Here’s a first: the King’s grocer, Fortnum & Mason, is embroiled in a furious row with a graffiti artist.
James Goldcrown made his name through his repeating hearts, which he sprayed on walls in London, Los Angeles and New York, before winning commissions from brands including L’Oreal, MTV and shoemaker Skechers.
The Londoner, 43, was, however, shocked to see Fortnum’s using a similar design for its Valentine’s Day display (above right) at its store in Piccadilly.
Accusing it of ‘ripping off’ his designs, he claims: ‘You’d think by now larger companies like Fortnum’s would know better than to hire lazy designers who studied rip-off skills online during the pandemic. Not much today is original.’
A Fortnum & Mason spokesman acknowledges that its display was inspired by graffiti artists but denies it plagiarised Goldcrown. ‘The entire design of this packaging was inspired by street art,’ he said. ‘There are many different iterations of graffiti hearts in existence.’
(Very) modern manners
Roxie Nafousi, who has been out with pop superstar Harry Styles and artist Damien Hirst, has joined a dating app for the first time in five years.
‘I’m a sex-on-the-first-date kind of gal, to be honest,’ she tells me.
‘I don’t think there are any rules. If you meet someone and the chemistry is unbelievable, and you feel comfortable and safe with them, and you have that at-home feeling, and with that comes this lust, then do it.’
Roxie, 33, a ‘self-development coach’ known as the ‘queen of manifesting’, says: ‘I’m newly single. I’m not joining the app because I want to meet someone right now, but because I want to energetically put myself out there and feel like I’m open to it. Self-help is not sexy.
‘On the app someone called me a baddie. I don’t know what a baddie is, but my assistant saw the message and she was howling.’
A baddie is someone considered ‘hot and sexy’, I am reliably informed.
The smart set’s talking about… Oxford students’ ‘looting rampage’ at rival Cambridge
Known as the Corpus Challenge, the annual sports day between Oxford and Cambridge’s Corpus Christi colleges is a cornerstone of university social life, with students competing in football, hockey, frisbee and even darts.
However, I hear that this year’s challenge has been called off after Oxford students went on the rampage at Cambridge, pinching a photograph of Boris Johnson’s son Theodore.
They also looted a junior common room, taking pool cues, light bulbs and a teddy bear.
On the Cambridge college’s confessions page, distressed students paid homage to the teddy bear which was supposedly dismembered, describing it as ‘forever loved’.
The looting of the common room was described as ‘savage’ by one student, who told Varsity newspaper that ‘they took everything they could’.
A spokesman for Corpus Christi College Cambridge confirms: ‘By agreement of the Deans of both the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the 2024 Corpus Challenge was cancelled.
The Deans and colleges will review the 2025 Challenge in due course.’ Tut tut. Wouldn’t have happened in Boris’s day, would it?
Anya’s gambit to take on Gwynnie
Peaky Blinders star Anya Taylor-Joy appears to be taking a leaf out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s book and launching her own lifestyle business.
I can disclose that the ambitious actress, 27, who played mobster’s wife Gina Gray in the BBC’s hit Brummie gangster drama, has applied to the Intellectual Property Office to trademark the name ‘Anya’ for a vast range of goods and services.
They range from cosmetic bags and phone cases to stockings and suspenders, according to newly published documents.
Interestingly, her application also covers games, so Taylor-Joy, who starred as prodigy Beth Harmon in Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, could bring out her own chess set.
She has spoken of how her fans frequently ‘want to play me at chess’. She said: ‘I don’t carry one [a chess board] with me, but the thing about jumping from project to project is you gain skills from that particular project.’
Last year Anya, a dual U.S.-British citizen, married the American musician and actor Malcolm McRae, 29, in Venice, Italy.
SamCam’s brother poses with his new erotic artist girlfriend
Samantha Cameron’s brother Robert Sheffield appears to be the picture of contentment with his new girlfriend, Athena Lemanska, an artist who specialises in sexually explicit paintings of women.
Last month, I disclosed that the baronet’s son and heir, 39, was enjoying a blossoming new friendship with the American. Now he has posed for a photo with the erotic artist in California, where she lives.
The brother-in-law of Foreign Secretary Lord (David) Cameron split up last year with the mother of his daughter, aged three.
Old Harrovian Sheffield had lived with Gucci model and actress Ellen Francis Gibbons at Sutton Park, his family seat in North Yorkshire.
King Charles’s goddaughter India Hicks admits she left cabin crew on a recent flight bemused after bursting into tears when they offered her ice cream.
The granddaughter of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma was on her way back from a visit to Ukraine, where she was helping to deliver vital aid via Global Empowerment Mission (GEM).
‘I felt I was getting accustomed to seeing life in a warzone,’ Hicks, 56, tells British Airways Executive Club’s magazine. ‘I thought I’d be able to handle it better emotionally. And then, when I was flying from Warsaw, your cabin crew started handing out ice cream in a box.
‘With GEM, I hand out boxes of food, warm blankets, battery packs for phones and the like. When the cabin crew handed me the ice-cream box, I burst into tears, sobbing in my seat. They were terribly confused as to how ice cream had rendered me so hysterical.’
It’s one of England’s finest stately homes, and the resting place of Princess Diana, yet Althorp has become victim to the modern scourge of rural fly-tippers. Adey Greeno, conservation manager at the 13,000-acre Northamptonshire estate, reveals the staggering scale of the illegal dumping.
‘So far, 183 tonnes of fly-tipped rubbish has been removed from Althorp land in the past couple of weeks,’ he says. ‘All at great cost. The countryside is being degraded at an alarming rate. It’s a national disgrace.’
If only Diana’s formidable stepmother, Raine, was still around to scare them away.
Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly are two of Sir Elton John’s most avid fans, but they have so far failed to persuade him to sing on their long-running ITV1 show Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which is due to bow out after 20 series in April.
‘We’ve always wanted Sir Elton to come on and open with Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting, but he has always told us very politely to bog off,’ Ant admits. ‘But you never know — we’ll keep trying.’
The inseparable duo were in the audience for Sir Elton’s Paris concert last summer.
Bridget Skelton was the toast of punters when she landed the County Hurdle on Faivoir at the Cheltenham Festival last March.
But I can reveal that she won’t be riding at the Cheltenham Festival next month, as she and her husband Harry, the 2021 champion jump jockey, are expecting their first baby in April.
They have just returned from a short holiday in Florida visiting Harry’s father, Olympic gold medalist Nick Skelton, who has a training base there for his showjumpers.
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