Thursday, 17 April 2025

Nantucket Reds

  



https://www.nantucketreds.com/

 

Nantucket Reds are a style of trousers distributed by Murray's Toggery Shop on the island of Nantucket. The pants were featured in The Official Preppy Handbook.

 

Description

Nantucket Reds were originally inspired by cotton trousers worn in Brittany. A characteristic of Reds is that they fade to a "dusty rose" as they age. Since their inception, the cotton canvas pants have been marketed as shorts. The distinctive salmon pink color has since been used on hats, shirts, sweaters and socks. Reds are worn predominantly by summer residents of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod in place of khakis or chinos. Because both Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are popular vacation destinations for wealthy north easterners, reds have become associated with northeastern preppy style and culture.[citation needed] Reds are also commonly worn on Fire Island and the Hamptons.

 

Distribution

Reds are produced by and distributed to the public by Murray's Toggery Shop, which is located on Main Street on the island of Nantucket, in Massachusetts. Nantucket Reds are marketed as "Guaranteed to Fade."


Wednesday, 16 April 2025

LA DOLCE VITA ORIENT EXPRESS / A train from the UK to Italy? We’ve heard that one before, but I’m on board


Eat, sleep and party’: a taste of La Dolce Vita aboard Italy’s Orient Express

 

Replica of world-famous train aimed at reviving glamour of the classic version makes debut journey from Rome

 

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Sat 5 Apr 2025 09.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/05/eat-sleep-and-party-a-taste-of-la-dolce-vita-aboard-italys-orient-express

 

A replica of the world-famous Orient Express made its debut journey from Rome on Friday, transporting well-heeled passengers into the heart of Tuscany’s wine region.

 

La Dolce Vita Orient Express, the first Italian-made luxury train, is aimed at reviving the glamour of the classic version as well as the romanticised notion of Italy’s dolce vita, or “sweet life”, all the while promoting slow tourism.

 

The train, the first of a fleet of six, is made up of 12 refurbished carriages that once chugged along Italian rail tracks in the 1960s and which have been decked out with 18 suites, 12 deluxe cabins, a bar, a lounge and a restaurant serving haute cuisine by the Michelin-starred chef Heinz Beck.

 

A collaboration between Orient Express; Arsenale, an Italian hospitality company; and Italy’s state railways, Ferrovie dello Stato, the maiden voyage, which involves an overnight route called “tastes of Tuscan vineyards”, left Rome’s Ostiense station at about midday.

 

Rather than having to mingle with longsuffering commuters, deal with any delays or make do with an espresso and a soggy sandwich from the station’s bar, passengers began their experience in the opulent Dolce Vita lounge, strategically located on the station platform from where their train departed.

 

The itinerary is one of eight that collectively cover 14 Italian regions, from Veneto and Liguria in the north to Basilicata and Sicily in the south. On Friday afternoon passengers travelled along the coast, passing the seaside towns of Santa Severa and Santa Marinella before gliding through the countryside of Tuscan, where by early evening they could sip locally made Brunello wine as part of the aperitivo. As an option, they could disembark and be taken to the hilltop town of Montalcino before returning to the Dolce Vita for their evening meal and entertainment. The train, which also passes through Florence and Pisa, completes its loop back to Rome on Saturday morning.

 

“You eat, you sleep, and you party on board,” said Paolo Barletta, who dreamed up the idea for an experience that combines slow tourism with Italy’s landscape and its diverse regional cuisine. “It’s kind of like the experience of a cruise ship, but instead of being a boat cruise it’s a rail cruise.”

 

The first trip sold out, with 38 passengers partaking. Trips are also fully booked for the rest of April and most of May, with itineraries involving Venice, Portofino, Matera, the Unesco-listed town in Basilicata known for its ancient cave dwellings, and Sicily. On a trip scheduled in November, passengers can explore the Monferrato truffle region in Piedmont, while tasting said truffles and drinking barolo wine.

 

The vast majority of those who have booked so far are Americans, followed by Europeans and visitors from the Middle East. Needless to say, a voyage on the Dolce Vita does not come cheap, with prices starting at €3,500 (£2,982).

 

‘A rail cruise’: the itinerary covers 14 Italian regions, from Veneto and Liguria in the north to Basilicata and Sicily in the south. A voyage starts at €3,500 (£2,982). Photograph: Patrick Locqueneux

By comparison, a one-way trip from Rome to Pisa, on a standard Italian fast train will cost about €45 (£38), even cheaper if you book early. For those wanting to replicate the Dolce Vita feeling, the onboard bar sells half-bottles of prosecco for €12 (£10).

 

Barletta said the Dolce Vita experience is not just the preserve of the super-rich. “A lot of people are booking for the one-time experience,” he said. “Perhaps they are retired and want to spend some of their retirement savings doing something special, or it is an anniversary or they are celebrating a wedding. It’s not only about experiencing the train … people really want to see Italy, and in a slow, relaxed way. The Dolce Vita won’t just take them to famous places like Venice, but also areas that are less well-known, for example Abruzzo.”



A train from the UK to Italy? We’ve heard that one before, but I’m on board

Jonn Elledge

It’s a lot easier to tease new cross-Channel rail services than it is to actually start running trains. I’m crossing my fingers anyway

 

Tue 15 Apr 2025 03.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/15/train-uk-to-italy-cross-channel-services

 

Between environmental breakdown, economic crisis and Donald Trump, it often feels like there’s precious little reason to feel hopeful these days. So how’s this for a reason to cheer up: Italian state railway company, Trenitalia, is planning to run trains through the Channel tunnel before the decade is out. It’s studying the option of direct trains from the UK to Italy, too. Eagle-eyed readers may note that those are two separate propositions.

 

Trenitalia is no stranger to the British rail network: it already operates the C2C franchise, which connects London Fenchurch Street via south Essex to Southend. Last week the company announced a €1bn (£860m) plan to launch a new high-speed service connecting London and Paris by 2029, as a direct competitor to the long-established Eurostar. In addition, it’s reported to be “studying the possibility” of extending the route, to Lyon, Marseille and Milan, which could be reached by train from London in eight hours. (Trenitalia already runs from Milan to Paris in just over seven hours.)

 

If some of this sounds a little bit familiar, that’s because we’ve heard it before. Train operators are increasingly vying for ownership of new, and potentially lucrative, routes across Europe. Last month, Richard Branson’s Virgin group announced it was trying to raise £700m to fund a “high-frequency” new cross-Channel route. Switzerland’s SBB, a Dutch startup named Heuro, a British one named Gemini and Spain’s Evolyn (which now seems to have teamed up with the Italians) have all expressed an interest, too. There have been days when I’ve considered having a go myself, just for the attention.

 

All of this sounds like good news for consumers. And it still might be. But it’s a lot easier to announce a new cross-Channel service than to actually start running any trains. In 2010, Germany’s Deutsche Bahn announced plans to run trains from London to Brussels, where they’d split, one half going to Amsterdam, the other to Cologne and Frankfurt. It never happened. Neither did the proposed daily commuter stopping service from London to Lille – a pity, since it might have dealt with the absurd situation in which London’s Stratford International station has never seen a train going further than Kent.

 

If anything, route options through the tunnel have actually declined. For several years, you could get Eurostar trains direct from London to Lyon, Avignon and Marseille: it felt like the supreme achievement of civilisation to be able to board a train on a drizzly Euston Road and get off in sight of the Med. That route stopped running during the pandemic, apparently never to return.

 

Why is it so hard? The problem is neither, as one might assume, platform capacity at St Pancras International, nor space in the tunnel: both could accommodate more trains. There are other practical difficulties – a UK shortage of depot space; a Europe-wide shortage of trains – but these would surely not be barriers to a really committed operator, either. The Office of Rail Regulation says there’s space for more trains at the Temple Mills depot in Leyton, east London. (Eurostar says otherwise but, well, it would.) And while there is currently a lack of 400m trains meeting the stringent fire safety requirements required to operate through the tunnel, that’s hardly insurmountable: just pair a couple of 200m ones together. Trenitalia, which has a large fleet of trains described as “almost tunnel-ready”, says it sees no hurdle here.

 

But the biggest issue facing these ambitious operators is border policy. Even before Brexit, the UK was not in the Schengen area, meaning that travelling on Eurostar required passport checks, which the Home Office insists must be done before boarding, rather than on board the train or on arrival. Every station served by cross-Channel trains needs both passport control facilities and cordoned-off space beyond them; where these do not exist, entire trains’ worth of passengers have been turfed off to do their paperwork at Lille. The need to scan luggage for security threats complicates things, too.

 

All this also means a bottleneck at St Pancras. There may be space for more trains; there’s rather less for more passengers, each of whom has to pass through airport-style security measures before boarding, and even more checks since Brexit reduced capacity by a third. Trenitalia says that plans to address this problem are at “an advanced stage”, but it won’t be easy – the station is a Grade I-listed building. Add in the expense and disruption posed by all those other problems, and you can see why new services are announced a lot more frequently than they ever happen.

 

Perhaps this time will be different. Access to rolling stock and money make the Trenitalia/Evolyn tie-up the most plausible competitor so far, with the possible exception of SBB. (Switzerland has a lot of flights to London and limited airport capacity.) Eurostar itself is promising expansion, suggesting it doesn’t think the capacity problems are insurmountable. And there’s Europe-wide pressure to replace flights with trains.

 

For now, though, the most likely outcome here is surely a bit more competition on the existing routes from London to Paris, Brussels and Lille. That might push standards up, or ticket prices down, both of which would be good. That, though, might be as far as things go. Trains to northern Italy – or even southern France – may be technically feasible, but that doesn’t make them economically viable. Still, we can hope. After all, we all want a better future.

 

Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman


Tuesday, 15 April 2025

Inside Arterton / VIDEO: The Ultimate Cleaning Shoe Brush - Wild Boar Bristles from Paul Brunngard


Inside Arterton, a London Menswear Shop That You Can Leave With Everything But Clothes

 

The London-based accessories brand celebrates community and craft with a new showroom and lounge in the Princes Arcade

 



Published on March 11, 2024

By Eric Twardzik

 https://robbreport.com/style/menswear/arterton-london-store-1235541416/

 

 Arterton sells everything a dedicated clotheshorse could want—except clothes. Rather, it trades in what founder William Wong lovingly dubs “desiderata”, a Latin word translating to “things desired.”

 

If that sounds vague, shoppers can now see such objects of desire firsthand at the new Arterton showroom at 12 Princes Arcade, which opened in December. Within its small, high-ceilinged space, wooden cabinets are stocked with shoe creams by the Swedish maker Paul Brunngard, eco-friendly stain removers from Britain’s Clothes Surgeon, and shapely beechwood clothes hangers made by Japan’s Nakata Hanger.

 

Above them, boxes that hold snuff suede Chelsea boots made in India by Bridlen or hand-welted oxfords from China’s Yearn Shoemaker are stacked to the ceiling. Luckily, a solid walnut library ladder rests against the merchandising cabinet for staff to retrieve them.

 

Arterton may have stitched together a veritable United Nations of fine clothing accessories, but it all began with a garment bag. Or rather, the lack thereof. Unimpressed with what the market had to offer, Wong—then a PhD student at Cambridge—decided to design his own. The result was released in 2021 as Arterton’s first and still best-selling product, the signature garment bag made from 10 oz waxed cotton with a dual-zip opening and holes enough to accommodate three hangers.

 

“Sometimes you want a very specific thing, but you can’t find it,” says Wong of the business’s genesis.

 

Now, it’s not entirely true that clients can’t purchase clothing at Arterton—they just can’t walk out of the door with it. The showroom also serves as the permanent workspace for Matthew Gonzalez, a California native who was for years the only American-born tailor on the Row, where he cut his teeth cutting for Hunstman before striking out on his own. The expat now practices his signature Anglo-American cut in a mezzanine visible to showroom visitors, who might catch Gonzalez cutting a pattern or constructing a basted fitting with a cast-iron sewing machine.

 

Gonzalez’s elevated, front-and-center position is an inversion of the typical Savile Row experience, where tailors work underground and out of sight. “I think there is something really beautiful about walking in and seeing all of these amazing products at your eye level, and then having the symbolic craft above you,” Gonzalez tells Robb Report.

 



The Arterton experience continues across the hall at 13 Princes Arcade, which serves as a private lounge for Wong and Gonzalez’s clients. Hidden from street level, visitors may access it by mounting a spiral staircase that opens to a pocket-sized space with plush carpeting, a well-stocked bar, and a set of vintage McIntosh speakers. It’s a fitting backdrop for customers—or as Wong calls them, “enthusiasts”— to commission a new jacket (£3,750, or about $4,800) or suit (£5,100, around $6,500) from Gonzalez, or a customized accessory like an embroidered garment bag, an engraved Nakata hanger or a made-to-order shoe in a particular leather.

 

Just as importantly, it serves as a retreat where the Arterton community can kick back with a good scotch or a double espresso in hand. “When you’re sitting in this space, you instantly forget that there is the hustle and bustle of Picadilly that’s just 50 yards away,” Gonzalez says. “It really does feel like an oasis.”

 

In the year to come, Arterton’s desiderata will grow with new lines including its first-ever luggage offering, consisting of a briefcase and weekender made from waxed cotton with leather trimmings. Gonzalez, meanwhile, is planning for his first trunk shows on American soil. But for now, anyone with a desire for the finer things will be well-served with a visit to 12 and 13 Princes Arcade.

 

Eric Twardzik

Eric Twardzik is a Boston-based freelance writer with a passion for classic menswear and classic cocktails. He has a deep reverence for things that get better with age, such as tweed jackets and single malt scotch. In addition to Robb Report, his writing has appeared in GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, Vice, WM Brown, and many other websites and publications. He has far too many ties and not enough occasions to wear them.


Monday, 14 April 2025

Retailers Face Tough Questions.

 




Raise Prices? Eat Higher Costs? Retailers Face Tough Questions.

 

A trade war with China and tariff threats on other countries are ramping up pressure on stores that sell products from overseas — which, for some categories, is just about all of them.

 

Ken Belson Karen Weise

By Ken Belson and Karen Weise

April 12, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/business/retailers-tariffs-uncertainty.html

 

Vivian Hoffman has worked in retail for a half-century, including 25 years as a buyer for Century 21 and the last eight running Whim, a chain selling affordable women’s clothing in the suburbs of New York City. She has adapted to recessions, the turmoil after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

But the last few weeks have presented a set of challenges that are confounding even for an industry veteran.

 

The bulk of the clothing and accessories that Ms. Hoffman sells are produced in China, facing import duties of 145 percent for now, and Vietnam, which could face high tariffs in a few months. While her vendors pay the tariffs, one of them recently raised shoe prices 20 percent while others say they will soon increase theirs to offset higher costs. A vendor that sells Chinese-made jeans could not even figure out what prices to put on items in its fall line.

 

The upheaval on top of wavering consumer demand has left Ms. Hoffman in a bind.

 

“I was going back and forth: Do I buy less because I think business is going to be hurt or do I try to buy extra merchandise because I’m afraid of an increase in prices?” she said. “I’ve been going back and forth between two extremes.”

 

With five stores and a small online presence, Whim is just a speck in the vast retail universe. But the thorny decisions that Ms. Hoffman faces are a microcosm of the whiplash that retailers across the United States are confronting. All businesses crave clarity, yet the wide-ranging tariffs imposed, threatened and pulled back by the White House are making it difficult for companies of all sizes and shapes to plan ahead.

 

Big-box retailers like Walmart and Target and giant e-commerce operators like Amazon have the power to demand concessions from their suppliers overseas. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said in an interview on CNBC on Thursday that the company had accelerated bringing some inventory to the United States ahead of the tariffs and would try to “renegotiate terms” with some suppliers.

 

Most retailers, though, are small, independent businesses that are often at the mercy of their vendors. And in many industries, like apparel, most of what they sell is produced in China and other countries, with few options they can afford made in the United States.

 

Alyssa Chambers, who owns Nova Essence IO, which makes scented candles, said the price of a 12-pack of Chinese-made glass candle jars had jumped to $25, from $21 last year. But similar jars produced in America cost at least twice as much, she said. Even before this week’s events, the costs of wax and wicks, which she also orders from China, have risen as well.

 

“Right now, I’m eating the extra cost for the supplies because I just don’t want the customers to be affected,” said Ms. Chambers, who works on her own and sells her goods online and at pop-up shops, shows and events. “I’m just taking the time to sacrifice and not respond emotionally.”

 

The start-and-stop nature of the rollout of tariffs has also roiled the stock market and dampened consumer confidence as people have hunkered down. Retail sales grew 0.2 percent in February compared to January, though spending on clothing and accessories, on electronics and at restaurants and bars fell.

 

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell 11 percent in March, the third straight monthly decline, to its lowest level since November 2022. Anxiety about rising prices could persuade consumers to buy more secondhand apparel and other items on the secondary market, according to ReturnPro, which recently surveyed consumers about products they had returned. Nearly 85 percent said they were concerned that tariffs would raise prices.

 

“Consternation over the tariffs and its impact on consumer sentiment on retail sales could end up being worse than the impact of inflation,” said David Silverman, senior director of the corporates group at Fitch Ratings, which this week lowered its rating for the U.S. retail and consumer product sector to “deteriorating” from “neutral.”

 

The latest increases in tariffs on China are likely to disproportionately hurt consumer goods, according to Anna Wong, an economist at Bloomberg.

 

Last year, three-quarters of all toys and sporting goods, 40 percent of all footwear and 25 percent of all textiles and clothing imported into the United States came from China, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

 

For months, many companies have tried to adjust their business plans in anticipation of tariffs, with varying success. The shoemaker Steve Madden said in February that it had reduced the percentage of goods it imported from China to 58 from 71 since November. The company wants to reduce that number to the low 40s range in the coming months.

 

“We will selectively raise prices,” Edward Rosenfeld, the company’s chief executive, told investors in February. “Where we think that we can get a little bit more for the goods, we will do that starting in the fall.”

 

At an investor conference this week, Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, stood by its forecast for a 3 to 4 percent increase in sales in its first quarter. But because one-third of what Walmart sells comes from all over the world, especially China and Mexico, tariffs have made it harder to predict operating income growth.

 

“We’re one week into this new tariff environment, and we’re still working through what this means for us,” John David Rainey, Walmart’s chief financial officer, said. “For the current quarter, the uncertainty and decline in consumer sentiment has led to a little more sales volatility week to week and, frankly, day to day.”

 

In the days after the tariffs were first announced, Amazon canceled orders for some items, including skateboards, that it bought from suppliers through a special program, according to one vendor whose orders were canceled, two consultants to suppliers and LinkedIn posts from others saying their orders were canceled.

 

Under the special program, vendors sold their products to Amazon at a lower price, but Amazon paid to move the products to the United States and was on the hook to cover the tariff costs directly. When that tariff risk changed, Amazon effectively pushed more of the costs back onto its suppliers by canceling the orders. Now, the suppliers must import the products themselves, pay the tariffs and then try to renegotiate a higher wholesale price with Amazon.

 

Amazon declined to comment on the canceled orders, which were reported earlier by Bloomberg.

 

Hobby Lobby, the crafting retailer, told vendors that because of the escalating trade war and the “rapidly shifting and unpredictable landscape,” it was delaying shipments from China, though not canceling orders, according to correspondence dated Thursday and viewed by The New York Times. It said it would review its plans weekly. Hobby Lobby did not have an immediate comment.

 

Smaller retailers, no matter how well prepared, don’t have Amazon’s muscle or flexibility. Kim Vaccarella, the founder of Bogg, which sells handbags and accessories, anticipated tariffs on China, where all of her suppliers are. So in January, she visited Sri Lanka and Vietnam to find suppliers to help insulate her company.

 

She and her team received samples from a manufacturer in Vietnam and was ready to place an order. But after the White House imposed tariffs of more than 40 percent on imports from Vietnam, Ms. Vaccarella delayed the order until she could gauge the impact.

 

“We felt like we were in a good place” before the White House announced tariffs on dozens of countries last week, she said. “It was like, oh, my God, we did all this work and spent all this money going out there for nothing.”

 

The tariffs on Vietnam have been paused for three months, but the confusion remains. Ms. Vaccarella said her company had recently raised prices by $5 on some products, but retracted the increase out of deference to its customers. For now, it is bracing to see what happens before taking such a step again.

 

“Every day, you can ask me the same question and it’s a different answer,” she said, “which is the craziness and the uncertainty.”

 

Ken Belson is a Times reporter covering sports, power and money at the N.F.L. and other professional sports leagues.

 

Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America.

Sunday, 13 April 2025

Men's Vintage Clothing & Decor | Richard's Fabulous Finds -


https://www.richardsfabulousfinds.com/

 

Richard's Fabulous Finds

2545 West North Avenue

Chicago, IL 60647

 

 





Proprietor, Richard Biasi, draws on his extensive background in luxury menswear and boasts a resume which includes client facing positions at Bloomingdale's, Ralph Lauren, and Neiman Marcus.

 

His years of experience dressing the most discerning clients coupled with his love of fashion history inspired him to open his vintage menswear boutique, Richard's Fabulous Finds, in Chicago's Humboldt Park in April, 2014.

 

Richard caters to men with an eye for style and quality who appreciate the silhouettes, construction, and refinements of an bygone era. He helps bring those elements into the 21st century by keeping them fresh and relevant. Richard is known for his uncanny ability to pull together the perfect look for each unique client. He also dresses models and actors for various projects in the Chicago area and is often called upon to consult on the historical accuracy of costumes.


Saturday, 12 April 2025

November 24, 2022: The Fascinating Backstory of King Charles III and His (Sometimes Controversial) Environmental Crusading / Sat 5 Apr 2025 : King Charles will have to tone down support for net zero after Badenoch says 2050 is ‘impossible’

 



Royals

The Fascinating Backstory of King Charles III and His (Sometimes Controversial) Environmental Crusading

 

His entry into the movement might have started from the path the royals put him on, but early in his life, he sought out his own mentors. Now he’s one of the most influential thinkers on climate in the world.

 

By Erin Vanderhoof

November 24, 2022

By Ken Goff/Getty Images.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/11/the-fascinating-backstory-of-king-charles-iii-and-environmental-crusading

 

Most people know by now that King Charles III really cares about the environment. It’s been repeated often in the months since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, especially by the people who admire him. What may be less known among the general public is exactly how respected among environmental advocates he really is.

 

This year, Charles reportedly canceled plans to attend COP27 in Egypt last week due to advice from Liz Truss’s short-lived administration, which was upheld by the new prime minister, but he did host a Buckingham Palace reception for over 200 politicians and activists who were on their way to Egypt. For Charles, trips to the United Nations Climate Change Conferences are about more than keeping up appearances—he actually participates. At 2015’s COP21 in Paris, where a landmark treaty was set to be negotiated, Charles used his opening remarks to remind the attendees to think of the world they were leaving their grandchildren. On his last trip to COP26 in Glasgow, Charles gave four separate speeches and introduced a video message from his mother.

 

One obvious reason for his passion for the environment is that he was simply in the right place at the right time. Historians have named 1970 as the year when threats to the environment broke through to the mainstream, and as a 22-year-old finishing up his university degree in anthropology and archeology and planning his career, the concern came naturally. For a handful of baby boomers, caring for the environment became a countercultural lifestyle, and though Charles was never a committed member of the Back-to-the-Land Movement, some of his beliefs and practices—from his organic farm at Highgrove to his concerns about GMOs—weren’t too far off.

 

 

Still, Charles remained unusually committed to environmental concerns even after the ’70s drew to a close, perhaps because it spoke to something deeper in him. Through speeches about the environment spanning five decades, he has described his interest in the environment in elemental terms, speaking of beauty, awareness, synthesis, and imagination. He has also been remarkably astute when it comes to incorporating new information and following the movement’s buzzwords. But engaging with his history in the movement also helps illustrate some of the pitfalls that have made action regarding the climate much harder to achieve.

 

The future king made his initial forays into environmental concerns long before global warming was even on the agenda. On a drab day in February 1970, Charles followed his father, Prince Philip, into a room at Strasbourg’s city hall for a conference about wildlife conservation. In a dark suit, looking younger than his 22 years, Charles sat in the audience as his father delivered a speech about resource depletion, endangered wildlife, and the need for more land to be set aside for conservation. These were the issues that Philip spent most of his life committed to, and they were fairly normal concerns for European royalty at the time. Charles and Philip were joined by four other European princes at the conference, which brought together government representatives and activists to launch the European Conservation Year.

 

By 1970, Charles had already been involved with the European Conservation Year planning for nearly two years. Many of Charles’s decisions about education and employment were planned by Queen Elizabeth II and her advisers, and his initial forays into the world of environmental activism were motivated by their desire for him to form closer connections in Wales. In 1968, Charles started preparing for his responsibilities as heir apparent by spending more time in the nation. First, he chaired a committee tasked with planning the nation’s participation in the upcoming European Conservation Year, his first time serving as the head of a meeting. The next year, he returned to take a summer course in the Welsh language before his lavish investiture in Caernarfon Castle in July 1969.

 

Charles’s 1970 trip to France was part of a larger plan to launch him into his career in public life. His university studies would come to an end that spring, so for the year following his investiture, he committed to a hectic travel schedule to serve as a royal apprentice before beginning his military training at the Royal Navy College, Dartmouth. After leaving the conference in Strasbourg, Charles traveled to Paris to attend the state funeral of French leader Charles de Gaulle.

 

 

One week after his trip to Strasbourg, he launched the Countryside in Wales conference in Cardiff, where he delivered his first-ever speech on the environment, noting that he was “personally fascinated by the problems of conservation at a time when the whole idea had become immensely fashionable.” The speech lays out some of the things he learned the previous week. He mentioned the scourge of “pollution in all its cancerous forms,” the growing issue of “nonreturnable bottles and indestructible plastic containers,” and how conservation is about “being aware of the total environment that we live in.”

 

In 2020, Charles returned to the speech and read portions of it in a video shared to the royal family’s YouTube channel, and it sounded surprisingly fresh. But one segment in which Charles discusses overpopulation wasn’t revisited in the video, perhaps due to its now controversial nature. “In many places the number of people is increasing faster than the resources of the local environment can cope, thereby exaggerating the problems of conservation,” he said in 1970. “There are two main schools of thought here. One is that nothing need be done about population because nature is bound to react by producing a particularly virulent plague or virus, and the other is that something certainly needs to be done by man to prevent his overpopulation.”

 

The rhetoric about a virus seems almost directly pulled from one of Philip’s more infamous comments from the 1960s—about returning in another life as a virus to wipe out some of the world’s population—though Charles moves on without endorsing his father’s idea. Though it’s strange to look back at this moment now, the idea that widespread population control was an urgent concern spread throughout the English-speaking world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Philip eagerly embraced the movement for a confluence of reasons. As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, Philip had a personal investment in conservation, and he approached environmental problems with the perspective of a natural scientist.

 

There’s also a long-running connection between the British royal family and the early scientists whose research made concern for the environment and the “quantity” and “quality” of the population into major issues. During the 19th century, Britain saw a population boom due to the Industrial Revolution, all while its citizens were moving to cities where disorder, crime, and pollution proliferated. Movements toward appreciation of nature and the eugenic improvement of society both have their roots in the British aristocracy, and many of its practitioners were awarded by and even close to the royals—including some people who were alive during Philip's lifetime. Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution and popularized the study of nature among the British aristocracy, was elected as a the Fellow of the Royal Society by a secret ballot that included family members. His cousin, Francis Galton, well-known for research into the nature of heredity and for founding the British Eugenics Society, was knighted by Queen Victoria. The next generation of natural scientists who were even closer to the family. Sir Bernard Mallet, a statistician who eventually became the president of the Eugenics Society, was married to one of the queen’s ladies in waiting. Lord Thomas Horder served as the personal doctor to Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II, juggling the duties with a role influencing international population control policy, which informed the use of forced sterilization abroad.

 

As historian Emily Klancher Merchant notes, the traditional motivations for eugenics—the quest to improve the “quality” of the human population—was supplanted by a push to moderate population growth for the sake of economic development and resource preservation. It rested on a theory that economic growth will lead the global poor to have smaller families. “This is based on British history, because Britain is where the Industrial Revolution happened, and these were the demographic consequences,” Merchant told Vanity Fair. “‘This is what happened in England, so this is what’s going to happen everywhere,’ is how demographers understood it.”

 

This motivated demographers to see family-planning as a tool for poverty alleviation. “We had population growth without industrialization and no social revolution to create small families. For demographers, this is the problem, and the initial solution that they propose is decolonization and kick-starting their modernization processes,” she said. “Modernization is going to create this new balance between low mortality and low fertility. Population will grow, but industrialization will take care of everybody, and everyone will have high living standards.”

 

Merchant added that the scientific evidence that connected population control with either economic growth or improvements in conservation has always been thin at best, but it became a central concern for the environmental movement as it grew in the 1970s. It remains a concern for some, even as scientific advances began to unravel their underpinnings and global critics attacked the movement for racist objectives and coercive practices in developing countries. Prince Philip continued to mention it into his 90s.

 

“This is still a very common thought—it seems almost like a truism,” Merchant said. “People are destroying the environment, which is true. So, if there’s fewer people, then maybe there will be fewer points for environmental destruction. It seems really obvious to natural scientists even now.” But there has never been a one-to-one connection between population and consumption of resources. “They don’t alway realize that the human activities that hurt the environment are determined by social, political, and economic structures.”

 

For most of his life both Charles and his sons, Prince Harry and Prince William, have mentioned Philip as their main inspiration to become environmental activists. But during the 1970s, Charles’s and Philip’s environmental interests began to diverge. Philip stayed involved in the conservation movement through his leadership at the World Wildlife Fund, which kept him tuned in to the latest scientific advances when it came to biodiversity loss and warming temperatures around the globe. In a 1982 speech at the University of Salford, Philip first mentioned the greenhouse effect and its potential threat to life on earth, just one year after The New York Times first ran a story about it on the front page. By 1986, he was describing the threat in apocalyptic terms. “The damage is being done, here and now, with long-term consequences just as destructive as a nuclear holocaust,” he said in a speech to the European Council of International Schools.

 

Charles, on the other hand, largely moved away from his father’s interest in population control when he found another set of mentors and started to embrace a much broader vision of what counts as an environmental concern. In 1973, the heterodox economist E.F. Schumacher released his book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered, and it made its way into Charles’s hands. By the end of the year, Schumacher visited the royals at Buckingham Palace, and Charles became a committed supporter of his ideas and institutions.

 

Schumacher’s work, which Charles has quoted in speeches for decades, has retained its relevance into the 21st century. “He wrote about getting beyond GDP growth—living within the limits of the planet and reorganizing economic activity such that people on the planet can truly thrive,” said Jared Spears, director of communications and resources at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Schumacher’s message was explicitly anti-fossil fuel because he was writing “against the backdrop of oil crises and shortages in the 1970s.”

 

Spears explained that the ideas only have added resonance now that the environmental movement is centered on fighting climate change. “In a way, the opposing forces have been the same for the past 50 years, but we know a lot more,” he said. “There’s a lot more you can say about the limits of scale, the limits of economic growth, and the reality that industrialized capitalism as it’s been operating for the past couple of decades is certainly not serving the people or the planet.”

 

Throughout the early 1980s, Charles kept his affiliations with the Prince of Wales Countryside Committee and other nature organizations. But his concern for nature and the environment were primarily expressed through the hobby of organic farming, which began when the Duchy of Cornwall bought Highgrove House in 1980 and his controversial forays into critiquing modern architecture. He also had to contend with widespread mockery in the press. As the Thatcher-era tabloids took aim at the urban left, environmental issues were increasingly referred to as “fringe” and “loony,” alongside other priorities of the Labour Party. Stories about Charles’s enthusiasm for talking to plants, his unconventional solutions to heating his own estates, and the jokes he made about banning hairspray in his home to save the ozone layer had the effect of making Charles seem political while also painting environmentally minded politicians as out of touch.

 

A watershed moment came in 1987, when Charles served as the UK’s patron for the European Year for the Environment and presented the first round of Better Environment Awards for Industry with a speech where he took on increasing “anti-conservation” sentiment in the world at large. By the time he appeared as a guest in a 1989 documentary about global warming and recommitted himself as a spokesperson for global warming, he was doing so in concert with then senator Al Gore, who first learned about the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic changes to the climate as a student at Harvard in the 1960s. As science became more incontrovertible, Gore became the US government official who most avidly called for action to protect the environment. In the mid-1980s, Charles met Gore during a trip to Washington, and the pair traded ideas for decades. (In 1990, Charles made another documentary called The Earth in Balance, and in 1992, Gore released his book Earth in the Balance.)

 

By the time the queen started speaking out about climate change in the early 2000s, the issue had become thoroughly mainstream, and by 2009 both of Britain’s major political parties had it as a part of their platform. By connecting his interest in conservation to his old-fashioned tastes and architecture and his passion for religion, Charles formulated a way of talking about the environment that focused on building consensus based on philosophical pursuits and shared values. In some ways, he was prescient to think less about the science of climate change and focus more on building a positive vision of society.

 

At the same time, abandoning explicit politics meant that his work became about preserving the status quo. For nearly three decades now, Charles has focused his rhetoric around the idea of “sustainable development” and worked with major corporations to come up with plans to reach carbon-neutrality over the next few decades. This year, at COP27, the biggest issue up for discussion was explicitly political and it might be one Charles will never be able to address. Before the conference, vulnerable countries organized to put “Loss and Damage” at the center of the agenda, demanding financial compensation for the disproportionate impact of extreme weather and climate change they have already faced.

 

One of Charles’s main mentors might have trained him for the situation, but it’s unlikely that he could really put the ideas into action. Spears, the director of communications at the Schumacher Center, pointed out that the fundamental importance of direct democracy was at the cornerstone of Schumacher’s ideas. “If we find a solution to the problem, it won’t come at COP27,” he said. “It will come from the communities on the ground who are working hard to come up with democratic solutions.”

 

Ultimately it might have actually been impossible for the future king to truly embrace the ideas of localism, and an unelected monarch might never be the person who will bring about egalitarian, sustainable communities. But Charles did find a way to preserve environmental rhetoric even when it became unfashionable, and due in part to his decades of work, concern for the environment now feels central to British identity. As the wave of direct action coming from young adults in Britain is already proving, it’s the next generation’s turn to carry that further.


 King Charles will have to tone down support for net zero after Badenoch says 2050 is ‘impossible’

 

Constitutional expert says Tory leader’s break from political consensus over target for greenhouse gasses will require monarch to choose his words carefully

 

Richard Palmer

Sat 5 Apr 2025 18.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/05/king-charles-will-have-to-tone-down-support-for-net-zero-after-badenoch-says-2050-is-impossible

 

King Charles will have to temper his public support for net zero after Kemi Badenoch broke the political consensus over the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Senior royal sources have conceded that the 76-year-old monarch, who has spent more than half a century highlighting environmental challenges, will have to choose his words more carefully now that the Conservatives under Badenoch have said it will be impossible for the UK to hit net zero by 2050.

 

“The only way that we can regain it [trust] is to tell the unvarnished truth – net zero by 2050 is impossible,” the Conservative leader said last month.

 

Charles III has spoken publicly about how vital it is to hit net zero by the 2050 target date, set by Theresa May’s government in 2019 and agreed upon by subsequent administrations. Successive prime ministers have used the king’s long track record on campaigning for climate action to help promote Britain’s leadership on combatting the challenges.

 

In December 2023, for example, the king told the Cop28 UN climate change conference in Dubai that more urgent action was needed to bring the world towards a zero-carbon future. “After all, ladies and gentlemen, in 2050 our grandchildren won’t be asking what we said, they will be living with the consequences of what we did or didn’t do,” he said.

 

At that point, the main UK political parties were agreed on the issue. Now the monarch runs the risk of becoming embroiled in a party political dispute. In addition to the change in the Conservative view, Reform wants to scrap net zero completely.

 

Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert at Royal Holloway, University of London, suggested the king must be less specific about his own views on the target. “I think if you take the view that the monarchy has to be ‘two or three steps away’ from party politics then, as party politics changes, the monarchy should change,” he said.

 

Charles, who flies to Italy tomorrow with Queen Camilla for a state visit that lasts until Thursday, will still put tackling the climate crisis and other environmental challenges at the heart of his monarchy.

 

The work to create a more sustainable future will be a feature of the trip. In Rome, the king will join a meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and attended by business leaders to hear how Britain and Italy are working together on the transition to clean energy. In Ravenna he will meet farmers whose land and crops have been severely affected by devastating floods in the region in the past few years.

 

He and Camilla, who celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary at a state banquet in Rome on Wednesday evening, will visit the Colosseum and celebrate close defence ties between the two countries, in spite of the political differences between Keir Starmer’s Labour party and Italy’s rightwing leader, Giorgia Meloni.

 

The need to avoid involving the king in party political controversy has been highlighted after documents released on Friday revealed that the monarch secretly met Prince Andrew to discuss his future and was twice briefed about plans for him to be involved in a £2.4bn investment fund run by an alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo. Buckingham Palace insisted Yang, since banned from Britain despite protesting his innocence, was not specifically mentioned.

 

Prince William is likely to attend the Cop30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil, in November and may also be more guarded than before about his views on achieving net zero, although royals may still be expected to reflect on government policy on the international stage.

 

Any silencing of the monarch and his heir threatens to weaken Britain’s voice abroad, according to some environmental groups. Shaun Spiers, executive director of the environmental thinktank Green Alliance, said Charles might be unable to speak out specifically on the 2050 target but could talk generally about the need for climate action. “The king is a well-respected leader and it would be a shame if he didn’t speak on it, particularly internationally,” he said.

 

Reshima Sharma, deputy head of politics at Greenpeace UK, pointed to popular support for green policies. “King Charles has long been an important advocate for action to clean up our environment and tackle climate change. While the monarchy must remain politically neutral, thankfully climate action continues to receive the kind of popular support that politicians can only dream of. This is reflected across voters of all stripes,” she said.

 

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.


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