Sizzling Paris Fashion Week, Martin Parr’s last show, perfect swimwear

It’s a scorching day at Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, and, beneath the screeching of low-flying swifts, Martin Parr’s widow is in the National Trust property’s Manger Barn, discussing her husband’s final work, and his legacy. ‘This project, it really did resonate with him,’ Susie Parr says of ‘Lacock’, a series of portraits of English community and tradition, a year in the taking and curating, which the great photographer-documentarian completed shortly before his death, at 73, in December 2025, and is now on show at the abbey’s Fox Talbot Museum.

Spanning prize-winning vegetables, bell ringers, cricket and VE Day anniversary cake, the images marked ‘a return to [Martin’s] much earlier, more elegiac way of working. More connection, more gentleness,’ Susie tells Craig McLean. Did he like a cake to eat as well? ‘He loved a cake! He loved his cup of tea and a cake at 3.30pm. And the final picture in the [‘Lacock’ exhibition] book is his cup of tea and his plate with cake crumbs on it. For me, it’s a poignant full stop to the project.’

At the Haiti studio of architect, designer and Loewe Foundation Craft Prize finalist Hervé Sabin, the sounds of jazz, wood saws, chisels and sandpaper are punctuated by the din of automatic rifles and drones in the near distance. Yet Sabin’s process continues, undeterred, ‘not out of resistance’, as he puts it, ‘but out of existence’.

Working in precarious conditions, often in transit, has become a defining feature of his practice, which explores the intertwined threads of family, place and memory. Currently based in Port-au-Prince, and moving between the homes and studios of family and friends in Miami, New York and Montreal, he produces furniture and objects carved from weighty, sometimes gnarled trunks of salvaged wood found along the way. In his hands, these resistant materials are coaxed into softer forms with gently smoothed contours, shaped through an intuitive process of carving, charring, sanding and waxing that plays out as a push-and-pull between material and maker. Sabin takes Ali Morris on a tour of his itinerant practice.

Toyota is the largest car maker in the world, a position it has held since 2008, innovating in both automotive and production technology. But it’s also busy working towards a transition into an all-encompassing mobility company, a move it announced back in 2018. Where better to explore the interaction between next-generation mobility and people than in your own test laboratory? Welcome to Woven City, Toyota’s purpose-designed community in Japan’s Shizuoka prefecture, close to Mount Fuji.

Described by the company as ‘a real-world test course for mobility innovation’, the ultimate aim is for this modest complex to serve as a place where Toyota’s experiments in mobility, autonomy, robotics and AI can be tried out in a full-scale, ‘live’ environment. Residents will be known as Weavers (the name Woven City is a nod to the company’s origins in industrial weaving and textile manufacture), while workers from Toyota and partner companies, start-ups and entrepreneurs, will live and work alongside each other. Already 50 households out of 300 are occupied. Hop on the e-Palette autonomous micro-bus for a tour with Jonathan Bell.

Commodore’s new flip phone, the Callback, gets hip to the demands and requirements of the modern age, swapping out obsessive scrolling with intentional friction and an old-school form factor. It walks a fine line between functionalism and full-on digital detox. You do get Uber, WhatsApp and Google Maps, a ‘retro camera’ and music streaming; you don’t get any social media, or even a browser. The wait list is open; orders from 30 June.