir/novel/history book Question 7. It goes like this. In 1911, the writer Rebecca West kissed HG Wells. So terrified was he by her proposition of a love without limits that he fled to Switzerland where he wrote his novel The World Set Free, in which he imagined a nuclear war. The book was a commercial failure, but gripped the mind of Hungarian Jewish physicist Leo Szilard, who would go on to work on the science behind the atom bomb. Fearful that the Nazis would develop the technology first, he petitioned Roosevelt to start a development programme which became the Manhattan Project. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Booker-winning author Richard Flanagan A deep thinker and quietly compelling speaker, Flanagan is well aware of the moral complexities in this story. It also touches him personally: the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima lead directly to the release of his father from a Japanese labour camp where he would otherwise likely have died. In that sense, he owes his own existence to the bomb. As he is not on this side of the planet very often, his visit to the Book Festival on Tuesday was a rare chance to encounter a unique writer and a unique mind. Flanagan, who won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, explained that Question 7 was written in just ten months, after he was given a misdiagnosis of early-onset dementia (there was later found to be a mistake in the radiologist's report). Recent BBC drama hit The Narrow Road to the Deep North was based on Flanagan's 2014 novel | Contributed However, the diagnosis focused his mind on profound questions about how we live, and on considering afresh how his parents lived. He realised that, in their 'very ordinary lives', raising six children in the Tasmanian rainforest, they 'cleaved to the idea of love and goodness'. If we can take our moral compass from that sense of common humanity, he said, and resist any ideology which dehumanises another person or group, we might find hope in our troubled world. To stay up to date, why not sign up to our weekly Arts and Culture newsletter? So you don't miss a thing, it will be sent sent daily during August. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Leading Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov also traced a chain reaction in his visit to the Book Festival, beginning with the writer Gogol and ending with the current war in Ukraine. Born in central Ukraine, Gogol wrote so beautifully about Ukrainian life and customs that he created a fashion for all things Ukrainian among the aristocracy of St Petersburg. It helped embed the idea in the Russian psyche that Ukraine was part of Russia. Well-known for novels such as Death and the Penguin and a fluent English speaker, Kurkov has become a kind of ambassador for his country in this time of war. His war diaries, the second volume of which has just been published, offer humane and even sometimes humorous insights into daily life in a country at war. Ethnically Russian – although he has lived in Ukraine since childhood – he spoke about choosing his country over his mother tongue. Russian is still his 'internal language', and the language in which his fiction is first written, though now it is read chiefly in translation: books in Russian are not sold in Ukrainian bookshops, and in Russia his books are banned. He described the recent summit in Alaska as a 'sitcom' in which the 'main character… laid out the red carpet for the war criminal'. And he was cautious of any prospect of a peace deal, given the different motivations at play: Trump hoping to win a Nobel Peace Prize; Putin wanting to be remembered as 'the tsar who made Russia great again'; Ukraine unlikely to agree to any split on territory. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
