Greta Gerwig's hotly anticipated Barbie is just around the corner, and fans are already ecstatic to watch Margot Robbie in action as the iconic doll. The film has already secured an impressive 89 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes with days to spare until its 21 July drop, as fans gear up to purchase cinema tickets in advance to avoid disappointment. But now, there's an even better way to watch Barbie, and it involves an immersive rooftop setting inspired by Miami Beach. Depot Mayfield in Manchester has undergone an incredible transformation for their summer screenings, complete with sand, sunshine and signature cocktails at the Flamingo Beach Bar. It comes after Backyard Cinema's success in London and Manchester last winter, prompting founder Dominic Davies to return for a summer filled with iconic specials, old and new. Barbie is among the showings, with dates from July through to August. There's also Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, as well as Dirty Dancing, Grease, Back to the Future, The Little Mermaid (Remake), Top Gun Maverick, Mean Girls and Pulp Fiction and many more. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Miami Beach will also host recurring Dirty Dancing Beach Parties every Friday night, at which guests will have the "Time of their lives" dancing along to the film’s famous soundtrack, along with special surprises designed to further immerse them in the world of the film. "It is clear that people just can’t get enough of Barbie. Since releasing dates for our 'Barbie on the Beach' screenings we sold out over six dates in 24 hours and have had to add extra dates throughout August to meet demand," Dominic Davies, Founder and CEO of Backyard Cinema told Indy100. He continued: "While it might not be Malibu Beach, we are certainly bringing all things Barbiecore to our very own Miami Beach rooftop in Manchester, including a chance to take your photo inside a Barbie box. Sand, sunshine and signature palm tree cocktails - what more could you want?!" For more information on bookings and other events, click here. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Cosmic beings, we’ve made it through the first part of eclipse season. We’ll still be feeling the vibes of the recent Solar Eclipse in Libra all week long (and for the next six months). Now that Mars is in Scorpio for the next six weeks, we’ll experience a strong surge of determination when it comes to bringing passion projects to life. But we may also be moodier and less patient during this transit, so tread carefully when driving and when trying to get your point across.

Lewis Hamilton said the racist abuse aimed at Real Madrid winger Vinicius Junior evoked painful memories from his own career. Brazil international Vinicius was subjected to monkey chants in his side’s 1-0 defeat at Valencia in LaLiga last weekend. Valencia were given a partial stadium ban for five matches plus a fine of 45,000 euros (£39,000) – a punishment the club called “totally disproportionate” – while Real, who said the incident constituted a “hate crime”, filed a complaint with the Spanish State Attorney General’s Office. Hamilton, Formula One’s sole black driver, experienced racist abuse in Spain at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya in 2008. He also revealed earlier this year he had bananas thrown at him and was repeatedly called the “n-word” at school. Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, the 38-year-old said: “It really hits home for me. “It really brings up emotions about things that I experienced, whether it’s back in the UK or whether it was when I was racing in Italy or in France or in Spain. It can be so hurtful the things that people say. “It’s devastating to think that in 2023 we’re still seeing these things and hearing these things. “Firstly, he’s [Vinicius Junior] been incredibly brave. It is amazing what so many of these athletes that are experiencing that on the pitch are doing in terms of standing tall, standing strong and continuing to be humble and not being reactive but being responsible. “There is no room for discrimination in society today. Sports need to do more, we all need to continue to do more. If we see it, and hear it, we need to do something about it.”

Whether you’re a super diligent packer or prefer to wing it right before heading out for the airport, there’s no overstating the importance of packing cubes. Not only do they take the stress out of organizing your travel bags or suitcase, the compression design makes it easier to cram even more stuff inside. Since everything is neatly separated, you’re spared from rummaging through the whole suitcase when you need to locate that extra pair of socks or a tiny toiletry bottle. In other words, your future self will thank you for investing in some proper packing aids.

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Lewis Hamilton was the notable exception on a night when numerous F1 drivers voiced their concerns about jet lag and the demanding end of season schedule. This weekend’s inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix in the heart of Sin City takes place a week prior to the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi, 8,000 miles away. F1 has a record 24-race calendar next season but even with this year totalling 22, Max Verstappen was among a number of drivers critical of the end of the season travel across the world. Yet Hamilton, speaking in the pre-race press conference in Vegas on Wednesday, insisted he feels ‘great’ ahead of the final two races of the season. “I personally haven’t found it [jet lag] a problem,” the seven-time world champion said. “Still manage to keep training and I feel great. I saw some of the drivers complaining about jet lag… but I’ve not found it a problem since I’ve been here. “It is demanding but we know that entering the sport. If it was easy, we wouldn’t do it.” Three-time world champion Verstappen had earlier criticised the schedule as the 2023 season draws to a close. Pierre Gasly, Yuki Tsunoda and Alex Albon were among the other drivers admitting to struggling with their sleep. “It’s already a 12-hour difference but also a completely different timezone because basically we live on a Japanese time schedule [in Vegas] but then almost on a different day,” Verstappen said. “I don’t really get that. That is very tiring. “It’s the end of the season that we have to do this, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense.” Verstappen also lambasted Wednesday’s lavish opening ceremony outside the new $500m pit building. All 20 drivers were introduced via lifts onto a string of podiums, concluding a half-an-hour show which included a drone sequence and a number of musical performances from the likes of Kylie Minogue, John Legend and Steve Aoki. Lando Norris also revealed he was “not a big fan” of the opening ceremony festivities, while Carlos Sainz believes the sport should soon look at the overall race weekend schedule due to it being “overpacked” with commitments for the drivers. Practice at the Las Vegas Strip Circuit starts at 3:30am on Friday morning (GMT). The race starts at 6am on Sunday morning in the UK, which is 10pm on Saturday night in Vegas. Read More ‘You look like a clown’: Max Verstappen derides Las Vegas GP opening ceremony F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix LIVE: Opening ceremony updates and news Lewis Hamilton makes F1 ‘circus’ plea after backlash from Las Vegas locals Celebrities and sponsors descend on Las Vegas as F1 returns to Sin City How Formula 1 cracked America Bernie Ecclestone wouldn’t bet on F1’s future in Las Vegas

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Wings! Fake tans! Low body mass indexes! For millennial women, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was an annual reminder of the myriad ways in which we were failing to adhere to exacting and exhausting beauty standards. When it was cancelled in 2019, few mourned it. But fashion loves a comeback story, and today the company unveiled Victoria’s Secret: The Tour ’23 on Amazon Prime Video, its first televised catwalk event in five years. According to the company, the feature-length film is the “ultimate expression” of their ongoing efforts to rehabilitate a brand that has been mired in scandal. Alongside long-standing criticisms over promoting an unrealistic body image, the company’s former marketing executive Ed Razek was also accused of behaving inappropriately with models in a New York Times report (he described the allegations as “categorically untrue, misconstrued or taken out of context”) and a recent Hulu documentary Angels and Demons explored troubling links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Visually, strategically, everything about it is the incarnation of where the brand is going,” Victoria’s Secret president Greg Unis has said. Instead of the usual structure, which was centred around a straightforward runway show, The Tour ’23 is roughly divided into quarters, each focusing on one of four locations: Lagos, Nigeria; Bogota, Colombia; Tokyo, Japan; London, the UK. In each city, a local designer has dreamed up their own fashion collection to be modelled by the likes of Naomi Campbell, Emily Ratajkowski, Adut Akech, and Gigi Hadid, who does double duty as the show’s narrator. In London, the chosen designer is Michaela Stark, whose corsets aim to celebrate a diverse range of body shapes, rather than constrict them. She agreed to take part in the VS show 2.0, she suggests, so that she could counteract the damaging messages put out by the original runways. “It was a big thing” when she was a teenager, she recalls, “but it was also that culture around it, of not wanting to eat after you saw it”. Her comments inadvertently raise a question that looms over the whole production: can you ever truly detoxify a brand practically built on the insecurities of a generation of women? Founded by Roy Raymond in the late Seventies, who felt awkward buying lingerie for his wife in his local department store, Victoria’s Secret began life as a women’s underwear shop aimed specifically at men. In 1982, Raymond sold the business to Limited Stores founder Les Wexner for $1m; Wexner went on to transform the brand, envisaging it as a more affordable version of the fancy European label La Perla. In 1995, when the company was facing competition from Wonderbra, the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It proved successful enough to become an annual event. In 1999, the show was streamed on the internet for the first time, prompting the website to crash as 1.5 million users tried to tune in. Two years later, the VS show celebrated its inaugural TV broadcast, during which the National Organisation for Women (NOW) protested outside a New York branch of the shop. “Some people are terribly blase about this, that this is not a big deal, that we ought to be used to this kind of daily sexuality,” Sonia Ossorio, NOW’s vice president for public information, said at the time. “But I think we need to keep questioning the ever-extending sexualisation of women in mass media.” The following year, NOW branded the event a “softcore porn infomercial”. By then, the blueprint for future VS shows had been set. A lineup of models would don bras encrusted with millions of pounds worth of jewels and embarrassingly themed lingerie (never forget Cara Delevingne’s god-awful outfit circa 2013: a sort of miniature shell suit likely pitched in the boardroom as “sexy football fan”). Somewhere between the models, a famous singer would pop in for a brief performance; if they were a woman, they’d be decked out in a VS creation of their own (Taylor Swift got a particularly raw deal in 2013, too, when she had to wear a Union Jack-inspired number, complete with a tiny red, white and blue top hat). This glittering, over-the-top spectacle, much closer to a beauty pageant than a Fashion Week presentation, spotlighted the world’s most beautiful women – who were not just genetically blessed but worked hard, too, we were told ad nauseam. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules. These wing-wearing “Angels” were selling a dream, one that we lesser mortals could supposedly buy into by picking up some synthetic underwear at our nearest Victoria’s Secret branch. But it was their painstaking fitness regimens, not the pants they were wearing, that were the real focus of fascination. In endless interviews, the models were asked to detail exactly how they whittled themselves down to “Victoria’s Secret ready” size – so that we could try and copy them. To combat the criticisms of objectification, the brand relied on its models to pay lip service to just how “empowering” the whole circus was, offering up their take on choice feminism. “There’s something really powerful about a woman who owns her sexuality and is in charge” – model Karlie Kloss was peddling this line to the media as late as 2018. “A show like this celebrates that and allows all of us to be the best versions of ourselves. Whether it’s wearing heels, make-up or a beautiful piece of lingerie – if you are in control and empowered by yourself, it’s sexy.” Naturally, it was very convenient that this “best version of ourselves” aligned with the oppressively narrow conventional standard of sexiness Victoria’s Secret was selling. By the late 2010s, though, as the fashion industry began to (slowly) address its diversity problem, Victoria’s Secret started to seem more and more like an anachronism. As other brands took small steps to spotlight plus-size models on their catwalks and in their advertising campaigns, the VS show remained the preserve of the extremely thin. They had been preparing for the show like endurance athletes, sticking to carefully tailored diets and intense workout schedules Placing white models in culturally insensitive outfits (see: Kloss walking down the runway wearing a Native American-inspired headdress) only added to the glaring PR problem, which was later exacerbated when the brand’s marketing boss Ed Razek made controversial comments about transgender people and plus-size models to Vogue in 2018. “It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in your show?” he said, apparently recalling questions from critics. “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy.” Elsewhere, he claimed “no one had any interest” in seeing bigger bodies on the VS catwalk. Razek later apologised, admitting that his “remark regarding the inclusion of transgender models in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show came across as insensitive”. His comments about plus-size bodies went unaddressed. In 2019, against a backdrop of plummeting TV ratings and declining sales, the brand confirmed that the VS show had been cancelled; instead, they said, the company would focus on “evolving” their marketing. The news came just a few months after the revelation that Jeffrey Epstein had provided financial advice to Victoria’s Secret founder Wexner – and had exploited his personal connection to the brand as a means to lure in young women. “Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved, is something that I’m embarrassed I was even close to,” Wexner said to investors. “But that is in the past.” He left the company the following year. Since then, Victoria’s Secret has made some high-profile attempts to rectify past missteps. The company brought in a majority female board of directors; they ditched the “Angels” concept in favour of the new “VS Collective” whose ranks include actor Priyanka Chopra, US football star Megan Rapinoe, and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser. Last year, an ad campaign featuring a more diverse array of women was accompanied by the slogan “we’ve changed” – supposedly into something “ever-evolving” and “real”. How much has Victoria’s Secret “changed”, really? The latest show features a handful of plus-size models, Elsesser included, but many of the old VS cohort are present and correct, including Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, and Adriana Lima. The nods to body diversity can’t help but feel a bit cursory when the overriding vision is still one of impossibly thin women parading up and down a runway – albeit a runway that now snakes around a Brutalist building in Barcelona as opposed to a swanky New York City hotel. The outfits too, are more arty, less skimpy this time around and mercifully there hasn’t been the usual media battery of stories on extreme exercise and diet in the run-up – but that doesn’t mean those practices have ended altogether. “We haven’t forgotten our past, but we’re also speaking to the present,” the brand’s chief creative director Raul Martinez said before the film’s launch. In an era when more inclusive, dynamic lingerie labels, like Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty, reign supreme, the VS show can’t help but seem like a relic. And as long as its legacy of impossible body standards lives on for many of us, any attempts to dress the spectacle up as empowering feel very hollow indeed. Read More Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Victoria's Secret overhauls its racy fashion catwalk in its latest moves to be more inclusive Chioma Nnadi at Vogue: All hail the era of the Black female fashion editor Naomi Campbell and Gigi Hadid lead first Victoria’s Secret runway show in five years Kim Kardashian debuts buzz cut and thin eyebrows for new photo shoot Travis Kelce wears ‘1989’ inspired outfit after leaving NFL game with Taylor Swift