Clogs, chore jackets, straw hats and woven baskets are the look of the season. But are the brands and people embracing this aesthetic really doing any gardening?

Lately, it feels like you can’t move for clogs. Everywhere you look, it’s straw hats, dungarees, floaty dresses, chore jackets and basket bags – and that’s in city centres, not garden centres. This is the rise of “allotmentcore” – somewhere between the linen-clad luxury of the “coastal grandmother” and the whimsical outdoorsiness of “cottagecore” – and it’s coming for all of our autumns.

“I’d describe it as Little House on the Prairie meets Felicity Kendal in The Good Life, meets Bill and Ben,” says Mal James, professor of fashion design at the University of Edinburgh. “With the overall style of an imaginary love child of Monty Don and Pamela Anderson, the reinvented queen of garden chic.” It’s true that Anderson – once most famous for sporting a high-leg red swimsuit – has more recently become a pioneer of the allotmentcore style, living “romantically” in midi dresses and bandanas, frequently clutching floral bouquets. Popular brands include the family-run Carrier Company from Norfolk, Danish designers Skall Studio and Welsh-founded lifestyle label Toast. As online fashion publication Who What Wear put it: “If it looks like you’re ready to sport a pair of pruning shears at any moment, you’ve got the look right.”

As John Lewis reports a 96% rise in searches for CD players, music fans share their reasons for ditching streaming

CDs appear to be having a resurgence. John Lewis said searches for CD players are up 96% since July, while another report on trends in music and film this year found that CD sales are up 16%.

With this in mind, we asked music fans why they favour discs over other formats, and if it is a new preference or a lifetime habit.

As John Lewis reports a 96% rise in searches for CD players, music fans share their reasons for ditching streaming

CDs appear to be having a resurgence. John Lewis said searches for CD players are up 96% since July, while another report on trends in music and film this year found that CD sales are up 16%.

With this in mind, we asked music fans why they favour discs over other formats, and if it is a new preference or a lifetime habit.

With a footprint of less than 40 sq metres, the Melbourne project required careful planning – and some spatial trickery

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

Last week on a balmy spring evening, Ronnen Goren and his partner had dinner in a small pavilion on their terrace for the first time. Inside, an Aga stove was keeping their home warm. They could have retired to their sunken lounge room and cocktail bar for a nightcap, had the mood struck.

This domestic scene took place in a semi-subterranean former laundry in inner Melbourne – a space of less than 40 sq metres that was renovated at the end of 2024. On 29 October, the “exuberant” reimagining of the damp basement space in Toorak, on the grounds of the heritage-listed Quamby apartment complex, received the Emil Sodersten award for interior architecture at Australia’s National Architecture awards.

Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire

Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.

She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the ability to, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.

Elena records messages for Ayo because they’re often apart, but he would prefer a simple text or chat on the phone. Is he right to call her out?

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I haven’t got time to listen to 10-minute messages. I’d much prefer a simple text or phone call

Food safety campaigners have long been concerned about pesticide residues on lemons, limes and oranges – and now a social media post about it has gone viral. How safe is it to eat lemon cake or drink a G&T with ice and a slice?

Do you sprinkle citrus zest on to your cooking or drink hot water with a slice of lemon? According to an Instagram post that went viral last week, you shouldn’t. “Select citrus fruits at Lidl now come with a ‘Peel unfit for consumption’ warning,” posts @wholefoodwarrior. She photographs some of the supermarket’s labels, which list the post-harvest chemicals used to conserve the fruit: azoxystrobin and fludioxonil (limes) and imazalil, 2-phenylphenol, thiabendazole, pyrimethanil and fludioxonil (easy peelers), plus E903 in the peel’s wax coating (both).

The 10,500 comments on the post are largely appalled. So what are these substances? And how worried should consumers be?

Thanks to Jilly Cooper, tartan and tweed, waxed jackets and wellies are a style vibe right now

British heritage, in fashion terms, is a country where it is permanently October. A conker-brown and pleasant land, if you will. Brand Britain in the style sense comes into its own in autumn: roaring fires, muddy lanes, damp dogs. Waxed jackets and chunky knits, tartan and tweed, jaunty scarves to banish draughts. Clothes for going on a hearty walk, but with a hip flask in your pocket. Fashion has been mining this seam since long before Brideshead Revisited made battered evening dresses and Oxford bags look romantic, and it keeps returning, because trad British style is satisfyingly utilitarian while also being loaded with enough backstory (class, history, eccentricity) to be intriguing and reinventable.

Also: Rivals. It has taken considerable restraint for me not to mention Rivals in the whole of the first paragraph, because it is now a matter of mere weeks until we get our next Jilly Cooper fix and I, for one, cannot wait. Cannot wait for Cameron stalking the corridors in her foxy power suits, for Taggie in her cute jeans and jumpers, for Valerie in head-to-toe tweed and an aggressive amount of blusher. The success of Rivals has done for old-school British dressing what Emily in Paris did for the beret, only with better jokes and more adultery. Jolly hockey sticks style is the new French girl chic. This fantasy is homegrown, which makes it both more embarrassing and harder to resist. Just as Emily and her friends and frenemies are a camp send-up of fashionable Paris, Rivals is a fond, nostalgic semi-parody of the British wardrobe. The show’s costume designer, Ray Holman, has drawn on original 1980s pieces from Dunhill and Mulberry for inspiration. With Liberty fabrics, nods to polo uniforms and sturdy waxed coats, he has brought the Sloane ranger back into the fashion conversation for the first time in years.

It involves the fracturing of a patient’s ribs, before they spend three months laced into a corset. Some of those who have had this cosmetic procedure say it is like being ‘hit by a bus’. Why is it becoming more popular?

Daniela Cesin was 14 when she began thinking about her looks. “I was a little bit chubby and I started to work out at home and lose weight. I saw the difference in my body: my abs, the muscles in my arms, and I started liking it,” she says. By 31, she had the slim, toned body she had hoped for, but something was still missing. “I wanted to have that guitar hourglass shape.”

In August, Cesin travelled from Miami, where she has lived for the past 15 years, to her native Venezuela for liposuction and a fat transfer to her hips. She met her cosmetic surgeon for the first time the day before the procedure, and he realised she didn’t have enough fat to go ahead with it. Instead, he offered to perform RibXcar: a rib remodelling surgery that would involve fracturing three of her lower ribs on each side and binding them in a corset for three months, to set the ribs in a new position and give her a wasplike waist.

As the weight-loss drugs become more common, some runners find the side-effects challenging. Here’s what experts say

• Women: was your autoimmune condition misdiagnosed?

Keri M, a marathoner in her 50s, knew the race would be terrible.

This feeling couldn’t be chalked up to inexperience. Keri, who asked us to omit her full name due to the sensitive subject matter, has completed dozens of half marathons and four full marathons.

In her new book, Envy, Stacy Kim explains how to understand the feeling, identify your deeper desires and use them to achieve your goals

In the 16th-century poem The Faerie Queene, envy is a ghoulish figure riding a ravenous wolf, sad to see the fortune of others and “wonderous glad” of their hardship. It’s not a flattering depiction; better to be thankful for what we have, rather than dwell on such a bitter and self-destructive feeling, right?

Maybe not. “I think that when we don’t examine our envy, that’s when it leads us astray,” says Dr Stacy Kim, social scientist, life coach and author of the new book Envy: Why Wanting What They Have is the Key to Getting What You Want. Kim wrote the book after seeing the way envy came up for her coaching clients and reflecting on the role it had in her own life. The book is informed by social science and philosophy research, as well as her personal and professional experiences.

Similar target: “You remind yourself: ‘Hey, the reason why I’m feeling this envy is because what I want is within my reach,’” she says.

Intangible desire, as mentioned above

Relevant comparison: Identify which specific domain – something you care about or already participate in – is relevant to your desires

Negative emotion: How long does it last? How intense is the message it’s sending? This tells us how important the feeling is.

Envy by Stacy S. Kim is out now. To support the Guardian, order your copy of the UK edition at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Before being rescued, he had an extremely traumatic experience. You’d never know it though, from the joy his patience and sunny nature bring to those who most need him

In December 2024, my kerry blue terrier, Magnus, died suddenly from a stroke at the age of nine. Devastated, I started looking at rescue dogs on Facebook and came across Clement, who was being looked after by a shelter in Romania. It wasn’t his appearance that caught my attention, but his heartbreaking story.

An eight-year-old mixed-breed rescue, Clement had spent most of his life with a woman living with Alzheimer’s. One day, she accidentally let him out. He was hit by a car, attacked by two large dogs and left in a ditch for three days in the snow before being rescued by chance. When I read this, I knew I had to take him in.

Faced with a stagnant jobs market, many are spurning children or pets in favour of ‘raising bricks’

Young adults in China looking for a cheaper, low-maintenance alternative to having children or pets have found an answer: raising bricks.

Bricks may not be as cuddly as cats or as life-affirming as human offspring, but they also cost next to nothing. “No cats, no dating, I started raising a brick,” wrote one brick parent on social media.

A new report has found many crops are far less nutritious than they once were, so we need to eat more of them. Here is how to get your five portions of fruit and veg a day, easily and affordably – and potentially increase that to ten

When Eva Humphries first started working as a nutritionist, she met a client who had just found out he had high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and was on the verge of type 2 diabetes. He had no idea how to change his diet or lifestyle.

The man broke down and cried for 45 minutes, leaving Humphries with “no idea of what to do”, she says. In the final 15 minutes of the session, scrambling for a quick but helpful message, she finally said: “When you look at a plate of food, can you just make half of it veg for me?”