[KATE REW]

It’s past dawn in the English mountains. Past the time the birds woke up and sang in the thin air, past the time we rolled over in our tent and heard the hiss and static of mizzle against canvas. We are on the top of a Glaramara, next to a tarn and camped in a cloud. I yellow slug my boyfriend in my down sleeping bag and say ‘shall we go for a swim?’

I am always like this: a missionary, a believer in the pagan redemption of a wild swim. We unzip and feel colder. The ground is soaking wet from it’s shroud; water squelches between our bare toes as we hop-scotch to High House tarn. We can talk freely and stand naked because there is no one else up here: not yesterday, not tomorrow.

This is not an obvious wild swim. There is no siren living on the round grey rocks in the middle of the peaty brown water, fringed by wet grass. There are no natural Jacuzzis, no clear waterfalls, no sun-baked rocks. But there’s an essential celebration to swimming outdoors. Holidays are started and arrivals marked by the sheer act of stripping off and plunging in. In the water new worlds unfold.

Like many people, I used to be aware of the transformative powers of water when I travelled. In Mexico one Christmas a friend and I skipped through the bush on the Yucatán, high on youth and freedom, days spent drinking tequila and nights sleeping in hammocks. He had been living in Mérida since university, and heard about swimming holes in his pigeon Spanish from a guy in the carwash.

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A border of high brush marked the edge of Tulum town, and we picked our way past the exhaust, dried pee and dust that had blown against the scrub. Out the other side in the bush we weaved along an unknown path amidst lower prickles, follow my leader one after the other, improbably looking for a hole in the ground.

‘Jump!’ said Beau, as we arrived. I stripped off to my bikini and leapt after him into my first cenote: a world I had not previously known even existed. And there, just below the dry earth and windblown detritus was a perfect clean freshwater underworld, a clear azure universe of stalactites and freshwater caves. We swam freely in the areas lit by sunshine, and nervously under the stalactites. We got out feeling new.

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Then I discovered the same revelations happen at home. The transformative powers lie in natural water, not it’s location. In the Outer Hebrides, once past the smack and slap of purple cold in the sea, I find seals swimming with me. In the Oxfordshire countryside moonlit night swims in the silky river water are accompanied by the twinkling of drowned branches and the distant crunches of combine harvesters. It’s the swimming that taps you into renewal, reveals the magic of the undiscovered nearby.

The swimming – and the action. The vocabulary of wild swimming belays a philosophy: we ‘jump in’, we ‘take the plunge’, we are buoyant, immersed in the experience, we go with the flow. In all of this there is an embracing of life and a surrendering to it’s uncontrollable elements.

Up in the lakes, I stand on the sidelines with goosebumps and dither my toes. I am always like this too: prone to hesitation. To a doubtful incredulous ‘do I really want to?’ just before I get in. The water is shallow, peaty brown, cold yet surprisingly warm, it’s black bottom having soaked up all the heat of previous days.

‘The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty,’ said John Cheever in his short story The Swimmer. And it’s always a beautiful day when you go for a swim, I’ve discovered, so then I’m in. Head down, chest gasping, knees knocking against rock and water washing the sleep and yesterday's salt sweat from my eyes.

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Floating on my back with the cloud parting and then obscuring the mountains.

'I am sure no adventurer nor discoverer ever lived who could not swim. Swimming cultivates imagination. This love of the unknown is the greatest of all the joys which swimming has for me’ said long distance swimmer Annette Kellerman. We feel like that, as we float, in this wild little tarn. The water renews us. Redefines us. Makes us sturdy with cold.

And when we get out we feel more of ourselves. We have knocked against the element of the world. We are alive. We have swum.

Kate Rew is author of Wild Swim and founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society. For more on wild swimming visit www.outdoorswimmingsociety.com

We have a few signed, hardback copies of Kate's book available to buy. Click Here

There's something about a market that is utterly engaging, partly because of what's on show. For starters, the food is so much more enticing than anything you'd find at a supermarket and vegetable stands sit so close to cheese stalls and fruit sellers that you can't help but allow your imagination to roam.

It would be difficult not to dream up a light summer salad of creamy mozarella burrata, fennel, mint and ripe nectarines when they're displayed in such close proximity. Just add a simple dressing of oil, lemon and pepper.

Equally, in an antique market it is hard not to get carried away with one’s imagination: where did these piles of coloured beads and gold lockets come from, and what exactly would I do with that deep aubergine glass light shade that has caught my eye? Because there is no formula to how the wares are laid out, no theme that says this year you must decorate your home with a set of lacquered furniture inspired by a Japanese teahouse, your own preferences and tastes take priority. This doesn’t make those everyday creative decisions any easier; in fact it is much harder this way, though immensely more fun and far, far more satisfying when you get it right.

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[JAMES SEATON, TOAST.]

We spent a long, hot Saturday shooting in Hacienda Yaxcopil. The rooms were faded, shadowy, dusty. Judicious opening of shutters and doors caught a cooling breeze – though occasionally a shutter or window frame somewhere would catch the wind and bang loudly, suddenly shut. Swallows flew in and out through broken windows. And, being a Saturday, the weekend life of the village ebbed and flowed around us as we worked. The sound of a distant fairground floated across the warm air, an indistinguishable voice over a tannoy, a ramshackle but enthusiastic brass band.

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As the afternoon cooled, boys and half wild dogs emerged onto the paddock bordering the hacienda buildings. The dogs formed packs, dissolved into sub-packs, reformed into larger ones and acted entirely as dog-ily as they pleased – running after whatever whim, sniffing, chasing, rolling. At one point surrounded Nick, who took this film, and edged him just threateningly enough to bring on a hasty retreat - before losing interest and trotting away. The boys, more purposeful, came to fly kites on the gathering wind.

I’ve seen kites flying in Mexico; on Primrose Hill; in crowds from the rooftops of Old Delhi. Have flown them to destruction myself in a gale on a Welsh hillside. The same universal impulse – catching the wind, soaring. Flying by proxy.

An ancient, barely silenced VW Beetle came by, slowing to take a lazily interested, amused look at the gringos with their cameras. As the sun set and the light turned to evening gold the kites were still flying, the boys apparently immune to the legions of mosquitoes that emerged with the dusk and which, as a finale to the incidental sideshow that our presence had provided, sent us fleeing to our vans, slapping out as we went, as though afflicted by a sudden (and ineffective) St Vitus’ dance.

We have a very small number of lovely traditional Chinese dragonfly kites, of silk and bamboo, available to buy here.

[JAMES SEATON, TOAST.]

Flying in over the Yucatán, over miles upon miles upon hundreds of miles of flat, nondescript, grey-green scrub – until Mérida comes into sight, a large, white city… in the middle of nowhere. Why, one asks oneself, is this here?

Disembarking the plane, the heat hits one like an oven door opening – over 40ºc and breath-catchingly humid. The bush is packed tight, dusty, low, thorny. Come dusk or shade or damp, the whine of mosquitoes. Despite the humidity, the land is dry - highly porous limestone. All the rivers run underground.

Henequen, an agave, is well suited to the Yucatán. Tough as hide, jealously conserving its own moisture and protected by spikes as hostile, sharp and unyielding as guardsmen’s pikes – as I know to my cost, carelessly taking one deep on the back of the hand

when unguardedly turning among the plants.

And henequen, of course, explains the presence of Márida, its faded but once grand avenues and villas, theatres, museums. Henequen yields the fibre we know as sisal, named for the Yucatán port from where the product was exported. Wealth in copious plenty came to the area as sisal was exported for rope, ships’ rigging, twine to bind the bales of straw on the boundless North American prairies. Great haciendas sprang up, thousands and thousands of acres of henequen production, palatial mansions set incongruously in this inhospitable land.

The Maya, native to the area, worked in debt-peonage. The hacienda owners, mostly Mexican, tended to stay in the relative comfort of Mérida.

On the next page, to the right, is our film of a henequen machine at work - a piece of early machine age poetry.

From Hacienda Petac to the backstreets of Bethnal Green, London in the snow, searching for one of the very few (that we could find) British stockists of Achiote. Once found (with the help of Mr Denny at Casa Mexico www.casamexico.co.uk), home to try and recreate the food of that humid October day.

This dish can be cooked the Yucatan way – wrapped in banana leaves, in a pit in the ground – or by the more conventional use of some baking paper and an oven. This is our more prosaic version.

Serving Suggestions: Serve the Mexican way, with rice and mellow pickled onions or with tortilla and jalapenos. For a more British interpretation, eat alongside a torn loaf of warm, crusty bread and a green salad to sop up the juices.

Chicken Recipe

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• [Ingredients]/

• [Method 1]/

• [Method 2]

San Miguel de Allende, high on Mexico's central plains, and thrilled to discover that the house we were to shoot in - the house that had initially drawn us to Mexico - belonged to the great photographer Deborah Turbeville. Great fans of her work, freshly arrived in the country and feeling slightly like strangers in a new (to us) land, this felt to be both an inspiration and a reassurance - we must be on the right track! Delightful days of work followed - and some hours of conversation with the elegant, super-alert and erudite Ms Turbeville. Thus the opening pictures in our new catalogue, this little film, the podcast.

The podcast... An extended version of our conversation with Ms Turbeville, to download and listen, as and when you please.

[DAISY GARNETT]

"You'd hate to run into someone you knew..." the photographer and artist Deborah Turbeville has scrawled at the top of one of the photographs that appear in her autobiographical book Casa No Name, taken in and close to her Mexican house of the same name. "It would ruin the spell." Luckily for us, no matter how hard you scrutinize a Turbeville photograph, its spell remains intact. What is going on in a Turbeville image? Well, sometimes it is something as apparently simple as a woman dancing or children lined up and smiling, and sometimes the subject matter is far more mysterious. A clothed bird? A frowning Madonna? A rickety bed surrounded by mysterious objects? What do such things mean? And even the dancing woman or the children become more and more opaque the more you look at them.

When were they photographed? A year ago or a hundred more? What are they doing, so immersed in their own world, so busy with their own thoughts or activity, so self-possessed and unselfconscious?

And how has the photographer got so close - these are deeply intimate images after all - without intruding into her subjects' space or magic circle at all?

This is what Deborah Turbeville does, and has always done, even when she worked as a fashion photographer taking pictures for high-end commercial magazines such as American and Italian Vogue. She photographs things and people and rooms, yes, but just as important in her work is the stuff you can't see: her subjects' thoughts and feelings; the provenance and history of her rooms or objects. More than almost any other photographer of her era, Turbeville produces images that are about ambivalence and mystery, paradox and unease.

Born in New England, Turbeville worked first as a fashion editor in the late 1960s for Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle, where she was one of the first editors to use 'real' people in her shoots as well as more unconventional looking models.

By the mid-70s, however, she was becoming well established as a photographer, and was important as one of the first in a new wave of women fashion photographers, as well as an image-maker whose pictures demanded debate that wasn't, for the first time, confined to the fashion industry.

Turbeville's Bath-house series, published in American Vogue in 1975, along with work by Helmet Newton, shocked America because they seemingly implied some kind of sexual decadence - in a mainstream fashion magazine.

But on closer inspection Turbeville's photographs differ wildly from those by her male peers. Turbeville's women are not

objects of desire, nor do they invite the viewer to look at them.

Instead, their eyes are mostly down cast or staring off into some dreamy mid distance. They are preoccupied, who knows with what, but certainly their inner lives and secrets seem to interest Turbeville much more than the clothes they are wearing. Imagine this, in a fashion photograph. Turbeville got away with it.

Since the 1970s Turbeville has become better known as an artist whose medium is photography rather than a fashion photographer, and instead of seeing her work in magazines, you will see it more often in art galleries and books (her 1981 book, Unseen Versailles, is regarded as seminal).

Turbeville also uses words, collage, montage and fragments in her work. Sometimes she scratches or writes directly onto her prints.

And just as she is well known in her fashion photography for the brilliant and innovative way she placed models in her settings, so she has used mostly found treasures - birdcages, Madonnas, chairs, textiles, pigments and colours - to create the utterly singular Casa No Name. Where do the boundaries between the real and the fantastical lie in Turbeville's work and life? Who knows. Is Casa No Name a home? A shrine? A dreamscape? A series of sets ripe for story telling? It is all these things. Welcome to the spell.

Click to buy a copy of Casa No Name

Toast's co-founder and designer talks us through his fashion label's gentle revolution of what we wear and what we wear with it.

[JO CRAVEN]

What's the best part of the Toast story?

The whole journey - the collections we've dreamt up, the travels we've had, the great people we've worked with and still are working with, the relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere at work. And the fact that Toast has grown and prospered from its wildly improbable initial idea - selling simple cotton pyjamas for lazing around in at home - always gives me a nice frisson of amazement.

It's been a dozen years since those first pyjamas, do you think your customers have changed?

Not the customer I see in my head, the one I'm designing for. She's still the same - independent-spirited, bohemian, intelligent. As far as demographics go, we seem to sell to women from 25 to 65 from town and from country - which is how I like it. But I don't pay much attention to demographics - I try to design for individuals.

What makes Toast different?

We love what we do and have fun doing it. Each collection is a single story from conception through design to photography to catalogue design and finally to our customers - and it's challenging and frustrating but very, very satisfying when it comes right.

Tell us about your latest creation, Toast Travels...

We love designing clothes, but our interests reach far beyond them, all over the place. So really we're just following our interests - and hoping our friends and customers will share our enthusiasms. We've made podcasts and films in the past, and realised we wanted to say that we're not just interested in the clothes; we want to put them in context.

Talk us through a few of your favourite pieces from your past collections.

I've got a few: a pleated wrap skirt from AW 2001 with two buckles on the waist that flatters a woman's hips and I thought was supremely elegant.

Then there's a series of military jackets, the Waterloo jacket from AW 2005 is probably my favourite. It was made in an English woven wool with moleskin lapels and had a good antique feel.

What inspired you for the SS10 collection?

Edmund Dulac's illustrations, particularly from Au Rouyaume de la Perle. He drew at the turn of the century, which was a high point for book illustration. For me, his images created a dream of a perfect tropical summer.

I know people who like to disappear into a Toast catalogue because of the shoot locations, where did you go for Spring/Summer 2010?

There was a house in Mexico that really caught my imagination and it turned out it belonged to the legendary photographer Deborah Turbeville. I've admired her work for a long time and loved the way her house was consciously magical, haunting.

Do you have any favourites from the SS10 collection?

There's lots in there I like. Favourites are the Manjula coat, a double breasted military design in cotton boucle; the Naisha skirt, full length and tapered at the ankles; I particularly like the fit on our slim leg jeans; the retro, hippy-ish Demeter boot; and, if you're feeling extravagant, the entirely hand-worked Shreya dress. And I like Mimi Berry's new accessories designs, her straightforwardness and Englishness.

Do you find it easy to keep your inspiration flowing?

My new year's resolution is to go two days a week to look at stuff, in art galleries, markets, museums - wherever. I also love moseying around the shabbier parts of old cities. I like unusual, unlikely juxtapositions and let it all seep in.

Do you remember when you first became aware of fashion?

Yes, I was eight at school; I remember everyone was listening to the Beatles. Fashion became very important: which particular drain-pipe trousers and Chelsea boots you should be wearing.

Do you twitter?

I don't but I'd quite like to. Jessica, my wife, says it would be the perfect occupation for me. Take that as you will.

What makes you lose sleep at night?

The feeling that there's more to do than I have time available to do it.

What do you need to design?

Any available scrap of paper using my old
Montblanc propelling pencil and a soft lead

Years go by, what stays the same for Toast?

The idea that the best way to go is an independent one, trust that if you follow your own enthusiasms other people will share them. I think it would be disastrous for Toast to start trying to second guess what its customers would like or expect.

Toast now has shops, thousands of customers, the world is a different place, has Toast changed?

From my point of view, as a longtime tiresomely obsessive perfectionist, it came to the point of delegate or die. So now I do and am delighted with the result - working with lots of really sparky and capable people.

From Edmund Dulac's illustrations for Au Royaume de la Perle and several cases of cloth samples from two or three continents; through sketching, pattern cutting, stitching and fitting; to flying far west in search of some tropical depth and glory...

Dulac's Perle illustrations combine the exotic, detailed feel of Indian miniatures with the ideal of a perfect and magical tropic. They were the starting point for our collection, built on over the months with other references - mood boards of tear sheets, photographs, colours, samples of fabric, drawings...

Until the collection was complete and we could search for a place that would echo Dulac's tropical world.

We chose to photograph the catalogue in Mexico for Deborah Turbeville's house: more than just a home, it's a deliberate manifestation of an artistic idea and holds an equal, though darker, sense of magic to that we found in Dulac's paintings. It does not matter where the house is; it is the mood it creates that is important

But Mexico was wonderful: a deep and resonant culture founded on strong tradition, religion, history. The buildings were washed in sun-saturated, clear earth colours - reds, ochres, cobalts; the sea was the perfect turquoise blue and the deep, buried pools of the cenotes, with their green depth, contain mystery and magic just as we found in the Dulac pictures...