Pippa Middleton may be a professional party planner, but the Celebrate author let someone else oversee celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's Instagram bash at Fifteen in London on Monday, Sept. 16. The Duchess of Cambridge's 30-year-old sister paired a French Connection blazer with a pink sweater and black mini-skirt for the occasion. While there, she noshed on a selection of canapés and chatted up Oliver, 38.
Other guests included musicians Boy George, Ashley Roberts, Ronnie Wood and Eliza Dootlittle. Oliver described the soiree as "fantastic" and "great" in an Instagram caption. "Thank you to all the guys who we invited that came," he added. "It was such a pleasure to meet you all." Middleton's boyfriend, Nico Jackson, appeared to be M.I.A.
Three days earlier, Middleton penned her first "Sport and Social" column for the U.K.'s Telegraph. In it, she explained how she came to love boxing and transform her hot body. "The air was heavy and sweet with the sweat of adrenalin-fuelled bodies. Every so often the dimly lit room seemed to shudder as a Tube rattled through far below," she wrote. "I stood there a little uncertainly, well aware that in my slinky workout attire I was inappropriately dressed. The 20 or so men and women around me knew better, opting for loose-fitting T-shirts or wife-beater vests."
"This dingy location—a former air-raid shelter—under a railway arch was a club, but not the sort I was familiar with: no VIP areas here. As for Happy Hour…forget it. Skipping ropes, punch bags and an array of pungent-smelling gloves were the props," she continued. "The Fitzroy Lodge Amateur Boxing Club in Lambeth, south London, is an altogether more serious establishment, the place where the famously intense actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, prepared for his role in the 1997 film The Boxer."
Middleton was initially nervous about boxing and asked a "fitness fanatic friend" for input. Hoping to get a "svelte silhouette," she agreed to try it.
"The basics of the boxing classes I attend at Fitzroy Lodge are the same week in, week out, rugged and ruthless: a five-minute skipping warm-up, not the school-playground-gallopy-type, but a boxer's skip, requiring speed and agility," she explained. "The aim is to barely lift your feet off the ground, as if you're just tapping each foot over the rope, requiring balance and coordination."
After describing each aspect of the workout in detail, she added, "It's an hour and a half of pure but pleasing agony and by the end I'm broken, worn out and worn down, but I leave on a high, hiding the sweat patches under my hoodie, delighted to have found muscles and fitness I never knew existed."