EMMA JOHNSON
DUNE STARS LOOK TO THE FUTURE OF FASHION
Confession time: I didn’t like Dune: Part One.
I know, I know. It’s an epic. It took home six Oscars, banked almost £350m at the box office... But I just couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was all the sand.
Where am I going with this? Well not to the cinema to watch Part Two, that’s for sure.
That said, the film has already provided me with hours of entertainment after its cast turned the promo for it into a globe-trotting fashion show.
With Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet among those returning from the first film, and Florence Pugh and Anya Taylor-Joy, not to mention Elvis himself, Austin Butler, joining the cast, it was a safe bet that its premieres were never going to be dull affairs.
But I don’t think anyone predicted robot costumes, leather jumpsuits, a futuristic nun and gothic glamour.
We have to start with Zendaya. At just 27, the former child star is one of the bestdressed women on the planet.
Working with her stylist Law Roach, she consistently pushes the boundaries of fashion.
Speaking to Vogue, Law explained of Zendaya’s Dune tour wardrobe: “The looks served as an extension of the wardrobe from the movie. It was intentional and purposeful.”
Nowhere was that more obvious than when she hit the red carpet in London wearing Thierry Mugler’s robot suit from the late designer’s autumn/ winter 1995 couture collection.
A break the internet moment? Aye, robot.
Florence, 28, also brought the drama and flashed a little flesh along the way in jaw-dropping looks by Valentino.
Like her co-stars, Anya, 27, has little time for simple shift dresses. The white Dior gown, complete with sheer hood, that she donned at the London screening definitely had sci-fi bride of Christ overtones, while she sealed her style icon status in a straight-off-the-runway number from John Galliano’s Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 couture collection in New York.
Rebecca, meanwhile, went full-blown gothic in a custommade Olivier Theyskens in the Big Apple.
Kudos to the 40-year-old Swede. I wouldn’t relish the prospect of sharing the red carpet with three of Hollywood’s brightest young things. She looked daring and sexy.
Not to be outdone, the male cast members also stepped up.
I am not sure Timothée, 28, has ever dressed down in his life, while Austin, 32, fills out Valentino and Gucci suits just as well as he did Elvis’s leathers.
Although I couldn’t help but wonder if Tim and Zen tipped him off about their plans ahead of their matching leather jumpsuits moment at the film’s South Korea premiere.
Poor
Austin ended up looking like he’d missed the memo.
THE cost-of-living crisis has forced most people to cut down their food budget. Taiwaneseborn British chef Ching-He Huang first learned to cook on a shoestring when she was just 11.
“My mum had to go away, back to Taiwan [from north London] to work, to try and make ends meet. My dad looked after us,” the 45-year-old says.
Her parents had paid everything they had for the expensive visa to move from South Africa to the UK in 1989, and then a recession hit and they “pretty much lost everything”.
Without her mum, cooking and meal planning fell on a young Ching-He. “My dad’s a very bad cook. To this day he can’t cook fried rice even. So my mum would teach me how to cook, then I would cook for him. Every time she’d come back, I would learn a bit more.”
Ching-He, who has just released her 11th cookbook, Wok For Less, all about budget Asian cooking in 30 minutes or less, says the recipes she includes “are the sorts of dishes that I made for my dad growing up”. Think chop suey, stirfries, fried rice and clever hacks to turn leftovers into tasty meals.
Born in Taipei, Ching-He’s first big influence when it came to food was her Chinese grandmother, whose farm she lived on until the age of five. “I was given to my grandparents to live in the countryside with. The norm was to be shipped off to the grandparents while parents are busy working in the city.”
She’d watch her grandmother cook for 25 family members, “Breakfast, lunch and dinner – it was quite something”, says Ching-He. “Even though there wasn’t much on the farm, everything was seasonal, everything was fresh, [we] used fermented ingredients like soy sauce or miso to give flavour.”
Her family emigrated to South Africa at a time when Taiwan was offering grants for residents to leave and travel for career opportunities, and Ching-He moved from one farm to another outside Johannesburg. “We’d never had an avocado before, we’d never had things like biltong or yoghurt. My mum missed home and there was one Chinese supermarket in Jo’burg, a very small store, that had soy sauce, tinned abalone... I remember very vividly her getting very excited. We’d go once a week to stock up on supplies.”
All of the recipes in the book use what she calls a ‘pared-down’ pantry. “I used £48 to buy all my store cupboard. I tested the whole recipe book and I still have so much left, it lasted months. With a little investment upfront – and I’m not saying everyone’s got to go out and buy all of them in one go – just £5 of them is just fine, and you can cook and eat well and wholesomely on a budget.”
While air fryers might be all the rage, she’s a traditionalist.
“As long as I’ve got a cleaver, a wok and a chopping board, that’s all I need.” Plus, a wok is cost-efficient. “Traditionally, it’s very little gas, very little oil and the dish is done in less than five minutes.”
And all those odds and ends in the fridge? Chuck them in a wok. “It’s an Americanised-Chinese way, but in essence [it’s] using leftover ingredients, throwing bits and bobs that you have to make everything ‘chop suey’ – a handful of bean sprouts, chestnuts from another dish, red or white onions, chicken or ham. A little goes a long way.
Even in hard times, like a costof-living crisis, “We just have to remind ourselves that actually you can still eat well and cook”.
■ Wok For Less by
Ching-He Huang is by Kyle Books,
£25. Photography by Jamie Cho
As long as I’ve got a cleaver, a wok and a chopping board, that’s all I need
Ching-He Huang