Paradisefold Blog

Every October, the UK marks Black History Month, a time to honour history, achievement and the people who shaped the world we live in. At Paradisefold, we want to use this month to celebrate something close to our hearts: hair, and specifically the beauty, resilience and creativity of Black women's hair. Hair Has Always Told a Story Hair has never been just hair. For generations of Black women, braids, twists, coils, locs and afros have carried culture, community and identity. They have been acts of care, of celebration and, at times, of quiet resistance. Plenty of us learned young that our hair was something to manage rather than enjoy. Many Black girls grew up being told to tame it, straighten it...

Release: A New Beginning Is Almost Here Can you feel it? The light is softer, the mornings are slower, and there's a little voice saying it might be time to begin again. We've been listening to that voice. And we've been making something. Meet Release Release is our new collection, and it's all about new beginnings. We can't show you everything yet (good things take time), but here's what we can tell you. It's inspired by the changing seasons. It wanders through woodland and open meadows. It's built around simple rituals like making a wish, gathering together and letting things grow in their own time. And at the heart of it all is a simple dandelion. We chose it as...

How to Style a Silk Slip Dress: Day, Evening and Everything Between There's a reason the slip dress never really leaves. It disappears for a season, everyone declares it "back" the next, and the truth is it never went anywhere. It just waited quietly in the wardrobe of anyone who understood its value. One piece of fabric, cut on the bias, doing the work of ten different outfits. If you own a silk slip dress and only wear it for one occasion, you're underusing it. This is the dress that goes from a Tuesday desk to a Saturday dinner without you having to think too hard. Here's how to actually get the range out of it. Why silk slips work...

In three years, our world has gone from a state of relative calm and stability to 65 inter-and intra-state wars wrecking societies and nature across of our fragile earth. An invasion of Ukraine, civil war, starvation and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, a genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and the West Bank, and the list goes on and on. In this new world, autocratic powers are on the ascent and democratic governments’ international footprints are in retreat. Aid budgets are shrinking and the peacekeeping system is absent. The United Nations, with all its flaws, has never been weaker, and its weakening is a deliberate consequences of those who stand to benefit from having no check on their ambitions to...

September always feels like the start of something, even long after school is over. New notebooks, new routines, a general sense that it's time to get our lives (and our hair) in order. So this month, we're heading Back to Hair School with a teacher who genuinely knows his subject: Ian Carmichael, hairdresser to the late Queen for 25 years and now part of the Trevor Sorbie team. Ian has been behind the chair for longer than most of us have been washing our own hair. He has seen every trend come and go, styled through decades of changing weather, changing products and changing hair health. When we sat down with him, we expected polished soundbites. What we got instead...