News

When the financial crisis reaches into the two sacred preserves of the football pitch and Twiggy's closet, you know it's time for the collective British lip to quiver. West Ham, a London club famed for the toughness of players and fans, has announced that it won't be able to spend any more money on talent in the near future: Its chairman and major investor is – I should say “was” – also chair of the doomed Icelandic bank Landsbanki.

Over on the BBC, Twiggy is telling the women of Britain how to “make do and mend.” (Didn't I tell you a couple of months ago that wartime thrift was making a stylish comeback?) Her new show, Twiggy's Frock Exchange, is a giant swap meet where women exchange unwanted clothes or have them altered by a seamstress into something chic and new. “Style,” Twiggy reminds us, before ogling someone's cast-off Manolos, “is a state of mind, not a status symbol.”

The most famous model of the Swinging Sixties is now one of the faces of Marks & Spencer's fashion campaign. Alas, M&S is also reporting falling profits, despite my single-handed attempts to bail it out through the bulk buying of underwear and vanilla custard.

The misery of London's bankers is being felt all down the yellow brick road, and the wise retailer is adapting to new realities. For those who can't keep away from Selfridges but can no longer afford its platinum baubles, the luxury department store has just launched Credit Crunch Chocolate, “a more-ish marriage of the very best velvet-rich Valrhona chocolate, thickly coated over hokey pokey honeycomb pieces.” I'm not entirely sure what that means, but if you send me $10, I'll buy you a bag.

It's hard to overestimate the twitchiness in London, which for a decade has hovered over the golden goose, coaxing it to spit out another egg or two. The housing market – where most ordinary people invest their future – is in freefall. A banker I know described the atmosphere at work as “surreal” and said he'd never seen anything like it. Britain's richest man, the steel baron Lakshmi Mittal, is reported to have lost £20-billion ($40-billion). No less an oracle than Anya Hindmarch, premier purse decorator for the Notting Hill set, pronounced the death of the “It” bag. Come on, people – break out those Bedazzlers!

Into this week's storm sailed Charles Saatchi, as calmly as the Queen Elizabeth II (or is it the Titanic?). Saatchi is one of the world's pre-eminent collectors of modern art, as well as being Mr. Nigella Lawson. He's also the man who helped bring Margaret Thatcher to power through the advertising agency he once shared with his brother, but given this week's whirlwind, that feels like ancient history.

This week's story is that Saatchi just opened his new 70,000-square-foot (6,500-square-metre) gallery, trumpeted as the only privately owned, free-admission contemporary-art space of that size in the world. Saatchi, although wealthy and influential, has always operated outside the cliquey world of curating and collecting, so perhaps it's fitting that his gallery is just off the King's Road, not far from where Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren brought punk to the world with their boutique, Sex.

It takes a certain amount of nerve to open a huge gallery to exhibit your own collection these days, although this new space (based in a beautiful old barracks) has been three years in the renovating. The first show, The Revolution Continues, showcases Saatchi's collection of contemporary Chinese art.

Walking through the blinding-white rooms, my immediate response was that it felt a little gimmicky; what might have seemed provocative and amusing last year has gone as flavourless as last night's gum on the bedpost. A giant turd statue by Liu Wei reveals, upon closer inspection, tiny soldiers embedded in the coil. Ah, that's a good one! Wei also created Love It! Bite It!, a room-sized installation of great Western buildings – the U.S. Capitol, the Colosseum – constructed of dog chews. Saatchi calls this “a comment on grotesque consumption and greed,” which is a bit rich considering that a sign across the hall reveals that two of the gallery's sponsors are Chanel and Veuve Clicquot.

Saatchi didn't attend the opening party on Tuesday night that I also somehow failed to get an invitation to – presumably, like the U.S. debt clock in Times Square, I lack the necessary digits. There was little consolation in the news that the great and the good stood shivering in their evening wraps in the crush outside, waiting to get into the party. Nigella Lawson posed with Lily Allen as Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro whizzed around them in electronic wheelchairs. All right, the old dudes were mannequins, part of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's political satire, Old Persons' Home.

The party was packed, according to an artist who was there. “Maybe it was a last hurrah,” he said. He'd just found out that the London banker who'd planned to buy one of his canvases had pulled out at the last minute, citing the market slump. Now the painter is concentrating his hopes on buyers in Asia.

Next week, the London art market faces another challenge with the arrival of the Frieze and Zoo art fairs, typically a mad round of buying and selling conducted at Aston Martin speeds. Who knows, this year? Maybe everyone will stay at home and watch Twiggy behind the controls of her sewing machine. Or they'll turn to the new digital channel Watch, which heralded its arrival this week with a series of timely, and cheeky, ads: “Enjoy some glamour and gratuitous sex before the world ends.”