Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 - Issue 63 i The Rake

Not long ago I found myself, through no fault of my own, at the stage version of Dirty Dancing. As expected, the auditorium was oestrogen-heavy, and as the rough-diamond dance teacher, Johnny Castle, got to grips with the artless Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman and helped her unleash her inner twerker, the women around me responded with shining eyes, flushed faces, and the occasional whooped exhortation (there may have been hen parties present). The deathless line “Nobody puts Baby in the corner!” was greeted with a tumultuous cheer, and the climactic mass singalong suggested that, yes, the punters had had the time of their lives, and they owed it all to… whom? “Let’s not kid ourselves,” my companion said, towelling herself down in the lobby afterwards. “The guy playing Johnny was fine,…

He was, to say the least, a shoo-in for Variety magazine’s 10 Brits to Watch in 2019 feature. Having become a familiar face on British screens with a role in the soap opera EastEnders, as well as in the English-speaking world with appearances in Doctor Who, Joivan Wade has since hit the big time: in last year’s American action-horror flick The First Purge, a gritty franchise prequel about a society blighted by annual 12-hour periods of state-sanctioned anarchy, he played vengeance-seeking dealer Isaiah; in this year’s spin-off DC Comics superhero series Doom Patrol, he portrays a half-human, half-machine coming to terms — in the style of Frankenstein’s monster — with his duality. The Rake caught up with Joivan during one of his regular visits to his native London, and found…

Back in the day, when actresses who were not altogether Anglo were invariably labelled ‘exotic’, no one was pigeonholed as often as Isabelle Yasmina Adjani. Thanks to an Algerian Kabyle father, a German mother and a French childhood, Adjani exuded a Gallic MILFy je ne sais quoi that the likes of Carla Bruni could emulate but never match. Adjani’s hair was spun from raven silk and her eyes were of a blue both comforting and unknowable, deeper than single malt and just as intoxicating. The jawline was chiselled from a marble so pure that Michelangelo would have abandoned David halfway for it. You get the picture. If you think we’re lingering unduly on the physical, you’d be right. But only to serve as a counterpoint to what was inside this…

It would not be an exaggeration to say that when it comes to shirtmaking, Turnbull & Asser is king, and if that is the case then a Turnbull & Asser evening shirt is their crown. Winston Churchill, Robert Redford’s Jay Gatsby, and multiple James Bonds have all turned to Turnbull when the occasion has called for them to look their very best; the results are some of the most iconic examples of evening attire in history. “Pulling on a freshly pressed T&A cotton shirt is one of life’s pleasures,” says Steven Quin, Turnbull’s royal warrant holder and arguably England’s finest shirt cutter. “The coolness of the cotton and crispness of the cloth is the perfect way to begin an evening, and gives the wearer an added confidence.” The Turnbull &…

Sitting in the Palazzo Litta in Milan, awaiting the first of some 200 one-of-a-kind looks that would represent Dolce & Gabbana’s latest Alta Moda and Alta Sartoria collections, the audience lining the internal perimeter of the rose-filled palazzo could have been said to have been viewing this most extravagant and opulent of collections with a certain nervous curiosity. The venue — the original nucleus was built between 1642 and 1648 by Francesco Maria Richini for Count Bartolomeo Arese, president of the municipal senate and member of one of the most influential families of Spanish Milan — may have been festooned with the most incredible floral arrangements (indeed, one room had been entirely covered in thousands of fragrant pink rose heads), but as Domenico Dolce said to journalists after the show,…

With the global media landscape so blighted by fake news, facile content and wilfully confrontational journalism, there’s an authentic moral integrity about Blamo!, the podcast founded by Jeremy Kirkland in 2016 that ploughs the fertile field of menswear via interviews with the big hitters who drive its evolution. This is because, for Kirkland — whose childhood-onwards fashion smarts were honed and smelted during a period working with Mark Cho at The Armoury — the truth is far more engaging than fabrication or sensationalism. The philosophy underlying Blamo! has made it the perfect platform for guests such as Nick Sullivan, Josh Peskowitz, Michael Bastian, Alan Flusser and The Rake’s founder and Editorial Director, Wei Koh, to share candid, lucid insights into their journeys and style philosophies to dedicated listeners who relish…

Bespoke is an addictive habit, but the degree to which one’s anticipation of the final result ebbs and flows is down to the level of trust between you and your tailor. Without trust, the process is achingly nerve-racking, for you know you might have wasted your time and dented your bank account. It must be very difficult to have the first idea as to where to go and whom to commission. With all the options available to you — the styles from which you can pick and choose between houses, as well as the houses’ microcosms, vis-a-vis their different cutters — it is damn near impossible to arrive at a single solution with which you can feel entirely confident. As well, it is unreasonable to expect even the best cutters…

O.K., let’s back up, to 2015, when Oris launched their much-loved Divers Sixty-Five. One of the hardest design challenges in watchmaking is the creation of a handsome, functional and original-looking dive watch. But that’s precisely what Oris achieved when they launched the 40mm rotating-bezel-equipped timepiece with amusing funky op-art-like indices at the four main quadrants based on a 36mm watch from its collection dated to 1965. Even more appealing beyond the watch’s well-executed and relatively slim case and domed sapphire, which provide the design underpinnings for a steady aesthetic evolution over the years, was the highly accessible €1,600 original price point. It was clear that Oris had decided to offer an extremely strong value proposition with their Swiss-made timepiece powered by a Sellita SW200 calibre. The water resistance of the…

GUY AROCH Guy Aroch is one of the most indemand photographers in the world. He creates images for clients such as Hugo Boss, Coca-Cola, Puma, Estée Lauder, Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger. He has a unique style, using colour and obscura, and he has the ability to make his subjects feel instantly at ease. He lives in New York City with his wife and three daughters. For his first assignment with The Rake, Aroch shot our cover star, Liev Schreiber, at the Lowell Hotel in New York, thrillingly capturing Schreiber’s intense and imposing presence. NICK SCOTT A former Editor-in-Chief of The Rake, Scott spent several years as a staffer at U.K. Esquire and GQ Australia, and is now the Editor of the U.K. edition of Robb Report, as well as…

The French excelled in the eighties. Pastels, big shoulders, and the triumph of smart-casual played to their fashion strengths, of course, but the emphases on exaggerated urban sophistication and free-floating existential angst were so up their allée the entire decade might as well have been flying the tricolour. While the pop music of the era was merely pretending to be French (bonjour, Nick Rhodes, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot and all those jazzy female vocalists in Breton smocks), the films didn’t have to. For at least a brief period in the eighties, France’s cinema was at the vanguard. Le cinéma du look, as it was called, seized the zeitgeist with a mix of urban alienation (let’s not forget the constant threat of nuclear war and the reality of western industrial decline) and glossy…

Hopefully, by the time this issue of The Rake is available, the weather will look a lot different than it did when you read my inaugural style column in February. If you were to compare the accompanying illustrations, they would look very different, too. This is down to the passing of the seasonal torch, of course, which means all those heavy-duty polo coats, tweed sports jackets and 14oz flannels have been cleaned, pressed and put away, and the cottons and linens in their more vibrant tones have entered the rotation. This season, Drake’s have caught my eye with their microwale corduroy suit in a biscuity beige. You might be thinking that that contradicts what I’ve just said above, and in some ways it does, as corduroy is mostly a winter…

Panerai Submersible Marina Militare Carbotech There is probably no brand on the planet with more robust credentials than Panerai when it comes to aquatic adventure — credentials built upon since the 1940s, when it became supplier to Italian navy commandos. (The naval connection has dictated the brand’s aesthetic from the start: compare the ultra-rare Panerai Radiomir Type A that once belonged to Rear Admiral Amedeo Vesco, which fetched €226,000 at French auction house Artcurial earlier this year, to the brand’s contemporary output.) Now, though, Panerai is going one stage further by inviting its superfans to not only experience aquatic adventures vicariously, by knowing the history of what they’re wearing on their wrists, but personally, for three new watches introduced at this year’s SIHH invited those who snapped up limited-edition versions…

Having just graduated from high school, I found myself in London on my first trip abroad with $300 in travellers’ cheques, which was to last me the summer. It was June 1964. My travelling companion was my Martin D28 guitar. Bob Dylan was my hero, and I took him to the parks and streets busking for extra ‘dough’ to make a dream come true. The three hundred bucks was a graduation gift from my father, or Pop, as I called him. He was a man of impeccable style, taste and elegance; Pop was an habitué of the world of all things bespoke. His closets were not merely a place to keep one’s clothes, but rather a wonderland, a sanctum sanctorum redolent with the transporting exotic fragrances of vetiver, oud and…

It was one of those moments when there was a before and after. Overture and denouement. Or in the social anthropological/Jungian psychological terms, pre-liminal and post-liminal. But it was the moment in between that uplifted the soul and irrevocably and irreversibly shifted my perception forever. This was the first time I’d ever lifted a glass of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s Grands-Échezeaux to my lips and enacted the holy transubstantiative act that would take me from ignorance to enlightenment. And in the same way you are warned not to meet your heroes, lest they fall beneath your expectations, you are also cautioned against deifying material experiences lest they be similarly disappointing, i.e. making love to a supermodel. Yet the problem is that even if you’ve consciously tried to discard all expectation,…

O f all serious criminal offences, only murder is fetishised so eagerly in western culture. One cannot envisage a T.V. series entitled Drug Trafficking, She Wrote, or a movie called High Treason on the Orient Express, becoming standard Sunday night fare. So it’s no wonder that every single assassin in silver-screen history — in the realms of fictional realism, at least (sorry, Corvo Attano, Thane Krios, et al) — has been beguilingly cool. Javier Bardem’s cattle-gun-toting Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men) might be one of the coolest cats in feline-and-murine movie history. An equally frosty-headed and far more raffish killer-for-hire is the Jackal, as portrayed by Edward Fox in an open-top Aston Martin and sporting a Jermyn Street basement’s-worth of cravats (O.K., so his bank-robbery-funded commission came from…