Sports Calendar

Brazilians are devoted to the plastic surgeon's knife. Every year, 400,000 operations are performed in Brazil — the highest rate per capita in the world. Of these, half are done for aesthetic reasons. Brazilians used to like small breasts, but in recent years, there has been a fad for silicone implants. Brazilian surgeons are considered the best in the world (the wide racial mixture here gives them practice with all shapes and sizes) and, happily for them, they get lots of free advertising: people wear hardly any clothes, so their handiwork is always on display.

FILM

It's boom time in the Brazilian film industry. First, City of God broke domestic box-office records. Then the prison flick Carandiru (on release this Friday) became the most successful Brazilian movie of recent times. Both are epics that engage with the violent, dysfunctional, neglected side of urban life: City of God with Rio, a hot, glamorous, anarchic city; Carandiru with the hard-working, claustrophobic concrete metropolis that is S‹o Paulo.

FASHION

In Brazil, millions do not even earn the £50-a-month minimum wage. Yet, at Daslu, São Paulo’s favourite fashion store, the world’s most expensive fashion labels sell like bikinis on a hot day. Daslu is a way of life, not just a clothes shop. Located in a residential street, it comprises 11 houses next to each other, with interconnecting doors. With men forbidden from entering, and Brazilian women’s lack of self-consciousness being what it is, Daslu’s extremely rich clients stroll around in a state of virtual undress as they take their pick of 50 international labels.

SOAPS

The daily evening schedule of Brazil’s main channel, TV Globo, is three hour-long soap operas, or telenovelas. Their audience share is about 65%, and their stars are Brazil’s biggest celebrities. The subjects are almost always the same — forbidden love, betrayal, family feuds — and the actors are excessively rich and gorgeous, yet the soaps distinguish themselves from their South American neighbours with high production values. They may be pure cheese, but they’re quality cheese. Telenovelas usually last for about nine months; in the final week, when all loose ends are tied up, the story line is front-page news and the streets are noticeably emptier during broadcast times. Globo telenovelas have been sold to 130 countries a world record.

MAID CULTURE

Few middle-class Brazilians can cook, and not many more know how to make a bed. Luckily, they have domestic servants do these jobs for them. Slavery ended in Brazil in 1888 — later than anywhere else in the western hemisphere — and one of the legacies is that the difference between rich and poor is greatest in the world. Middle-class Brazilians can earn as much as Britons, but the poor, as mentioned above, earn very little. Maids can earn well, so there is no shortage of people willing to do the job — there are an estimated 3m servants in Brazil, and most middle-class homes are still built with maid’s quarters, with a windowless chamber for her to sleep in.

Brasil 40° will run in Selfridges stores nationwide from May 5 to 31; 0870 837 7377, www.selfridges.com/brasil

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?