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Almost nine years after launching her womenswear brand Cefinn following Brexit, the designer Samantha Cameron has announced she will be “winding down future operations” in the coming months.

The wife of the former prime minister David Cameron cited “turbulence in the fashion wholesale factor, ongoing cost pressures and international trading restrictions”. It had become increasingly difficult to “achieve the level of growth needed to reach a profitable position”, she said in a statement. Her final collection will go on sale online and in her two London shops at the end of the month.

Cefinn, which is an amalgamation of their children’s names, launched in autumn 2016, three months after David resigned over the Brexit vote. Formerly the creative director of the British brand Smythson, Cameron took a pattern-cutting course while her husband was planning the EU referendum. Against all odds – and public sentiment – it started well.

Self-funded, with just 40 looks which ran up to £400 for a coat, the brand hard-launched with a handful of pieces – sleeveless A-lined culottes, trouser suits in bright colours and a flattering tie-waist dress in her trademark windowpane print – in Vogue’s December issue.

It helped that her sister, Emily Sheffield, was then the magazine’s deputy editor, her cousin is the interior designer Cath Kidston and her mother, Annabel Astor, co-founded the interiors company Oka. But equally, its “C-suite chic” filled a hole in the market, according to Joy Montgomery, Vogue’s online commerce editor. “It understood that so many women just wanted easy-to-style, flattering staples that weren’t tethered to the changing tides of the seasonal trend cycle,” she said.

Cameron said the idea had been to create trend-free clothing for women who moved between roles in fabrics that ddidn’t need to be dry-cleaned. One of the few brands with a designer who was as much a visual ambassador of the clothes as anyone who wore then, Cefinn became inextricably linked with Cameron’s own style. Her collarbone-to-calf printed dresses looked as at home in the Cotswolds as the courtroom, and were worn by the Princess of Wales and Akshata Murty.

Among the bestsellers was the whimsically named Rosie dress, whose button-down front is sewn shut so as to avoid a gaping bust.

In 2020 she successfully launched knitwear. One item, a £150 tabard, even had a waiting list. She went on to model the pieces on social media, twirling desk-side in her white-walled office.

Yet in some ways, the latest news isn’t surprising. Despite its glossy start, 18 months into the business, in 2018, Cefinn lost more than £500,000. Later that year, it secured £2.5m from fundraisers including the Tory peer and party donor David Brownlow, who became company director and bankrolled the Johnsons’ Downing Street makeover. But by 2020, thanks in part to Covid, losses were mounting, and by 2021 it had suffered its fourth consecutive annual loss.

In 2022 revenues hit £3.8m, but the company went through various supply-chain problems after the UK agreed its post-Brexit EU trade deal – some of which she diplomatically outlined in a Radio 4 interview as “teething issues” – as well as escalating costs and the removal of tax-free shopping for tourists. Compounded by unforeseen international trading restrictions, the market simply conspired against it.

Cefinn’s story is a familiar one for several independent British labels whose outlook has been hit by the whims of the fashion industry, among them The Vampire’s Wife and Roksanda, which were particularly affected by the collapse in March of the online stockist Matchesfashion.

“Ultimately, it came up against the same challenge that has confronted every high-street and mid-priced brand in recent years,” Montgomery said. “How to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace in which content is king and customer loyalty is an ever-shifting target.”

The retail analyst and founder of Savvy, Catherine Shuttleworth, agreed. “Brands rely on influencers and social media,” she said. With just over 80,000 followers on social media, Cefinn’s online presence was relatively low-key.

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According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, customers in Cefinn’s 45-54 age bracket have the highest disposable income. But the safe formula that made Cefinn appealing “doesn’t stand a chance when John Lewis and M&S costs half the price”, Shuttleworth said. This week, John Lewis’ own-brand knitwear sales were up more than 50% week-on-week. Among its most popular offerings? Sleeveless tabard vests.

Those with bigger budgets have moved on to brands such as Rixo, whose vintage-inspired dresses have cross-generational appeal, and ME+EM which, in an ironic twist, has been worn by Cameron’s Labour counterpart, Victoria Starmer, and Angela Rayner and opened in the US.

“It’s notable that [British] high-street brands have been expanding their higher-priced offering,” Montgomery said of the newly normal four-figure coat.

It’s possible that it became too difficult to separate the designer from her personal history. Cameron is, after all, still married to the man who – among many things – left office after losing the Brexit vote and has remained a broadly disliked public figure.

There is no overt branding, but some looks are recognisably Cefinn. Shuttleworth disagrees that anti-Tory sentiment extends to sales: “I think if the product is right, that doesn’t matter,” she said.

Yet one customer, who preferred to stay off the record, told the Guardian she simply couldn’t wear her navy Cefinn dress to work “in case someone asked her where it was from”.

Starting this week at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter play the put-upon pair of Estragon and Vladimir in director Jamie Lloyd’s take on Samuel Beckett’s deep, empty abyss of a play, Waiting for Godot. It’s fair to call this an unexpected collaboration for the duo best known for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But it’s also an extension—and expression—of one of Hollywood’s most enduring friendships.

KEANU AND ALEX AND BILL AND TED

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter met in the mid-1980s as young actors auditioning for the title roles in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a low-budget comedy about two time-traveling teens. The film follows William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, two air guitar-shredding high school goofballs from San Dimas who hurtle around the space-time continuum, collecting historical figures along the way.

The auditions dragged on for weeks with dozens of prospective Bills and Teds tested in endless combinations. When Keanu and Alex met, they clicked immediately. They both showed up on motorbikes. They both played bass. They were both huge fans of Monty Python.

There were other points of connection, too. They both came from what Winter describes as “artsy, European, quasi-intellectual families.” Winter grew up in London, St. Louis and New Jersey. His parents ran a dance company before their divorce. He trained in theater and dance from a young age, performing in The King and I on Broadway and touring with Peter Pan. Reeves’ upbringing was similarly unconventional. After his parents split when he was three, he grew up with a series of stepfathers, including a stage and film director who encouraged his acting. Reeves lived in Beirut to Sydney, then New York, and eventually Toronto. 

The two quickly realized they were kindred spirits. “I share the sense of humor and the way we kind of look at the world and existence,” said Reeves. “That mixture of humor and intelligence… Yeah, I don’t get that anywhere else.” There probably weren’t too many would-be Bills and/or Teds drawing on their knowledge of 16th-century Italian theatrical forms during the auditions. “We’re riffing on Bill and Ted,” recalled Reeves, “and talking about commedia dell’arte.”

As the auditions wore on, they started hanging out, jamming together on bass. (Worth noting here that “jamming” on bass requires the musicians to stay even more attuned to one another, in order to avoid intruding on each other’s sonic frequencies.)

When they both landed the roles, they were thrilled. “It’s like when you start at a new school, you’re like, ‘Oh great, you’re going to be in my class,’” said Winter.

Reeves, whose career was just beginning to take off, had just starred in the moody teen drama River’s Edge; Bill and Ted must have felt like a joyride by comparison. For Winter, the experience was far more profound. He later called the movie—his camaraderie with Reeves no doubt in mind—as “therapeutic,” a key part of his recovery after being a victim of abuse as a child performer on Broadway. “It was really, really helpful for me mentally,” he said. “And it was a great environment. The world of Bill and Ted is a very sweet and fun place to run around in.”

In reality, Reeves, who struggled with dyslexia, had a tough time in high school, while Winter’s early years were consumed by his work as a child actor. Through Bill and Ted, they finally got a taste of the carefree high school experience they had missed out on—together.

STILL JAMMING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Due in no small part to its leads’ easygoing onscreen chemistry, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure became a cult hit. It also marked the beginning of a lifelong bond. “There’s very little constancy in this business,” Winter said. “You come together on a set, you’re like, ‘We’re like a family!’ And then it’s, ‘OK, bye.’ You never, ever see them again.” But the pair stayed in touch after the first movie and its 1991 sequel, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, even as Reeves’ career took off and Winter shifted to documentary filmmaking. They got to know each other’s families, went on vacations together and took to calling each other “brother.”

Bill and Ted writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon pitched their idea for a third movie to Reeves and Winter about 20 years ago, during a barbecue at Winter’s place. Years later, both reflected on the deeper meaning of the franchise, and their characters’ immortal exhortation to “Party on, dudes.” Their responses suggest a surprisingly philosophical lens through which to view the films—anticipating the themes of their next collaboration. “Bill and Ted is really about friendship,” Winter said. “Which means it’s about community. Which means it’s about the interconnectedness of people. And being passionate about that interconnectedness.”

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“We’ve known each other for a very long time. It’s a play about two people who’ve known each other for a very long time.” –Alex Winter

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Reeves said, “I think the sentiment of it is, ‘Be the best person, human you can be.’ And if you do that, then you can party on.” He added, “We’re just some humans on a rock in space. So it’s kinda nice to promote that idea.”

The movie’s post-credits scene featured an aged, decrepit Bill and Ted summoning just enough mojo to haul themselves out of their nursing home beds for perhaps one final righteous jam. “We still got it,” says Ted. “We still got it,” agrees Bill.

BILL AND TED’S EXISTENTIAL ADVENTURE

After the success and fun of their onscreen reunion in Bill and Ted Face the Music, the duo was eager to collaborate again. It was Reeves who suggested—of all the projects they might have embarked on together—a stage production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They’ve referred to the upcoming Broadway production, with a knowing nod to their past work, as their “next adventure”.

Bill and Ted may seem a long way from Beckett’s tattered tramps. But on closer inspection, there’s real continuity between the double act of Bill and Ted and Vladimir and Estragon—or Didi and Gogo, to use the handles that wouldn’t feel out of place in, say, a San Dimas skate park. 

For one, Reeves, who first read the play in his teens, has pointed out that the clipped rhythms of Bill and Ted’s back-and-forth banter mirrors Beckett’s. Character-wise, there are similarities too. “There’s more of a floppiness to Ted,” Winter has said, “whereas Bill is making more of a concerted effort to attack the world—but he’s failing completely”—a description that could easily apply to Vladimir and Estragon.

On one level, Beckett’s 1953 play certainly expressed a deep metaphysical anxiety about the universe and the human condition in the mid-20th century. It’s also about friendship. As with Bill and Ted, Waiting for Godot is the story of two longtime companions navigating an absurd situation, whose easy repartee and occasional bickering speak to a real affection for one another. A real love, in fact: Didi and Gogo’s riffing dialogue draws on the witty exchanges Beckett enjoyed with his wife, Suzanne. “We’ve known each other for a very long time,” Winter said on the Tonys red carpet. “It’s a play about two people who’ve known each other for a very long time.”

Considered this way, Didi and Gogo start to resemble the downtrodden doppelgängers of Bill and Ted—and this Waiting for Godot starts to feel like an exploration of the saving power of human connection in the most bogus of circumstances. As they draw on their shared history on stage, Reeves and Winter might even infuse Vladimir and Estragon’s weary, fatalistic maxim with an ebullient new spirit.

 “Nothing to be done? Party on, dudes!”

Catastrophe creates fragments that oppose it. Chilean poet, painter, and activist Cecilia Vicuña’s lifelong artistic practice is dedicated to this idea. Her work is grounded in the belief that objects and detritus cast aside by the movement of history may be made into bearers of transformative potential. Vicuña’s first book, Saborami, insists on the capacity for a “touched object” to become a “charged object.” That is, on the capacity for a collective political and aesthetic imagination to make insignificant, precarious, and fragile objects into bearers of transformative potential. First published in 1973 in a small print run from Beau Geste Press, Saborami was put together while Vicuña lived in London, first as a student at the Slade and then, following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government by Pinochet’s CIA-backed military coup, as a political exile. The book functions both as a chronicle of the years of Vicuña’s artistic development during which she committed herself and her art to Allende’s socialist vision, and as an urgent response to the military takeover in her country, an event that she understood as “a total, radical, and absolute erasure of everything.” The original print run of Saborami responded to this erasure by turning ephemerality, contingency, and the potential to be wiped out into a lever through which to prize open a gap in the false permanence of Pinochet’s regime. The book remains a vibrant repudiation of the world of free-market abstraction and concrete murder that the coup inaugurated.

The 2024 printing of Saborami by London’s Book Works is the first full facsimile edition to appear outside of Chile. It is edited by Amy Tobin and Luke Roberts, both of whom have afforded Vicuña’s work significant space in their own respective histories of postwar art and poetry. The editors’ introduction contextualizes the work and details Vicuña’s wider activism in internationalist artistic and political movements. An appendix provides essays and talks in which Vicuña reflects on the devastation wrought by Pinochet and his generals, on her own creative process, and on the collaborative methods through which the book was originally printed and distributed. Along with these texts, Tobin and Roberts include full-color reproductions of paintings that appear as monochrome photographs within the book proper, as well one painting, The Death of Allende, which does not appear, but which is described in detail in the 1973 text. It is to the deep credit of the editors that the 2024 edition of Saborami retains a sense of the singular power of the original while containing enough historical scaffolding to make this power accessible fifty years after the events to which it responds.

This is a book with an extraordinary capacity to invigorate and inspire, and writing about it means reckoning with where this power comes from. One possible answer, I think, lies in the work’s singular relationship to its historical circumstances, and therefore to history per se: Saborami was produced in the immediate wake of devastation, and it carries this within each of its pages. The book proper begins with a series of collages and texts, a “journal of objects for the Chilean resistance,” which forms Vicuña’s immediate response to the events of September 1973. From here, the chronology moves backwards, albeit with frequent mentions of the present moment of its production. After the journal, there is the “Brown Book.” Composed in June of the same year, this section acts as a tribute to life under Allende and an attempt to express through found photographs and cosmological speculation the sense of extraordinary possibility that suffused Chile during this time. After this, one reads a diary of the formation and reception of a piece entitled Otoño (Autumn) displayed in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, followed by reflections on Vicuña’s work as a painter alongside reproductions of, amongst others, her series “Heroes of the Revolution.” Saborami ends with a sequence of poetry written two years before Vicuña’s move to London. Arranging this work in reverse order of its composition means that Vicuña’s ecstatic tributes to a—now lost—collective life are necessarily mediated by a sense of profound loss and rage. The short, original introduction by one of the editors at Beau Geste, Philipe Ehrenberg—who was himself living in exile in England following Mexico’s 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—informs us that the book was “planned as a celebration” and that, following September 11, 1973, it became something that “symbolizes the contained fury and the sorrow of Chile’s present.” The coup transfigured an artist’s book planned by friends into a collective project to save and protect. This salvage mission was not conducted for the sake of one artist’s work. Rather, Saborami was conceived—and still reads—as a vessel through which a collective horizon that was the dominant condition of possibility of Vicuña’s art might endure.

The book’s split temporality is felt immediately in the journal of objects. We read that upon hearing of the first attempted coup of June 1973, Vicuña “decided to make an object everyday [sic] in support of the Chilean revolutionary process” and that following Allende’s overthrow, she conceived of the objects as “intended to support armed struggle against the reactionary government.” In one sense, the photographs, collages, and bilingual text that constitute the journal present a subjective correlate to processes of collective social transformation; they express the mixture of subjectivation and self-abandon that characterizes a shared remaking of the world: “As industries are nationalized, I am nationalized. From individual to communal property.” Against the backdrop of what Vicuña felt as the “horrendous grayness and sadness of the British Soul,” her home country takes on an impossibly vibrant Chile could be the first happy country in the world, a way of being constantly affectionate would grow from innocence and neolithic ecstasy, (reappearing). Suicide wouldn’t exist. Socialism would achieve a cosmic consciousness, the sum of the wisdom of the pre-Columbian Indians and of the many wisdoms of other places.”

A prefigurative experience of actual utopia dissolves so-called “social facts,” and tectonic shifts in the present radiate backwards, summoning alternative, ancient epistemologies without smothering them. This sensitivity does not, however, prevent Vicuña from assuming a register of authority: “Invent your task, do it!” she insists with an indignant joy in a text block dedicated to the role of cultural workers in the struggle.

For all its investment in happiness and sensuous experience, Saborami is not naive about its enemies. The journal’s enthusiasm turns to cold rage when it comes to the “mummie,” a term for the small-minded spokespeople of property who must be eliminated if Allende’s socialism is to endure. One page consists of four dolls representing this type dangling from nooses. At the bottom we read a handwritten quote from Mao that describes the necessity of eliminating reactionaries as a broom sweeps away dust. In a book whose images are warm, fantastical, and enthused in spite of their monochrome reproduction, this coldness is an articulation of the rational element necessary for effective class warfare. As a whole, the journal of objects consistently affirms the clarity of the opaque and the beauty of the coarse, and in doing so it enacts a synthesis at the level of the aesthetic that is repeated in statements of praxis. “Revolutionary violence,” writes Vicuña in one entry, “is a nail hammered on a banana leaf. A rough movement to capture the delicate, an [sic] haiku or a leap of Tai Chi.” Friedrick Hayek reportedly responded to the news of Pinochet’s repressions by stating that there are moments when “democracy needs a good cleaning.” Vicuña’s objects exist against this brutality: they are dirty and quick monuments persisting in opposition to an infernal machine of sterility and disappearance.

A major part of Saborami is dedicated to Vicuña’s paintings. Several of her works are reproduced in monochrome within the facsimile section and in vibrant color as part of the appendix to the 2024 edition. They include her well-known rendering of Marx looking pensive amongst sensuous copulating bodies, her portrait of folk singer and organizer Violeta Parra, and her painting of Lenin with his hands in his pockets declaring via a luxurious red speech bubble that the freedom of the proletariat can never be complete without the freedom of women. Vicuña’s openly acknowledged debt to Leonara Carrington is evident in this work. A particular blending of the wonderful and the sensuous into and out of the historical, however, is all her own. This relationship to history is complex. Vicuña’s rendition of the 1971 meeting between Allende and Fidel Castro expresses a cosmological innocence that stems from the presumed inevitability of their shared project. Castro, we read in the accompanying text, is represented as a “New Man” and Allende is wrapped “in the charismatic veil that descends on all historic characters.” Actual events, however, intrude on felicitous teleologies. It was, after all, this meeting where the Cuban leader advised his comrade to prepare for an armed struggle against fascism, and where the latter insisted that Chile must remain on its peaceful, democratic path towards socialism. In a world after the coup, the butterfly that has “mistaken Allende for a flower” is expressive of a terminally naive vulnerability. To look at the painting now is to experience these qualities simultaneously, and to see the communist horizon under whose influence Vicuña created the work persist within and against its foreclosure. Politics is in this art like water in water.

Each moment of Saborami moves back and forth between two sides of a ruptured continuum. The book stems from the time after the coup; the repudiation of the event is its stated purpose. At the same time, its aim is precisely to transmit an energy that stems from the beauties and sufferings of collective modes of life that preexisted the Pinochet regime. In other words, it is a book of a time after because it is emphatically a book of the time before. At points, these temporalities press against each other, creating an urgency that is itself a mode of preservation: “I didn’t want to make it with many words, since there is hardly any time left to live” writes Vicuña at the start of the journal of objects. This sense of limited time was optimistic: the systematic torture necessary for Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys to begin their economic vivisections was well underway when Beau Geste published the initial print run. Part of the magic of Saborami is its capacity to turn desperation into a mode through which the political and aesthetic possibilities to which Vicuña dedicated her life endure at the moment of their suffocation. In an unsent letter to their contemporaries at GAAG (Guerilla Art Action Group), Ehrenberg and Vicuña describe what had happened in Chile as “the ruthlessly [sic] decapitation of a newborn babe … the killing of 5 million people creating, thinking, and gathering in a new, joyful, unheard way.” If the coup is a decapitation, we could perhaps understand Saborami as existing in the hypothetical instant between the severing of the head and the dying of the mind. Allende’s Chile was not to be saved, and the life-defining collective experiences birthed therein were largely repressed. Still, the capacity to inspire and invigorate that runs throughout Saborami is itself a sign that transformative possibility has been preserved at the precise moment of the disappearance of its realization. The book is a flame trapped in amber.

As a work of salvage, Saborami is completely uninterested in resolving its own contradictions. Its politics are fast and enthusiastic, its poetry is erotic and sometimes rough, and its thinking is as sharp-edged and unrefined as the moment of its composition demands. The translations into English from the original Spanish are often hasty, and an elementary knowledge of the latter is enough to know that certain passages have been smoothed over or left untranslated. Like an effective guerilla fighter, however, the book weaponizes its own imperfections and the contingencies of its circumstances as a force against the false necessity of military-backed market domination: “Maximum fragility against maximum power,” as Vicuña has put it elsewhere. One assumes that an intuitive understanding of the need to preserve these elements guided Tobin and Roberts in their decision to print a facsimile edition, even as they point out that this involves a necessary flattening of the microscopic idiosyncrasies, inserts, and accidents that made each of the individual two hundred and fifty Beau Geste copies unique. What we have now is a mediated, composite object, one which necessarily smooths out a modicum of the sharp edges of the original. Rather than a reprint, it might be worth understanding the 2024 Saborami as a dynamic echo of what was already a series of echoes and inscriptions whereby an artist attempted to inscribe the communal transformations and devastations of her moment.

Speaking in 1974, Vicuña stated that “paradise is one of my concerns … But all this dreamlike life depended on the triumph of revolution, really. You can never have individual joy unless you have social joy, I mean joy everywhere.” There is a sense of bitter melancholy here, as if her art has misfired and become trapped at the moment of its realization. Still, this bitterness is itself a product of joy, of a happiness that has become frozen over and deferred, and it is through the reclaiming of the collective horizon to which Vicuña’s art still speaks that this feeling can be requickened into its former shape. As she put it more recently, it is “of the utmost urgency to recover the memory of the lost dream.” Saborami continues to encrypt and transmit this memory and this dream. The stakes of its recovery have hardly been higher.

Prince Harry has left Clarence House after meeting the King for what Buckingham Palace officials called a “private tea”.

It was their first meeting in 19 months.

The last time the father and son saw each other was in February 2024 when the Duke of Sussex flew to London after the monarch announced his cancer diagnosis.

Harry, 40, was driven through the gates of the King’s London home around 5.20pm on Wednesday afternoon following an earlier engagement at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London, an institution with which he has close connections.

The duke has been carrying out a string of events since arriving back in Britain on Monday.

He began his four-day working stay by leaving flowers at the final resting place of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, to mark the third anniversary of her death.

The King, who is still undergoing cancer treatment, travelled back to London on Wednesday from his Balmoral home, where he has been spending his summer break.

The reunion came after Harry publicly expressed hopes in May of a family reconciliation, as he told the BBC the monarch would not speak to him because of his court battle over his security and that he did not know “how much longer my father has”.

Since moving to the US, Harry, who stepped back as a working royal in 2020, has levelled a number of accusations at the King, his stepmother the Queen, his brother Prince of Wales and his sister-in-law the Princess of Wales in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary, interviews and his autobiography Spare.

The duke remains estranged from Prince William, 43, who travelled to Cardiff on Wednesday to learn about a mental health hub on World Suicide Prevention Day, with no prospect of the pair meeting.

In February 2024, Harry made the journey from his Californian home to Britain to see his father following his cancer diagnosis.

Back then, Harry spent about 45 minutes with the King before the 76-year-old flew to his Sandringham country estate to recuperate from his treatment.

The meeting showed both sides were willing to put their strained relationship on hold.

This summer, senior aides to the King and Harry were pictured in the Mail On Sunday during a meeting in London that was reportedly a step towards restoring the relationship between the duke and the Royal Family.

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