Capsule #60 ft. Kate Samuelson

Hello hello,

Excited to tell you that there is now a Capsule referral programme, meaning that if you share this newsletter with your friends/colleagues/lovers, you will get prizes. I really want to send these out so don’t hold back 🫶. And transparently, Capsule is just me, and word of mouth/referral is a huge part of keeping it alive.

The referral link will always live at the bottom of the email, but here it is for you to see today:

🖤

And now for the newsletter, which includes a note on bag charms, learnings from the Olympics, and a timeless shoe.

Have a great weekend!

Holly x

First up…

The latest accessory craze is… accessorising your accessories. Specifically, adding charms to your handbag. Early versions felt very DIY, inspired by Jane Birkin’s approach, with colourful, nostalgic key rings. Now we have a full Miu Miu collection of charms selling for an eye-watering amount. This charm that looks like a scoobie (remember those?) is £330. It goes without saying that you do not need to spend three-figures on cute attachments for your bag!

Like collecting fridge magnets from your travels, I think this trend is most appealing when used to showcase charms and trinkets acquired from varied parts of your life. Now I’m not saying we all have a drawer full of these ready to go - but we can get creative and look out for textures and objects on our travels.

It might be some gingham ribbon from your local haberdashery or a gift, it might be a key ring from a holiday in 2004, it might be a colourful silk scarf that you’ve been looking for a way to incorporate.

I’ll admit that this trend has stuck around longer than I expected. I first saved a photo with bag charms early last year, in the way you do when you see something novel on Pinterest or wherever, and didn’t expect to see much more. But I think there are a few reasons why this trend has grown in popularity:

1. Having one-of-a-kind anything is usually a luxury flex (see: the hand-painted Birkin Kanye got for Kim), but this trend offers a way to do that in a creative, low budget way

2. Accessory trends are often more pervasive than clothing because they are more one-size-fits-all

3. Major brands (Miu Miu, Coach, Anya Hindmarch) have quickly started selling a wide range of charms, meaning we see them across editorials, online ads, and in celeb fashion

4. Small designer goods sell really well as consumers see them as a cheaper way to own something from a luxury brand. The same theory applies to gifting

5. And lots of these charms have tapped into a key spending driver: nostalgia (think teddy bears, scoobies, Carmex), and strike a balance between girlhood (predominant trend of the last two years) and messiness (current rallying against the Clean Girl aesthetic)

My advice would be to spend very little, get crafty, and enjoy the fact that you can simply remove your adornments if you aren’t feeling the vibe one day.

Next up!

I’ve been enjoying Gigi Hadid’s street style of late for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she’s wearing stuff you could actually see yourself in - clothes comfortable enough to spend a day traversing a city, easy accessories, no inhibitive elements. Secondly, she’s wearing slip-on Vans, which are timeless. Just ask the Olympic skateboarders and BMX riders 🥺. It also feels increasingly rare for a new pair of shoes to cost less than £100 (when did that happen?), but Vans are still doing that. There are lots of sizes in stock here.

Zooming in on Gigi’s jeans for a moment, I think we’re also seeing early signs of a renewed interest in jeans that fit really well. Of course this is something we will search for until the end of time, but I mean specifically a turn to well-fitting denim rather than the super baggy styles that have dominated lately. Personally I think a baggy carpenter jean can do no wrong, but I also see the appeal for something more like this classic straight cut Lily Rose Depp wore in LA recently.

A note on the Olympics…

Have we all been tuning into the Olympics each day and releasing the odd tear, plenty of goosebumps, and picking up some gorgeous new communal chat material??? Of course we have. Love to ask my friends which sport they would compete in if they HAD to train to get good. Love everyone’s random confidence towards something like the javelin. But mainly love the athlete interviews post-competing, which are really moving.

This isn’t the part where I recommend we all take up a new sport (although I don’t think that’s a bad idea), but it is the part where I remind us all that regularly committing to something you enjoy, or taking a baby steps approach to getting better at something (whether better means more skilful or just more confident or happier when doing so) is a pretty good pathway to feeling fulfilled. I think we started to rebel against having ‘goals’ when they became so tied to the hustle culture that was burning us out, and maybe forgot some of the huge benefits they provide when taken in balance with the rest of our lives.

Think about something you’d like to be fractionally better or more experienced at by the end of the year, and figure out how that might slot into your routine. It might be a Saturday workout class with a friend, a regular post-work slot for reading philosophy, or a YouTube tutorial series on video editing.

I’m curious - what’s one thing you’d love to get better at or make more time for?

And finally…

News from the Capsule extended universe you may have missed this week:

• Lots of great fashion moments from the first week of the Olympics

• Code red… Suki Waterhouse wears a bandage dress in her new music video

• It was a big week for the brand Farm Rio and looking like your partner. See why

• It looks like Frank Ocean is recording new music

• Megan Thee Stallion endorsed Kamala Harris

• Dua Lipa is doing what we all want to: enjoying summer in a well-fitting red dress 

• Corsets are still going strong in the new Dilara Fındıkoğlu x Heaven by Marc Jacobs collab 

• Another celeb beauty brand just dropped. Can you guess what Blake Lively is making?

• The next creative director of Blumarine is the London-based Georgian designer David Koma

• And Charli xcx put out a remix of ‘Guess’ with Billie Eilish

This week, Kate Samuelson popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Kate is a journalist and founder of the Cheapskate London newsletter, which curates the best free events in London each week. She set up Cheapskate with her childhood friend Georgia five years ago, to help cash-strapped Londoners make the most out of the city for free. The newsletter has grown to 21,000 subscribers and won the Georgina Henry Award for Digital Innovation at the British Journalism Awards. It has also been shortlisted for a Press Gazette Future of Media Award. You can sign up for free here:

📺 Watching: The first live performances of songs off the latest Billie Eilish album. See ‘L’AMOUR DE MA VIE’ here and ‘WILDFLOWER’ here (hopefully before they get taken down!). And the video to the ‘Guess’ remix, which was only shot on Sunday.

📖 Reading: This article on the impact of Botox on relationships and eroticism, plus an extended interview with Jessica DeFino on the same topic.

🎧 Listening to: For upbeat runs, True Magic, the debut album from salute. Look out for features from Rina Sawayama, piri, and Empress Of. And for getting ready at home, the new Gracie Abrams album, which is really good. 

Bug has also been watching the Olympics and wanted to share these ideas about productivity with you:

This is similar to the concept of “strategic laziness,” a concept coined by trainer Joe Holder, which refers to looking at where you spend your time and energy, and “know[ing] what you have to do, but also understand how much is necessary and do strictly that—no more, no less.” Maybe we aren’t built to be busy 24/7! Not even world-class athletes are.

If you’d like to adopt Bug or one of her friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them!

See you next week 💋