Latest news with #MishcondeReya
Spectator
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Satire is nothing without contempt
On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving's anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle to restoring the ideas of Adolf Hitler was what happened to the Jews. If their genocide could be denied, fascism could be rehabilitated. For the occasion, I prepared a list of the 16 principal characteristics of fascism which I take to be: 1) Exploitation of historic grievances 2) Frequent resort to states of emergency 3) Rule by executive order rather than by assembly 4) Disempowering of the judiciary 5) Attacks on the media 6) Threats to annex territory 7) Constant blaming of an enemy within 8) Insistence that the leader is above the law 9) Assaults on higher education and universities 10) Withdrawal from international organisations 11) Extreme nationalism 12) Elevation of the heterosexual family 13) Obsession with birth rates 14) Impassioned denial of historical truth 15) Persecution of particular racial groups and 16) Attacks on cultural institutions. With Donald Trump planning to turn the Kennedy Center in D.C. into his very own Bayreuth, we can surely say he is returning a full score card. Theatre is normally the most uneven of art forms. You must sit through a few bad plays to discover a good one. But, for me, 2025 has been unusual. Everything I have seen is good. I had already caught Mark Rosenblatt's Giant before I saw Howard Brenton's lovely play about Churchill and Stalin. Then came Kyoto, centred on the 1997 climate conference; An Interrogation, by a new writer, Jamie Armitage; the brilliantly directed opera of Festen; and Robert Icke's Manhunt, an evening investigating Raoul Moat. Most original of all, Self Esteem staged her new album A Complicated Woman at the Duke of York's, in an evening which blazed with energy and warmth.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prince William's ‘Deliberate Snub' Speaks Volumes About His Relationship With Kate After He Hired Divorce Lawyers
Prince William and Kate Middleton are keeping their lives low-key recently. The family spent the Easter holiday away from Royal tradition, and it's making people wonder if they're going to veer away from even more traidtions. The Prince and Princess of Wales and their family— Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, 9, and Prince Louis, 6 celebrated with Pippa and Carole Middleton on Easter Sunday. The family was spotted at a Sunday morning church service in Sandringham, which is near their country home Anmer Hall. More from StyleCaster William & Kate's Latest Decision Just 'Raised A Lot of Eyebrows' at the Palace After He Hired a Divorce Lawyer William Just Hinted He Also Has Issues With Meghan After Reports He'll Have Harry 'Harshly Dealt With' Once He's KingMeanwhile, King Charles and his siblings attended the Easter Mattins church service at St. George's Chapel, located in Windsor Castle, on April 20. The Royal family in attendance were Princess Anne with her husband Sir Timothy Laurence, Prince Andrew with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson and Prince Edward with his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh. It was reported that William and Kate would not be doing the Royal Easter Tradition on Thursday, April 17. The family reportedly wanted to spend time with their children before they went back to school. 'Everyone understood the family not attending last year when Kate was sick, but there's been a lot of raised eyebrows at the palace about William's decision to skip again this year,' the insider added. 'It feels like a deliberate move and even a snub.' Everything still looks like it's in paradise for the Wales with the couple's bond stronger than ever after Kate's remission from cancer in January 2025. However, Buckingham Palace also raised its eyebrows when Prince William recently hired Princess Diana's divorce lawyers. William was regularly using his father's lawyers Harbottle & Lewis and its partner, Gerrard Tyrrell — and made the move to Mishcon de Reya, which represented Princess Diana in her divorce from Charles a year before her accidental death. 'William wanted to strike out on his own,' a source tells the Daily Mail, who broke this news. 'He did not want to continue using his father's lawyers. It's as simple as that. He wants to be his own man.' The unexpected move has been 'the talk of legal circles' and Buckingham Palace thinks it's 'the latest example of his desire to follow a different path from that of his father.' William's friend told the Daily Mail, saying 'William wants to do things differently from his father, and wants to be seen to do them differently.' Best of StyleCaster The 26 Best Romantic Comedies to Watch if You Want to Know What Love Feels Like These 'Bachelor' Secrets & Rules Prove What Happens Behind the Scenes Is So Much Juicier BTS's 7 Members Were Discovered in the Most Unconventional Ways
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prince William & Kate Middleton's Second Easter No-Show Feels 'Deliberate,' Says Source
When Queen Elizabeth II sat on the throne, no one in the royal family would have considered spending Easter Sunday anywhere but at St. George's Chapel in Windsor. With her passing, times have changed, and the palace dynamics are constantly in flux. This year, Prince William and Kate Middleton took a page from last year's Easter playbook and opted for a holiday at their country home, Anmer Hall, according to Hello! magazine. They were seen with their three children, Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, 9, and Prince Louis, 6, and Kate's parents, Carole and Michael Middleton at a service at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham. More from SheKnows Bindi Irwin's Daughter Grace Warrior's Stylish Easter Tradition Shows She's a Springtime Princess The decision to forgo spending the holiday with King Charles III and Queen Camilla is what an Us Weekly source is calling a 'big deal.' They explained what this means for Charles and William as they each try and establish their method of leadership. 'It's royal tradition for the family to attend this together,' the insider added. 'Everyone understood the family not attending last year when Kate was sick but there's been a lot of raised eyebrows at the palace about William's decision to skip again this year. It feels like a deliberate move and even a snub.' The Prince of Wales appears to be making moves for his role as the future king apart from his father's current reign. A recent example was his decision to hire his own legal team, Mishcon de Reya, that represented Princess Diana during her divorce from the then-Prince Charles. 'William wanted to strike out on his own. He did not want to continue using his father's lawyers. It's as simple as that. He wants to be his own man,' a source told the Daily Mail. Prince William wants to come out from behind King Charles' shadow years ahead of his coronation. It is a decisive move and shows that he's ready to modernize the monarchy. 'The next few years will see him thinking through what kind of monarch he wants to be and what kind of monarch the country will need to have in the mid-21st Century,' historian Sir Anthony Seldon told the BBC in June 2024. 'He has been defining his own agenda…' So, skipping Easter services might not seem like a big deal, but it's Prince William's way of asserting himself in the royal family. Before you go, click to see more photos of Prince William & Kate Middleton through the years. Best of SheKnows 38 Times Carmen Electra's Head-Turning Red Carpet Fashion Left Us Flustered & Enchanted These 20 Celebs Have Been Called Out by Restaurant Staff for Their Allegedly Rude Behavior Everything We Know About Suri Cruise, Her Relationship With Her Dad & Her Life As A Young Adult
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Perfume brands fighting a ‘lost cause' against cheap dupes, say lawyers
One perfume smells suspiciously like a £355 bottle of Baccarat Rouge 540 eau de parfum. Another, which has notes of grapefruit, rose and Levantine spice, is reminiscent of a £215 bottle of Penhaligon's Halfeti. But unlike those luxury brands, these 'dupe scents' can cost as little as a fiver. As many as half of UK consumers are now thought to have succumbed to the social media craze for cheap perfumes 'inspired by' well-known luxury fragrances. And lawyers now say perfume brands and beauty companies need greater legal protection from rivals who imitate their products. Intellectual property lawyers and chartered trademark attorneys told the Observer that the law must catch up to better protect the original creators of perfumes. Some said they had been contacted by companies seeking advice on how to legally dupe a perfume, while others had received enquiries from luxury brands about how to take legal action against dupe scents. 'Everybody wants to smell good and to have an affordable slice of luxury. However, it comes at the expense of proper artists, because perfume creation is an art,' Mireille Dagger, legal director at Broadfield law firm, told the Observer. 'These companies are riding on the coattails of artists. It's very unfair. It's very hard to create a perfume brand and build it up. It requires expertise, artistic talent, time, energy and investment.' 'There have been no known cases in the UK of any perfume brands being able to trademark their scent – because under UK law, it's a requirement that a trademark be graphically representable,' Dagger said. While perfume manufacturers can trademark their brand names, distinctive labels and unique bottle shapes, none of the lawyers the Observer spoke to believed it would be possible, in practice, to trademark the scent of an original fragrance. A company needs to be able to clearly, precisely and objectively describe what they are protecting with a trademark. 'When it comes to scent, you just can't do that, because scent is subjective. Different people smell different things. It's very hard to consistently reproduce that scent on paper,' added Dagger. 'You're not able to put it in writing.' Equally, a scent cannot usually be patented, said Eloise Harding, a partner in Mishcon de Reya's intellectual property department, because this requires a particular perfume formulation to have an 'inventive step' during its creation. 'I don't think any kind of fragrance is likely to have a sufficient level of inventive step,' she said. A brand owner might not even want to patent its perfume formulation, said Robert Lye, legal director at Gateley. 'The quid pro quo for patent protection is that the patented invention is made public, meaning that anyone would be able to copy the formulation once the patent has expired.' The maximum duration of a patent is 20 years, he added. Some copycat perfume manufacturers are using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS) to break down the complex chemical profiles of expensive perfumes so they can emulate these scents – potentially using cheaper, 'substandard' ingredients, Dagger said. The cheaper imitations are particularly popular on TikTok, where there are thousands of posts with the hashtag #perfumedupe. With the once-inaccessible trade secrets about a perfume's formulation now able to be deduced using GCMS, 'there is no way, legally, for perfumers to protect their work,' said Dagger. She would like to see 'dupe brands being forced to pay royalties to the original brands'. As for the law, 'something creative needs to happen – protection for the fragrance industry is lagging woefully behind beauty and fashion.' The UK fragrance market was estimated to be worth £1.74bn in 2024, and is on track to surpass £2bn by 2029, according to market researchers Mintel. In a recent survey of 1,435 fragrance buyers in the UK, 50% said they had bought a dupe perfume. A third of those surveyed said they would be prepared to buy a dupe fragrance again while 18% of those who had not yet bought one said they would be interested in doing so. 'It is almost a lost cause for perfume brands to defend themselves, if all they are saying is 'we came up with this fragrance first', because I don't think consumers really care about that,' said Dionne Officer, a Mintel research analyst. Admirers of designer perfume brands no longer think they should have to pay through the nose to have access to luxury scents: 'Seeing dupe scents on social media, and knowing influencers are buying them, has made them more acceptable,' she added. Younger consumers in particular are accustomed to seeing fast-fashion brands duplicating independent designers, and are unlikely to feel it is a taboo to openly wear a dupe scent or even give one as a gift. 'Maybe in older generations, it would have been looked down upon, to copy something,' said Officer. 'But younger consumers have grown up in a time of economic instability, where you're praised if you get a bargain – it's seen as quite cool, now.'
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prince William's Decision To Hire His Mother's Divorce Lawyers Has Everything To Do With King Charles
Prince William hired the same lawyers Princess Diana used in her divorce from King Charles III, but there's no need to worry about the state of his marriage to Kate Middleton quite yet. William is breaking away from the legal team that has been representing the British royal family for decades in a move that has more to do with his father, King Charles, than his marriage. More from SheKnows All of the Biggest Royal Family Scandals in the Past 50 Years Daily Mail reports that Prince William dropped King Charles' longtime legal team — Harbottle & Lewis and its partner, Gerrard Tyrrell — with whom he has also worked throughout his adulthood. Instead, he is now represented by Mishcon de Reya, the legal firm that represented his mother when her divorce from then-Prince Charles in 1996, a year before she died in a car accident. The firm, which handles a lot more than just divorces, will now represent William in many legal areas. The move does not appear to be a sign of trouble in his marriage to Middleton. 'William wanted to strike out on his own. He did not want to continue using his father's lawyers. It's as simple as that. He wants to be his own man,' one source told the Daily Mail. Another source, described as a 'friend' of the Prince, added, 'William wants to do things differently from his father and wants to be seen to do them differently.' Dropping Harbottle & Lewis, the firm that most famously represented the royal in the 2006 News of the World phone-hacking scandal, is the latest in William's efforts to forge his own path within the monarchy. As he described it to the BBC in November 2024, 'I can only describe what I'm trying to do, and that's I'm trying to do it differently and I'm trying to do it for my generation.' 'And to give you more an understanding around it,' he added. 'I'm doing it with maybe a smaller 'R' in the royal, if you like, that's maybe a better way of saying it.'Best of SheKnows 20 Best Celebrity 'Revenge Dresses' That Will Go Down In History Every Single Time Jessica Chastain's Bold & Ethereal Red Carpet Fashion Brought Us to Our Knees 9 Times Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi's Marriage Was Rocked by Controversy
