Frankfurt am Main, Germany | Slicing through juicy cuts of pork belly alongside rarer delicacies of ox brain and sheep intestine, young butchers at a Frankfurt trade hall cast a suspicious eye towards the so-called fake meat products on display. 

Puzzlingly, for the butchers, the fake meat seems to be popular. 

"As a butcher, it just can't be that we have to get into plastic!" said Paolo Desbois, an 18-year-old French butcher, referring disparagingly to the synthetic burgers, sausages and nuggets at the IFFA meat industry convention.

The concept that animals are meat -- and plants are not -- never used to challenged.

But increasingly plant-based protein products are trying to muscle in on the meat market.

Derived from sources like soy, peas or beans, the synthetic products are being manufactured without using animals.

And Desbois, who placed second in a young butchers competition at the convention, feels they undermine "the essence of the profession".

"It's just not possible to work with synthetic meat," he said. 

Another budding elite butcher from Switzerland, 20-year-old Selina Niederberger, agreed.

"As a butcher, I'm for real meat. I think a lot of people would see it the same way," she declared.

Non "real" meat products have been making headlines lately, backed by investors with an appetite for supplying plant-based burgers and sausages to the trendy diet-conscious masses.

The celebrity-backed vegan burger start-up Beyond Meat, for example, made a sizzling Wall Street debut on May 3 when it more than doubled its share price.

Backed by Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the firm and its competitors aim to turn plant-based foods mainstream and capture a huge potential market.

- Ethical concerns -

Whether meat substitutes will ever be able to 100 percent replicate the taste, colour, smell and texture of a freshly chopped up slaughtered animal is debatable.

But some young butchers suspect their growing popularity will inevitably have a transformative effect on their trade.

"It's just shifting with the world and working with it rather than against it," said 19-year-old British butcher Lennon Callister.

Trade skills are "what sets butchers apart from supermarkets," he argued, but accepted consumers are starting to look at food differently.

Josja Haagsma from the Netherlands, who won the young butchers competition, agreed that synthetic meats were changing opinions.

"It makes you think about how you can use meat and how you can change it, how you can use more vegetables," she said.

"Maybe the next generation" will be the ones pressed to apply their knives and creativity to the task, Haagsma said.

Vegetables used to be considered a side dish, at best, for carnivore connoisseurs. 

But in increasingly health conscious societies, where governments warn about the dangers of consuming too much red meat, plant-based products are widening in appeal.

Alongside ethical concerns over animals bred for the dinner table and green advocates urging the public to eat less meat to save the environment, the scope for more no-meat products is growing.

- 'They aren't sausages!' -

"It's very important that we think about it, that we consume less" but "good quality meat," said Haagsma.

"You can use organic meat and homegrown cows, and not the cows from the big companies," she said.

The growing numbers of people turning to plant-based meat alternatives include vegans, who shun all animal products, and flexitarians, who advocate moderate consumption of meat.

One sign of their expanding popularity? Silicon-valley company Impossible has linked up with Burger King to offer a plant-based version of its signature Whopper.

Nestle and Unilever are also aiming to cement their presence in the sector.

The move by big conglomerates into the sector has made young butchers note that changes are on the way.

"There'll be less of this mass-produced stuff, which is also really, really bad for the climate," said 23-year-old German Raphael Buschmann.

However, while recognising environment-conscious citizens are rethinking their diets, Buschmann predicted a limit to the industry changes.

Vegetarian sausages would not be added to his displays any time soon.

"They aren't sausages," he said. "That's just the way it is."

Washington, United States | 

A lipstick pistol, a button-hole camera, a lethal umbrella and an authentic waterboarding table: the espionage world's heroic, ingenious and sordid sides are all on show in Washington's all-new, much-expanded International Spy Museum.

The hugely popular showplace that once conjured James Bond and Austin Powers as much as it did actual life-and-death Cold War intrigue has grown and, in the tailwind of 9/11 and the War on Terror, grown up.

Relocated in a gleaming new steel and glass building double the size of its former premises, the Spy Museum still amazes and charms with the tales and gadgets of the undercover world going back centuries.

But now it also depicts the complex and often unsettling challenges of the world of shadows, with visitors asked in clever interactive games and simulated situation rooms to decide: could I be an intelligence agent?

- Disguises, microdots, suicide needles -

The Spy Museum has been one of the US capital's most popular private destinations since it opened in 2002.

The new premises open officially on Sunday, just ahead of the summer tourist season.

On show, as before, is the iconic Aston Martin DB5 from 1964's James Bond thriller "Goldfinger."

But now there is also room for an equally sleek 1980s Amber surveillance drone, the precursor of the Predator.

There is a British World War II one-man submarine, and an actual section of the CIA/MI6 tunnel that penetrated East Berlin in the 1950s to tap Soviet communications.

And there are gadgets galore: a pregnant woman disguise from the CIA and a suicide needle hidden in a silver dollar coin, for use by Francis Gary Powers, the U2 spy plane pilot shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960.

There are historical encryption machines, including Germany's Enigma, and a display on the microdot technology central to spying for decades last century.

Among all manner of odd items throughout the museum are a saboteur's exploding lump of coal, pills that CIA operatives entering Cuba could use to sedate barking dogs and the sketchbook of a KGB agent operating undercover in New York in the 1950s.

"The objectives of spies have not changed over the centuries," said Keith Melton, whose massive collection of espionage gear is the core of the museum.

"The only thing that has changed is the technology, and how they accomplish the objectives."

- Could you be an agent? -

The museum's coverage is global, and mostly without judgement. China's theft of US secrets and technology is on display; so is the theft, centuries ago, of China's silkworm and tea cultivation know-how by Westerners.

Woven in between are engaging, well-designed interactive exhibits and challenges that press the question: what would the visitor do?

One tests a person's lock-picking ability, while another takes visitors through a series of tests of memory, judgment and observation in a simulated spy operation.

In yet another, visitors take the role of CIA analysts in the 2011 situation room where, holding deeply imperfect intelligence, they must decide whether to advise President Barack Obama to approve a raid on the Abbottabad, Pakistan compound possibly housing Osama Bin Laden.

Complex issues are engaged and not whitewashed. The museum puts on show the spying world's failures, including a display of the actual intelligence that, if it had drawn more attention, might have helped prevent Al-Qaeda's September 11, 2001 attack.

And, with a waterboard on display and a video discussion of actual participants, there is a disquieting debate on the CIA's use of torture after 9/11.

- 'The essence of espionage' -

The museum has its roots in the 7,000-piece collection of Melton, a navy veteran and engineer who, beginning in the 1960s traveled the world to amass.

He advertised that he was a buyer of any spy technology, and he sought out and befriended agents and officials from all sides of the Cold War game.

"As the wall fell in Berlin, I was there," he said, and the collection's extensive spyware from East Germany's Stasi service is the result.

Weeks after the Soviet Union crumbled in December 1991, he traveled to Moscow.

"I went and knocked on the door of KGB headquarters and said I'm here to buy spy equipment," Melton said.

While he raised some suspicions, many realized he was a genuine collector who didn't talk about politics.

"I like gadgets, they like gadgets," he said.

"Cameras, microdots, coding machines, short range transmitters: that's the essence of espionage."

The pride of his collection is gruesome, but he spent four decades seeking it: the ice axe that Joseph Stalin's assassins used to murder Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, in the climax of an intense three-year intelligence operation.

Melton is hugely proud of the new museum, but somewhat wistful about the new digital age, in which computer technology has replaced many espionage tools.

"I think we are past the golden era of spy devices. This is now the most powerful spy device in the world," he said, pointing to his smartphone.

Paris, France | 

Lanvin is back. After going through four designers in four years, the oldest Paris couture house stormed back in style with the debut show from new young French creator Bruno Sialelli.

The little-known 31-year-old, whose appointment last month surprised many, lit up the third day of Paris fashion week with an impressive and eclectic collection.

With Hollywood stars Uma Thurman and Asia Argento in the front row alongside Chinese-Korean singer Meng Meiqi, and supermodels Kaia Gerber -- the 17-year-old daughter of Cindy Crawford -- and Gigi Hadid on the runway, the brand's new Chinese owners, Fosun, clearly wanted to make a splash.

Sialelli obliged by sending out Hadid braless in a sheer top under a pearl pink coat that sent social media and the tabloids into a whirl.

But his debut amid the medieval and Roman artefacts of the French capital's newly renovated Cluny Museum was much more about clothes than clickbait.

There was poetry aplenty in his dreamy co-ed mix of folkloric fishermen's tops tied with leather straps, duffle coats and silk scarf dresses.

The former costume maker at the Marseille Opera threaded a child-like wonder into his clothes with prints of Saint George and the dragon and Babar the Elephant taken from a children's storybooks.

Text from fairytales also made an appearance on boots and bags, with Sialelli, who previously work for Balenciaga and Loewe, festooning a series of sheer tops and dresses with a pack of embroidering foxes.

Vogue's Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of fashion critics, was instantly won over.

- 'Fabulous start' -

"What a fabulous start!" she told her followers on Instagram.

"Fresh from Loewe menswear, Bruno Sialelli makes an instant mark at Lanvin," she said. "Colours, mediaeval inspirations for an imaginative but wearable Lanvin show... with colourful coats galore."

Godfrey Deeny of Fashion Network was also won over, calling it a "sensational debut".

"The more I think about it, the more I like it," he told AFP.

"After several false starts (for Lanvin), this collection, and show, was a significant fashion statement," he later wrote.

"Whoever said the Chinese couldn't manage a great luxury brand now should be quiet. Fosun chose a savvy senior executive who had the guts to select an unknown young designer and the result was a great debut in Paris' most famous ruin," Deeny added, referring to the fact that the museum was once a Roman baths.

But another heavyweight critic, the New York Times' Vanessa Friedman, was far less convinced.

"There were so many plotlines going on, it was a little hard to follow," she said, bemoaning Sialelli's lack of clarity.

"There were lots of influences from other brands you might or might not recognise -- though not so many that seemed connected to Lanvin's own history, which is too bad," she added.

- Flemish master Van Noten -

Fosun, a conglomerate which also owns French resorts operator Club Med, snapped up Lanvin, the oldest continuously operated French label, last year when it had lost direction and was leaking money.

The turmoil at the house began in 2015 with the departure of star designer Alber Elbaz after a 14-year run during which time the brand became a favourite of the fashion set.

The next year the company recorded its first loss in a decade.

Sialelli told reporters backstage that he had gone back into the house's archives and discovered that its founder Jeanne Lanvin was something of an explorer.

Which is why he called the show "Mystic Pilgrims" and why he ranged so wide in his influences from the British Pre-Raphaelite painters to the Aztecs and Breton fishermen.

For a house in desperate need of a big hug, he said he chose the Babar prints because "for every French person who has grown up with Babar, he is hugely reassuring".

Nothing short of genius is what is routinely expected of the Belgium designer Dries Van Noten and that is what he delivered yet again Wednesday.

The "king of prints" took a quote from a Gertrude Stein poem -- "a rose is a rose is a rose" -- as the starting point of his autumn winter women's collection, which began with a line of grey, faintly pinstriped suits inspired by men's tailoring from 1950s, before bursting into his rich trademark colours.

Van Noten photographed flowers in his own garden for the dazzling prints in duck egg blue, powdery mauve, fawn, neon orange, oxblood and imperial yellow.

Paris, France | 

Dior went back to the feisty Teddy Girls of 1950s Britain for its vision of a feminist future in its Paris fashion week show Tuesday.

With black leather jackets, long nipped-waist Dior "New Look" skirts with leather cumberbunds and tartan a-go-go, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri raided the wardrobes of the rebel girls of the early days of rock 'n' roll.

The original royal rebel Princess Margaret -- a Dior addict -- and the proudly proletarian Teddy Girls who were the "queens of the ravaged landscape" of postwar Britain were the two pillars of the Italian creator's autumn winter collection.

She took some of the most feminine clothes of the epoch -- kitten heels with black socks, shiny bucket hats and tight woollen sweaters -- and mixed them with a more masculine and sportswear silhouette.

Chiuri has been on something of a crusade during her time at the most feminine of French labels to make its famously chic clothes simple and adaptable enough for everyday wear.

And you could easily imagine women wearing trainers under even the most intricate of dresses in this collection.

The Teddy Girls were the punks of their time, "impertinent characters with wild quiffs who wore Edwardian-style men's jackets with ample skirts, jeans and black leather jackets," the designer said.

"London always represents tradition and at the same time the breaking with tradition," Chiuri told AFP.

- 'Fashion is a political act' -

The show was a long love letter to the iconoclasm of British style, and comes as a exhibition about Dior at the V&A museum in London has become a sold-out hit.

"I tried to create pieces in this collection in which everyone can express themselves in their own way by using different combinations while respecting the codes of the brand," Chiuri said.

Since her debut collection in 2017 -- when she made headlines with a "We Should All Be Feminists" T-shirt -- Dior's first female designer has put down a ladder to women artists and writers.

This time she lionised the veteran Italian artist Tomaso Binga, who took on a man's name to satirise male privilege.

One of her most iconic works, an alphabet formed from the naked body of a middle-aged woman, was the backdrop for the show in a huge pavilion in the grounds of the Rodin Museum in Paris.

With Hollywood star and #MeToo activist Jennifer Lawrence in the front row, the 87-year-old artist (whose real name is Bianca Menna) dressed up like a kind of cardinal to read a stirring declaration urging female solidarity before Chiuri sent out her models.

- Saint Laurent's killer vamps -

In another feminist nod, three wore T-shirts bearing the titles of books by the American feminist thinker Robin Morgan -- "Sisterhood is Powerful", "Sisterhood is Global" and "Sisterhood is Forever".

"Today fashion and the act of buying is a political act," Chiuri told AFP.

"Apart from clothes, bags and shoes, people want to know that behind objects there are values in which they believe," she said.

It is safe to say that Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello is less up to speed with latest feminist theory.

Shortly after he took over the label he found himself in the firing line of outrage over a "hypersexualised" 2017 ad campaign for the label that put painfully thin models in "degrading" poses.

The young Belgian designer has not backed down from his sexed-up vision for the brand, and his Paris show was a procession of leggy models in black micro dresses and hotpants.

Vaccarello's women are night owl vamps and his only concession to winter was to drape some in big overcoats with exaggerated shoulders -- all the better to show that every one was a man-eater, wearing her sexiness like a weapon.

These were clothes to sin in, to turn heads at glitzy cocktails and nightclubs, with a line of flourescent looks literally lighting up in the dark.

His co-ed show under the Eiffel Tower also made a game bid to steal a march on his Saint Laurent predecessor Hedi Slimane, who has created a male line for the first time at Celine.

Vaccarello's response has been to go toe-to-patent-Chelsea-boot-toe, out-Slimane-ing the man they call the "sultan of skinny" at his own lux-grunge rock god game.

Milan, Italy | British designers  presented fashion collections for two Italian houses at Milan fashion week, with one inspired by shoes as key items, and the other by tiger motifs.

Paul Andrew presented Italian fashion label Salvatore Ferragamo's latest collection, just days after being announced as the group's creative director.

And Paul Surridge, creative director at another Florence-based fashion house, presented the Roberto Cavalli collection.

Andrew, who joined the group in 2016 and previously headed up the women's wear division, told AFP he had been inspired by plunging into the group's archives.

"Everything I do in Ferragamo is dressing from toe to head: the shoe dictates everything," he said.

"I started from this particular shoe made with patchwork of colour and material from 1942 and it inspired the colour palette," he added.

"Given that it's a shoe from 1942 but it looks much more modern than that, Salvatore was so ahead of his time," said Andrew, referring to the founder of the brand.

"I thought, 'How would he be designing now?"

The full range of the Florence-based fashion house was on display, presenting a simple,  unpretentious luxury range: suede leather, nappa, lizard or snake on trousers, jackets, coats and shirts.

Monochrome trousers were zipped around the body, while cashmere blankets and handmade wool sweaters conveyed a sense of simple and spontaneous luxury.

It was only on Thursday that Andrew was appointed creative director. Under his direction, French designer Guillaume Meilland will continue to run the creative output of the men's collection.

The Ferragamo autumn/winter collection was presented in the Rotonda della Besana, a desanctified church from late Baroque period.

- Surridge presents Cavalli -

Another British designer, Paul Surridge, presented the Roberto Cavalli collection.

Surridge, who has been creative director at the Florence-based fashion house since 2017, told AFP his inspiration had been "instinctive".

"I started to look at the idea of status in general and the memory of status of the idea of refinement, of beauty to make something exquisite."

He went back to print and underline print, "not just on silk dresses but on coats with jacquards" to "maximise the pattern" without making it feel heavy, he added.

"I wanted to define a new modern beauty," Surridge added.

Surridge carries on the style started by Cavalli in the 1970s combining eccentricity and glamour.

Surridge made the tiger motif in various permutations a recurring theme in this collection, reinterpreting it in a variety of contexts: midnight blue, bougainvillea, mustard on one side and in a variant of pastel colours on the other.

The same pallette informed the whole collection, including coats, jackets and trousers.

The python motif, another element dear to the Cavalli brand, appeared as jacquard hand-painted or embroidered in sequin.

Evening dresses, with their ultra-feminine and fluid silhouettes, evoked the 1920s.

El Paso, United States Anyone who doubts that some seconds last a lot longer than others should try riding a bull at the Tuff Hedeman Bull Riding Tour in El Paso.

As in all great rodeo classics, the rider has to hang on with just one hand as the bull bucks and kicks.

Some 25 contestants tried their luck and skill Saturday night in El Paso: the challenge was to ride a bull for at least eight seconds without getting thrown and without touching it with their free hand.

The Tuff Hedeman Bull Riding Tour is named after a four time world bull riding champion, who today is retired.

The competition carries a $30,000 prize and cowboys come from far and wide to participate.

For instance, Ben Jones, who injured his face during the event, is originally from Australia.

- Inseparable from the American West -
Juan Alonzo, a Texan, can also testify to the dangers of rodeo. He served in the US army for five years, and while on a tour of duty in Iraq, he trained on a wooden barrel.

The rider grips a leather handle attached to a flat braided rope cinched around the bull. The bulls can weigh a ton.

Inseparable from the American West and the myth of the cowboy, but in reality owing much to Spanish and Mexican vaqueros, rodeo celebrates balance and resistance to pain.

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