🎤 🤑 Adele has confirmed a lucrative Las Vegas residency, where she’ll play two gigs a week from January to April. The Daily Mail expects the 33-year-old singer to “double her £130m fortune”, with superfans paying as much as £11,000 for a ticket. Rather them than me, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator. The crooner from north London has enjoyed rave reviews – and huge sales – for her new album, 30. It’s meant to be her “mature album, her BRAVE album”. But it’s just the same old “schlock” as her previous two, full of “cocktail piano and eminently predictable faux-jazz chord changes”. “I thought she was pretty awful before – when she was just fat and from Tottenham. Now… she seems to have become even worse: a kind of Meghan Markle with a larynx.”
Tiffany’s jewel in the crown
💰 💎 Tiffany & Co has come up with “the ultimate stocking filler”, says Jacqui Goddard in The Times – the most expensive piece of jewellery the firm has ever made. The World’s Fair necklace, which took two years to create, features 578 diamonds, including the 80-carat Empire diamond in its centre. Named after the Empire State Building, this “mega diamond” can be removed and worn separately as a giant ring. The jeweller came up with the idea after archivists “unearthed an original sketch of a piece that Tiffany’s made for the World’s Fair in 1939”. That sold for “a modest $28,000”; the new version is valued by experts at between £15m and £22m.
An awkward succession at Zara
👨👧 📉 In a scene that could have come straight out of the TV show Succession, the Spanish parent company of clothes shop Zara has appointed the 37-year-old daughter of its founder as its new chairwoman – and seen its share price plummet. Marta Ortega has worked for the Inditex group for 15 years, but the news of her appointment sent shares down 6%. The president of the Madrid-based consultancy Freemarket told the FT it was a “backward step”.
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