Yahoo News Laura Craik on celebrity puppy love, Lulu’s mystique and pulling off cropped jeans
Despite the best efforts of the John Lewis Christmas ad, the boxer isn’t the most popular dog in Britain. According to The Kennel Club’s latest survey, Buster’s chinless cousin, the French bulldog, is set to take the title, for if you put ‘French’ in front of something, even the plague, then British people will immediately find it desirable. Someone should invent French ancestry for Donald Trump: he’d soon find himself riding high in the ratings polls. Or, then again, maybe not.
I have to say I’m surprised at this statistic, namely because almost everyone I know owns a cockapoo. It’s almost sinister. Although I see the sinister in everything — even ickle puppies — so ignore me. It seems to me that, however noble your intentions about rehoming a rescue dog, sooner or later, you will encounter a cute picture of a cockapup on Instagram, and be smitten. So smitten that when someone — probably a bulldog owner — points out the folly of paying £1,200 for what is, essentially, a mongrel, you will shush them and go back to thinking of dog names.
According to my children, our cockapoo will be called Steve. For them, no breed is too ludicrous to countenance, be it goldendoodle, affengriffon, maltipug, bogle or the painful-sounding wirepoo. They play Pretend Puppy every day, using two deflated balloons bought from a stall at a charity dog show last September. Every night, they put these lifeless foil creatures to bed under a woollen blanket, and I cave in a little more.
‘We are literally the only people in London not to have a dog,’ says the eldest, who has inherited my penchant for exaggeration. I fear she is right. Somewhere on a leather sofa in Yorkshire (the waiting lists are too long in London), Steve The Cockapoo is waiting, a substitute third baby in need of a home.
Lulu love
‘Mystique.’ Now there’s a quality not much in evidence these days. So hurrah for Lulu, the fresh-faced model chosen by Raf Simons to open his first Calvin Klein show. Not only is Lulu supremely beautiful (like a teenage Kate Moss mixed with a soupçon of Katharine Hepburn); more impressive still is that she possesses an air of mystique. Despite a career trajectory that can only be described as rocket-fuelled (her first job? No biggie: just the cover of Italian Vogue shot by Steven Meisel), there’s still a rare and precious feeling of ‘who’s that girl?’ about Lulu. A cursory google doesn’t reveal her surname, her age or where she comes from, and even her Instagram account gives nothing away. Lulu, long may you continue not posting pics of your breakfast.
Top crops
New season, new wardrobe nemesis. What, you don’t have one? Then you must be 5ft 10in and built like a fork prong. Last season, the agent of my downfall was a top with trailing bell-shaped sleeves that inserted themselves into every meal. This season, it’s rapidly shaping up to be cropped trousers. I know. They sound so harmless! So innocuous! So why are they such foes? Well, that would mainly be because they all appear to be tailored for giraffes. I mean, I’m not even short. I’m no Gwendoline Christie either, goddess that she is, but I’m surely tall enough that ‘cropped’ jeans shouldn’t fall to the floor. If you, too, are tempted by endless street-style pics of leggy women striding across busy roads looking chic while trying not to get run over in cropped trousers, try Topshop, whose jeans come in three different leg lengths. Because we’re not all the same.
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