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A court in South Korea has ordered a social media user to pay 500,000 won ($360; £265) for defaming a K-pop boyband – whose members are virtual characters.

The five members of K-pop group Plave are voiced and animated through motion-capture technology by real, anonymous performers.

Last year, Plave’s agency filed a civil suit against against a social media user for making derogatory remarks about the group online.

The ruling by the court, handed down in May and made public on the court’s website this month, is among the first to deal with virtual K-pop idols – an increasingly popular breed in South Korea’s entertainment industry.

Plave, which debuted in 2023, is one of K-pop’s most successful virtual stars, with more than one million followers on its YouTube channel where they regularly post music videos and vlogs.

They are also a regular at the country’s biggest music awards. Their song Way 4 Luv was nominated for best vocal performance and song of the year at the 2024 MAMA Awards. This year, they won a major prize at the Seoul Music Awards.

In July 2024, the defendant targeted Plave in a series of posts – some containing profanity. Among them were comments that the people behind the avatars “could be ugly in real life” and gave off a “typical Korean man vibe”, Korea Times reported.

The defendant claimed that the comments were aimed at the fictional characters and not the real people behind them.

But the court rejected the argument, saying that if an avatar was widely recognised to represent someone real, then attacks on the avatar also extended to the real person.

Plave’s agency, Vlast, had asked for 6.5 million won for each of the five performers behind the group, saying that the comments had caused them emotional distress.

What the court granted them instead was a fraction of that: 100,000 won per person. The court said it had decided on the amount after considering the severity of the offending comments and the circumstances surrounding the incident, local media reported.

Vlast has appealed the damages stated by the court, arguing that the case set an important precedent for defamation of virtual avatars.

Advocates of virtual K-pop idols say the avatars can alleviate pressure from human idols, who face intense scrutiny over their personal lives.

Miley Cyrus has dropped her new song “Secrets” as a deluxe track for her Something Beautiful album!

The Grammy-winning singer wrote the song with Fleetwood Mac artists Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood. She says that the “song is for my dad.”

“This song was written as a peace offering for someone I had lost for a time but always loved. In my experience, forgiveness and freedom are one and the same,” Miley wrote on Instagram.

Keep reading to find out more…

Miley had a falling out with her dad Billy Ray Cyrus for years, but they’ve worked their way back to a healthy relationship.

“I wrote this song about my dad, because I wanted him to tell me, even though they were secrets, even though I didn’t really wanna know, I wanted to be the one he felt safe enough to tell me the things that were damning and damaging to the family,” Miley said on the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast. “But I wanted him to think that, as a middle child, I’m old enough that I could take some of that you know. And I always wanted my family to feel like I was the safe place, that I always had the white flag when they came to talk to me.”

Watch the music video below!

The song starts, “Secrets, I wanna keep your secrets / Like sunlight in the shadows / Like footsteps in the grass / I won’t ever break my promise / Like a songbird in the silence / Like stones against the glass.”

Miley sings in the chorus, “Hero / Can I be your hero? / Call off all your forces / A white flag in the war.”

Read the full “Secrets” lyrics below.

A warm autumn afternoon: blue sky scattered with cumulus, three red kites wheeling above. I’ve come to gather blackberries – an age-old pursuit, gentle in rhythm, quietly absorbing.

At the scrub’s edge, I meet a formidable bramble. Its stems are red, grooved, thicker than my thumb, and arch outwards for 10 metres or more with fearsome spines. This is giant blackberry, introduced from eastern Europe for its large, plentiful berries, though not today – its fruit have gone over already. An aggressive coloniser, it sprawls into dense, impassable thickets, seemingly intent on swallowing whole patches of land.

Nearby, beneath flowery grassland, the ferociously prickled stems of railway bramble criss‑cross the ground like tripwires. Its fruit, though, is meagre and misshapen. Further on, an elm‑leaved bramble, its branches heavy with swags of glistening jet-black berries among ruby-red unripe ones. That’s more like it. This familiar hedgerow bramble has fruited generously this year, even if the berries are small.

I pick steadily, the fruit yielding with a soft pop, staining my fingertips purple. A dock bug probes one berry, sipping juice that is sweeter than its usual fare of dock and sorrel seeds. Nearby, a family of chiffchaffs flicker through the scrub, calling softly.

Elsewhere I find slender‑spined, pruinose and Yorkshire brambles, making it a grand total of six different brambles in this small patch – more than the four that the poet John Clare recognised in this parish two centuries ago. It is, however, only a fraction of the 350 or so species now known in the British Isles. The reason for that abundance of variety is that most brambles reproduce asexually, producing seed without fertilisation, and every genetic mutation can give rise to a new species. Some thrive only in rare habitats, others are tied to specific regions, and some are found nowhere else in the world. A few, like the giant blackberry, spread so aggressively that they threaten our native wildlife.

This will probably be the last blackberrying of the year. Already the air carries the sweet tang of fermentation, and soon the remaining fruit will be coated with a white down of mildew. Time to leave the rest for birds and insects – and to look forward to blackberry gin at Christmas.

“I’m fortunate enough to work with our CEO Daniel and also our chair Karl-Johan Persson. With them, every decision is about investing very long term, which feels especially good when you’re working with branding because these kinds of things take time,” Andersson says. “You do this kind of [activation], obviously it won’t show in the tills the day after, not even the week after. But then you pick up the sentiments from the consumer, or you hear that people in the creative industries are talking about H&M. When everyone is facing a little bit of a headwind, people are looking for energy. We want to give that energy.”

Andersson hopes that these events will underline that H&M is for a diverse shopper and can address a broader consumer than other high street competitors. “Thinking of our main competitors, whether it’s Zara or Uniqlo, they have a distinct style. We don’t have that specific style. We are much more like a platform, like Spotify, and then you can mix your song, or you can create your playlist,” he explains.

Last night’s collection followed the more maximalist mood fashion is moving into, with punk influence and plenty of checks. But H&M’s music events over the last few seasons have also helped the brand create intrigue, even if collections reflected the quiet luxury trend, Andersson adds. “When fashion becomes a little bit more basic, you have to find new ways of playing with it and inspiring people.”

The key is to do so without alienating existing shoppers. The public involvement in the show is one thing, but H&M will also feature the collections in a simpler, less high fashion context across its AW25 campaigns, to offer customers a different point of view on how to style them, he adds. The retailer will also experiment with different retail strategies to sell the collection, with some key items only available in-store, “learning from the Supremes of this world to create the fear of missing out”.

In terms of future activations, there’s definitely more in the pipeline, Andersson tells me. “You create the model and you have to play it again and again and again, and eventually people will see it and they will understand — it’s not a story you can tell with one event,” he says. “So you have to be very focused and be very sharp and very and not be distracted by everyone else. So we will continue with events and collaborations.”

That said, Andersson is keen to keep mixing it up. “H&M almost should be like you’re chasing soap in the shower. Once you believe that you understand what we’re doing, boom, we will fly off in another direction.”

Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.

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Fawlty Towers

18 October 1975

Friday night used to be music night for those of us with steam radio memories. Now, it’s comedy night, at least on BBC: this season they have been pumping Dad’s Army and The Liver Birds at us on BBC-1, with Sykes and Ronnie Barker in Porridge about to take over as the second wave from next week; and a flick of the switch when those are finished have brought us into BBC-2 and the undoubted hit even of a season with a lot of comedy on show: Fawlty Towers.

Fawlty Towers really is something out of a new mould. It hits you the way Some Mothers did, as a totally new mix of the bag of techniques available to television comedy. At first there seems the possibility that its zest is derived solely from John Cleese. He is the centre of the action as manic proprietor of a small hotel, and his performance combines all the skills evident in Monty Python, even more sharply honed, thanks particularly to that physical presence, like an octopus with its elastic wound to bursting, and his fist-flying assault on every cue.

But over the weeks it has turned out to be a far richer mix than that. There is Prunella Scales, a smashing actress at any time, having a ball as Mrs Fawlty adopting a refined whine somewhere between Henry Cooper and Twiggy, and attacking Cleese at the level she finds him, which is usually just below the nipples. There is Andrew Sachs as the diminutive Spanish waiter; and there is also Connie Booth, who happens to be Mrs Cleese, and co-author with him, but earning her money, without doubt, as the one straight part in a character-actors’ benefit.

Between them, as authors and actors, they cheerfully embrace a range of comic methods that stretches from Pythonesque funny walks, through split second slapstick, to comedy of manners. Some of the best moments come precisely because different styles are in un-anticipated collision: like the one when Prunella Scales seems set for a social-voices send-up on the telephone when suddenly Cleese waltzes in, dragging Sachs by the ear, does a quick “That’s Sybil, me Basil, this is a slap round the ear” routine, and whisks smartly off.

Which brings us to the final, vital credit: John Howard Davies as the producer. He’s done what must on paper have looked improbable, to find the style of shooting and editing, and the precision, that makes all these complicated jokes work, and with a mounting energy that, now I think of it, is hard to believe in a season of jokes spread thin.