Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 - Issue 50 i The Rake

Well, this is intriguing,” I mused while in wine country this winter, which is my name for the couch parked in front of my television where I am frequently found genuflecting, naval gazing, or passed out, Bill the Cat-style, while in my cups. Ack. A public relations company recently sent me an email proclaiming their new discovery, a 20-year-old lady and social media phenomenon who, after amassing an unprecedented 7.4 million Instagram followers in just 320 posts, has become the new media’s ‘It girl’. The P.R. company invited magazines around the world to petition for the privilege of editorial collaborations with her. As a recent convert to social media, my interest was, to say the least, piqued. Especially in an era in which innumerable luxury brands are reallocating their budget…

I am afraid that Mr. Birley cannot come to the phone because he is busy relaxing.” It is without doubt the best excuse I have ever heard for not being able to take a call, and if one knew anything about Mark Birley it was that he was not someone to look kindly on being interrupted while he was busy relaxing. Relaxing was a sort of religious activity — or do I mean inactivity — and he would go to ends nobody else knew existed to ensure that it remained sacred. During the 1990s he and I arranged some backgammon evenings at Thurloe Lodge, his large, exquisite house tucked away in almost rural calm just across the road from the Victoria and Albert museum in south-west London. I remember being…

Sharing a relatively unusual surname with a famous actor, and with whom he shares a profession, means that Max Irons faces that “Any relation?” gambit more than, say, Tom Hardy’s or Will Smith’s offspring ever will. “I get it all the time, when booking taxis and so on,” says Irons, whose father really needs no introduction and whose family on his mother’s side, all Cusacks, includes showbiz big-hitters including Sinéad (mother), Niamh and Sorcha (aunts), Pádraig (uncle), as well as Cyril and Maureen (grandparents). But Max Irons is carving out a pretty impressive television, film and stage career of his own, and seems to take hurdles in his stride. His turn as the husband of Jewish refugee Maria Altmann in the historical drama Woman in Gold, which also starred Helen…

Unlike caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, sugar or other narcotics, there is no upper limit to the consumption of cloth. If you think they are incomparable, you might want to think again. Historically, cloth has been an addictive substance: in the 1600s the English vogue for textiles related to clothing swept aside the legislation that had hitherto restricted what people wore. Owing to the fact you cannot overdose on cloth, the market for new and exciting fabrics was, and I am glad to say still is, inexhaustible. The Rake regards itself as a bit fanatical about cloth. And with the best cloth available, of course, the tailors whom we tirelessly celebrate can create majestic art. This duet of warp and weft has defined how men dress for centuries. When the opportunity arises…

Shakespearean gravitas is Patrick Stewart’s stock-in-trade. Applying it to roles in two blockbuster sci-fifranchises — X-Men and Star Trek: The Next Generation — has made his sternly avuncular persona as recognisable to global cinemagoers as it once was to the RSC faithful and viewers of quality weeknight television in his native Britain. Which is why, from around early 2013, Stewart began posting tweets, from the self-deprecating to the downright daft, that he hoped would strip away the veneer of grandeur from his public image and expose what John Lennon once referred to as “the little child inside the man”. One shot featured him wearing a lobster onesie. Another captured him fashioning a bust of his own head in pink candy floss. Perhaps the most heavily retweeted post to date, though,…

In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, a genre-defining film replete with iconic set pieces, there is one truly emotionally satisfying scene: when the assembled members of the Corleone family each bow and kiss the hand of Michael Corleone, the man who has saved and resurrected their future. And while far less resplendent in pageantry than any royal or papal coronation, it is somehow even more stirring to us. Because, during the time we’ve been emotionally invested in Michael, we’ve witnessed his quietly reflective brilliance, his unerring, almost prescient, insight, and his soft-spoken courage that belies his fearless geometry. Most of all, we’ve seen the incandescent intellect that burns within him. With his typical modesty, Alessandro Sartori, once the Head Designer of Z Zegna, the former Artistic Director of Berluti, and…

In the world of traditional British luxury, Crockett & Jones stands head and shoulders above its compatriots as a shoemaker of nigh-on titanic proportions. Founded in 1879 in Northampton, Britain’s fine-shoemaking hub, the company has remained family owned throughout its history, occupying an expansive factory with long-serving, loyal and talented staff. This was not always the case, though. When Mr. Jonathan Jones, Esq. started at Crockett & Jones in 1977 (he was appointed Managing Director in the early nineties), he joined a highly respected manufacturer that was, to put it mildly, not in great shape. Indeed, it was losing ground to its competitors and very close to closure. Forty years later, Crockett & Jones is one of the largest producers of high-quality Goodyear-welted shoes in the world, with 12 retail…

À Rebours, a book about one man and his obsessions, shook more than a few trees and was regarded by many as a sensory manifesto that more than accommodated the aesthetic movement’s philosophy that every sense must be entertained, every object beautiful, and taste in all things paramount. Hitherto, there’d been neither a cultural movement that entertained such notions or a book that catalogued and applauded them. Accordingly, no dandy of merit was without his dog-eared copy. Beardsley and Whistler never left home without theirs, and the French poet, essayist and philosopher Paul Valéry described the volume as his “Bible and bedside book”. Penned by the virtually anonymous J.K. Huysmans, a 36-year-old minor Parisian civil servant and part-time author, the story focuses on Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the quintessential…

Everyone, whether they like it or not, or know it or not, is culturally impacted by Stan Lee, the seemingly immortal nonagenarian. Film franchises, comic books, television box sets: all of these have not only been infiltrated by this legend’s creations, but also dominated by them. Let’s face it, the Marvel Universe is a colossal success. Three of the top 10 grossing films of all time are Marvel movies (Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Iron Man 3). Earlier incarnations of characters such as Daredevil (2003), the Fantastic Four (2005) and Captain America (1990) were major flops, and it is only in the past decade that the full potential of Stan Lee’s creations have been realised. As well, characters that were hitherto less well known have also become unmitigated successes.…

Scroll through your Netflix feed and you’ll find the sitcom Grace and Frankie. One of its stars is 79-year-old Jane Fonda, and the other is Lily Tomlin. They play a pair of one-upping lifelong friends whose husbands fall in love with each other, leaving the women suddenly single. Even in 2017 it is a fairly daring premise for mainstream media, yet for Fonda it is merely an extension of a career in which she has gleefully stirred hornets’ nests and displayed a billionaire’s nous for business. Born in 1937, her father was the noted actor Henry Fonda, a man who could portray a staggering range of emotion on screen but who was, by most accounts, colder than an Inuk’s fridge. Despite an initial reluctance, Jane joined the Actors Studio and,…

There are certain leather jackets that are inextricably linked with certain values. For example, the J-24 Buco/Schott Perfecto double-breasted motorcycle jacket conjures up images of a sneering Marlon Brando slouched against his Triumph motorcycle in The Wild One, and, as such, perfectly characterises the word ‘rebellion’. The A-2 aviator jacket, issued by the United States Air Force to officers since 1931, has been donned by such an incredible litany of real-life and screen heroes, from General Douglas MacArthur to Steve McQueen, that it will forever be associated with acts of immeasurable heroism. Who can forget McQueen in his A-2 made by American brand Rough Wear in The Great Escape, his jacket draped insouciantly like a flag of defiance against his German prison camp oppressors? Throughout my life I’ve owned dozens…

The sexiest scene in movie history is not Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s tussle between Venetian bed sheets in the 1973 psychological thriller Don’t Look Now. Neither is it Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman’s Sapphic tryst in 2010’s Black Swan. It’s not the nihilistic orgy in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, the bookshelf knee-trembler between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in Atonement, or any of the classification board-ruffling cross-cuts in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También. No, the sexiest scene committed to celluloid involved no nudity, saw no physical contact between the actors, and was soundtracked not by some tenor-sax bra-remover in C minor but by a Carioca-lite cacophony of pounding bongos. I’m referring, of course, to the famous dance scene in Et Dieu... Créa La Femme (And God Created…

Each time I’ve been invited to go shooting in England, I’ve always struggled with my response. On the one hand I recognise that it is a sincere gesture of friendship and an important part of aristocratic British social life. And, yes, I want to wear the funny trousers. On the other hand, I don’t like guns. I don’t want to shoot anything. And I have in particular zero desire to blast a living creature out of existence. Even the thought of it fills me with a prevailing sense of guilt and grief. I mean, seriously, what the fuck did that woodcock ever do to me that I need to hasten its departure to the next cycle of karmic reincarnation? There is, however, one exception to this. One creature so offensive…

As well as The Rake, Nick — a historian and author, and surely London’s most prominent luxury commentator — writes for periodicals including How To Spend It, The Financial Times, The Independent, Vanity Fair and The Daily Telegraph. Among his many published tomes to date are the Count d’Orsay biography Last of the Dandies (2005), Dunhill by Design (2006), TAG Heuer (2009), Cigar Style (2008), Gentlemen and Blackguards: Gambling Mania and the Plot to Steal the Derby of 1844 (2010), and Swans, Legends of the Jet Society (2013). Last year, Bernard Buffet: The Invention of the Modern Mega-Artist was released to great critical acclaim. In this issue, Nick, with his usual authority and wit, relishes the memories and legacy of the great Mark Birley (page 32). He also lets us…

A working-class hero is something to be,” declared John Lennon in his song of the same name. Doug Hayward didn’t make Lennon’s suits — that honour fell to the more celebrated sixties Savile Row insurgent Tommy Nutter — but he would surely have concurred with the sentiment. Hayward’s distinctive sense of style was shaped by a workingclass childhood, when labouring men like his father, who cleaned boilers at the BBC, stood straighter and walked taller when they went out on Friday night in their best, and only, suits. And while Hayward’s tailoring establishment in Mount Street would eventually clothe men across the social scale — from friends and fellow upstarts like Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and Terry O’Neill to Sir John Gielgud and lords Lichfield and Weinstock — he never…

It was some powder-wigged ponce in the late 18th century who came up with the word ‘dogged’ to mean persistent, tenacious and steadfast. Whoever he was, he surely had one eye on us, a breed of canine characters who can show gritty resolve when it comes to protecting our territories and owners. If you’ve ever wondered why we was bred (from Mastiffs, as it happens) to have our noses set back almost between the eyes, it’s so we could still breathe while hanging on to the neck of our bovine opponents — that’s right, we came into existence for one purpose: bull-baiting. That is, until they banned it in 1850 (despite what they tell you, there’s nothing new about the bloody P.C. brigade). Maybe that’s a ban we can get…

The Chanel Monsieur De Chanel Given the febrile hoplophilia foisted on the world by Hollywood since the westerns of the 1930s, few would be surprised to learn that the word ‘calibre’ comes from an Arabic word describing a mould for casting bullets. In watchmaking, of course, as in gun-making, the word refers to precision engineering, and the Calibre 1 — the first movement designed, developed and assembled by Chanel, and the beating heart of the house’s first men’s watch — is sure to pierce a gaping, smouldering hole in the existing horology status quo. Unveiled at Baselworld 2016, the 170-piece movement boasts instantaneous jumping hours that can be set forwards and backwards, as well as retrograde minutes, and is the latest pearl of horological excellence from independent watchmaker Romain Gauthier,…

To slip on your first jacket cut by Lorenzo Cifonelli and reflect upon the man staring back at you from the mirror is to be filled with the same emotion that Senator Giovanni Falier must have felt when he stepped into his gardens in 1777 and witnessed the statues of Orpheus and Eurydice sculpted for him by Antonio Canova. As with Canova’s expressive ability with stone, Cifonelli is a man so unique in his ability to bring forth life from inanimate cloth that he seems to breathe the Ancient Greek concept of anima, or spirit, into his creations. And, like Canova, who was considered the greatest sculptor of the neoclassical period, Cifonelli’s influence in shaping the prevailing aesthetic of the global sartorial revival over the past decade has been so…

The Rat Pack was as much fun as the American male ever had. Perfectly timed at the turn of the fifties — when prosperity was overcoming the nation’s Protestant impulses, the second world war was fading from memory and Vietnam was still a far-off land — Frank Sinatra and his pals took hold of music, film, the stage and masculine aspirations by doing what looked very much like hanging out with their buddies. In this, they achieved much more than their own success, helping to establish the transformative new world of the sixties every bit as much as the rock ’n roll generation that came after them, expressing the thought that there might be more to life than work, family and duty. What’s more, in just a few action-packed years,…

It is not often that one of my books starts a war, but if you believe Hodinkee, the widely followed horological website, my Authorized Biography of Patek Philippe caused something of a stir among collectors of the hallowed watch marque: “The book may have, in fact, dropped the equivalent of an atom bomb on the vintage Patek market — does a 1518 in platinum exist??” This rhetorical question was quickly answered. “According to this book, it does. On page 465, within what is a lengthy, 26- page reference table of all watches made in the modern era, including year of introduction, calibre, and metal types, we see what is hard-to-argue-with proof that in fact a 1518 — the world’s first perpetual calendar chronograph made in series — was not only…