Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring - Summer 2021 - Issue 77 i The Rake

When I started The Rake, almost a decade and a half ago, Lorenzo Cifonelli was already a mythological figure to me. So it is with immense gratitude that today I consider him one of my closest friends. Sometimes, often while in my cups, I imagine a Valhalla of the sartorial arts’ greatest masters: Frederick Scholte and Gennaro Rubinacci seated besides an Odin-like Domenico Caraceni, with the superstars of each successive generation — such as Colin Hammick, of Huntsman, Douglas Hayward, the creator of Thomas Crown’s suits, and of course the inimitable Tommy Nutter — taking their rightful place at the banquet table. But when it comes to this generation, not only is Lorenzo’s seat at the table assured, it is clear that he will be regarded as the most influential…

A while ago I was invited to a black-tie Christmas bash for the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace. After the initial thrill of being waved through the gates and gliding across the quadrangle into the hallowed environs, the incongruities started to pile up. Did the interior of the palace resemble a gilded Trusthouse Forte on steroids? Yes, it did. Was I really standing, kir royale in hand, next to a genuine Vermeer? Yes, I was. Could that be the erstwhile Wombles maestro Mike Batt conducting an orchestra in the ballroom? Yes, it could. Not long into the evening, a buzz went round the attendees and an orderly line was formed: the family were making their rounds. I happened to be standing at a corner, my vision of their progress obscured,…

A camel has equatorial winds and their weathering of Cretaceous sandstone down to sand to thank for its cometo- bed eyelashes and valve-like nostrils. Were it not for blood-sucking horseflies’ inability to decipher the aperture effect, zebras would not have their stripes. Evolutionary cul-desacs make for some curious traits in the animal kingdom. In my breed’s case, to prevent us drawing the attention of dog-meatloving big cats in the ancient African forests in which we evolved, we have a laryngeal ventricle that is shallower than in other domestic dog species, which is a rather clinical way of saying that we have a shrill yodel as opposed to a gruff bark — a vocal timbre that, compared to the Labrador’s hostile growl, is as Edith Piaf’s trembling alto was to Tom…

Breguet, architects of trailblazing mechanisms, are best known for their haute horology watchmaking, which includes the first ever tourbillon. The French-Swiss watchmaking genius Abraham-Louis Breguet patented his mechanical coup in 1801, 26 years after founding the marque. The family’s contributions to telecommunications and aviation have been life-changing inventions for people around the world. Precision, clarity, irresistible elegance and an infinitely baroque style have always been celebrated characteristics of Breguet timepieces. In July the house made a rare modernist move, with a stripped-down and sporty chronograph that lies within their Type XXI collection. The 3815 timepiece marks a new chapter in the history of this iconic aviation chronograph. With a titanium case and vividly coloured lume, the new limited edition 3815 deftly blends vintage and modern aesthetics. Breguet have reminded us…

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” So runs one of the famous passages from Walden, a tome written by Henry David Thoreau detailing the transcendentalist American author’s experiences over two years, two months and two days in a selfbuilt cabin in the wilderness next to Walden Pond, Massachusetts. Along with the works of the naturalist painter Giuliano Mauri, this paean-in-prose to reconnection with nature, with its vivid accounts of autumn hues, has served as inspiration for a stunning new collection of outerwear from Lardini, a brand founded in Filottrano, in the Ancona province of Italy, by its now creative director when he was…

Luca Rubinacci’s family are not simply masters of the alchemic métier that is Neapolitan tailoring, which reconciles the seemingly disparate elements of effortless comfort with immaculate style. The fact is, they created it. Indeed, it was Luca’s grandfather Gennaro Rubinacci who first removed the stuffy horsehair and canvas in British tailoring and thus pioneered the first jackets that were, as they say, “as light as the winds over Vesuvius”. The result was a style that soon captivated the world for its slightly more relaxed, softer construction, which brought with it a powerful dégagé elan and sense of effortless chic often described by pundits as sprezzatura. Although that word is overused today, and its meaning has become diluted and co-opted, when you look at a Rubinacci suit — the way it…

Nikesh Patel recalls one of the moments that inspired him to become an actor. It was during a play at his school in London. While sitting in the audience, he was surprised to see a pupil several years his junior appear on stage. “It was a Sri Lankan kid from a few years below,” he says two decades later. “I looked at him and thought, What’s Krishnan doing there? But even that small moment, seeing someone on stage who looked like me, made a big difference in becoming an actor.” Since that light-switch moment, Nikesh has gone on to have quite the career. He is a thespian sort who leans more into theatrical work, a self-professed Shakespeare nerd, and now a common face on British television screens (he’s also rather…

Jay Fielden, I have decided, is what happens when Jim Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald reproduce. My first close encounter with Fielden, the former Editor-in-Chief of U.S. Esquire, Men’s Vogue and Town & Country, came during his Esquire tenure, in Brunello Cucinelli’s homeland of Solomeo, Italy. It was an extravaganza that attracted international media of all types, and muttered in reverent tongues among journalism’s finest was the gossip that Jay was on site. His reputation proceeded him, and we all hoped for a chance meeting. He came across exactly as we wanted him to: a rock star with an intellectual aura. Jay’s successful career in the industry was predestined from his days growing up in San Antonio, Texas, where there was a Ralph Lauren Polo store in which he got…

‘Ghost distillery’: even in the rarefied, mystique-soaked world of fine whisky, it’s an enthrallingly emotive phrase. For the uninitiated, it refers to a whisky facility whose productive life came to an end long ago but for which a finite supply of stock remains in existence or, in some cases, is still coming to maturity. There’s more to the romance of this concept than rarity and provenance: it’s also about legacy and posterity. When a master distiller lays down a whisky that will come to fruition after years or decades of extraction, evaporation, oxidation, concentration, filtration and colouration, he proffers a gift to the future. Like the medieval artisan laying a cathedral’s foundation stone, or the man who plants a tree in poet Alexander Smith’s aphorism, in some cases he may…

Bang & Olufsen’s BeoCom 6000 telephone was said to be the main inspiration behind the original iPod. Bang & Olufsen are nearly 100 years old. In that time, the Danish company has designed some of the most original, ingenious and downright beautiful electrical products the world has seen. The brand, founded in 1925, has always placed great emphasis on quality materials, effective, simple design, and ease of use — and decades before firms such as Apple made those qualities their signatures. In fact, B&O’s BeoCom 6000 telephone was said to be the main inspiration behind the original iPod, with its sleek profile and famous click wheel. Plenty of other B&O products have stood the test of time, becoming design icons in their own right. Take the Beolit 39, for instance,…

Greg established his reportage style as a photojournalist in the 1990s, covering war zones in Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone. An assignment for The Sunday Times Magazine gave him his first access to the film industry, and he has now shot specials on more than 200 movies, including four poster campaigns for the Bond franchise. Greg has also enjoyed exclusive access to the Baftas, the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue. In addition to his prodigious photographic output, Greg is a filmmaker, principally with his first-person, ‘moving reportage’ documentaries, and a product designer (his limited-edition Leica Q2, in partnership with Daniel Craig, is Leica’s fastest selling large-scale edition). His education platform, Skills Faster, is home to his successful Candid Photography…

Acerbic newspaper columnists who wish to distil a human subject’s existence down to a nugget of scorn can always rely upon a fail-safe formula: hyphenated-descriptor + reductive noun form [h-d+rnf]. Whether it’s a veteran football manager being reduced to a ‘passion-sapping journeyman’ or a liberal-minded comedian to a ‘patience-testing snowflake’, it’s a tried and trusted way of spiking the editorial cocktail. (My all-time favourite appeared when Charlie Brooker, the man behind the dystopian sci-fi anthology Black Mirror, prefaced George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s name with “Teddy- Ruxpin-faced planet-vandal”.) Presumably, cuttings containing these barbed descriptors rarely make it into subjects’ Project Life scrapbooks, but when The Washington Post calls you a 38-year-old “discotheque-hopping fiancé” — and the bride-tobe is 21-year-old Princess Caroline of Monaco, the daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III,…

Like so many other nameless British aristos (unless you’re counting Debrett’s), India Hicks could have coasted through a very comfortable, low-key life. A footnote in history as one of Diana’s bridesmaids. All gumboots and tweed on ancestral lands, children named Tarquin and Alisdair, plus ‘the little flat’ in Knightsbridge and first-name terms with the ‘lovely ladies at Harvey Nicks’. But for Hicks, the model, interior designer, mother of five and philanthropist, an urge to wander was encoded in her DNA. Which is probably what happens when your grandfather happens to have been the last viceroy of your namesake nation. It was a childhood marked by the peripatetics of privilege. A home base in Oxfordshire, summer holidays on the hereditary Irish estate, and weeks at the Bahamian home built by her…

To indulge in a rather moth-eaten phrasal template, there is little doubt that green, in the world of haute horology, is the new blue. Breitling’s Premier B09 Chronograph, with its gorgeous pistachio dial; Patek Philippe’s verdant take on the Nautilus; Jaeger-LeCoultre’s version of the Reverso Tribute Small Seconds inspired by the fir forests surrounding the manufacture; Montblanc’s 1858 Geosphere in bronze and olive; IWC and Blancpain introducing a Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 and the Villeret Extraplate Boutique Edition, respectively, with something not far off British racing green gracing their facades… All supremely elegant pieces, indicating that, having looked on jealously for so long, the pastoral hue has finally usurped its neighbour on the spectrum’s throne. There are many theories as to why. A subconscious response to the rise of environmentalism?…

In late 1966, the most lauded act in popular music history were suffering serious ennui. The staples of rock music — guitars, drums, twin-track recording gear, punishing touring schedules, three-minute chorus-and-verse singles, vacuous album concepts — no longer sated their creative hunger. Instead, given carte blanche by EMI, they started to dabble not only with exotic instruments — ukuleles, sitars, tablas, darbukas, mellotrons — but also backwards guitar riffs, speeded-up piano solos, epic orchestral segues and avant-garde album concepts. I mention this because a similar vociferous hunger for experimentation, for expansion of repertoire and, crucially, for improvement has characterised Loro Piana’s approach to textiles since its founding, almost a century ago, in Quarona, Italy. “Our whole history is about innovation in fabric manufacture,” a spokesperson for the brand — 80…

Before unveiling Lorenzo Cifonelli’s new, exclusive collection for The Rake, there is an issue I need to address, and that is that we were late on the deliveries for our first collaboration with Lorenzo. In some instances, inexcusably late. As the founder of this magazine, I want to apologise sincerely to anyone who was affected. I hope that when you received your clothes, you loved them as much as Lorenzo and I do, and feel they are an incredibly strong value proposition for garments so elegant and well made, and made with Loro Piana fabrics. The reason the clothes were late was simple: we were overwhelmed by the success of the collection, and our suppliers — in particular, our jacket maker — struggled to get the orders made in time…

Moral debasement by degrees. It’s a literary trope that plots the story arcs of characters from Macbeth to Walter White via Count Dracula, Dorian Gray, Anakin Skywalker, and even the ultimate fictional villain — Satan, as depicted in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the case of Michael Corleone, played in the Godfather trilogy by Al Pacino at the dogged behest of Francis Ford Coppola — who’d seen the young actor play a teenaged drug addict on stage (Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Alain Delon, Burt Reynolds and Robert Redford had all been linked with the role) — what is it that turns him from a decorated war hero and devoted family-man-to-be into a single-minded homicidal monster? From a man who wishes to detach himself and his future wife from…