Calabria: The revamped Hiking Trail Regenerating an Italian Region Blighted by Mafia Stereotypes

The mountain village called Pentedattilo at the start of the trail. Photograph: Polonio Shutterstock.

By Aurora Moxon 

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese – the Trail of the Englishman – is bringing new hope to Calabria’s Aspromonte mountains in southern Italy, one of the EU’s most marginal and economically depressed areas.The six-day trail is named after the English poet Edward Lear who walked these mountains in the 19th century. The route encourages hikers to challenge preconceptions of the Aspromonte and experience local hospitality, while boosting the economy of an area at risk of abandonment.

The Aspromonte has long been associated with the ’Ndrangheta – Italy’s most powerful mafia. In the 1970-1980s, organised criminals held high-profile kidnapping victims in these mountains, consolidating this association. The most famous of these was Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty Sr, whose kidnapping inspired the 2017 film All the Money in the World.

As well as researching food, farming and ecotourism in the Aspromonte mountains, my work investigates the negative effects of stereotypes of this area.

Although the ’Ndrangheta is still active in Calabria today, much of its primary activity now takes place in Italy’s north and overseas. Despite this shift, a negative image of the Aspromonte and its inhabitants still prevails among Italians.

It was not the ’Ndrangheta, but mountain brigands (robbers) that Lear feared when he set off on foot through the Aspromonte in 1847.

Best known for his poem The Owl and the Pussycat (1871), among Lear’s other works is Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria. Published in 1852, he wrote about the people of the Aspromonte who shared their houses and food with him, from members of the landowning class to the poorest peasants.

Although he often interpreted his surroundings through a northern European lens, exaggerating the presumed backwardness of the area and its inhabitants, Lear was evidently impressed by this hospitality and Aspromonte’s physical  

Boosting the trail

In 2019, a hiking organisation called La Cooperativa San Leo, based in the village of Bova, opened Il Sentiero dell’Inglese. The trail follows the first 80km of Lear’s journey on old mule tracks with views of the Ionian Sea, Mount Etna and the dramatic valleys and peaks of the Aspromonte.

The cooperative runs a network of local B&B hosts across the seven villages along the route. They offer hikers local cuisine in private homes and no-frills eateries, with accommodation for around €60 a night. Now numbers of tourists from Italy’s north and other parts of Europe are on the rise.

Andrea Laurenzano, president of the cooperative and coordinator of the trail, told me that 2024 saw around 600 hikers walk the sentiero while approximately 1000 hikers completed it in 2025. This year has seen approximately 700 people walk it so far. However, despite Lear’s fundamental role in the trail’s story, hikers from the UK are rare.

The trail is becoming a vital economic artery. Locals with B&Bs can join the hosting network and earn a small income during the low-season (hiking is best avoided in the summer heat). It also provides employment for local guides and brings business to bars, restaurants, shops, museums, artisans and farmers.

Antonio Frangipani, local guide and vice-president of the association that runs the trail, explained that the cooperative’s restaurant in Bova uses organic ingredients such as cheeses from local herders and fruit and vegetables from local farmers.

Finding ways to protect and promote the unique agropastoral culture of this part of the Aspromonte, called the Area Grecanica, is important. Ancient rural know-how and the Greco-Calabro language, which includes words and phrases from ancient Greek, are at risk of dying out as inhabitants move away from the local villages. This movement is part of a wider pattern in Italy of human abandonment of inland regions.

The repercussions of the trail go well beyond the purely economic. Human geographers like Tim Edensor argue that walking has historically forged stereotypes, contributing to the marginalisation of cultures considered “other” from a western viewpoint. The bourgeois Lear and his travels across southern Europe arguably fall into this category.

Local guides, however, believe that hiking is helping to challenge negative associations of the Aspromonte. They say that hikers often arrive with varying degrees of prejudice regarding locals and their way of life, and leave with a new appreciation of the region.

Ugo Sergi, trail host, organic bergamot producer and well-known figure on the local ecotourism scene, described his experience to me: “Many people have come here … believing they would find a dangerous and backward underclass. I have taken great pleasure in helping them understand how they were mistaken.”

Similarly, local guide Stefania Praticò explained: “The Sentiero dell’Inglese has started to remove the stigma as people walk these paths [which] help to show these places in a new way. [The trail] creates this connection, they can understand with their own eyes that the [stories] are different from reality.”

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese is demonstrating that a form of slow tourism adapted to the particular culture and problems faced by locals in the Aspromonte is working to regenerate and rehabilitate a once notorious region of southern Italy. 

The Shards Transforms Bret Easton Ellis’s 1980s LA Nightmare into a Warning for the Present

Igby Rigby as Bret and Kaia Gerber as Susan in a scene from the series thriller The Shards, set in 1981 Los Angeles following an elite group of prep school students. 

By Bran Nicol

Ryan Murphy, director of the controversial Netflix true-crime Monster Anthology (2022-), and Bret Easton Ellis, literary provocateur and author of American Psycho (1991), seem the perfect match. Sure enough, Murphy’s new TV adaptation of Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards, for Disney+ is an exhilarating mix of teen drama, serial killer nail-biter and homoerotic cat-and-mouse thriller.

The Shards features a fictionalised version of Ellis himself (a standout performance by Igby Rigney). The show details the unravelling of a close-knit group of friends during their senior year at a private LA high school in 1981. It’s triggered by the simultaneous arrival of a charismatic and mysterious newcomer, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere), and the terror and destruction wrought by a serial killer at large in the community dubbed “the Trawler”. Are these events coincidental? Or connected in some way?

Ellis has said that the appeal of his precocious first novel, Less Than Zero (1985) (which he was indeed working on in his senior year, as the series shows) was that it allowed viewers to imagine what it would be like to be a privileged youngster in cool, affluent Beverley Hills.

The trailer for The Shards.

This TV incarnation of The Shards presents a particularly vivid version of this fantasy. The affluent teenagers pad around beautiful, empty houses, throw endless pool parties, drive through LA in their shiny cars and indulge in as much drugs and sex as they want.

Yet the flip-side of such extraordinary freedom is excessive vulnerability. The story of the Trawler recalls the dark history of late 1970s and 1980s LA. It was a time when over 20 serial killers – each given similarly foreboding monikers like the Night Stalker or the Hillside Strangler – were also traversing the city.

Watching the lives of such a privileged group become shattered might be considered just deserts: a secret satisfaction for viewers enamoured by that Beverley Hills fantasy life. This is, after all, the kind of dark morality which propels the slasher movie (a genre which has influenced both Ellis and Murphy) where characters, usually girls, die in seemingly direct proportion to how sexually active they are.

But The Shards wants to do more than glamorise and invite critique of the lives of affluent youth in the US. Outwardly its sumptuous rendering of Westside interiors and exteriors tempt viewers to regard it as another example of TV’s current fascination with displaying the indulgent existences of the super-wealthy, such as Big Little Lies (2017) or White Lotus (2021-).

The Shards aims at something more profound. At its heart is a comparison between 21st-century existence and the world of the early 1980s. The series reminds us that then there were no helicopter parents, no social media nor smartphones. Factors which explain how these teenagers can do what they wish without adult scrutiny.

Despite the permissive atmosphere – as Bret’s comparison of Mallory’s arrival to “a virus” signals subtly – all this sexual decadence was, in only a few years, about to be extinguished by the advent of Aids.

Lessons for today

Yet The Shards also insists this era is the gateway to understanding the world we exist in now. This is a core message of the novel, conveyed powerfully through references to songs from the period.

Ellis’s fiction has always used music as a way of summing up character or anchoring its narrative in a particular cultural moment. In The Shards, his observations about emblematic music tracks of the time – such as Ultravox’s Vienna or Kim Wilde’s video for Kids in America – focus on what he calls a pervasive social “numbness”.

The novel’s virtual soundtrack is one reason it feels so deeply personal. In literary terms, The Shards is what is known as an autofiction. It’s a mode of writing which differs from straight autobiography. Autofiction conveys personal truth in a way which keeps it unverifiable or obscure, perhaps even to the authors themselves.

Like Ellis’s Lunar Park (2006), another magnificent autofiction, The Shards seems an effort to understand which dark parts of his psyche could have summoned up a creation like Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic anti-hero of American Psycho.

Kids in America by Kim Wilde.

Murphy’s adaptation of The Shards – as expected given Ellis’s close involvement as executive producer and co-writer – preserves much of this personal significance. This helps to elevate it above racy, entertaining but essentially empty, bonkbuster thrillers such as Hunting Wives (2025). It is hard, for example, not to see the casting of newcomer Gere, who plays Robert Mallory with a perfect combination of beauty and menace, in the light of Ellis’s notes about the elemental impression the work of his father, Richard Gere, left on his own formative years.

Ellis’s novel is remarkable for how it creates such a deeply immersive blend of image, narrative and soundtrack in prose. The tools available to screen directors ensure they can do this much more easily, as Murphy’s version of The Shards demonstrates. But the pairing of director and writer ensures the series also, just about, avoids the superficial trap TV can fall into – the lingering on surfaces, the indulgence in sex scenes or gruesome murders. It preserves the powerful elements of autofiction and cultural analysis that drive the original work.

Bran Nicol, Professor of English, University of Surrey

Paris Fashion Week: Turning the Fabric of Fashion Inside Out, Lilia Litkovska Brings Ukrainian Avant-Garde Art, Exposed Construction and the Power of Reinvention into Focus

A vividly hued new creation by designer Lilia Litkovska in Paris. Photograph (above) and cover picture by Brittany Scott for DAM.

We look back at one of the highlights of Paris Fashion Week, Spring/Summer 2027, the Ukrainian designer Lilia Litkovska's new collection which challenges the conventions of dressing with avant-garde art, experimental tailoring and adaptable silhouettes. Inspired by artist Borys Kosarev, she exposes the beauty of construction while reflecting on the realities of war and the enduring power of creativity to transform how we see ourselves and the world. Story by Isabella Lancellotti. Feature photography by Brittany Scott 

One of the intriguing transformative

designs presented in Paris. 

Photograph: Brittany Scott

LILIA Litkovska presented her Stricha collection at Café Beaubourg, facing the Centre Pompidou in Paris.  The show brought Ukrainian artistic heritage into dialogue with the city's creative culture, while asking an intriguing question: who decides what a garment is supposed to be?

The designer explored the relationship between appearance and identity through experimental tailoring, fragmented imagery and garments designed to be worn in more than one way. A blouse could become a dress, a cape transforms into a coat, and seams that most designers would conceal become integral to the design.

Café Beaubourg, a place for conversation opposite one of Paris's principal centres of contemporary art, provided a fitting backdrop for a collection concerned with the unexpected connections between people, cultures and ideas.

The title comes from a dialect of Ukraine's Hutsul region, where stricha means a meeting or encounter. Litkovska describes the small but significant moments in which we first see one another, before appearances give way to a deeper understanding. “Everything begins with a meeting. Before words, before names, a glance, a gesture, a way of standing in a room.”

It is an idea that translates naturally into fashion, where the first impression is often visual, formed through silhouette, texture and the way a person inhabits their clothes. But Litkovska is interested in what happens after that initial encounter, when familiar appearances begin to shift. 

The artistic reference point was Borys Kosarev, one of the founding figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde

Voluminous proportions and adaptable 

pieces made for an experimental yet 

very wearable collection.

Photograph: Brittany Scott 

The artistic reference point was Borys Kosarev, one of the founding figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde. His experimental portraits and masks fragmented the human face into geometric planes, challenging the notion that identity could be captured through a single, coherent image. 

Litkovska translated this visual language into garments through prints, appliqué and collage, incorporating angular compositions into a collection already preoccupied with the possibilities of breaking things apart and putting them together differently.

Rather than simply reproducing Kosarev's artwork, she adopted his experimental approach. Traditional Ukrainian homespun textiles were turned inside out, while seams and construction details were deliberately exposed. 

Familiar silhouettes were similarly reconfigured: voluminous blouses extended into long dresses, and capes assumed the proportions of coats. The clothes revealed their own construction instead of presenting an immaculate exterior, giving the collection a graphic, architectural quality without sacrificing its sense of movement.

“I believe the construction is more honest than the silhouette,” Litkovska explains. “The seam, the cut, the place where two pieces meet and strain against each other. I do not want to conceal these. I want them spoken aloud, made part of the garment's own language.”

It is a compelling distinction. In luxury fashion, where craftsmanship is frequently celebrated through painstakingly perfected surfaces, Litkovska directs attention to the process itself. The visible seam becomes evidence of how a garment has been assembled, while its exposed interior suggests that what is usually hidden may be just as interesting as what is presented to the world.

Shaped by four generations of tailoring, Litkovska combines traditional craftsmanship with a willingness to challenge its conventions. 

Lilia Litkovska combines fine tailoring 

with an avant-garde sensibility.

Photograph: Brittany Scott

This approach has been central to the designer since the label was founded in Kyiv in 2009. Shaped by four generations of tailoring and garment-making in her family, Litkovska combines an understanding of traditional craftsmanship with a willingness to challenge its conventions. 

Her guiding principle, “there is no wrong side”, is not merely a slogan but a practical design philosophy: pieces can be reversed, deconstructed and restructured, inviting the wearer to discover alternative ways of using them.

The concept extends to the smallest detail. Each garment leaves the atelier with its label covered by a strip of white fabric, symbolically leaving space for the next chapter to be written by its owner. As the designer explains:

“Once a garment leaves the atelier, it is no longer entirely ours. It enters someone else's life, body, and imagination. We invite the person who wears it to become its co-author, to give it a new interpretation, to transform it through their own gestures, and ultimately to decide what the garment can become.”

This notion of shared authorship offers an alternative to fashion's familiar emphasis on designer signatures and prescribed styling. Rather than dictating a finished image, Litkovska provides the framework for personal interpretation. The wearer becomes an active participant in the creative process, bringing individual experience and imagination to the garment.

Since joining the official Paris Fashion Week calendar in 2017, the designer has developed an international presence while maintaining a strong connection to her Ukrainian origins. That connection carries particular significance in this collection, where the exploration of what remains essential takes place against the reality of war.

“During the war, a person does not simply survive, there is still a choice, again and again, to want, to love, to create, to open a door to someone new”

On the runway at the Cafe Beaubourg,

the models walked between the tables.

Photograph: Brittany Scott

At the Paris show, the words “SET MISSING. DESTROYED BY MISSILE” were above the runway. They introduced an abrupt and devastating reminder of the destruction confronting Ukraine. They are difficult to reconcile with the beauty and ingenuity of fashion, and that is precisely the point. Litkovska refuses to separate her creative practice from the circumstances in which it exists.

“Perhaps this is what life in Ukraine has taught me, more than anything else could have,” she says. “When the ground itself is uncertain, you stop mistaking decoration for substance. You learn, with a clarity that almost hurts, what is truly yours and, from everything you own, what is worth carrying into whatever comes next.”

The collection's message is therefore more nuanced than a simple celebration of resilience. It concerns the decision to remain receptive to life, even when circumstances encourage withdrawal: “During the war, a person does not simply survive, there is still a choice, again and again, to want, to love, to create, to open a door to someone new.”

That spirit informs the collection's broader vision. Through her Kyiv flagship, Litkovska Basecamp, the designer also supports a cultural programme of exhibitions, encounters and dialogue, extending her interest in the meeting of ideas beyond the runway. Fashion, in this context, is part of a larger conversation about how people express themselves, preserve their histories and imagine what comes next.

With Stricha, Litkovska brings these concerns together through clothes that are technically considered yet deliberately open-ended. The collection's most interesting proposition is that transformation need not mean abandoning what came before. Sometimes, it requires only a different perspective and the freedom to turn something inside out and perhaps discover what was there all along.

See the full collection from the Litkovska Spring/Summer 2027 Paris show 

Paris Fashion Week: Victoria Beckham Gives Fashion Something to Dance About as Sheer Dresses and Sculptural Tailoring Find Their Rhythm

The fluidity of one of Victoria Beckham's dance-inspired designs for the new SS27 collection shown in Paris at the gothic La Conciergerie. Cover picture of Issey Miyake by Filippo Fior.

For Spring/Summer 2027 at Paris Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham looks to the artistic revolution of the 1920s, when dance, painting and fashion began to challenge established ideas of form. At La Conciergerie, that influence emerged through sheer dresses, painterly prints, sculptural tailoring and a sophisticated play between weight and movement. The collection arrives at a pivotal moment for the house, following its first operating profit and the introduction of a new red lipstick. Story by Isabella Lancellotti 

Beckham's new red lipstick called Rouge

Victoria, was launched on the Paris runway.

THERE was something almost deliberately contradictory about Victoria Beckham choosing La Conciergerie for Spring/Summer 2027. Beneath the Gothic stone vaults of the former prison where Marie Antoinette spent her final days, Beckham presented a collection rooted not in historical costume, but in one of the great artistic ruptures of the twentieth century: the moment when dance began to break away from ballet’s prescribed vocabulary and seek a new language for the body.

The 1920s provide Beckham with more than a period reference. They were a moment when choreography, painting, music and fashion began to overlap in increasingly experimental ways. Dancers questioned the architecture of the classical body; artists questioned the boundaries of the canvas. Beckham translated that same curiosity into clothes, asking how much structure a garment can contain before the body begins to dictate its final form.

There is also a new maturity in the commercial acuity of the collection. Victoria Beckham’s business recorded its first operating profit in 2025, reaching £7.3 million, while revenue across fashion, leather goods, make-up and fragrance increased 15 per cent to £129.8 million. The achievement gives the collection a different context. Beckham is no longer establishing whether the fashion house can survive beyond its founder’s celebrity; the numbers indicate a business with increasing traction across several categories.

Beauty has become an integral part of that equation. The runway introduced Rouge Victoria in House Red, a new lipstick developed over two years. Applied to the majority of the 44 models, the matte-velvet red was deliberately striking against otherwise polished, natural complexions. Because the gesture was so simple, the saturated red mouth cut through the collection’s more nuanced palette.

Victoria Beckham’s business recorded its first operating profit, reaching £7.3 million, while revenue across fashion, leather goods, make-up and fragrance increased 15 per cent to £129.8 million

Hand-painted flowers and translucent

georgette created a delicate aesthetic.

The most evocative dresses were cut from translucent viscose georgette, their asymmetric, wavering lines creating an almost drawn quality around the figure. Tiny ball beads replaced conventional hems, giving the delicate fabric a counterweight. 

As the models walked, the beads pulled the dresses downwards while the sheer material responded upwards and outwards. The effect was less about decoration than physics: weight becoming part of the design.

Painting entered more directly through hand-painted flowers and kissing birds, motifs that recalled the extraordinary collaborations between choreographers and visual artists during the period. 

The Ballets Russes had already demonstrated how costume, set, painting and movement could become one visual language; Beckham approached the idea from a contemporary perspective, transferring painterly gestures onto dresses, knitwear and crêpe viscose rather than treating the 1920s as a source of retro imagery. Her own history with ballet makes the reference particularly pertinent. Yet there is no attempt to reproduce the stage. Instead, its influence is absorbed into a collection where line, weight, suspension and rhythm become design principles.

Elsewhere, coloured fragments taken from the backgrounds of 1920s portraiture appeared almost like pieces of canvas translated into cloth. Bows were threaded through dresses and knitwear as constructional devices, while pleats and tucks created garments whose forms seemed to be determined by the relationship between fabric and body.

Beauty has become an integral part of the label and the Paris runway introduced Rouge Victoria, a new lipstick developed over two years, applied to the majority of the 44 models

A starched cotton shirts and soft Nappa

suede bag made for a stylish look. 

The contradiction became more appararent in the more streamlined pieces. Starched-cotton shirts and mini dresses opened like paper fans around the figure, recalling the curious relationship between paper dolls and their clothes. Pleated geometric forms maintained their shape while leaving space for the body beneath. 

Trench coats folded into sculptural silhouettes suggestive of couture, yet were made from exceptionally light technical fabrics. Tailoring followed the same principle: elongated jackets, floating high waists and oversized trousers maintained Beckham’s precision without turning it into rigidity.

The accessories continued the modernist vocabulary. The new Fontana buckle divides Beckham’s familiar B into a lighter graphic form, while the oversized Sloane bag abandons stiffness for soft Nappa leather and suede that can be gathered beneath the arm. Flat bags take their cues from 1920s shapes, while sculptural wedges introduce another conversation between industrial construction and organic form.

What makes this collection interesting is therefore not simply its reference to dance, nor its polished commerciality. It is Beckham’s understanding that modernism was never merely an aesthetic. It was a way of reconsidering how things function. At La Conciergerie, she applied that principle to the wardrobe: how a hem can become a moving line, how a bow can alter construction, how weight can animate fabric, and how tailoring can retain authority without dominating the woman wearing it.

In that sense, Spring/Summer 2027 feels less like an exercise in looking backwards than a conversation with the artists who first questioned where one discipline ended and another began. Beckham has taken that century-old argument and brought it into her own precise, increasingly confident fashion language.

See the full collection below from Victoria Beckham's Spring/Summer 2027 Collection in Paris