Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 - Issue 45 i The Rake

A few years ago, Kiefer Sutherland put in a call to Volvo. His father, Donald, had been supplying the resonant voiceovers for the Swedish car giant’s television commercials for some years; Kiefer, only half-jokingly, was now offering to do the job for half the price. “You won’t get a better Donald Sutherland sound-a-like,” he’s alleged to have protested, even as he failed to steal his father’s thunder. There can be few starker illustrations of a son attempting to, if not escape his father’s shadow, at least give it a little goosing. It was an acknowledgement on Kiefer’s part that he and Donald shared a wealth of attributes — lantern jaw, intense blue eyes, wiry frame, and, yes, a rich baritone, but also that, after a decade’s worth of Very Bad…

It was a pretty safe bet. Every Christmas, television stations around the world looked for films a family could watch without dad having to explain what happens ‘when grown-ups who love each other very much lie down and have a special cuddle’. One of these was the original Pink Panther, featuring Peter Sellers’s bumbling Jacques Clouseau. It was, however, Claudia Cardinale — playing an exotic princess in possession of the famous diamond from which the film took its name — who sparked less-than-P.G. stirrings for many a viewer. Born in 1938 in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia, Cardinale stood a fraction over 5’6” and grew into a teenager of such pulchritudinous symmetry that she resembled a Botticelli by way of Girls Gone Wild. The Cardinale sin, if…

Mark’s Club in Mayfair has welcomed more than its fair share of artfully attired flâneurs through its doors since Mark Birley first opened them in 1972. But on one cold January evening this year, when The Ambassador’s Project for London Collections Men held its celebratory soirée there, the club’s Tino Zervudachi-refreshed interior became a who’s who of London tailoring. The project — a team effort involving member houses of the Savile Row Bespoke Association and The Woolmark Company, who worked with London Collections Men ambassadors to create exceptional and unique Merino-wool bespoke suits for the occasion — is emblematic of bespoke tailoring’s place at the epicentre of London’s menswear scene. “The Ambassador’s Project was a marvellous initiative, and the kind of thing that could only have come about because of…

Extraordinary though it is, Pitti Uomo seldom fails to bring about the sartorial equivalent of an epileptic fit. Whether it’s the long-black-cardigan-wearing, too-cool-for-fashion-school set, the unnaturally pristine peacocks courting paparazzi, or the expanse of sprezzatura-embracing aesthetes with monkstrap buckles adrift, one cannot but help feel inspired, intimidated and often somewhat perturbed by the show’s other-worldly display of sartorialism. The most recent Pitti, however, apart from offering up its usual bamboozling spectacle, also presented a glimmer of hope. Just when I feared that the sea of unending affectation and ostentation would never end (like Tantalus’s quest for a thirst-quenching drink in the underworld), my faith was restored. Said restoration took the form of the emergence of a new breed of menswear aficionado, a species so young in the tooth, finite in…

Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar As Ken Kessler explained in the preceding feature, yellow-gold is having a bit of a moment. This is good news for the haute-horlogerie buyer, as watch maisons are pulling out all the stops to design pieces that take advantage of the scrumptiously shiny warmth that yellow-gold offers. From the various incarnations, one brand has come out on top, and has produced an absolute showstopper, one that gave more than a few magpie journalists in Geneva a coup de foudre. The yellow-gold Royal Oak perpetual calendar is extraordinary: the luscious tones of the blue Grande Tapisserie dial with sub-dials at each quarter; day, month and date at nine, noon and three, as well as a leap year indicator at noon; and the astronomical moon sitting…

When not dining at the finest establishments in London — including his favourite haunt, 45 Jermyn Street — Christopher Modoo, the senior creative at remarkable ready-to-wear Savile Row tailor Chester Barrie, spends his time creating some of the most inspired English tailoring known to man. Having built up the house’s reputation as a superior contemporary outfitters, known for its glamorous designs, clever concepts and erudite taste in fabrics, he is a passionate advocate of high-end ready-to-wear suiting for the modern man. “Good ready-to-wear allows you to try different looks and have something curated for you,” he says. “Bespoke can be either quite safe or you can end up looking like a customised car-kit, saying ‘yes’ to every option.” No danger of that at Chester Barrie. Fortunately, Modoo’s designs are as…

‘O man, take care! What does the deep midnight declare? I was asleep— From a deep dream I woke and swear…’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra The horizon fractures the sky and land. And from it a man walks forward. His gait, his lean, raw-boned frame immortalised in innumerable battles. His face scarred and remade hard through myriad acts of anguish. He has lived and died a hundred times in the last six years, and each time he has returned to us transformed as a more perfect leader. He is the Messiah of Dystopia and Moses of the Wasteland, leading the last remaining tribe through the parted waves of insanity in a world in which order, compassion and frailty are anathema. He walks towards us, and then miraculously breaks into…

Bernard and Nick Fouquet may live on different continents, but that hasn’t stopped these dynamic, bilingual rakes forging a father-son relationship for the ages, writes tom chamberlin. The relationship between a father and son is never the same in any two families. Since the story of Abraham and Isaac, classic literature and folklore is riddled with differing accounts of this particular bond. Since then, these texts have been somewhat superseded by aisles of self-help books and — the worst pseudo-counsellor of them all — the life coach. Bernard and Nick Fouquet live on opposite sides of the world — Nick in Los Angeles and Bernard in France — so the fact they maintain a close and strong relationship is impressive. The Rake spent time with them in Los Angeles and captured…

Traditionally, sartorial lust-at-first-sight — that experience of beholding a garment from a short distance and hankering for it to be enveloping one’s mortal form in the same instant — has emanated from a man’s inner peacock. With truly seductive pieces of clothing (Lapo Elkann’s six-button, double-breasted denim jacket with voluminous lapels springs to mind, as does the kind of windowpane-checked three-piece in worsted alsport tweed that David Gandy might wear to tear up the tarmac at Goodwood), the emphasis has always tended to be on how one might look rather than feel when the item in question is worn. Comfort, when it comes to tailoring, has not exactly taken a back seat — the way fabric caresses the acromion bone, the armhole and sleevehead’s interaction, and other such factors all…

The name Jason Basmajian has, in the past few years, become shorthand for the future of menswear. Basmajian’s repurposing of Savile Row tailors Gieves & Hawkes into the most enthralling ready-to-wear brand has set in motion a revolution of sartorialism, in which formality and comfort are no longer mutually exclusive. Gieves & Hawkes’ transition away from an exclusive focus on bespoke tailoring would have been more treacherous without such a personable, visionary and talented Chief Creative Officer at the helm. But the brand has settled into its new era with considerable élan, and now Basmajian is turning his attention to a new challenge: stewarding Cerruti, a firm that has seemingly lost its way of late. This most European of brands is, however, perfectly suited to Basmajian’s particular nous. After a…

RUVEN AFANADOR Ruven Afanador is an internationally renowned photographer of limitless imagination, powerful vision and profound sense of self. His extensive body of work has created an intensely personal language characterised by the balance of bold emotion and delicate nuance. The expressive images in his four books (Torero, Sombra, Mil Besos, Angel Gitano), portraiture, and fashion editorials reveal extravagant dreamlike sequences that seem to emerge from Afanador’s imagination fully grown — always splendid, sometimes mischievous, often decadent, and all steeped in classic formality. Ruven’s work has appeared in countless publications, including New York, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, Vogue India, Billboard and The New Yorker. For this issue of The Rake, Ruven shot our cover star, Andrew Lincoln (page 72). DIEGO MERINO Diego Merino was born in Madrid, where he…

Patrick Lichfield, or the 5th Earl of Lichfield, or just Lichfield, was, like Churchill’s view of pre-war Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. How could the royal family’s in-house photographer, the King’s Road dandy and the assiduous objectifier of the female form be one and the same man? With his permanent Cheshire-cat grin, shirt at half-mast, and bouffant hair, he was a tireless worker, shameless self-promoter and something of a hack — even, for all the breeding, a bit of a wideboy. Look, however, at a careful selection of his many photographs — Talitha Getty turned on and dropped out on a roof in Marrakech in 1969; Prince Charles rushing to embrace Lady Sarah Chatto (then Armstrong-Jones); Mick and Bianca Jagger as the just-married king and…

Henry Lloyd-Hughes has a tour de force of a personality. His gregarious, charismatic conversational skills at first put you off balance, but once you get your eye in (to pre-empt his love of a cricketing metaphor), it is a lot of fun, for he is articulate and positive. And he has good reason to be. His acting career has allowed him to dominate a portion of Britain’s television screens, appearing as a variety of characters, notably in The Inbetweeners as the school bully Mark Donovan, and the wildly popular Raj retrospective Indian Summers as Ralph Whelan. In feature films he has made his mark in adaptations of classic literature, starring in Anna Karenina, Parade’s End and Madame Bovary. Above all, Lloyd-Hughes is committed to the sartorial arts that this magazine…

The Pharos of Alexandria, arguably the most impressive of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was built by Ptolemy I between 280 and 247 B.C. Now destroyed, it stood for nearly 1,200 years, and in the 10th century A.D., more than a millennium after its inception, was still considered such an extraordinary feat that it was heralded as “practically the very centre-point of the civilised world”. A work of superhuman ambition, it represents a feat of architectural brilliance, a monument so technically advanced and impressive in its design that it is nigh-on impossible to understand how it was conceived in the first place. Which leads me to posit a theory. Allow me to suggest that, much like Ptolemy’s towering bastion of inspired design, the suits of master tailor Edward…

The Marbella Club has many stories, but my favourite concerns the Duke of Windsor, who, after giving up the British Empire for the woman he loved, found he had a bit more time to spend with his wardrobe, his guns and his golf clubs. The alternative name of the Costa del Sol is the Costa del Golf, so naturally the Duke stayed at the Marbella Club, the famous hotel founded by the late Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who was as fond of retelling the story as I am. “The Duke of Windsor came,” Alfonso would say, “and at that time the club was full of about 60 really good friends, so I told them I was giving a dinner at the Beach Club for the Duke of Windsor, and asked…

I confess to feeling rather smug in writing this particular epistle. I have long loved the voluminous, voluptuous, almost sensual drape that a broad-legged trouser lends to one’s figure — and not just because I have fat thighs. Rather, there’s something undeniably elegant about a pair of drape-cut trousers, or ‘bags’, as they’re known in fashionable circles. Put on a pair (preferably with braces and a fish-tail back) and one is instantly transformed into a cross between an extra in The Great Gatsby, a bit-player from the Bloomsbury set, and a privately educated cricketer. One does not walk down the street in a pair of bags — one half-swaggers, half-glides. They epitomise the tastes of a man who truly understands and appreciates the art of dress: confident, nonchalant and debonair.…

At the risk of exposing myself and this august organ to ridicule in Private Eye, when it comes to wristwatches, yellow-gold is the new black. There. I’ve said it — a cliché as criminal for a writer to use as the terms ‘iconic’ or ‘D.N.A’. But there is no escaping the trend that has affected the watch industry. Its virtues are well known, including its malleability and resistance to corrosion. Yet its softness should mitigate against its use in watch cases, which is why savvy enthusiasts prefer the far superior stainless steel. And yellow-gold is the closest of the refined golds to its raw colour. In its natural state, gold — unlike the majority of white or grey metals — is reddish yellow. As pure gold is too soft for…

While Ian Fleming’s most famous protagonist has become synonymous with Aston Martin over the years, his first car was, in fact, a Bentley. In the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), Fleming noted that “Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4.5-litre Bentleys, with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war … Bond drove it hard and well and with an almost sensual pleasure. It was a battleship-grey convertible coupé, which really did convert, and it was capable of touring at ninety with thirty miles an hour in reserve.” Bond’s automobile was one of the most lauded of all Bentleys and perhaps the ultimate performance car of…

When it comes to the anthropogenic climate change debate, the Cassandras are trouncing the naysayers. Planet Earth has never, in recorded history, had a hotter summer than 2015, and when an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states with 95 per cent confidence that CO2-belching, wagyu-munching, forest-felling homo sapiens are the main cause, it’s hard to ignore them, especially when alternative explanations (cyclical differences in solar activity and the like) have repeatedly involved what might euphemistically be called ‘funding’ from the energy industry. Often, the best way to decide the worthy winner in a binary debate is to examine the underlying motive each party has for making their particular case. Why do the deniers deny? ‘Because the wealthy and powerful will do anything to retain their wealth and power,’…